The Thinking Housewife opens with a real gem of a quote.

“…Federal bureaucrats have been feeding on red meat, but their appetites have only been whetted. They are the most dangerous wielders of power in the nation. They will use that power to redesign society according to their own arrogant notions of egalitarianism.

“What, I wonder, would the Founding Fathers have done with these bureaucrats? I mean would they hang them immediately or, being reflective men, would they save that recreation for dawn tomorrow, the better to start a new day?”

Amazingly, that note-perfect assessment was written by…wait for it…wait for it…

A fucking journalist? SRSLY?!? Specifically and to wit, “Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Edwin A Roberts, Jr.” Those sagacious words appeared way back in 1975; obviously, “Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters” were a totally different breed of animal than the miserable Progtoads we’re cursed with today. Just you wait, though, it gets even better from there.

2) In ancient Athens, a scaffold stood in the center of an amphitheater.

“Anyone proposing a new law, or a change in an old law, had to ascend that scaffold and stand beneath a dangling noose while he made his suggestions to the assembly. If his suggestion was approved and enacted into law, the innovator had to ascend that scaffold once again a year later. When the results of his suggestion had been to worsen instead of to improve conditions, he was hanged….”

            — Historian Otto Scott, “Why the Ancients Hanged Do-Gooders”, Conservative Digest, Dec. 1985, p. 93

If modern Americans had any sense and any understanding of individual rights against the police power of The State, they would make sure that Do-Gooders like Biden, Fauci, and CDC bureaucrats, among others, were escorted to an equivalent scaffold and noose. Because they are obviously above the law, such Do-Gooders do not stoop to anything so petty as proposing new laws. Instead, they issue edicts and lockdowns and mandates they fabricate out of the blue.

Then, when such Do-Gooders are made to stand beneath that noose, Americans should ask themselves whether the results of those edicts and lockdowns and mandates have made their lives better or worse than they were two years ago, including such impolite questions as how many tens of thousands of people are now dead or maimed for life as a result of those things, how many small businesses have been destroyed, and why anyone should thank those Do-Gooders for those things or for the obliteration of Americans’ rights, political liberty, freedom of commerce, and freedom of travel.

Funny, innit, how each successive problem besetting society today is reflexively assumed—in our stilted, forgetful vainglory—to be wholly without precedent, stupefyingly complex, and most likely insuperable without applying extravagant effort, painful sacrifice, and ruinous expenditure of wealth to it.

T’ain’t so, McGee. Turns out the Bible had it right: there really IS no new thing under the sun. Our woes belong not just to modernity, but to ages past also. Common societal problems, obstacles, and conundrums can be thought of as threads woven into the fabric of human civilization, ever since humans have HAD one. As the example of our Athenian forebears demonstrates the solutions and/or preventives, far from being impossibly complex or unworkable, come to seem like simplicity itself if you examine them thoughtfully.

Can anybody doubt the wisdom, the basic fairness, or the efficacy of the Athenian way of dealing with the related problems of corruption and how a keen sense of responsibility and probity might be nurtured in its lawmakers? Do we arrogantly flatter ourselves that the Athenian approach is a primitive, even barbaric one that the far more enlightened inheritors of Western Civilization have thankfully left behind? Suffused with pride, do we tell ourselves that—with all due respect (ahem!) to the wisdom (for their time, poor dears) of the Greeks—they would surely find our modern dilemnas to be well beyond their ability to comprehend, let alone cope with—overwhelming and terrifying for aboriginal throwbacks who walked around in public comically dressed in togas, sandals, and grape-leaf headbands of their own free will. Able as they may have been when dealing with the simpler challenges of a simpler time, the Athenians of antiquity would no doubt be awed into catatonia if brought face to face with even one of the more trivial of our Modern Problems™—as helpless as a toddler in a bear-baiting pit.

Only one slight problem with such modern egotism: The Athenian idea worked pretty well for them then, and it would work pretty well for us now. Lord knows what we’ve been doing ain’t. Plus, I dunno, but it seems pretty damned cheeky to me, this whole notion that the people who ran Western Civ into the ditch and totalled it would have the gall to spurn those who created it as inferior specimens—pretty hip for their time, maybe, but total cave-tards compared to us. If Modern Man was anything like as clever as he thinks he is, he’d be reading and re-reading every book he could get his hands on chronicling those who came before, treating every scrap of knowledge he could glean as the priceless treasure it is.

Instead of remaining steeped in the sour bouillabaise of historical illiteracy, unfounded assumptions, and smug banality, perhaps we’d be better served by boning up on how the world we live in came to be; learning the lessons history has to teach us; and coming up with ways those timeless lessons might be applied to help us out now, no? If all we got out of the effort was the heartwarming spectacle of Little Mengele Fraudci being dragged onto the hangman’s scaffold, pale and bugeyed with terror, pleading for a mercy that will not be forthcoming, it would be well worth a try. I’m betting we’d get a lot more than just that, though, beginning with the re-instilling of an appropriate reticence in the hearts and minds of those who fancy themselves our masters, then moving onwards and upwards from there.

2

Error happened.