Beck: There Won't Be Anything Heroic About It

From Billy Beck:

"someone should put the record $1.42 trillion deficit in a balloon"

Jake Tapper jams American public awareness, implicitly indicting the frantic media zooms on floating shiny objects. Fairly well cracked, I say. Personally, I recall my father saying during the mid-80's that he would live to see the first two trillion-dollar federal budget. That was a fearsome prospect to him, for good reasons including all the destruction that such numbers would wring upon the landscape, and he was right: a Republican signed that budget the year before Dad died. (Bush, 2002)

Friday brought news that the federal deficit for fiscal year ended September 30 went $1.4T. It is widely reported as the largest deficit "since WW II"; a fnord designed to ease the average psychic strain of such a concept by ethical comparison to great moral adventures of the past which were, after all, borne and survived by Great Generations.

{spit}

Look: this is not that sort of crisis. Absent the aggressions of foreign dictators and the various stipulations, presumptions, and enforcements of United States administrations, it is very difficult for me to imagine that Americans would have gone to war in the whole of the twentieth century. The productivity and very existence of those people were roused in dedication to battle as what were considered (correctly or not) necessary responses to immediate and long-term military events. Of course, it's ridiculous nonsense to imagine that World War II represents some sort of "investment". However, it is an economic event of considerable moment in its amazing concentration of productivity upon such a generally-endorsed value. (Let us always recall that the thing was done half-assed.)

The crisis now is one of identification. I take these socialists at their words that this will be a different country. Let history record that freedom was an American ideal and that it had no place among these people who are attempting the wholesale concentration of entire generations' productivity to their designs for everyone's lives. That is the nature of the crisis now. It doesn't play headlines like a Pearl Harbor, and most people never even imagine anything like it, even while they are chin-deep right down in it.

This isn't a bump in history, like World War II. This is a different way of life -- which cannot even really be called that, because it is actually and ultimately a way of death, mitigated only to any degrees of hypocrisy in its practice.