WhenWeAreQueen

He was the star in “The Men Who Stare at Goats.”  The rest of the movie was just a meandering mess, not knowing whether it was making fun of the army or trying to be earnest about the power of right thinking.  Several references to the way America “used to be,” meaning of course that now we’re a bunch of war-mongering, paranoid assholes who don’t understand that the rest of the world just wants to raise their goats in peace. 

I should have known better—George Clooney is in it.  But I liked the goats; I’ve always had a soft spot for them.

There is no painful situation which is not improved by the clever and judicious use of pharmaceuticals.

Queen2 apparently has an oyster somewhere in her ancestry, and she has suffered from several kidney stones in the past few months.  She says the pain is not as bad as unmedicated childbirth (to which I say, who wants to find out?), but still, it hurts.  Nonetheless, she has texted me from the ER, Dilaudid on board, to say she thinks she is going to survive the experience again.  I am sorry for her and happy that so far and knock wood, I haven’t had the pleasure of kidney stones.  Opiates don’t seem to work on me, at least the more modest ones I’ve had prescribed for me. 

But for those of you who have experienced the outer edges of acute or chronic pain, remember to say a prayer of thanksgiving for those big, evil pharmaceutical companies.  They are constantly on the alert, living up to the motto:  Better living through pharmceuticals.

That is what the Left would impose on us, stripping us of individual liberty in favor of their definition of group “fairness” and “community service.”  That is what the vacuous phrase “social justice” means—obliteration of the rights of the productive individual in favor of preferential treatment of politically preferred groups.  Taken to the extreme, the Left’s elevation of group rights is of course socialism—a social system with a myopic focus on the distribution of material goods that abrogates the private property rights of the individual and forces redistribution of goods and services.  Because humans are not naturally charitable in such an extreme way, at least to those outside of their inner circle, some authority must be established to set and enforce the rules of distribution.  Inevitably, other individual rights, such as the right to speak critically of the authorities and the right to assemble, must be circumscribed, lest those from whom the system takes more than it gives seek to overthrow the authorities.  We know from the miserable economic failures of frankly socialist states such as the USSR and Cuba that absent rewards for production, the productive cease to be so, and everyone stumbles along in poverty and deprivation.  (Everyone except the lucky elite imposing the system on everyone else—they always have money and access to what they want.)

Despite inescapable evidence that socialism is intrinsically defective, the Left in this country seeks to impose a redistributionist system here.  Seduced either by the Utopian rhetoric of Marx or cynically aware of the power to be had for the bureaucracy in a socialist system, they ignore history and deny human nature.  Because most of us have an altruistic streak, and because we have been steeped in the language of “fairness” and “equality” for the past 60 years, we have a difficult time countering their assertions that we must provide for everyone’s needs and that it is our fault that some have less than others.  And because we have pushed the Divine out of our public conversation, we are unable to proffer a meaningful philosophy of living other than materialism’s insistence on the supreme value of consumption.

Indeed, American-style soft socialism is perhaps more disposed to failure than elsewhere because underneath the group-rights rhetoric persists a stubborn insistence on the individual.  Socialism’s only chance of success lies in the extinction of the urge to individuate.  With its mythical identity of rugged individualism, America does not incline itself to subsuming the one into the many.  Whether this self-understanding will be enough for us to push off the collectivist politics being forced upon us by the current administration remains to be seen.  Certainly, those now trying to grow a Leviathan state and starve the market economy understand well that many humans have a tendency to prefer to take from others rather than produce for themselves—and they are diabolically clever in designing a system that incentivizes dependence and demonizes resistance to collectivization.

Ironically, a society conforming to a divinely-inspired ethic would probably become more socialistic, but in an organic fashion that built in natural incentives to be a productive member of the community. Indeed, one can make a forceful argument that a Christian society by nature is not one that emphasizes individual rights, but rather one that insists on collective responsibility.  Love thy neighbor as thyself is a simple command with clear ramifications for how individuals are to care for one another’s needs.

I have given this much thought since an Orthodox friend of mine pointed out to me that Christianity is not really a celebration of the individual, and the early Christians would have been incapable of understanding our insistence on personal liberty.  My rebuttal to him lies in the fact that we do not live in a liturgical community governed by scripture and tradition and given life by the Holy Spirit.  In such a community the individual willingly sacrifices his self-interest for the sake of the whole body of Christ, knowing that the body cannot consist of a single part, but is made up of many parts.  The crucial characteristic of such a community, however, is that every member sacrifices his interest so that no one takes advantage of the charity that permeates the society.  Because humans are not perfect, conflict is inevitable—but the liturgical community not only has shared values, but also the ability to sanction those who repeatedly refuse to conform to those values.  That is what we lack in a materialist society where God is a dirty word.  Everyone claims the privilege of charity while eschewing the responsibility that comes with accepting it; and those who sacrifice self-interest have no means of protecting themselves from being manipulated.  What is voluntary in a liturgical community becomes coercive in a secular society. 

Robert Bork has written that the path back to a healthy America lies in a re-Christianization of the society.  I don’t think that is possible; we have too far down the path of materialism.  We will have to find a public and political language that encompasses not just the mandate to be charitable, but the duty to receive charity humbly and graciously.  Conservatism used to have the words to express this, before most of them were reconstrued as code words for bigotry by the Left and a complicit media.  I don’t think we have a public figure brave enough to reframe our creeping statist policies and the taxation that accompanies them as coerced charity.  Perhaps by giving up our insistent focus on “rights” we could also shuck off the pernicious talk of entitlement.

Max is driving me out of my mind.  He only knows one way to get what he wants—ramming his head against the wall as hard as he can, as fast as he can, until the wall breaks or he is knocked unconscious.  I can’t imagine why anyone suffers from empty nest syndrome.

Albert is enjoying an excursion out of his cage.  Well, I am not exactly sure that enjoyment is the emotion he is feeling; these things can be hard to tell with a mouse.  At any rate, he is rambling around on the couch, whiskers twitching and ears perked, depositing mouse poops hither and yon.  Horus has taken to sitting by Albert’s cage, peering inside intently and with a concerned expression on his face.  Bring him nose-to-nose with Mr. Mouse, however, and he backs away with a look of cat-horror.  But just the other day, his brother Tiger snacked on a field mouse for lunch. 

I think the most absurd thing I’ve ever heard anyone say came from the lips of that ditz Valerie Jarrett at the White House:  “We’re going to speak truth to power.”  Her mouth must be on a reflex loop to her spinal cord, not engaging her cerebral cortex.  She just has tired Lefty cliches that spill from her and she doesn’t have enough imagination or insight to understand how utterly ignorant and fatuous she sounds.  I can’t believe these people are allowed to drive, let alone try to run the government.

Life isn’t fair. 

Max is having a hard time with that one right now.  He isn’t his brother, and he can’t get by with some of the things his brother can.  He has to adhere to a strict sleep schedule (chronic insomnia plagues him otherwise), and he can’t eat anything he wants (his dad’s metabolism, not his mother’s).  He wants the rules for living to be exactly the same for him and Tobie (and for some reason, for Charlie, who is four years older); and he is struggling ferociously against the inequities he perceives.  I’ve chosen not to shield him from this particular horrible life lesson by force-fitting all three boys to one regimen; he will have to come to terms with life since he can’t make life come to terms with him.

Washington is filled with people who refuse to accept that life isn’t fair—or more precisely, they know it isn’t (and they don’t really care, not deep down, because they came out on the up side), but they have discovered all the power to be had by pretending to the less fortunate that they can force life to be fair, if they just have a little more money and a little more control.  We call people who refuse to accept the basic unfairness of life victims and our politicians have declared victimhood a spiritual calling, one which all too many are ready to follow.  Now we have an administration run by ex-patriates of various Angry Studies departments busying themselves with activities designed to make life equally unfair for everyone—themselves excepted, of course. 

The rhetoric issuing from the Obama administration is practically indistinguishable from the dribble one can find in just about every liberal arts department in any university in the country—predictable, banal and warmed-over mush about social justice and capitalist hegemony.  None of the Obamists have lived long enough in the real world to learn that none of that stuff actually works, in the sense of producing a world that sane people want to inhabit.  They share the fatal flaw of every other Utopian—they think that the only thing missing every other time someone else tried to enforce fairness was their particular genius.  That’s the only explanation for someone actually coming up with the solipsistic babble of “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” 

I say this, but I think that at least Obama—and probably quite a few of his closest cronies—really do know that life isn’t fair, isn’t meant to be fair, and can’t be made fair (not in this world).  They’re just the ultimate cynics, manipulating the naifs who buy the dreamy equality bullshit and ruthlessly suppressing the realists who don’t want to be controlled by the state.  Obama and his ilk are simply taking advantage of the adolescent angst of millions of people who never came to grips with the fact that life isn’t fair.