Occupied America
The national character has changed, and not for the better.
Over the last two years in America, I’ve witnessed our own forces of evil with incredulity, despair, and rage. Corruption, blasphemy, and absurdity have been accepted by one-half of the electorate as the cost of doing business; as has the fear this acceptance generates. Does anyone actually believe that men change into women and women into men who can give birth, that the Earth is burning, the seas are rising, and we’ll all perish unless we cover our faces with strips of cotton?
No one does. These proclamations are an act of faith, in a new, as yet unnamed religion, and the vehemence with which one proclaims allegiance to these untruths is an exercise no different from any other ecstatic religious oath. They become the Apostles’ Creed of the left, their proclamation committing the adherent physically to their strictures, exactly as the oath taken on induction to the armed services. The inductee is told to “take one step forward,” and once they do he or she can no longer claim, “I misunderstood the instruction.”
Those currently in power insist on masking, but don’t wear masks. They claim the seas are rising and build mansions on the shore. They abhor the expenditure of fossil fuels and fly exclusively in private jets. And all the while half of the country will not name the disease. Why?
Because the cost of challenging this oppressive orthodoxy has, for them, become too high. Upon a possible awakening, they—or more likely their children—might say that the country was occupied. And they would be right.
Gandhi said to the British, you’ve been a guest in our house for too long, it is time for you to leave. He borrowed the line from Oliver Cromwell, and it’s a good one. The left has occupied the high places for too long, promoting dogma even as the occasions for their complaint have decreased (what position is closed to people of color, or women? Inclusion in all levels of the workforce; preference in higher education, a seat in the cockpit, in the Oval Office, in a movie’s cast, or admission to an elite school+? And yet the vehemence of their protests has increased, progressing into blacklisting and even rioting by those claiming to represent “the oppressed.”
Old-time physicians used to speak of the disease “declaring itself.” History teaches that one omnipresent aspect of a coup is acts of reprisal staged by agents provocateurs of the revolutionaries, and blamed on supporters of the legitimate government. It would be a historical anomaly if we were not to see such between now and the midterm elections.
For the disease has declared itself, and we are not now in a culture war, but a nascent coup, with its usual cast of characters. The Bolshevists could have been defeated by a company of soldiers in the suburbs of Moscow, Hitler stopped at Czechoslovakia, and the current horrors confronted at the Minneapolis police station or a meeting of the San Francisco school board. But those tragedies, and our current tragedies, were not just allowed but encouraged to run their course.
Yet I believe there is hope for reason and self-direction.
As you would expect, America’s Governor, DeSantis the Great, comes in for a mention shortly after that statement. As well he should. Mamet, that most rara of show-biz avii—ie, a recovered Leftist—himself, closes the piece with a question I find chilling:
Now, the disease having proclaimed itself and its dangers having become clear, it is time for us all to overcome the occupation by standing up to those tyrannies under which we are not prepared to live.
Time, and long past time. Just one leeeetle problem. These days, can we say with any confidence that there are ANY tyrannies under which the majority of “Americans” are not fully prepared to live? Because from where I’m sitting, they seem to have made themselves perfectly comfortable with pretty much all of ’em, braying incessantly in boastful praise of their precious “‘Murcafreedom!” while they bend over and spread dem cheeks so as to more easily take the latest high, hard one from their Überstaat ALL the way in.
The article’s subhed says “Brave dissenters willing to defy an oppressive orthodoxy are our country’s best hope,” and I can’t really disagree; such defiance was once part of the bedrock of the American nation, and must be nurtured in the breast of any person who intends to live his life as a free man. But how much hope is left to us, really, when we see less and less of defiance out there, and more of compliance?
Just because a population has convinced itself that surrender might be analogous to a kind of victory when contrasted with the horror, devastation, and death of even the most just and righteous war; that even a peace purchased via accepting the bit of subjugation can still be considered a bargain; that pacifism and nonviolence can still be honorable and noble stances even when there are tyrants, despots, and brutal monsters running amok, unopposed and unrestrained, amongst We The People—these things do NOT mean said population isn’t COMPLETELY FULL OF SHIT just the same. Not by a long yard, they don’t. Kinda the other way around, actually.
3
- Entries