Professional or not, your perspicacious publisher was correct when he wrote, “(American) voters have delivered the message that individual liberty and government debt are far less important than taxpayer-provided benefits and handouts.” We wish he wasn’t.
Jack McNeil got it, but Rob Murphy missed the Mark Walker point, entirely. And Bob Nicholson is probably an old white guy who roots for his favourite sports team, even in the face of terrible odds.
This is not a right-wing/left-wing thing, however. This is the two wings of the Pax-American-Eagle, spanning a new world order, where feudalism has been re-energized and re-branded, where freedom has been free-traded for security.
And as Benjamin Franklin warned, long ago: anybody who would do that, deserves neither. So, if we don’t watch out, this thing is going to get to where it’s headed, sure as bread and Cirque de Soeil.
No point blaming Obama, though. (Romney would be reading from the same teleprompters.) If voters choose not to recall that change-you-can-believe-in didn’t change at all, so be it. The American people are still free to be deceived.
How did de Tocqueville get so smart? Is it simply a matter of knowing history, and thereby, not being condemned to repeat it, as Santayana said? From a similar understanding, Thomas Jefferson warned that “The tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of patriots and tyrants, every 10 years.” Probably too late for that.
The American empire sealed its fate when they rubbed out the Kennedy boys and MLK. That was the coup d’état. LBJ traded with devils and went mad. Nixon was a crook; Ford and Carter came and went. The Reagan Administration was an evil puppet show, with the Bush Dynasty pulling strings, long before Slick Willy lied, and long after George Jr. stood on the smoky rubble of World Trade to declare, “Go shopping!” But who remembers any of this?
They don’t teach history in school anymore; they teach social-studies, instead. But still, “he who controls the past, controls the future,” said George Orwell. And “he who controls the present, controls the past”. Some — like Rob and Bob — say it won’t matter, because folks have so many more consumer options, nowadays. In the future? Every Friday will be Black Friday.
Yes, the die is cast. The new America — rising like a phoenix from the ashes of the old — includes Canada and Mexico. If the alternative is China? All bets are off.
Geoff Burton
Penticton