I’ve always thought it impolite for a writer to quote himself, but perhaps I may be forgiven a breach of manners for the sake of brevity. In my novel Empire of Lies, the narrator Jason Harrow says: “The world always seems like it’s going to hell when you’re depressed. And, of course, it always is going to hell in some way. That’s what makes it so hard to tell the difference between Armageddon and the blues.”
There is no question that a substantial number of people — the thinking ones — are currently depressed over the state of western culture in general and of our nation in particular. How could they be otherwise? Europe our mother is dead and an anti-American American leadership seeks to impose on our homeland the same socialistic welfare state that was either the disease that killed her or at least the primary symptom of that disease. Our not-really-very-intelligent intelligentsia is openly bent on weakening the foundations of our freedom in law and in religion, perverting and ignoring the Constitution, attacking the Bible whenever it can’t be banned. Our educators have ceased to educate our children about the sources of our liberty — from Greece and Rome and Jerusalem to England and Virginia — and instead train them to elevate the primitive, the oppressive, the abnormal, and the downright wrong to cardboard thrones of mock nobility. I would say our elites are fashioning a golden calf for us to worship, but perhaps you have never been told that story.
The results of these destructive trends are everywhere apparent. More and more children are born out of wedlock and thus condemned to dysfunction and poverty. More and more people are trained to childlike dependence by a government that has learned to trade entitlements for power. The president and Congress grow rich in both money and privilege while demonizing the wealth of others in order to pacify a populace struggling to survive. “The best lack all conviction,” as the poet Yeats wrote, “while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
President Barack Obama is not the first cause of these problems but he is the incarnation and champion of the philosophy that is the cause. And as he seeks to divide American voters through envy and anger in the hope he can bamboozle them into the tremendous mistake of electing him again, the opposition seems able to do little more than assemble a hapless array of second stringers to try and stop him.
So we grow depressed and the world seems to be going to hell. But are we done for or just dispirited? Is it Armageddon or just the blues?
I’m going to keep recommending your articles on Facebook. I don’t care how many personal attacks I have to put up with.
A good article if: 1) you do love freedom; and, 2) the ancestors you respect were Americans. Americans are a particular blend of peoples who lived in the 13 colonies in the 18th and 19th centuries. The colonists were English, Irish, Scots, Swedish (New Sweden), Dutch (New Amsterdam), and German (from 1685). These were the people who mixed and married to produce a nation called ‘American’ and then created a free, independent state called ‘America’. Later, people arrived who were not Americans, and not genetically related to the people who became Americans, and Americans were re-described as WASPs. Names don’t really matter, DNA does. President O’bama loves to compare himself with previous Presidents, but he is completely unlike them. He is our Odoacer. Like Odoacer, he is the personification of the American nation’s final decline.
Jacobite gives more weight to DNA than I do, or do thousands of other anti-racists. Please see my latest on the hyphenated Americans and the Democratic deployment of the race card: http://clarespark.com/2012/01/03/the-race-card/.
Been here, done that: favourites in a nutshell with what you say here;
1. Marcus T. Cicero re treason
2. that dead white male imperialist R. Kipling in 1919 with his “Gods
of The Copybook Headings”.
Between Armageddon and The Blues. I think I’ll write a song. Thanks Andrew.
In order to understand Obama and the Left, you only have to understand one fundamental thing: they are ashamed of American history as participants or hate it as non-participants. The great irony here is that the very connection by skin called “racism” that says one can predict the actions of people based on their skin color is used to at once demonize those with a white legacy and then turned around to say it doesn’t exist in the case of minorities.
This lack of an overarching philosophy in favor of a non-existent one full of self-contradiction is a dead giveaway that “justice” is simply whatever the Left points at.
How many times have you heard nuanced and complicated history stripped of context and reduced to “This country was stolen from the Indians” or “God damn America” or “This country was built on slavery?”
The history of the New World is one great Trail of Tears from Tenochtitlan to Pine Ridge of which I bear the blame and debt. No matter the men involved are long dead; I am white and that is the long and the short of it. Meanwhile for me to even suggest such a connection in regard to black crime here and now and today is considered pure bigotry and the lack of mention of the color of flash mobs and spontaneous riots in the media is a reflection of this.
No one on the Left or media has any trouble mentioning skin color in regard to the travails of history because white people are a spectacularly unprotected group where everyone ever on the wrong side of that history now brings rotten tomatoes and cabbages to hurl at will.
Obama doesn’t like America, that is what his “change” meant. His wife doesn’t like America, that is why her “pride” in America is filtered through a lens of race, 12% of the American people; there are no moon landings or arch triumphs for America for the First Lady because she believes in the connection by skin she acknowledges by her actions and denies with words.
Holder doesn’t like America, that is because his “people” have been undone by white people who are endemic racists who deserve affirmative action, even if they arrived years after the Civil War.
This group on the Left, white and black, despise the word “meritocracy” and phrases like “Pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. Their childish rhetoric believes everything is a good ol’ boy network where exploitation and oppression is the true measure of the difference between going to the moon or squatting by the side of the road selling Bic pens and razor blades.
Obama, the Democratic Party and the Left define their world by race because it fits in so neatly with their views that social position determines success and not native and cultural brilliance with its attendant value systems.
Excellent!
Depression is just the brain’s way of putting the body in low gear, while the leftists are in charge of destroying the world.
Obama did not invent insane leftism, he only gave the asylum keys to the last kingdom that wasn’t destroyed by it.
Between Pollyanna and Pandora lies the state of mankind. Anyone who is not depressed, isn’t paying attention. We are on the precipice. Toes hanging over. Teetering and wobbling.
Wind blowing hard in our faces. Chill wind at that.
Once we said, “Never again”.
Never is here.
Where’s my fiddle?
Instantly, I thought of “MacPherson’s Lament.”
Mr. Klavan, you should add that in November and December the FBI did 1,100,000 gun store background checks for purchases. (Not sure how many Wii play stations were sold over the same period but I bet one or the other is a close second place.) Does that classify as the Blues? Or is there a category for Realists? An added statistic not recorded, how many gun store purchases were Kool-Aid drinkers? Not very many.
It’s not an either/or, why can’t it be both? It’s a Blues Armageddon
Andrew, your last paragraph will be used to inspire some of us who are still standing and fighting…as discouraging and frankly frightening as these times we are living in get. Agree, THINKING people cannot help but be alarmed as the Master Blamer lures us closer to the cliff’s edge… And like lemmings so many are going along to get along.
Armageddon or The Blues. I hope the previous poster writes the song!
I’ve already begun. Oddly enough, I’m also reading Lucifer’s Hammer.
Good ol’ “Lucifer’s Hammer”.
I don’t expect much good to happen in 2012. Even if we can defeat Obama, Romney, and Mullah Ron Paul, and elect a conservative as president, we still must undo all of the damage that has occurred since Ronald Reagan left office.
Starting with the national debt.
Didn’t you hear? Paul Krugman said the debt does not matter… and when has the New York Times ever been wrong?
I think the answer to Mr. Klavan’s question — at least for the short haul — lies in the outcome of this year’s elections. It seems to me that the Institutional Left (thank you, Mr. Breitbart) is confident that it has accumulated sufficient power to bring about the “end times”. How else to explain the arrogant and imprudential behavior of the administration, Democrat congress and liberal media who seem to believe themselves immune, ultimately, from public accountability? What lies before us, in my view, is a contest to match the concentrated power of the numerically small but well-organized Left against the distributed public will. If things fall out in a way that pleases conservative Americans, it will not be enough; without fundamental (systemic) change driven by the Right, the game will only go into overtime. To paraphrase the hackneyed political metaphor we’ll only be kicking Armageddon down the road.
Faith and honor.
Grace note: is the current President the 12th Imam? If so, Ahmadinejad is in deep trouble for his failure of recognition.
You don’t have to be one of those types who try to build a better yesterday, to dread the way things are heading.
“Our educators have ceased to educate our children about the sources of our liberty — from Greece and Rome and Jerusalem to England and Virginia — and instead train them to elevate the primitive, the oppressive, the abnormal, and the downright wrong to cardboard thrones of mock nobility.”
Precisely!
I am convinced that every other symptom of illness could be reversed and become irrelevant, if this is addressed.
Please sir put names to the PROVEN first stringers. No president since Washington has been first string until after the requirement of performing in the job. It should be noted that the Greatest Generation didn’t start out that way.
Well put Mr. Klavan. I suspect that the average thinking person in the 1930s, 1870s, 1348 and innumerable other epoch dates in history had the same feelings of despair. The sun rises the next day no matter what, but there could be alot of misery along the way.
Don’t get too nostolgic for the greatest generation. This generation elected FDR to the Presidency 4 times. This was enough times for him to pack the judiciary with like minded people. As a result, FDR ushered in the era of big government (social security, unemployment insurance, & regulators). He is also the same one to order the interrment of millions of Japanese citizens and under him let syphllis grow in black patients so they could be “studied”.
No they didn’t, their parents did. Back then, you had to be 21 to vote, but only 18 to be drafted or 16 to enlist (and some as young as 14 enlisted with fake ID’s).
Any WWII vet born before 1919 or 1920, depending on the month could have and probably did vote for FDR in ’40 and ’44, so you can’t dismiss what he said out of hand and say only their parents voted for FDR.
Fundamentally, the parents of the ‘Boomers put in place most of the stuff everybody so loves to hate ‘Boomers about, but we call them the Greatest Generation. The first election ANY ‘Boomer could vote in was ’64 and then only a very few in GA and KY, which allowed 18 yr. olds to vote. The first Presidential election any significant number of ‘Boomers could vote in was ’68 and the Republican Nixon guy won that one, and the next one in ’72. The first election that the whole ’46 – ’64 ‘Boomer cohort could vote in was ’82, and as I recall that Reagan guy was President then and re-elected in ’84.
It is easier to be nostalgic
it is easier to address history than face the challenges of today.
The future as always is uncertein.
goo.gl/46hGW
“We’re always saying goodbye to what we cherish even as it rises from the ashes in some unrecognizable form.”
Great line. I heard you mention once, citing your time in the UK, that one has to actually live outside the borders of the US to fully appreciate her. You’ve lost that ex-pat perspective- understandable, since it’s been awhile. I’ve been in Greece since 1989, and from here the US is still a spectacularly exceptional land, despite all the telling statistics which mark her for decline.
A year ago my Greek wife and I were in the US and happened to see an interview with Rick Santorum. She says to me, ‘”He’d make a good president.” So even an until recently lower tier candidate like Santorum appears first class to a citizen of one of the most politically dysfunctional democracies in the world.
I’ve been reading A Team of Rivals, and it is a revelation what a low view his contemporaries had of Lincoln. If one has a Christian worldview, one relaxes with the insight of the prophet Daniel who says that God ultimately is the one who permits rulers to come to power. God still loves us, and is about to do His thing.
The Repubs on offer are just fine, in my view. And one of ‘ems going to wipe the floor with our Current Occupant. Then we’ll see something we cherish rising from the ashes in a new form.
Victor David Hansen once wrote that we are now living in the kingdom of lies and there is so much truth in this. One only has to refer to the news media of the USA and realize how much of it is controlled by the central government. Information is distorted; lies are published without remorse and the constant cheering of the Obama regime goes on and on and on. We no longer have a socalled free press; the Universities and their professors have taken a personal oath to support the Fuehrer of the New American World State. The key to survival is to believe nothing that issues from this government, not the unemployment figures which are made up; not the latest supposed diseases that are about to strike and which do not really exist; not any study coming from the government controlled think tanks and universities;not any of the military reports coming out about our worldwide involvement and nothing coming from the Hilary Clinton State department, a pro Jihad institution paid for by the studpid American taxpayers. Let them that have eyes look and let them that have ears listen; it will amaze you when you finally realize how much bs we are being fed. America Nova delenda est.
Regarding Johann’s comment and as long as Mr. Klavan quoted one of his books, I like this line from The Identity Man:
“If stupidity were a communicable disease, Ramsey thought, journalists would have to be herded into a pit and shot like infected cattle.”
– is always broadcasting Gangs of New York on one of its channels. Watch it to cheer yourself up.
Beautifully put, Mr. Klavan. Thanks for the inspiration.
I was on Citalopram most of last year finally decided to get off it even though (like any thinking person today) I am very depressed. But this drug was making it worse. Now I suffer the occasional “brain zaps” but I’d rather ‘enjoy’ my natural low. I hope I make it through this year but I recognize I may not…
Compare Western culture to a home…that’s been taken over by a hoarder.
And you’ll see that the clutter we’ve allowed to accumulate due to tolerance and laziness by now seriously interferes with living in this house, and at every turn, more mess is created and slowly we’re not longer able to move anymore, lest we have an entire pile of junk trap and suffocate us.
And that inability to fix the situation is far more depressing than the epic mess itself.
Contrary to Mr Klavan’s pessimistic outlook, the leftists are not breeding. What 1 generation has created another can easily null & void it.
I do have hope for a better future & I see signs of it.
In order to know where you need to go, you must know where you have been and from where you begin.
Proper perspective is necessary for taking the proper path for the future. You can fool anyone you care to, but IMHBLO, the last person you want to fool, is yourself.
This article really doesn’t address either. It’s merely an observation that people are thinking about current conditions. And this writer took the long way round to make that point.
We can’t all be mindless liberal twits. Some one with some concern for themselves and those around them has to make good choices, for every ones best interest.
“Some sunny morning
And it won’t be long
He’s{Obama’s] gonna wake up
And find we’re gone.
But when we’re gone
He shouldn’t worry about us
Cause we’ll be sittin’
Up on top
Of the World.”
This is a re-rendering of a recording I heard by Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee. I couldn’t find it on Youtube, but you can get a taste of the style here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLKvn6WRwQM
Things will change when a significant number of states threaten secession, or at least, threaten to forbid the businesses operating within their borders to transmit any more federal taxes to the IRS.
You kill the beast by starving it.
Armageddon or the blues???????? If its Armageddon Im gonna go down fighting. If its the blues the clouds will lift and we will see a brighter day. This is a great country that many have fought and died for, for them we should never give up.
It is unfortunate that the prospect of attempting to establish a nation in Antarctica to escape from this madness and preserve what’s left of Western civilisation is becoming more and more attractive.
Armageddon is better than the blues. Armageddon means the destruction of what is evil and obsolete. The blues means the same ol’ same ol’, no end in sight.