The American Political Scene: A Hollywood B Movie in Progress
There can be little question that something is desperately amiss in the United States as it veers sharply to the left. A learned friend, whom I have long admired for her political astuteness and intellectual sobriety, seriously believes there is “a mole in the White House.” Another acquaintance, an American businessman transplanted to Canada, who follows events in his former country with expatriate fidelity, fears that within a year or two there will be violence in the streets, “some kind of popular uprising.” Are they overreacting?
For that matter, am I overreacting? I am as concerned with the fate of America as any red-state-blooded American citizen for I spent several years in the U.S. as a graduate student, where I developed an abiding regard for the country, visit from time to time as a lecturer on the university circuit, and, most importantly, know that the well-being of my own country is intimately tied to the American destiny. Thus I cannot help but feel involved with what transpires south of our border and have grown increasingly alarmed at the clearly socialist trend that “progressively” dominates American politics. Indeed, unless I am egregiously mistaken, what I appear to be seeing is a kind of renovated Marxism permeating the structure of an administration that seems less American with every passing day.
Ron Radosh informed us, correctly, that there was a communist in the White House, by whom he meant green jobs bolshi Van Jones, who has just resigned. Without being overly facetious, one wonders if there may not be another, at least crypto-communist, the American president himself, who has, unfortunately, no intention of resigning. And if the word “communist” is too strong in this context, how about “socialist radical,” which is, I respectfully submit, close enough, and certainly rather too close for comfort. Let us count the ways.
This is a president who cut his teeth as a “community organizer” (code for shaking down the “system”), who gives every indication of playing by Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals (whose methods he taught at the Developing Communities Project in Chicago), who enjoyed a close relationship with Weather Underground alumnus Bill Ayers, who is far too cozy with the trade unions and apparently approves their bullying tactics at town hall meetings and elsewhere, who supports the Honduran leftist and would-be strongman Manuel Zelaya and is disturbingly chummy with leftist Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, who believes in “spreading the wealth” or economic distributionalism (code for managerial socialism), and who wishes to ram through various pieces of nation-changing legislation without proper study, consultation, or plebiscitary review. It is not far-fetched to conclude that, though a Democrat, he is surely no democrat.
And he is surely no quintessential American, given his syndicalist antecedents, paternalistic convictions, and dubious affiliations. Moreover, the current occupant of the Oval Office is not a man who has proved himself in any meaningful way but seems lacking in almost every major respect. He has neither military nor executive experience and nothing to his credit but a few ineffectual years in Congress and two poorly written, self-congratulatory autobiographical books that were, to put it gently, somewhat premature. Add to this an oddly shrouded past with every significant document held under seal or otherwise kept from public view and one may legitimately wonder what is going on. Who exactly have Americans elected to steer the nation through these tumultuous times?
We do not have public figures as cinematic as Obama in Canada but we do have our share of minibamas: for instance, the leader of the New Democratic Party, Jack Layton, head honchette of the Green Party, Elizabeth May; and Jennifer Lynch, our very own Nancy Pelosi, who presides over our free-speech-hating human rights commissions, to all of whom we have long been inured. It is therefore easy for a Canadian to recognize a member of the phratry, a fellow traveler who has assumed his position at the head of the pack.
What is not so easy for a Canadian to imagine is a socialist revolutionary, a contemporary Massanello “sweep[ing] away the liberties of the continent,” assuming his position as the president of the United States of America. This has to be a bad movie, like a parodic version of Last Action Hero in which characters enter the celluloid reality and mingle with the actors of the movie-within-a-movie. Not to worry, though. This is only a hypothesis, a figment of exaggerated speculation. We will all leave the theater shortly and return to normal life as we know it, Canadians back to a rather innocuous nation and Americans back to a real country. Well, maybe not quite. Things may not turn out as well as they do in the film — which, if the events we are observing are anything to go by, could plausibly morph into The Terminator with a bad ending.
Canadians have the advantage of being able to exit the theater and return to a troubling if less devastating world. But Americans, I’m afraid, do not yet enjoy the Canadian option and are now living inside the theater or, even worse, inside the screen itself. They have become part of the B movie, willy-nilly conscripted into the mediocre but nonetheless terrifying spectacle they have created for themselves.
And if they don’t find a way out, instead of “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” or “The Star-Spangled Banner,” they may one day find themselves singing “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night” or “The Internationale.” Stranger things have happened.
The Obama Project is built on a house of cards. It will not stand against the wind of outraged citizens, regardless of how clever the National Socialists believe themselves to be.
Speaking of Canada: It’s a fallacy to compare Canadian medical coverage to Obamacare. I lived in BC and the Yukon for 23 years and was quite happy with it. I never needed expensive technology so I had a limited experience of the system. I was an active volunteer for the socialist NDP (until they took power in Victoria and I got a rude awakening). There is a paternalistic streak in Canada but it is nowhere close to the totalitarian measures the National Socialists have put into the “Stimulus Bill” and HR 3200. After I left BC in ’99, the Liberals went on a slash and burn program against both education and health. I’m still hearing new horror stories about it from friends and family. Yet I doubt it is anywhere near what our Supreme Leader has in store for us when they fill in all the blanks in the legislation.
More exactly, it is a little-known novel by a respected American jurist and author, Allen Drury. The novel, “Come Nineveh, Come Tyre” was published in 1964, after his more famous
“Advise and Consent”.
In the novel, an ultra-liberal Senator is elected President, with the help of a friendly news media who believe he is morally superior to his opponent, a moderate conservative, primarily on social issues and foreign policy. In doing so, the media deliberately ignore the Senator’s questionable past associations, including his membership in various organization of a radical-left nature.
Once he is in the White House, he begins suppressing any dissent or even disagreement with his policies, first by societal pressure (again with the help of the media, who eagerly pursue scandalous rumors about his opponents, even when the rumors are made up out of whole cloth by the President’s staff), and in the end by having his political opponents arrested on trumped-up charges ranging from bribery to murder.
In the end, the President declares martial law, orders a roundup of all “dissidents”- and then goes to a summit meeting with the Soviet Premier (remember, this was 1964) to draw up an agreement for the unilateral dismantling of the U.S. nuclear deterrent and the equally unilateral withdrawal of U.S. forces from Europe, the Far East, and basically everywhere outside of the North American continent- in the name of peace and cooperation.
When the few media figures who had called the President out on his past behavior are arrested and charged with treason, the remaining media mavens, appalled, ask how this could happen.
And realize- a bit too late- that it happened because they were so eager to see not just this President, but any liberal-left politician in a position of power, that they had spent literally decades vilifying anyone not on that end of the political spectrum. In the end, they have succeeded in figuratively slitting their own throats.
In the process of helping transform the United States into a Syndicalist/Socialist prison state.
“Come Nineveh, Come Tyre” by Allen Drury. Out of print, but definitely worth reading.
As yet, we are not quite in the situation described in the novel.
As. Yet.
clear ether
eon
Thank you David. Well thought, well written.
Thank you Eon. Drury’s book got buried in the dust of Lyndon Johnson Borking Goldwater that year. It needs a re-do.
Bolsheviks have overrun our government. The Oval Office and the Berlin Chancellry of 1933 look alike. This time Holder-Rahm-Axelrod form the phalanxes of S.A. to come after us all.
I’m an American living in Canada and I agree that “It is therefore easy for a Canadian to recognize a member of the phratry, a fellow traveler who has assumed his position at the head of the pack.”
The Oxford English Dictionary defines “phratry” as: “A political-religious division of the people.”
Because we are used to seeing degrees of communism here in Canada, we are perhaps better than Americans in the USA at recognizing communists. From having lived among communists in a communist country in Asia for a while, I also learned that it is completely acceptable if one is a communist living in a bourgeois society to lie, lie blatantly and whenever necessary, in order to achieve communism’s goals. Communists living in a non-communist society consider lying simply a tactic to achieve communist goals and there are no moral implications to lying for a communist.
I also discovered that communists consider members of the bourgeoisie stupid if they cannot discern lies uttered by communists. The communist’s thinking is that if you are so naive as to think that the lie is true, despite obvious counterfactual evidence or conditions, then you bourgeoisie deserve whatever happens to you.
Sometimes a lie is so blatant, however, that a person’s soul, without the person’s own volition playing any role, cries out in anguish. This was the significance of the South Carolina senator’s, “You lie,” during Obama’s address to the Houses of Congress last Wednesday.
Everything that David relates about Obama’s experiences and associations and accomplishments were all well known to those of us who use the new media to inform ourselves of the truth. As related by eon in sighting Drury’s book the “useful idiots” of the MSM kept the truth from that part of the electorate who take on face value what they read in their local paper or view on television. But since Drury wrote his book the alternative media has and will assume a much greater role in informing the electorate of what is what. Yesterday’s demonstrations in Washington and elsewhere are just the start of the people taking back their government from the communists who were elected in the last two cycles.
Barky Obama wears eye shadow. You won’t see it tonight on the 60 Minutes interview as the cameras are too close; they don’t want to give the game away but in all his teleprompter addresses his lids are shaded and the lashes slightly touched with mascara. Male prostitutes yes. Presidents nyet. The world is leaderless.
And there don’t appear to be any exits. More of a Hotel California than a theater but the point is well taken.
We should remember that one essential attribute of evil is its capacity to escape rational explanations, which does not prevent rationalizing, unfortunately. When a man of no particular accomplishment, having graduated from two respected(!) universities, with no particular appreciation of civilization (except perhaps a nihilist perspective), unable to credit the foundations of America for its greatness is given the presidency, and presides over unprecedented exponential growth of deficit and undebtness, something is terribly wrong, and we don’t need any graduate degree to sense it.
The somnolence of an electorate anxious to purge its self-image of the stigma of racism does not quite explain it, the immaturity of a young president does not really explain it either, the corruption of the press by itself would not suffice.
When you see this kind of perfect storm whithout being able to discern precisely the coordinating mechanism, it is reasonable to postulate evil. This is why the present expressions of alarm invoke Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, etc… Not because the specific attributes fit precisely, they don’t, but because we are dealing with evil, simple as that!
Then, it makes sense that our president surpasses most ardent activists in the systematic denial of evil in all of its contemporary manifestations, Iran, Islamic imperialism, Antisemitism and widespread tyranny, basically co-opting evil, embracing (sometimes literally) Chavez, Ahmadinejad, Hamas, etc…
If America possesses an immune system against tyranny, now is the time to trigger its response. I hope and pray that the tea party movement is what will ultimately prevent the fall, within the bounds of civility, while it is still possible to do so.
Never, never understate the failure of the captive media in this travesty. Chimpy the Kenyan would not be President today if even a few in the “media” had done an honest job. His entire background is a lie. His whole life has been concealed. He was elected because the media and other liberals and anti-Americans saw him as a magic negro and, for that reason alone, worthy to be President!
Thank you for your observation: “how bizarre this locution seems to a Western ear – President Obama” – yes, indeed it does. What it portended before the elction was an individual whose cultural upbringing would be at odds with the majority of Americans, whose devotion to this country and its history would be in question, and his motives would be suspect. Of course the predictable response to all of these misgivings would be to call the suspicious racist, nativist, chauvanist etc. But those are marxist responses meant to keep the marxist narrative alive in the minds of Americans, to soften us up for the inevitable collapse of America. We had every right to question who this man was and where his heart and loyalty lay. If he were not of a different race it might have happened more vigorously. And he knew that and in his usual manner cynically exploited it. We have been told for decades to embrace multiculturalism and diversity, two codes words for anti-white and anti-American. Now we see common sense makes sense. It is heartening to see people finally expressing common sense and logic regardless of the tired old vicious smear tactics being levelled. Our very survval depends upon people calling this man what he is. The pity is we have been so cowed and bashed for so long that it didn’t happen before the election. He is not an American. His character and ideas are foreign and inimical to the ideas which shaped this country. In my opinion, he is a domestic enemy and a terrorist. Or should I say more accurately, a man caused disaster.
Dear Eon
Thanks for the heads up on Drury’s novel, which I’ve just ordered. Somehow I missed the book along the way. Sounds like it might have triggered Charles McCarry’s Shelley’s Heart.
D.S.
Mr. Solway,
Your voice is pitch-perfect.
Thank you.
Revolutions, violent revolutions or upheavals are generally carried on by small bands of opportunists & adventurers who cynically guide massess of aroused “useful idiots”, useful idiots whose preparation and conditioning require a well coordinated effort.
An important element of Obama’s (so far successful) revolution has been the presentce in the tissue of this nation of a large number of active and seditios citizenry who are facilitating his efforts and are constantly dampening across the country the perception of their (Obama efforts’) consequences (and this, alas! against their own very best interests!).
Who are this generation of useful idiots?
Gary Ogletree, We were in the book business together. Do you still live on East 5th or 6th? Sounds like your not in Vancouver anymore. If you are I’d like to get in touch with you.
David, as a Canadian/American and an unknown poet of dubious abilities, i enjoyed your essay immensely. I appreciate dry sarcastic wit above all else. Please contribute more in the future.
How interesting, there are so many Canadians who appreciate Americas freedoms and the imminent loss of those freedoms. Especially when so many of the Canadian newspapers seem to be in a duplicitous relationship with the Obama Marxist Servitude Train of Slavery moving at mach one around the world.
Yes I pull no punches, Obama is a blatant Marxist who seeks to destroy this country so that he can remake it in a National Socialist Dystopia complete with a Black Liberationist Elite group of rulers who will control everything, especially the wealth.
Can’t recall a more readable and literate article. Thumbs up for the elegant turn of phrase! As an American I wish to offer impressions from my perspective. To be ingenuous, the Obama scenario unfolds like a Kabuki stagepiece.
Perhaps you surveille the big picture, perhaps not – I have no way of knowing. It is my view that the issues are global, rather than national. Conditions you describe in Canada, and questions surrounding the presidency of the U.S. are of common origin. Uncoiling from a nest of international bankers, figuratively speaking, vipers have encircled the earth, locking nations in a death-grip.
The British Commonwealth and Europe have been swallowed by the Bank of England (the Rothschilds.) Nothing in the States is safe from David Rockefeller, as his tentacles penetrate every aspect of American life.
CFR, the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission are his spawn, organized to circumvent constitutional process and control events from the shadows. Through stealth and ‘gradualism’ their agenda seeks to destroy U.S. nationalism in favor of a New World Order. Treason and subterfuge are the rule.
The Obamas, and most who surround him, are proponents of CFR. Vice President Biden hails from Bilderberg, Obama’s foreign affairs advisor, Zbigniew Breszinski, springs from the Trilateral Commission. As said before, these are Rockefeller babies. Here is a quote from David Rockefeller’s ‘Memoirs:’
“For more than a century ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents, such as my encounter with Castro, to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a global political and economic structure — one world, if you will. If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.”
In view of irregularities experienced in the U.S. with electronic balloting, it is clear that massive electronic fraud is possible. Further, considering the criminal practices described above, a realistic observer no longer assumes any official has been legitimately elected. Such was my view concerning the second term of G. W. Bush, and this is my view concerning Barack Obama. He is a plant, groomed for this purpose over a period of years by an East Coast banking cabal. In Indonesia Stanley Ann Dunham, Barack Obama’s mother, developed Ford Foundation’s micro-finance program under Peter F. Geithner, father of Tim Geithner, Obama’s Treasury Secretary. This explains why individuals in the Geithner clique are present in the White House today, despite the fact that these individuals were in large part responsible for the banking crisis. AIG, which profited handsomely from the banking bailouts, was one of Obama’s largest campaign contributors.
So Obama is clearly a pawn of international bankers, who favor dissolution of borders, immigrant invasion, racial diversity, socialist programs, depopulation, i.e., anything to promote divisiveness, to break-down the establishment, and create dependency on a State conceived and run for the greed and dominion of a few depraved men. But the vision goes beyond America to embrace Mexico, Canada, indeed, the world. In my judgment these developments are not about ‘communism’ but – considering the players – Zionism. They reflect a child-like obsession with myth, an ambition for supremacy approaching the psychotic, an adaptation to oppression amounting to misanthropy, licentious behavior indistinguishable from criminality, the elevation of rivalry to embrace genocide. In many ways, as I see matters, Europe and The Commonwealth have ‘been there and done that.’ America is the last frontier. If it is any reassurance, the plot will never see fruition. Our people are yet too robust, our men, too rugged and independent to be conquered by the effete. Likely public intervention will be required for reform, so far have we departed from the Constitutional model. Our downward spiral began in 1913 with creation of The Fed. There will be an interval of trial, but the indomitable American spirit will prevail.
Not to presume, but a complete chronicle of these problems can be found in this free online edition of ‘Final Warning’ by David Allen Rivera, comingjudgement.250x.com. Part I represents a great deal of research, and I suggest beginning with Chapter 2, the section on The Federal Reserve. Except for religionists, Part II can be bypassed.
David, I’ve been watching and thinking along much the same lines. As a Canuck who believes that one of the reasons Canadians enjoy the luxury of being Canadian is due to the protection of the US military umbrella, I wonder if we’ll be able “to exit the theater (sic) and return to a troubling if less devastating world” without its aegis.
Obama appears quite happy to become a one-termer. He doesn’t like the country that much anyway so what’s the biggy with two terms? His administration will insert several viral programs into the system that will never be removed.
Jeez, Davie, I realize you’re a Canadian, but when you’re writing for a Reagan-loving audience, you gotta be careful about using B-movie as a term of derision.
My only quibble is David forgot to mention the uneasy half-recollection many have felt with seeing Obama, alone on stage (his solitude while declaring victory on election night was especially provocative) with that chin jutted up, emoting. Baracko Tortellini… I fear a good part of America will eventually eat this guy alive, and then, the body distributed and consumed, they will have to figure how to renew their sacred signs without becoming the corrupt and eternally-fractured post-war Italy.
David Solway. Interesting piece. Interesting, Greece. Any relation to Larry Solway, Canadian television talent back in the day?
The exit will be created in November 2010.