This is a somewhat re-worked piece from earlier in the week:
We have always asserted on Maggie's Farm that the Left has fascist impulses, which is the main reason we fear them. Many of us have been there - in our liberal youths - and done that, so we know what it's like to imagine that one knows how to run a utopian world.
We believe that the Left wishes to control everything and anything they can -from the food we eat, to the games we play, to the cars we buy, to the guns we shoot, to the medical care we seek, to the stores we use, to where we enjoy tobacco, to the ways we participate in politics - in their illusion of wisdom and their will for power. I believe that this is why they can seem so strangely sympathetic towards, and apologists for, dictators like Stalin, Fidel, Chavez, Saddam, Hamas, etc. No Pasaran takes a look at the "progressive" adoration of Chavez.
The concept of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" persists, but, as it has always been, that becomes the dictatorship of thugs and the power-mad. Plato's philosopher-king doesn't work in real life.
When I see people from liberal democratic societies kissing the feet of socialist dictators - feudal kings, in effect - it gives me a chill, and gives anyone a chill for whom individual freedom - the free choice which confers dignity, and the consequences of our choices which confer humility as often as they confer joy and glory - is the holy grail. I know I am preaching, but I fear the tendency in the human species to be willing to sell one's birthright for a bowl of lentils or a bottle of snake oil.
But more than that, I fear the lentil salesman.
Life was meant to be difficult and to stretch our neurons and muscles and spirit to the fullest as we seek our path through the dark woodlands and deserts of life, guided by whatever star or stars we chose. And still, we will fail in many ways. "Fail, and grow. Succeed, and stagnate." I said that.
Which leads to the subject of Risk. The freedom to take risks is one of the fine things about free capitalist societies, and you could make a case that people are compensated, in part, by the amount of risk they are willing or able to shoulder in their work (military, cops, miners, and firemen excluded - those are government jobs, so they don't count). Risk and responsibility go hand-in-hand. As a newspaper reporter, I have minimal responsibility other than covering my local assignments glibly, and, if I screw up, no-one really cares. But a whole world of work is open to me, if and when I decide to jump into the cold water and make a change. Freedom to fail - a very fine thing indeed. But it hurts.
Part of being American is a willingness to sustain the hurts without running to Mommy Government for a kleenex. (Americans run to trial lawyers instead - which is almost as much of a culturally-subversive trend.)
I guess I have little more to add to what The Beatles say in Revolution and what Dylan says in My Back Pages. (excerpt):
A self-ordained professor's tongue
Too serious to fool
Spouted out that liberty
Is just equality in school
"Equality," I spoke the word
As if a wedding vow.
Ah, but I was so much older then,
I'm younger than that now.
In a soldier's stance, I aimed my hand
At the mongrel dogs who teach
Fearing not that I'd become my enemy
In the instant that I preach
My pathway led by confusion boats
Mutiny from stern to bow.
Ah, but I was so much older then,
I'm younger than that now.
(Ignore that continuation page below - I can't make it go away)
