Beck: Permafrost

From Billy Beck:

E-mail in, this afternoon:

"I know that you said you wouldn't always write at the blog if you didn't feel like it. I'm just wondering when it is that you may ever feel like it again. Two--four is now a disgrace. Barely a word from you in months now. Surely there must be something that you could say to the rollicking disaster that once was America."

"Something to say..."

{hah!} You had to hear me laughing during that Scott Brown flail over in Massachusetts. Everywhere around me, conservatives and Republicans were just about shooting guns off in the streets in celebration. It reminded me of nothing so much as the round of foolishness that I put on during The Reagan Delusion. Young and full of hope, I hadn't grasped the evidence of principles over the long runs of decades and centuries, nor how deeply the rot of ideas had hopelessly seeped all of American political practice. A handy example was the first time that anyone had even glanced at the horrendous threat of Social Security: that discussion only got out of the bag during the mid-80's. Everyone was able to agree on that infamous "third rail of American politics" metaphor, and that's as far as things got before another whole generation went down that rat-hole. You could not have blown a conceptual hole through to the principles of the thing with a truckload of ANFO in polite company.

But it was "morning in America".

A generation later, things are down to news-cycle thrills over a Senate seat, because the cannibal-pot fight is balanced just that precariously. The basic premise that might makes right is in its most desperate heaves to date through American history, and the central founding premise of America -- freedom -- just doesn't count anymore.

It mystifies a thinking man: how does anyone believe that it can be resurrected through what the chattering Right has in mind? To hear these simple people swoon over electoral prospects regularly into the future as far as the eye can see is to know truly pathetic and tragic times. They think that freedom consists in choosing their own masters. Whatever their notions of "patriotism" might be (when they exist), these people are content to pass on to their children -- as far as the eye can see -- the general incontinence of generations to whom serious ideas were playthings without consequence. This is a necessary artifact of their own cowardice in not attacking the idea of slavery at root and branch. It is now an enormous forest of the welfare state grown over what was once the glory of the earth by way of the goodness of its people in their freedom.

This will never be voted away, and the idea that there is something valuable afoot in this threadbare charade in Massachusetts is as appalling a thing as anyone ever knew.

...to understand that the snow will never melt in your remaining lifetime.