Chautauqua

It’s almost impossible to keep up with all of the evidence flying at us indicating that we’re headed down the tubes. And the extent to which we’re falling for political rhetoric – instead of dissecting it and making the rhetoricians answer for it – is becoming overwhelming. Today’s case in point: because it’s no longer acceptable to teach what used to be referred to as American History in our union-controlled public schools, we’ve put things like popularity, political correctness, and self-defeating revisionism in place of other, less important things like constitutional fundaments, underlying principles, and … oh, yeah … history. That’s how and why we’re not terribly concerned with remembering that the liberty we used to enjoy in the very same United States we now find so disdainful and politically incorrect was bought and paid for with the blood and bone of those who thought they’d rather die in a war for independence than live under a government that imposed taxation without representation. Wow. Those guys had some screwy ideas, didn’t they?

If they’d been a little more clever or clear-headed – and if they just hadn’t been so darned idealistic – they might have thought of short-cuts like the prestidigitation Barack the Beguling is performing with healthcare. Right? It’s beautiful. Not only does Obama the Omnipotent not have to deal with that pesky and dilatory Congress, he doesn’t have to bother getting any elected officials to agree with him. He hires his lackeys. They do what he wants. If they don’t, he fires them. Nice and clean.

Well, no, those folks aren’t our elected representatives. No, they don’t have any responsibility other than to do what the boss wants them to do. And, no, Barack the Beginner doesn’t have any experience with healthcare, with running a business, or with governing even one of the 50 States with which he’s now playing fast and loose. But we elected him because [insert favorite promise here]. He’s cool. And talk about efficiency. Barack the Businesslike clearly is not a guy who would have wasted eight years fussing about self-government (he’s already self-governing), squawking about independence (he’s completely independent, especially from the legislative branch; we’re the dependent ones), and getting his shorts in a bunch about some aristocratic muckety-muck like George III. Given the way they operate, those two probably would have been buds. If they’d lived at the same time, it would have saved the National Education Association a lot of time and trouble tossing and re-writing all those misbegotten history books, wouldn’t it? Time and trouble is all that would have mattered. Neither of the kings – Barack or George – would have cared about the money involved.

Why or how does any of that matter? Like this: hot on the heels of Barack the Brilliant’s decision to side-step the federal legislature (what are rules to a guy like him?), we (remember us? those the elected representatives are supposed to serve?) welcome another stooge into the Senate; although, this one happens to be a professional stooge. And what does this stooge have to say? He tells us he’s going to assume the solemn responsibilities of his office by acting as the people’s proxy. And among the first of those solemn responsibilities? He’s going to participate in the confirmation hearings for Sonia Sotomayor’s appointment to the Supreme Court.

It’s entirely possible this particular stooge is so sharp, his proxy comment is a gag so incisive, that it went right over our heads. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and say it is. What a cut-up, huh? But for what people was he talking about acting as proxy? He wasn’t exactly specific on the subject. Just this much is clear: he can’t be a proxy for the people who aren’t being represented in Barack the Bold’s healthcare plans. In case you’re curious, that too would be us – all of us.

Could we take a few minutes out from all the rights we’re always inventing – from all the things to which we think we’re entitled, for which we used to expect we’d have to work – to defend this right? Yes, kids. It’s true: we still have the constitutional right to have our legislative decisions made by elected representatives. But we’re so busy crying about all the things that haven’t been handed to us yet – all the things we’ve been promised that haven’t been delivered and won’t be – that we’ve abdicated one of the few things to which we’re legitimately and uniformly entitled by law (at least for the time being). Why? What are we doing?

If we still had any of those horrible history books around, we might be able to find out why we thought elected representation was a good idea. But they’re gone now. At the rate we’re going, our right to elected representation will be right behind it. When that happens, let’s at least not be hypocritical enough to act like victims. That right will not have been stolen from us. We will have given it away in favor of a new form of government: adication by proxy. Shame on us.

This story – and this one – came out the same day. The former story is important because it suggests the electorate that didn’t do its reading before November 4, 2008, is catching up now. That means the house of cards is crumbling even before its architects imagined it would. And those of us who are trying to live affordably in that house are trying to figure out why the price keeps going up, even though the place is caving in.

The latter story is important because it suggests how desperate the architects are becoming. Shanghaiing a Senatorial election in attempt to bring comic relief to disaster is intriguing enough. The possibility that the clown’s butt will hit the 60th seat too late to stop the tsunami that’s heading for the house of cards is even more engrossing. The cult of celebrity might be disastrous in its political consequences. But as a form of entertainment, it would be tough to beat if the price weren’t so devastatingly high.

Here’s the problem for the Delirious Democrats, as Professor Zelizer reminds us:

With 60 votes, a united Democratic Party can obtain cloture and end attempted Republican filibusters. But the problem is that 60 votes does not make the Senate “filibuster-proof.” That would require 60 votes, plus Democrats sticking together.

Aye, there’s the rub. Sticking together would require the Democrats to have plans to correspond with their promises. To extend the earlier analogy: if any of the various subcontractors involved in the construction of a house are unfamiliar with the direction the house is intended to take, or what it’s supposed to look like, they consult the blueprints that all of the subcontractors share. Blueprints, to state the obvious, would be the renderings drawn by the architects to unite the subcontractors in fulfillment of the common plan. You sense where this is headed, right? Good.

The term, architect, derives from the Latin architectus, as well as from the Greek arkhitektōn, meaning builder or craftsman. Architects evolved from being builders and craftsman to being planners and renderers when prospective occupants of the houses they were building stopped falling for promises like this: “We’ll take care of everything. The place will keep you dry when it rains and warm in the winter. It’ll keep you naturally cool in the summer. It’ll be the envy of the neighborhood. And no wolves will be able to huff and puff and blow it down. Really. We promise. Cost? Don’t worry.”

Ironically, the term, democrat, also derives from the Greek, dēmokratikós; although, our derivation of it comes more directly from the French démocrate. In the form of a common noun, democrat is defined as an adherent or advocate of government by the people. In the form of a proper noun, however, Democrat means an adherent or advocate of government inflicted on the people. That’s why Democrats believe they don’t need plans – and why they’re too short-sightedly power-hungry to know the house will crumble without them. That’s also why, taking their cues from Barack the Builder (no architect he), plans for the new American house were dispensed with in favor of promises, all manner of promises.

Banking on the probability that we – the ever more gullible and complacent occupants of said house – would ask no questions about the absence of plans or the proliferation of cards passing for construction materials, the Democrats promised to make it ever more grand, as beautiful as any one and every one of us could want it to be, all-sheltering, and all paid for by … well … they haven’t quite gotten there yet. Big talk. Bigger promises. Lovely vision. No plan. And now, in an attempt to preclude debate on the construction of the new American house of cards and its flimsy fallibility, we have the guy in the white pants in the Senate – ready, willing, prepared, and eminently qualified to cast his vote with his fellow Democrats.

It can’t be any wonder, then, that three of the top five best-selling nonfiction books on Amazon.com last week were Glenn Beck’s Common Sense: The Case Against an Out-of-Control Government, Inspired by Thomas Paine, Mike Levin’s Liberty & Tyranny, and Dick Morris’s Catastrophe. Houses of cards can’t stand. They can be disguised. They can be hidden. They can be called other things. They can have things attributed to them that we might not choose to examine, at least initially. But they cannot and will not stand.

Another charasmatic leader, Malcolm X, said: “If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.” And so we shall … maybe. Last week’s book sales are promising. A comedian in the Senate is not. The outcome is up to us. Construction materials dealt from the bottom of the deck do not a house make. We need not buy it if we don’t want to live in it.

In November of 1992, Lewis H. Lapham, who lost his brilliant, discerning mind in the first term of the Presidency of Bush the Younger, wrote an enduringly insightful piece in his “Notebook” section of Harper’s magazine. He called it, “Deus ex machina”, a literary device defined this way in C. Hugh Holman’s A Handbook to Literature:

In the ancient Greek theater when gods appeared in plays they were lowered to the stage from the “machine” or the stage structure above. The abrupt but timely appearance of a god in this fashion, when used to extricate the mortal characters of the drama from a situation so perplexing that the solution seemed beyond mortal powers, was referred to in Latin as the deus ex machina (”god from the machine”) … the employment of the deus ex machina is commonly recognized as evidence of … an uncritical willingness to disregard the probabilities.

In “Deus ex machina”, Mr. Lapham was commenting on the effect of mass media on the political process in general – and on perceptions of individuals therein, in particular. He was, of course, writing during the Presidential election season that pitted Bush the Elder against Clinton the Shameless. He might just as well have been writing about – and warning us against – our present Deity-in-Chief:

The authors of the American Constitution recognized in themselves and in their fellow citizens the familiar vices of vanity and greed, but they preferred the risks of freedom to the assurances of monarchy … the mechanism of checks and balances preserved the principle of liberty against the promise of miracles and the comforts of despotism. The proposition was as courageous as it was optimistic, but it doesn’t meet the expectations of an age the worships celebrity and defines itself as the sum of its fears … the rising levels of perceived risk lower the levels of tolerance for the norm of human fallibility … Authority invested in institutions gives way to authority vested in persons, and the less that people understand of what it is that politicians do, the more urgent the desire to appoint them to the ranks of the immortals …

The primitive vocabulary of the mass media doesn’t lend itself to the discussion of complicated political issues, much less to moral ambiguity or moments of doubt. The television camera demands prophetic certainty and a sentimental script … The rule of love supplants the rule of law, and instead of attracting voters the postmodern politician recruits fans … The sentiment is profoundly anti-democratic, but then so is the trend of the news. If the hope of civilization defines itself and an advance toward impersonality – toward an idea of justice that doesn’t depend on the whim of a judge or the favor of the White House – the pagan worship of rock singers or movie directors, like the pagan worship of stones and trees, implies the joyous return to the what the history books of the moment still describe as barbarism – a word that the new political dictionaries certainly will amend or delete.

At the time, Lapham was describing a dawning phenomenon, an evolution of perception precipitated by the advent of mass media, of 24-hour news, of the indiscriminate informational onslaught of the Internet. He imagined his words might be a wake-up call, an invitation to critical thinking, a peeling away of the superficial critieria of personal popularity, rousing rhetoric, endless repetition, false promises, falser gods, and our uncritical willingness to disregard the probabilities of giving ourselves over to such promises, such false gods. He could have had no idea that just 16 years after writing them, his words would come to be proven literal by a nation, this nation – would come to a life of mindless adulation in yet another Presidential election, would come to be embodied by a a false god who would seduce a nation and anesthetize a national consciousness. But it happened. And so it is that authoritative institutions – the Executive branch of the federal government, the auto industry, the banking industry, the healthcare industry, the Supreme Court – fall under the rule of the one and the power of the popular.

When Neville Chamberlain returned from signing The Munich Agreement in 1938, Winston Churchill said to him, “You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor and you will have war.” Likewise, we had the choice between taking care and being taken care of. We chose to be taken care of and we had better take care. We have seen fit to forgo our risks of freedom, choosing to embrace, instead, the assurances – and the promises of miracles – of Obama the Omnipotent. As a result, we have consented to despotism. Because it’s been packaged as compassionate, protective generosity (it always is), we’ll never see it coming. Universal healthcare. New jobs. Clean energy. Friendly foreign relations. Handouts instead of hands out. Don’t we wonder how and why all of these Utopian ends haven’t been achieved before now? We’re right to be afraid of living in a world without all those things. But we’ll never be delivered from our fears until we confront them and take back the responsibility for overcoming them. There’s a difference between a showman and a shaman. Barack the Entrancer is the former; although, he managed to convince a majority of us he’s the latter.

What King Barack the Bewilderer calls “the audacity of hope” is, in fact, the sham of the new barbarism, the promise of miracles and the comforts of despotism. We will deny it. But we will not regain the right to call ourselves civilized, independent, and at liberty until we defy it.

If we don’t determine to do so today – 233 years after the first Independence Day – we should prepare to fight for the next one.