The Nightingale And the Rose

Pardon me while I don’t quite bite. Anything can be spun, including facts and numbers - like ‘the economy is improving’ and ‘unemployment is decreasing‘ and ‘green‘ jobs are the future. It’s generally done by introducing a ‘new’ method of counting, using ‘new’ parameters and a different basket of assumptions. In education, overall results are generally improved by lowering the bar and dumbing down tests.

All this frantic fudging does not change a single thing of significance. Obama is still a socialist (whether we say it or not). And he may even be a card-carrying member of the Muslim Brotherhood for all we know (whether we even dare ask the question).

Partisanship has nothing to do with it. The proof is in the pudding. America is slipping, the dollar is slipping, our educational system is not producing and we are making mistakes in every area of endeavor relative to the rest of the world.

Whether we point it out or not, whether or not we’re turning off our radios because we’re sick of hearing about it, it’s happening at an alarming rate.

I note that the Batchelor show has one big advantage over everybody else in the business: he doesn’t take calls. Therefore he’s spared the tedious bleating of the inarticulate, the partisan poisoned, and the uninformed. Batchelor only talks to ‘experts’; meaning, that what has made them experts is in large part their familiarity and comfort level regarding language. This translates well to radio. It does not mean, however, that the ‘great unwashed’ - the rest of us - have nothing to say.

While everyone likes to claim the people’s support for whatever murderous scheme they might find themselves accessories to, they remain prepared to drop public opinion for expediency’s sake. In Beck’s case, I am not so sure his being dropped from major markets has so much to do with poor ratings as with his fingering of the great puppet master himself: Soros, who seems to have his fingers in every conceivable pie - just as I never believed that the re-elections of Reid and Pelosi were entirely free of electoral fraud.

I just finished reading ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ by Oscar Wilde. It is one of the stories that came in a volume published by Puffin Books, a division of Penguin. Like Grimm’s fairy tales, the themes in these stories are not necessarily all clover and honey. Some serious issues are explored here under guise of clear language and simple metaphor. ‘Nightingale’ for instance explores the notion of personal sacrifice for a lost cause. It can bring tears to a child’s eyes and continue to haunt into adulthood.

In America, there have been many more such sacrifices than those currently living here. In fact, it could even be said, that every grave in America holds the remains of a martyr who had some sense of the eternal. What would any of them say if they were to come back today and watch the rose tossed carelessly aside to be crushed by an unseeing wagon wheel? Would they be impressed by the gloss of manipulated polls and surveys? Or would they be moved to weep at the flag (they fought and died for in some cases) being dragged through the muddy streets of our relentless discontent?

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Hollywood Always Has It End Well

The narrative in and around the Gulf is so compelling - so riveting - if it never had happened, we would have had to invent it. And so we did. Plenty of horror movies out there in which some threat is burgeoning and seemingly unstoppable. Then the hero rides to the rescue on his white horse… Hollywood always has it end well.

It occurs to me that in this particular oil spill saga there are no heroes – at least none that we can see (yet). It just keeps chugging along, getting worse every day. The means we have currently devised to mitigate the immediate problem – the loss of jobs; massive dislocation, and overall threat to the environment – seem inadequate. We’ve elected to sacrifice BP on the altar of public opinion and, along with it, even more jobs. The moratorium on drilling ups the ante as even more jobs are absurdly sacrificed to our pagan god, Gaia. In short, we seem to be fighting the loss of jobs with the loss of more jobs.

In the meantime, the spill spills on. There are signs that the media and our ADD president are on the verge of losing interest altogether. The World Cup and our rapidly approaching midterm elections are just too juicy to overlook. And then, of course, there was Michael Jackson’s death anniversary.

Odd to see no one coming to our aid. Besides affecting the lives and livelihoods of Gulf residents – not to mention wildlife – badly, the spill can also be classified as a global environmental emergency. Whenever there has been such an emergency abroad, the U.S. has usually been the first to arrive. We were always quick to offer humanitarian aid to the stricken whether we were invited or not. Earthquakes in Turkey and Haiti; tsunamis in East Asia; famine in Africa; etc. Often our considerable contribution had to be disguised - our sacks of emergency foodstuffs re-labeled - to look like it’s not coming from us but from some NGO (as not to offend the people filling their bellies with our own home-grown grains).

On May 3rd, 2008, Cyclone Nargis hit shore in Myanmar and devastated the densely populated, rice-farming delta of the Irrawaddy Division. It was the worst natural disaster in Burmese history. The ruling junta’s version of our Jones Act prohibited the country from accepting foreign aid – this, despite 200,000 dead or missing and millions displaced. We continued to beg and bribe officials and they eventually relented and allowed some of us in.

No such efforts are being made here. The nations of the vaunted ’global community’ seem to be just standing around, clucking their tongues and shaking their heads. Where are the Russians, the Chinese, the Venezuelans, Brazil? Where is the Middle East? Europe? Where is The Sierra Club? PETA? Nothing to say? Where is the UN to bash down our doors and fix this thing (which, as is becoming increasingly clear, we can’t handle ourselves).

“Yes, we can!” indeed! Since Obama has been in office, we haven’t been able to do anything, except to make things worse. Whether due to incompetence or by design, it doesn’t matter anymore. We’re going to hell in a hand basket. While the rest of the world just stands around watching.

I once saw an Indian film “Bandit Queen” (Shekhar Kapur) in which a woman was publicly beaten to within an inch of her life. The town’s people just stood around and watched. It sent a chill through my heart.

Could this be the legacy of Ameica's fall from grace: Nobody helping anyone? Every man out for himself?

Does It Matter?

I think we're making too much of it, this Special Election coming up next week in Massachusetts. The trick for the White House will be to play whatever happens down. Business as normal. Elections can be either won or lost. It doesn't matter. Business as normal. Proceed with health care, cap and trade, immigration as announced. Proceed with imploding the dollar; undermining Israel... Elections don't matter; pubic opinion doesn't matter. All that matters is that Barack Hussein Obama is now in the Oval Office and he can get it done. The media can be counted on to paper over any unpleasantness.

The battle was won when Obama was elected by a plurality of the vote. He's already done more than any president before him in this short a time. He still has three-quarters of his term to go: more than enough time to take care of all the rest. Mark my words, Obama is not about to lose any election that counts. Brown-Coakley counts (as far as the Senate is concerned, maybe), but it really doesn't. That's because after Obama is done, the Senate won't count; neither will the House; nor will public opinion. Face it folks, it'll take a shoe horn to get him out. Once this dawns on us, and we mobilize in earnest - happily abandoning our Marquess of Queensberry playbook - that's when we'll see fireworks - of the atomic kind.