Ruminations on music, culture, America and the world stage
The Aquarian Totalitarian tells an adoring crowd of fellow narcissists that the economy is recovering by the second and will shortly be positively rockin’. Tell it to those among the ranks of the highest number of unemployed Americans in 25 years.
The bit of BN terminology for which I’ve decidedly been taken most to task over the years is “Freedom Hater.” I coined it to characterize those members of the Democrat party – politicians, apparatchiks, pundits, think-tank scholars and fundraisers – who have effected a quantum leap in the party’s century-old instinct toward big government. As I’ve said before, since 1972, when the counterculturists began “working within the system,” the party’s core drive morphed into something beyond just the tax-and-spend welfare-statism of the New Deal and the Great Society. With ever-increasing momentum, the Democrat view of government’s role has come to be that of a force indispensible to continuing the very operation of the universe.
It is now in a new and unprecedented stage. The utopian vision of the mid-twentieth century counterculture has been wedded to the worst aspects of totalitarianism. The new breed of Freedom-Hater is clearly playing for keeps.
A few posts ago, I offered the example of Energy Secretary Chu’s proposal that all the world’s flat roofs be painted white. Taken by itself, this item is worthy of titters and comic derision. Alas, it’s of a piece with a couple of other exhibits of what I mean, and, when one examines them in that light, the chuckles subside and the chills set in. There is San Fran Nan’s statement that, to stave off global warming, “every aspect of our lives must be subjected to an inventory,” (do I need to spell out who is going to conduct this inventory?) and then there is Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood’s determination to “coerce [us] out of our cars.” (Yes, I know, LaHood is a Republican, but that doesn’t mean a great deal these days, as we all know. He serves, after all, at the pleasure of the most fearsome Freedom Hater America has yet produced.)
Thes people play for keeps. These aren’t off-the-cuff remarks designed to have a chance of affecting the conversational climate in our country. These people are telegraphing our future. Think back to TCM’s “smart box,” whichhe wanted to see as a replacement for our current thermostats. Come forward a bit to the last few weeks and the obvious relish with which the regime is gearing up to redesign the products of the car companies it now owns.
Gun sales are up in this country, but I think the most important instrument of protection we have at our disposal right now is a finely tuned intellectual radar. As I say, these people aren’t offering casual remarks in the hopes of getting a little airtime on the dinosaur network evening news. They are letting us know what our lives will be all about. They are assuming we won’t resist. They’re assuming we’re fools, that we’re cattle that can be herded.
That’s the dark essential truth about the whole leftist impulse, going back not only to 1972, but back through 1965, 1933, the 1914 founding of The New Republic and back into the whole Progressive era. (Again, I know a major figure of that era was the Republican Theodore Roosevelt, but it’s the impulse, not the party affiliation I’m talking about when we go back that far.) It’s based on feigned pity for “the common man.” That’s actually a disguise for contempt.
Nancy Pelosi, TCM and their Freedom-Hating colleagues are counting on you to be so cowed that you’ll swallow their patently ridiculous curtailments of your dignity and liberty. Don’t oblige them.
That ought to get North Korea to quit threatening to attack US and South Korean ships in international waters, doncha think?
And will we need extra strong condemnations for re-commencing plutonium production and the announcement that NK no longer considers itself bound by the 1953 armistice?
North Korea test-fires yet another short-range missile.
As grim as Aquarian totalitarianism is, it does have its silly side. Exhibit A: Energy Secretary Steven Chu’s proposal to paint all flat roofs – I guess in the world – white.
Sotomayor is on record as saying gender and ethnicity affect her legal thinking.
. . . five days ago in a WSJ column. Guess who didn’t see it coming? TCM’s special envoy to the Korean peninsula, Steven Bosworth.
You’re not surprised, are you? North Korea has conducted another underground nuclear test, this one with a Hiroshima-sized impact.
This is what happens in a world so devoid of resolve that even the basic survival instinct is badly eroded.
Will TCM, the IAEA and the UN Security Council please shut up about sanctions and further isolation? Will the world’s pundits please shut up about “why they did it” and internal power struggles and pointy-headed little scenarios about what happens from here?
Our enemies smell blood, period. It’s to be expected when six-party talks are still treated as a viable option, when Leon Panetta of the CIA goes to Israel to sternly warn that nation not to take out Iran’s nuke program, when TCM accepts a book of West-hatred from Hugo Chavez, when the MSM can’t bring itself to put the obvious main point of a story about New York jihadist plotters of synagogue bombings – their religion – until paragraph number ten.
They smell blood in far-flung corners of the world, such as the international waters of the Gulf of Aden, into which Iranian warships have moved.
This has never been about posturing or swagger or copping an attitude or jockeying for political gain. When the great heralds of our age, such as Dick Cheney and John Bolton, speak plainly about danger and history and human nature and what we must not do and what we may have to do, they are not concerned with the “brand” of the party they happen to belong to. They are not concerned with cronyism-level interests. They certainly aren’t consumed with the utopian countercultural vision of the Freedom-Haters who currently hold our fate in their hands.
The longer you wait to face evil, the greater the chances are that you will have to face ever-more severe discomfort in the defense of what you value. How much pain are we interested in taking on?
The towering repository of vision, courage, character and love of freedom Dick Cheney spoke this morning at the American Enterprise Institute on national security. Here’s the full text of his speech.
The small-but-dangerous, narcissistic tyrant-in-the-making TCM, the Most Equal Comrade, also spoke in Washington on the same topic.
Pundit and Pundette say the former veep blew TCM’s doors off.
In the pronouncements TCM made at the Rose Garden event the other day – the one in which he unveiled his coordination of fuel-efficiency standards (the goal of 39 mpg by 2016) with EPA greenhouse-gas emissions standards – we can see that a certain style of dictatiorship is taking place.
He had, as he was eager to boast, a diverse (Freedom-Haters always love that diversity) array of interested parties – executives from the two bankrupt-and-now-government-owned car companies, as well as from the one US company still nominally privately owned, union officials, and environmental zealots. He went to great lengths to stress how these groups have not customarily seen eye-to-eye on much, but here they were, because they have a common stake in the current juncture of the auto industry.
Well, yeah. A president who assumes more extra-Constitutional power by the day is about to tell the world how things are going to be for the American car business, you want to be there to get the full story. There is no other game in town. There’s not much choice but to listen up and get with the program, is there?
And then he got to the part that was really chilling and obscene: the business about how this will “make it easier” for the car companies, because they will have “clear guidelines” as to what they are to comply with. That’s the rhetoric of the side with all the power in a given situation.
We’ve taken an industry – the one that arguably has symbolized American inventiveness, confidence and freedom more than any other for the last century – that has been set back on its heels, and handed it over to a hard-core Marxist regime for final dismantling and reassembling in the service of a junk-science meme that it doesn’t even really believe in. This isn’t about any stinking “Climate change.” This is about TCM and his minions seizing power and wiping out freedom.
TCM is given to lots of smiling. The tabloids and the network-news dinosaurs go in for that. They find it appealing, a symbol of a new era of hope and fairness and empathy. Me, I want to hurl when I see it. I know what those bared incisors are all about.
An important WSJ editorial on several of the most wacko aspects of the utopian automotive vision of TCM, The Most Equal Comrade.
This is your blogmeister. Hopefully this post publishes okay as well.
And a big mega-thanks to a certain tech genius who discovered what was going on and unhosed things for us. As I told him, there’s a homemeade dinner in his future.
We’ve been having WordPress difficulty here at BN. Hopefully this test post will verify that we are back on board.
San Fran Nan’s sticking to her “I’ve-never-had-anything-to-do-with-that-icky-waterboarding-stuff” narrative even if it means desperately sputtering at a press conference.
Pass the popcorn. This is going to get good.
It’s the three-year anniversary of BN’s existence. The first post – May 6, 2006 – was a link to my Indie-music.com review of blues guitarist Mark Cook’s then-latest album, Blue Voodoo.
Looking through the posts for that month, one can see that the array of themes and subjects, the core body of principles, and the excursions into reality’s lesser-noticed corners that captured our interest were established from the get-go. That month, I discussed public vs. private arts funding, the EU’s lack of urgency over Iran’s nuke program, musical associates I’d been gigging with, cool meals I’d eaten, and travel. There is the classic Bent Notes interview with Barney Quick.
It’s been an adventurous three years. Had a stalker – a guy of Arab ethnicity in another state who got so mad over my Zionism that he went to the trouble of getting my phone number and leaving me threatening messages. Had several people – including a nephew – get mad and quit visiting the site.
One guy said he quit because he found the terms I’d coined, such as “Freedom-Hater” – how did he put it? “Coulteresque.” I guess that’s a bad thing in his book.
There’s one left-leaning commenter who has hung in for the whole ride even though he vehemently disagrees with BN positions with clockwork regularity. Because there’s no discernible consistency to his worldview, BN holds out hope that he can be brought around to the side of freedom. He’s demonstrated an undeniable capability to think when pressed to do so.
I have codified my core principles in the Bent Notes Manifesto, which still stands. From time to time, I flesh out particular points within it, so as to be perfectly understood by all with whom I discuss public policy and the human condition. I’m big into clarity.
As I say on occasion, in case a visitor from my main site finds his or her way here, I am a creative type by nature and by occupation, and the views you find here may strike you as a little incongruous at first. Not so; the older I get, the more I see the consistency, the seamlessness of my approach to life. It all starts with freedom. Freedom is such an important condition for human well-being that we must spare no effort to arrive at the richest, most thorough definition of it possible. From that, we can then look at what is necessary to bring about, preserve and spread real freedom. Once we do that, we start to see that the foundations of Western civilization are indispensible.
We must, of course, proceed with groove and soulfulness. As Duke taught us, otherwise, it don’t mean a thing.
Sally Pipes at the Pacific Research Institute looks into this 45-plus-million figure representing uninsured Americans and finds it’s not so monolithic.
BTW, We Stand Firm is an excellent resource for those interested in pro-freedom solutions to society’s vexing health-care issues.
Here at BN, we generally focus on why socialized health care is wrong on philosophical grounds, that is, its assault on basic human freedom.
