Fighting for the National Soul

If you don't mend your principles you will go to the devil.

~~F.A. Hayek, 13-Oct-73

Fourth Wincott Memorial Lecture:

Economic Freedom and Representative Government

Vying for occupancy of the Oval Office has always been a matter of ideology.  When operating at the helm, the direction to which you stir the ship of state depends primarily on your vision of what tomorrow brings or should bring.  Gov. Romney’s choice of Rep. Paul Ryan as his running mate confirmed that conservatism will be the ideological anchor in a Romney presidency.

As seemingly illustrated in the 1972 movie, “The Ruling Class,” [C.f., http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069198/] the decadence of the ruling elite is a leading indicator of the national polity’s decline and degradation, making its claim to hegemony over any aspect of civilization untenable.  Or worse yet, it can be the unmistakable precursor to the polity’s eventual collapse. 

Thus, for instance, Pres. Obama’s flying off to Las Vegas for a fundraiser in the immediate aftermath of the sacking of Benghazi, was to be charitable about it, the moral equivalent of Nero playing the fiddle while Rome was burning.  At least in the case of Nero, what the Emperor flaunted about was only criminal malicious negligence for the welfare of the citizens of Rome. 

In the case of Pres. Obama and the Benghazi tragedy, the President added insult to injury when he perpetrated the lie, especially at the memorial service reception for Ambassador Stevens and the other casualties, that it was all caused by an obscure internet video deemed, by the Islamic mob, offensive to the religious sensitivities of Islamic Jihadists. 

The President chose to dishonor the dead in order to cover up the total collapse of the Obama Doctrine in foreign relations, which essentially consists of an apologetic appeasement of our enemies and an unconditional rapprochement with the Islamic world, in particular, and all adversaries, in general, both foreign and domestic.  For make no mistake about it: home grown al Qaeda cells have flourished during President Obama’s watch.  They were just veiled and wrapped in the Regime’s delusional euphemisms.

Beyond foreign affairs, an entire spectrum of policy formulations that define the Obama Regime can best be characterized as a Kabuki dance paradigm of governance, encapsulated in the following excerpts from the [Dance of] Heaven and Earth Affinity:

Gone are the worries,

Troubles of olden days,

All, all forgotten;

While in their place flows great joy,

Joy that o'erwhelms with its bounty.

 

For which some historical perspective may be in order.  In its heyday, around the rare half of the Ashikaga Shogunate (1338-1573) of Imperial Japan, the art form of the Kabuki dance emerged as a conveniently effective vehicle for socio-political satire deployed by the lower classes vis-à-vis the powers that be, as an acceptable avenue to express a parody subtly critical of the extant mores in any feudal military regime. 

 

Subtle was the crucially operative modifier.  In a feudal regime the personal well-being of anybody outside the privileged and ruling classes was nothing but ordinarily expendable, as a matter of protocol.

 

Deployed by the underlings against the powers that be, a parody may prove as an effective tool for redress of grievances against the economic-political power structure.  But when used by the power elite, especially those at the helms of government against the governed, it conveys contempt and mockery of the welfare and aspirations of the governed.

 

The self-professed undocumented pundit and unassimilated foreigner, Mark Steyn, opined three years ago, on President Obama’s over dramatized indignation at AIG executives:

The first two months of the Age of the Hopeychange have been an eye-opener.  I expected it to be ideologically distasteful to me, but I didn’t expect it to be so inept. Not because I had any expectations of President Obama’s executive skills.  But I assumed he’d have folks around him who could take care of details like governing, while he pranced around as the smiley-face hopeychange frontman.  But the bench is still empty save for a handful of mediocrities.  And the  disconnect between the smoothly scripted mush and what’s actually happening makes the telepromptered cool look even more ridiculous.

There was nothing subtle about the Benghazi-Las Vegas confluence and sequence of events.  Rather, it was a blatant, unbridled, in-your-face show of contempt for the well-being and sensibilities of the governed.

There is no doubt whatsoever that the re-election of Pres. Obama would ensure the decline and collapse for America.  Re-electing Pres. Obama would be properly interpreted by the power elite as an electoral mandate for the philosophical underpinnings of the agenda Pres. Obama espoused during his first term, viz., the fundamental transformation of the mode of governance from a government by the people and for the people to a government by the elite and for the hoi polloi. 

Competition by voluntarily owned free enterprises will give room to an infrastructure of commerce and industry controlled by the government through a cabal of functionaries chosen by crony enterprise czars who derive their power from executive orders and bureaucracy-created Regulatory Commissions.  Free-market based capitalism will be replaced by a market mechanism based on command-and-control system with all the ideological trappings of central planning and life-boat economics.
 

It shall be tantamount to kissing the proverbial American Dream good bye, forevermore.  It is the moral equivalent of mortgaging the National Soul to the devil himself.