Your assignment for today, should you choose to accept it:
Read Roger Cohen’s much -discussed article The Great Unraveling, in which he looks back at our era from a hypothetical after-the-collapse/in-the-ruins future: “It was a time of beheadings..it was a time of aggression…it was a time of breakup…it was a time of weakness…it was a time of hatred, fever, disorientation.”
Then read NeoNeocon’s take on this article, in which she notes that the people in Cohen’s circle seem to have been quite unaware of things which many of us have been following for years. See especially Geoffrey Britain’s comment about the specific and direct causes of each of several “unraveling” phenomena that Cohen cites.
Next, watch this video: Can the threads of the American tapestry be rewoven?, with Bill Whittle, Scott Ott, and Steve Green.
Also read Sarah Hoyt’s post The Great Re-Weaving.
Then discuss.
The best comment there, and one I agree with is: “Leftists live in fantasy land. They have wonderful good intentions and they are always so surprised when their good intentions produce awful results. Remember LBJs war on poverty that was going to end poverty in a generation?”
I wonder about Obama but, for the most part, I attribute good intentions to the left. Of course, those intentions always include their priorities and ignore any others.
Most of their priorities are matters that make them feel good. Effectiveness is far below that level. Global warming is an example. They would pull civilization out by the roots to reduce “greenhouse gases” with no credible evidence. What they consider credible has been so contaminated by such manipulation as discarding data, moving temperature monitoring stations and ignoring Urban Heat Island growth as undeveloped countries develop, like China, that it means nothing. Some years ago, it was learned that the man who was responsible for monitoring stations in China hadn’t been there for years.
I spent time studying this a few years ago but gave up as it became more apparent that they don’t care. The whole topic is a mares nest, as the British say. I see lefty commenters on other blogs say Scotland “deserves” to break free of UK. I agree. They deserve the consequences. With Czechoslovakia it actually had a beneficial effect on both Slovakia and Czech Republic but they had lived under communism, which has a strong effect on thinking, especially the wishful variety.
I am a pessimist. I attended a talk by Angelo Codevilla the other night and he is the best truth teller I know of now.
Instapundit has written that whenever a Democrat President begins to suffer the inevitable consequences of his ideology, the journo-hacks proclaim the country to be ungovernable. Unraveling, is just more of the same stuff. The journo-hacks say see, Obama is perfect, it is the world that is imperfect. I say blatherskite.
A competent president unhindered by liberal (a/k/a socialist) ideology, could reverse a lot of these problems in short order. Although rebuilding the military around a new streamlined model would take more than two terms.
OTOH, there are many long term problems like the total indebtedness of the governments and the people, and the rot in the education system, that they did not include in unraveling. They are the inevitable consequences of the creation of the Peoples Democratic Republic of the United States during the two generations beginning in the 1930s. Those problems have not really unraveled yet, and we await their doom.
What I forgot to add was that Cohen concluded his article with a reference to Kipling’s “Gods of the Copybook Headings”. I was shocked by that I didn’t know that anybody allowed into the NYTime’s sanctum sanctorum, had ever read Kipling.
It is now clear that Kipling was a prophet, and a great poet, the only one of Century 20 who is one of “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
When that acknowledgement becomes universal, a new day will have begun.
Cohen mourned that “no one read(s) Kipling.” In her response, NeoNeocon noted that she quoted that poem at her site in 2006, and has mentioned it several times since. I’ve seen the poem quoted/cited extensively, going back to 2003 or 2004, on a whole range of conservative sites and I believe in print publications as well. Cohen’s belief that *no one* reads Kipling says more about his circle of friends & acquaintances and about his reading habits than it does about the American public at large.
I believe that the transmission mechanism that ensures positive aspects of our culture has broken down, so I cannot enivision how a re-weaving takes place when the individuals who must undertake that effort have lost the knowledge of the loom. This is the transformational change that was promised.
We’re only at stage three of the progression:
(1) A group decides basic attitudes need to be changed
(2) They begin to complain of “ungovernability” when things don’t go as planned
(3) They complain of illogical results (from their point of view)
(4) They begin to attack “wreckers’ and yell “sabotage”
(5) They decide anyone not ‘with the program’ should be punished
The liberals just haven’t hit their stride yet. The immigration crisis we’re currently undergoing is in large part an attempt to ‘fire’ the public that disagrees with them and hire one they like.
One factor that must be considered is the sheer number of PAID unravelers our society. There must be well over a million people who view the destruction of some set of “bourgeois” values as a job responsibility. These people can be found in academia, in journalism, in Hollywood, as well as in the various “activist” organizations.
One thing that would be amusing were it not so tragically consequential: There are many academics who desire to “open the student’s minds” by challenging what they imagine to be the receive opinions the students got from parents and community. Academics of this type seem to thing that Dad is a farm-equipment salesman and a member of Rotary, while Mom is a full-time housewife and a sexually-repressed stalwart of the local church…actually, Dad is probably a guidance counselor at a Middle School and mom is a lawyer whose nearest approximation to a religion is shopping at Whole Foods….and the new & radical ideas the professor thinks he is imparting are actually just reinforcement of the same beliefs the student has been massively inculcated with for his entire life….so instead of mind-opening, what we have in reality is a positive feedback loop, aka vicious circle.
The mom and dad you describe are already home-schooling.
I’m about to start Codevilla’s To Make and Keep Peace . I understand from Steve Hayward’s review in CRB that he doesn’t much like anybody who’s been president since Lincoln. He was good the other night. I can’t link to Steve’s review.
>One factor that must be considered is the sheer number of PAID unravelers our society<
a massive reduction in the fed gov't would solve that.
Since we are talking about unraveling and reweaving….here’s The Loom of History.
From 13th century Iceland.
“Steve Hayward’s review in CRB”
It was Goldman’s review. No wonder it sounded so much like Goldman. Hayward reviewed a book on Goldwater.
“journo-hacks proclaim the country to be ungovernable.” As they did NYC prior to Rudy.