Beck: The Rat-Ship Comes

From Billy Beck:

"Obama is not worried that the American economy is slow to recover; he's worried that it will recover. And he is doing everything conceivable to see that it doesn't. Adding an unaffordable entitlement to already bankrupt entitlements; making energy unaffordable; raising taxes; harassing business; growing government while the economy shrinks; shrinking the economy while government grows; and most important of all, draining the wealth out of the middle class. Squeezing the last savings and remaining asset value out of them. He has the public employee unions living large in lean times, and their mission, from his point of view, is to scavenge whatever meat remains from the bones. It's not for nothing that he has his buddy Andy Stern over to the White House so often.

Even the face value meaning of his actions is missed because it cannot be grasped through the normative terms of American politics. But all of it is right there in plain sight. He is using the Presidency and the Congress to wage war against America. That is the meaning of everything that is right there in front of everyone. Of all the people I know only my friend the rogue philosopher Billy Beck understands the full meaning of government force used at this magnitude. And even he, with decades of study of Soviet totalitarianism at close hand for reference, is shocked at the pace of this war on America. "

That's Martin McPhillips.

"Shocked," he says. I, myself, am not quite sure that that's the right word, but I must say at the very least that it's an amazing thing to have a feel for history and watch the destruction of American culture right before your eyes in the very years of your own life. My most general sensation is something like: "It's finally come to this." Yeats' "What rough beast slouches toward Bethlehem?" type of thing. One reason why I balk at the word "shocked" is precisely that I know how bad this can get. There's a lot of dull horror left before "shocked", I think.

We are headed into the time of the petitotalists: the horde of mediocrities risen on power voted to them by imbeciles. Each holding a place in a vast machine -- from village to nation -- they all together become the implacable sieve through which all rights will be strained for the approval of the state. The thing is, of course, that the state is nothing but people who hold arbitrary power over others. There are now more of them than ever before in American history, they have never been so impudently dismissive of the very idea of "freedom", and there only promises to be more of them into the future.

I'm still not sure about some aspects of Obama. It is unquestionably true that he is wreaking bloody havoc on an unprecedented scale. What I cannot figure out is whether it really requires evil in order to commit these crimes upon the cradle of liberty. Would it not be possible for ignorance perverted by frightful deviance to sink to this?

If I am "shocked", then it is over this matter of observing the prospect of such hatred of humanity coming to pass, here. It is one thing to study un-relieved malice prevailing in places where ancient despotisms roared straight into the twentieth century without that interval of grace called the Enlightenment. It is quite another to live reversion to despotism right here where Enlightenment principles first came to earth in political practice.

This is unprecedented, and that's the thing that always holds my eye.

Obama? {spit} He's just a vessel upon which the plague arrives.