I had a long talk yesterday with an old friend, an ex-Congressman who served eighteen years before retiring in disgust. Back in the late eighties, he invited me to give a talk to a group of likeminded conservative colleagues in his office. (A couple of young Congressmen who were at that meeting are now very high-profile politicos, but, to protect their privacy, I will refrain from giving their names.)
Afterward, my friend told me how impressed they had been with what I had to say. But I didn’t buy it, because one of the things I remember most vividly about that meeting was their blank stares. Clearly, those supposedly conservative Congressmen were not prepared to hear my analyses of government, the economy, or the future.
It’s a bit ironic that religious terrorists created such havoc in India the day before Thanksgiving. I say ironic because Thanksgiving is a peaceful day … a family day … a day for counting one’s blessings. The destruction and bloodshed in India just didn’t fit in with the spirit of the holiday season.
What made the contrast so vivid was that much of the coverage on our TV screens was given to us by Indian newscasters on Indian television. It was a stark reminder that the world is now a very small place, a place where everyone is connected … global stock and bond markets … global business markets … global communications markets.
Taking full advantage of the invaluable gifts Great Britain left it with after plundering the country for nearly two hundred years (a highly educated work force, a language that makes it easy to communicate with the industrialized world, a good start on a modern infrastructure, and, above all, a democratic government that protects individual liberties and private property), India is rapidly moving toward becoming what America once was.
The fly in the Indian ointment is the clash of cultures, primarily between Hindus and Muslims. That wasn’t supposed to happen. Before giving India its independence in 1947, the British chopped off the northwest corner of the country, called it West Pakistan (now Pakistan), and handed it to the Muslims. That was supposed to eliminate violent clashes between the Hindu and Muslim cultures.
The problem is that there are still 154 million Muslims in India, and, as everyone knows, Muslims aren’t real fond of Western style life. Yesterday, radical elements among them sent a loud and clear message that they don’t intend to allow India to continue its evolution toward becoming a fully Westernized country. The idea is to terrorize and intimidate India’s other 1 billion+ people into not becoming too chummy with the U.S. and its Western allies.
Bengladesh (known as East Pakistan until 1971), though its population is 90 percent Muslim, is said to be much more tolerant of other faiths than its former counterpart, Pakistan, a thousand miles to the West. But cultural clashes between rival sects of the religion have caused a steady migration of Bangali Muslims into India.
I find the whole situation to be very sad, because India, sans its clash of cultures, could be mankind’s best hope for freedom in the coming decades. As a group, Indians are highly intelligent, warm, friendly people. While America continues its relentless march toward socialism, India continues to accelerate its march toward freedom and free markets.
But today I’m going to try not to think about the ramifications of what happened yesterday in India, about what’s happening to the once-proud culture of the United States, and about what an ugly sham our political system has become.
Instead, I’m going to relax and delude myself by pretending that I still live in the America of my youth. Unfortunately, if you’re under fifty, you can’t possibly share that wonderful delusion with me, because you never experienced the real thing.
On this Thanksgiving day, I’m thankful for all the great Thanksgivings of years gone by, for all the good things I still have in my life, and for all that is still good in our shrinking, violent world.
Of course, people also deluded themselves in the good old Thanksgiving days. They ignored the realities of the wars we lost, ignored the rapid growth of big government, and ignored the increasing dismantling of Western civilization’s values.
And India? It wasn’t a real country. It was just a fictional nation created by Hollywood – a fantasy you enjoyed watching on film. Terrorists? I don’t recall ever hearing the word when I was a kid. It was a time of delicious naivete.
Oh, and one other thing I’m going to be thankful for today. After seeing the The History Channel’s special on how turkeys are bred, raised, and slaughtered by the millions, I am, above all, thankful that I’m a human being and not a turkey. It was almost enough to make one think about joining PETA.
But, not so fast. Today I just want to enjoy a great turkey dinner. I guess it’s human weakness, but my appetite always seems to rule the day.
With that, I’d like to take this opportunity to wish you and your loved ones a joyful Thanksgiving day that provides all of you with many wonderful memories.
No matter how smart or successful we are, in the end, life is a series of unanswered questions. And when the question involves a life or death situation, you have to wonder why you survived. Was it Fate? Divine intervention? Or something else?
Some time ago, I received an e-mail from subscriber John P. about a close call he had while driving when he was seventeen years old. Here’s part of what he had to say:
What got me thinking about my interview with Ted Koppel on ABC News Nightline many years ago was watching how Sarah Palin was sandbagged by the media throughout the presidential campaign — particularly when her cerebrally deficient handlers threw her to the media wolves: Charlie and Katie.
Charlie Gibson’s now-famous question — “Do you agree with the Bush Doctrine?” — tongue-tied Sarah Palin for a second. And well it should have, because it was based on a false premise! Alert the media: There is no such a thing as the “Bush Doctrine.” The so-called Bush Doctrine can be just about anything you want it to be. There was no reason for the question other than to make Palin look bad. Why play games?
My, how time does fly. It’s hard to believe that it’s been nearly twenty-five years since my first and only appearance on ABC News Nightline. I must confess that my memories of that show do not bring tears of joy to my eyes. Tears, maybe … but joy? Not so much.
The producer of ABC News Nightline called me one day out of the blue and said he would like to do a show on “fear in the workplace.” He had already lined up Harold Geneen, former chairman of IT&T, and a psychiatrist from Wharton to be two of the guests. He said that because my name was “synonymous with intimidation,” he felt I would be the ideal person to round out the program.
There are a number of reasons why I don’t believe Barack Obama will use the boil-the-frog-slowly approach when it comes to moving his Marxist agenda forward in the midst of this economic meltdown.
First, he will have the Pelosi-Reid gang pushing him to take action.
Second, he will have millions of welfare addicts — pitchforks in hand — looking to him to deliver on his promises. (Perhaps you’ve seen the video of the gal who said she’s excited now that Obama has been elected, because she will no longer have to worry about paying her mortgage or filling her gas tank.)
Third is the ultimate wild card — Rev. Wright. He’s already come out of hiding, but what does he want? What will he say in the months ahead? Will he expose Obama as a fraud with whom he had scores of revolutionary talks over the years? If I were Obama, I would be very nervous about the intentions of the good reverend.
As I said in Part I of this article, I can think of at least three ways that the Obama presidency might play out. Let’s examine them one at a time.
The Clinton Option
When the HillBillies made it to the White House — by proving to be the most adept politicians in U.S. history when it came to playing the Lenin card (i.e., lying as a justifiable means to achieving their ends) – everyone thought communism was just around the corner for the U.S. It didn’t happen … not while they were in office.
Throughout Barack Obama’s campaign for the presidency, as I watched him backtrack on the nature of his many questionable relationships, on issues such as gun control, abortion rights, and taxation, and on his feelings about the United States, the words of another famous revolutionary, Vladimir Lenin, kept coming to mind. Said Lenin, “To tell the truth is a petty bourgeois habit, whereas for us to lie is justified by our objectives.”
Lenin, along with Leon Trotsky and his other comrades in arms, was a character right out of the book Eric Hoffer published years later (in 1951): The True Believer. Whether it’s global warming or cooling, gay marriage, animal rights, or any other “cause,” a genuine true believer has no problem telling blatant lies in order to further that cause.
A little more than a hundred years after the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, Congress acted again and passed the U.S. Sedition Act of 1918. Among other things, the act made it a crime to “willfully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States, or the Constitution of the United States, or the military or naval forces of the United States.”
And so it has gone. Power is a corrupting influence on those who achieve it. The very nature of a democratic republic makes it virtually impossible for a politician to adhere to libertarian freedom principles and manage to stay in office.
I know these are depressing times for those who cherish liberty, but I think it’s a good idea to keep the concept of freedom in perspective. The historical truth is that freedom is a myth. True freedom has never existed anywhere on this planet.
This reality recently came to mind once again while I was watching a program about the lives of the U.S. presidents on The History Channel. It was a stark reminder that even in the supposedly civilized Western world, some people seem to have an insatiable lust for power over others.
The boldest experiment in doing away with dictatorial government was the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Then, against very long odds, the British Colonies defeated Great Britain in the eight-year-long American Revolutionary War, and the United States of America was born. To me, the most important words in the Declaration of Independence are:
I thought it would be interesting to reprint some of the articles I wrote in the eighties for a hard-copy newsletter I published at the time, The Tortoise Report. And I’d like to begin with a poem that I first presented live at the NCMR Conference in New Orleans in 1984. If you change out some of the names and cultural references, I think you’ll agree that it could well have been written in the year 2008.
It never got me anointed poet laureate, but it did get a lot of laughs at the conference. Enjoy.
‘Twas the early 1980s, And all through the land, Everyone panicked And sold his last Krugerrand.
Clearly unstoppable Were the deflationist forces, As the big banks collapsed, Like Paul Samuelson’s courses.
As inflation tumbled Almost to zero, Reagan sat back And fiddled like Nero.
While a 1930s style deflationary depression is possible, the odds are against it. It is far more likely that the lethal combination of GAVEC and political expediency will result in a runaway inflation and, hence, a total breakdown of law and order. But time is running out.
Unless the general public is well educated in both morality and economics, they may very well follow a socialist demagogue down the road to collectivist enslavement. Let us never forget the words of Edmund Burke: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
