The Pied Piper of America
Everyone knows the old folk tale of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, made famous by Goethe, the Brothers Grimm, and Robert Browning. The story has its origins in a medieval legend in which a piper dressed in a parti-colored robe mysteriously appears out of nowhere — “there was no guessing his kith and kin,” writes Browning — and offers, for a sum, to rid the town of its plague of rats. Having done so, he returns to collect his payment. When he is refused he mesmerizes the town’s children with his melodies and leads them away, never to be seen again, except for a single lame child who cannot keep up with his fellows.
Setting aside the obvious differences and allowing for parody, there are curious analogies with the career of the current president of the United States. A man of pied heritage and sonorous aptitudes, he appears practically out of nowhere, proceeds to charm the multitudes with his dulcet airs, and promises to heal a country suffering a cultural and political infestation of metaphorical rats: doubt, cynicism, dissatisfaction, weariness, and dissension. Indeed, he vows a “fundamental transformation” of the current state of affairs, and a vast audience, dazzled by his virtuoso flair for deception, cannot resist his appeal. He raises his pipe to his lips (although, be it said, reading the music off a teleprompter) and before one knows it succeeds in enchanting an entire people who follow him like little children to the wondrous destination he has prepared for them.
In an exchange with Chris Matthews on Hardball, former Newsweek editor Evan Thomas certainly saw it that way. Obama “is going to say, now, children, stop fighting and quarreling with each other.” A skeptical Newsbusters blogger, reacting to Thomas and his ilk, comments on Obama’s numberless queue of rapt believers, “They would follow him to hell singing his praises.” They were feeling the love, the allure, the temptation, and had readily succumbed to the piper’s rich chromatics. As Obama said of his Secret Service detail, they “follow me wherever I go.” And follow him they did, to the very edge of the precipice of unsustainable debt, immigration chaos, racial controversy, military fallback, electoral unscrupulousness, American unexceptionalism, juridical nonfeasance, greater insecurity, and growing international derision.
This was not the “fundamental transformation” they had expected. Fortunately, among those who were attracted by the message of change, the honeyed cadences or the charismatic personality of a much-dappled candidate, and had enthusiastically joined his troupe, there were a sufficient number of “lame” votaries who lagged far enough behind to retain some degree of perspective, hobbling back with the warning that all was not what it seemed. This only confirmed and reinforced the skepticism of the more realistic and conservative observers who found the piper’s canticles rather more cloying than ambrosial and wisely stayed at home. Although many of the original naifs have now bethought themselves, plugging their ears against the president’s siren inducements and returning to where they started from, many are still determined to plunge over the cliff.
22% of self-described somewhat-to-extremely-liberal-renamed-progressives falling off a cliff is problematic. They would most likely stop in their tracks and complain about who is responsible for the incomplete environmental impact statement.
Wave goodbye and offer a shove to the false messiah and his psalter egos!!
So much for following a guy, listening to a guy, and believing a guy with absolutely NO experience who wanted to be president of the United States. How’s that “Hope and Change” working out for you, America? Remember,this was the same guy who had his toadies mock Sarah Palin, a sitting governor at the time of the election in 2008 of one of the largest states in the union, for lack of inexperience to be VICE President, when Obama himself NEVER RAN ANYTHING!!! He never ran a town, a city, a state, let alone one of those “evil” corporations he’s so fond of insulting on a regular basis.
So now the country has buyer’s remorse. Well, we can now actually DO something about it. November 2 is coming, and soon. We can actually neuter this socialist and stop him from destroying what’s left of this country.
And gang, in the future, the only Pied Piper we should be following is someone committed to a smaller government, less taxes, and has a real fetish for following the Constitution. You know, the Constitution, that document Obama thinks was written for some other country? You can’t get into too much trouble in life by saving money, taking less of it away from people, and having a lot less Federal bureaucrats.
Vote. Send them a message they will never forget.
Margaret Thatcher said, “All of life is conservative.” And right she was. Think about it in your own lives. If you drink too much, you lose your job and your family. If you eat too much, you become obese. If you spend too much money, you go bankrupt. The examples could go on and on. A conservative approach to life leads to harmony and happiness. So it goes with government. A huge, obese government, spending itself into oblivion, and drinking up all the God-given freedoms of individuals is bound to fail, just as an individual indulging in the same behaviors will fail at life. The left rejects Natural Law and Human Nature. This is why they will always fail. It may take years or decades for them to fail, but they will fail nonetheless.
In the future how about we don’t FOLLOW anyone.
If someone comes along that knows where he is going cautiously walk along as long as stays on the right road. People seem to lose their sense of direction as soon as they get to DC. Don’t know why I’ve live here most of my life and it is the easiest large town to navigate I know.
When I left the US in 2008 to move to Israel the timing was fortuitous. I did not have to watch the swooning over The One, from the captivated masses, up close and personal.
Instead,ironically, I watched in horror his rise out of nowhere from the confines of one of the most volatile places in the world-the Middle East.Nevertheless, I researched, I read all that I could get my hands on about the new ‘great (Black)hope’ for America’s ‘ills’, and I understood that my fellow Americans were about to face a reckoning if they elected him.And they have.
However, aside from extended family and friends that I miss back home, the only non familial thing I miss right now is not being part of this revolutionary-yes, it is-change via the Tea Party movement.
It is no understatement to suggest, the US is on the precipice.Either it will fall off the cliff, or, it will be ‘saved’ via a take back of the Constitution.
The choice is inordinately clear and stark, and in the hands of we the people-more or less.
All this enchantment yet my imagination fixes on sober reality. A scary tale with no escape and one last hope.
Well written David… thanks.
Looking forward to a November goodbye on Shove Tuesday (sic) to the pied piper false messiah and his psalter egos.
A beautiful, lyrical article!
it’s always been a mystery to me why people were so taken with the speeches of the current occupant of the Oval Office. I heard him live on the campaign trail and it was all platitudes and buzz words and “The lady in the front tow fainted. Does anyone have water?” (He did that at a number of speeches until the brain-dead besotted media could no longer ignore it). People see what they want to see. They hear what they want to hear. Reality is tough.
RE previous: Make that front “row.”
Thank you for “veteran innocents.” The wrinkled outrage on the same sixties faces from congress to my college peers is the left’s equivalent of the proud many-badged VFW cap.
Leaving aside the suspicion that indeed the Last Days are upon us and there IS an actual future for western civilization I don’t see how a house so horribly divided can stand much longer.
I personally have reached the point where I can barely remain civil in the presence of liberals. They irk me to the point of physical-skin-crawling revulsion. I can forgive them for their socialist leanings because most of them thought they could create a kinder-gentler-more-humane world. They did not know they were for the most part instituting each and every tenant of the communist manifesto in place of accepted american cultural ideals and values. They were dupes. Useful idiots.
But now, after every aspect of command and control government dictated socialism has been exposed as nothing more than a giant black hole in the universe into which all the money in the world can be dumped without producing any effect whatsoever other than impoverishing whole nations, we have liberals STILL blathering their big-government-green-economy-social-justice bullshit is unbearable. Absolutely unbearable.
I don’t want to live in the same country with these scum. The planet is too small for the both of us. This can’t be ‘fixed’. The cure would throw all civilization into never ending chaos and a new dark age. Maybe we shouldn’t put aside that original suspicion.
@Scott
Boy you just said what I’ve been feeling for a few years now! As an American I am soooo ready for a divorce from those (liberals) people! I just want to tell them to pick half the country and leave us the he!! alone, except we all know they would be begging us for a bailout 50 years down the road!
That should be “tenet,” not tenant. A “tenant” is one who rents space from a landlord.
Wow, you pretty much sum up my feeling on the matter too! Too bad we can’t divvy things up and say you guys can go your way and we’ll go ours. Good luck in the hell hole you’re bound to create!
I agree with you Scott, very much. Don’t lose your optimism though.
I would point out once the 80% of USA’s grown ups are back in charge (we have, what, approx 545 people in Washington to vet, keep if OK or change out with 2010-2012 elections?), America will be OK going ‘back’ to tolerating the 20%-ers who are staunchly mind-numbingly and idiocally on the liberal side (as this article so eloquently describes…)
Keep up the fight, remain vigilant to vet ANYONE’s background who wants to be in government. We need servants and no more career politicians.
America’s ship dangerously lists to the left because of current nincompoopness, but she will be righted.
Literally!
Oh, Mama, could this really be the end? To be stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again?
Thank you, Scott, yes, a lot of us are thinking it but are too sophisticated to say it in the Comments section. I for one hope it is the end.
The November midterm elections will be a portent of things to come for Obama, a measure of what the country thinks of him (unless the Republicans really screw up). Obama was elected by a bare majority which he called a mandate to govern (actually “rule” in the sense of despotism) and a sanction to put an arm lock on the country to force it to go in the “right direction.” Thus he, a man with no executive experience and of extremely suspect ideology, an ideology whose name his allies and beneficiaries dare not speak, was elected by a parcel of awe-struck boobs and yearners after relief from reality. But now the boobs and the wiser know what he is NOT capable of, they know that he speaks from both sides of his mouth (or his teleprompter), they know that he deserves the same contempt and animosity that Americans held for the Crown and its Stamp Tax in 1765, that while he has delivered on his promise to “remake” the country, it will come at a terrific cost to both boobs and non-boobs alike, not to mention to their heirs and progeny, and they like it not. Re the Velma Hart incident.
Obama and his cohorts are caught in a pincer movement between the Tea Party and his formerly awe-struck but now dismayed and frightened electorate. More and more Americans are hoping that the remaining two years of his office are filled with golf, basketballs, Easter egg rolls, and other diversions. Junkets to Marbella and points European are far less costly to the country than his Machiavellian activism.
At least the piper in the story really did get rid of the rats.
Good Point! Our current Pied Piper tells us that because of his efforts – the rats are on their way over the cliff (the fact that there are currently many more rats than when he got here is a certain sign that they are all on the way to the cliff – yes siree) and we should go ahead and pay him for his wonderful work.
He is genuinely amazed and angered that anyone would point to the fact that there are more rats here than when he arrived as a sign that his piping is not working as well as we hoped.
Exactly, the Pied Piper story is a warning against cheating a worker out of his wages. If you make a promise, you deliver on the promise, or you will regret not doing so.
a big,wet bronx cheer for the piper and his followers.
We won’t be fooled again 2012
A sobering thought. On November 3rd, we will be right back to where we have been for the last 21 months, having no direct voice in what our Government does. And this will last for another two years.
Make sure that OUR votes on November 2, are so decisive that we can face the electoral valley between 2010 and 2012. Two years is a long time for a duplicitous foe to destroy more of our nation’s freedoms.
Vote out every democrat even the ones in the BLUE STATES so we can overturn this clown’s VETOs that are sure to stop our legislative actions.
Unfortunately, it also works the other way: Who will be able to stop the piper´s executive orders? It´s gonna be one hard slog.
Congress controls the purse strings. Obama can issue all the orders he wants, but Congress can turn around and say that anyone who implements those orders gets their funding cut off.
” Unlike the Pied Piper, however, he did not work alone but arrived on the scene surrounded by a retinue of plutocrats, political mandarins, and clever enablers, and of course by the usual train of cavillers, pettifoggers, sybarites, and janissaries, that is, journalists, feminists, intellectuals and academics. This only facilitated his task which he would not have been capable of accomplishing on his own.” Yes the one came with demon spawn and he lured them to the lake that burns with fire. There is hell to pay after all. We pray for the salvation of all men but their evil deeds must go to the perpetual fire and some will go into the fire along with their deeds because they refuse to accept the truth and change their hearts and minds. Those who escape will feel as though they have been snatched from the fire but their old evil ways will not be tolerated whatsoever. We must remember that the fire is forever and those who escape it can always be thrown back. The truth sets men free and the lie sends men into judgement fire. Nice job Mr. Solway.
My wife just read me excerpts from Obama’s Middle East references in his UN speech. I don’t believe for an instant the peaceprocessers’ false propaganda that Israel’s future requires the existence of a Palestinian State. But he rest of Obama’s tune was was the prettiest heard from an American president since Harry Truman.
Of course, Harry Truman, unlike the townspeople in the typically grisly old German folk tale, was a man of his word who said what he meant and meant what he said. Reliably not one to walk back today what he said yesterday.
But Truman was also a prophet: “If we don’t have a proper fundamental moral background, we will finally end up with a totalitarian government which does not believe in rights for anybody except the State.”
Mr. Solway, please access a dictionary and learn the meaning of the phrase hoi polloi. As a member of America’s hoi polloi, I resent being mistaken for what you clearly meant to write, “European elites”. Now, since elites is a perfectly good and clear English word, why not use it rather than non-English words that you don’t understand? Clearly Canadian multilingualism does not include Greek. Cheers!
“NEMO REPENTE FUIT TURPISSIMUS.” Juvenalis
Dear H. B.,
I do not believe that Mr. Solway meant elites when he wrote hoi polloi. That said, I think that he should have used another ancient phrase to describe the rabble; in fact, either grex populi or faex populi would be much better in this context.
THE WELFARE STATE — PERSONIFIED
Faex populi, grex populi, the dregs,
Scissored between their mother’s hairy legs,—
Whose ample dugs provide, whose spotted tongue
Kisses her lover-children, licks THEIR stone-blind young.
Parchellan ipse fecit
No, I agree with Halichoeres bivittatus. The European hoi polloi is generally considered to be “les paysans”; not the bourgeoisie nor the elites. I think Mr. Solway used the wrong word.
BY the way, Solway is a student of the Greek language and literature. I would assume he meant precisely the European hoi polloi.
Our votes will be be meaningless unless we are vigilant about not allowing vote fraud to be implemented on a large scale by the Leftist freakazoids.
If you don’t believe OJ-0samaBama wasn’t serious about destroying whitey with his own personal ‘army’ of
negroids/beanersAcorn ‘resurrected’, you are in for a rude awakening.Conservatives are going to have to come out in HUGE numbers (I mean GINORMOUS) for our votes to beat the fraud.
Get out and vote for every conservative you can. DO IT!
Our republic will depend on the majority of us doing the RIGHT thing. Otherwise, say hello to the ‘peso’.
You’ve got that right…I was told by an election judge in my district that ballots were coming in from nursing home residents, signed with an unreadable jagged line and voting for (let’s see if you can guess).
Forced to endure Al Franken, darling of the AirAmerica’s 11 or 12 listeners, US citizens must not let 100 ballots in somebody’s back seat count for anything ever again…
The Pied Piper could not have worked his con without a crowd of willing victims. The key point of Obama’s con was the millions of suckers who wanted to believe him. When a nation assumes a Hollywood view of the world it is continually a prey for “Star Power”. That is exactly what the tea party folks have rejected.
The US can’t be rescued by yet another show-business-facade-of-a-person. The rescue can only be made by ordinary people with their feet planted firmly on the ground. The tea party movement shows there are millions of these people. Are they enough to overcome the air-heads who think that life is just an extended TV show? Colour me skeptical because the last time I was in California, the entire population acted and talked like they were in a TV show.
Who’s gonna win? I think it’s a toss-up between the folks on Fantasy Island and the folks on Earth.
I am in Los Angeles and the center cannot hold. We have got to do something this instant about what is happening here. Most people don’t seem to understand that it is happening at all. I hope this means I still have time to find a way out before the mass mad exit.
Unfortunately the mice will have two years of anti-conservative vitriol on which to recover, affirm and reaffirm their pro-progressive attitudes just in time for the resurrected messiah to once again stand on his mount, garnished with appropriately loaded teleprompters, give his soaring sermon, impress everyone with his obvious superiority and be given a second chance to prove that he’s been the anointed one all along. Conservatives beware!
I liked this article. There were two things I don’t agree on, however. First, the sheep that continue to follow this lame shepherd can go away forever. I don’t care if those fools ever return. Secondly, the masses of Europe have been coming to the same revelation as many of Americans. At this point, they feel that anything is better than the current mess. And if they did find some way to complain about any future American leadership, they could simply be reminded to worry about their own state of affairs.
So let me guess..the rats that THE ANOINTED ONE is currently trying to “pipe” away are ones he inherited from the previous “piper”….
#21 Dan….
Thank you for this…..” And if they [the Europeans] did find some way to complain about any future American leadership, they could simply be reminded to worry about their own state of affairs. ”
I’ve had it with pontificating Europeans, tut-tut-ing here, admonishing there.. wagging fingers at us, rolling eyes, furrowing brows. Selectively forgetting so much.
(I have wandered from the topic, so delete me. )I lived in Britain for 30 years. They are obsessed with us. In the same way that a certain segment of our current society is all about whining, the British are all about disapproval. They insulted me all the time, and it was all about stuff they had made up in their heads, just like the liberals. I couldn’t get through to them that Americans do not sit around discussing what is wrong with the the British or anyone else. The TV, radio, newspapers there are all totally anti-American. No one ever has a good word to say for us. It is so unbalanced, you would think they would notice. I saw a post somewhere recently by a British woman who had lived in the States for 26 years. She said that, in the whole 26 years, she had never heard any Americans whatsoever discuss the British, either pro or con. The rest of the planet seem to think we are omnipotent. I think that what gets their goat is we are not snobby about our good fortune and accomplishments. We take it in stride to go to the Moon, for example, whereas, if the British had gone to the moon, there would be a statue about that in every little town square in the country.
Very few realize that the United States is the best European project ever.
I recently read an article on the sinking of the Titanic. It was an interesting article so I relayed it to my wife as she listened patiently. I told her of the inexperienced young man guiding the ship that night. When he saw the iceberg straight ahead he effected a turn. The Titanic had two means of steering and both had to be engaged simultaneously. Instead of turning the ship away from the iceberg, he turned it directly toward it. There was a four minute window in which to respond correctly and that wrong turn used all of it up. The ship collided with the iceberg instead. That’s not the end of the story. After the collision, a company bigwig ordered the Capt. to continue at full speed. Had they stopped, they would have gained an hour afloat. That would have been enough time for the nearest rescue ship to reach them. Instead over one thousand people died.
After having told the story to my wife, she replied, “Ooops, I thought you were talking about Obama. Both stories are so similar!”
I like the Pied Piper analogy but it doesn’t quite capture the essence of Barack Obama. Unlike the fool Obama, the Pied Piper was actually good at what he did.
A better analogy is the short story of The Emperor’s New Clothes. During the 2008 campaign all the Washington beltway elites hailed Obama as a brilliant sage who would lead the country out of the wilderness. He was compared to the nation’s greatest presidents and called sort of God when he had barely served a day in office.
Now he is finally being exposed as an outright charlatan and extreme leftwing ideologue who has never managed anything of consequence in his life. The clues were there the whole time, but the elitists didn’t want to listen. It turns out that all those conservatives who have been warning of the red flags associated with this guy were right all along.
“there was no guessing his kith and kin”…
In the real-life version of this tale, there was, and is, plenty of information about Obama’s real roots on the Internet. The left-wing MSM ignored it, and even what passes for conservative commentators assisted in the coverup by ridiculing and belittling anybody who questioned Obama’s origins or his eligibility for the Presidency.
I guess I must be stupid. I don’t understand why with all the evidence we are talking about how to survive the next two years instead of talking about and actually finding the backbone to throw him out. Are the media who covered for this sorry snake oil salesman so powerful that even now their “birthers” attempts to cover for him are successful. I did not vote for Obama but in truth its been forever since there’s been a candidate I might believe in. I can’t believe its take so long for so many to finally see that “yes, he has no clothes”. But now that we do see why do we discuss surviving him? Richard Nixon was thrown out and as much as I disliked tricky Dick he pales in comparison to Obama and so I ask why the heck is he not being impeached?