Depressed? Heck yeah, I’m depressed. I was never much of an optimist. The best I can see out of this current situation is that “victory” is not an event, but a process. Victories achieved at little cost are often tantamount to defear. People often have to be convinced that they’ve lost. It was obvious to perceptive Japanese in 1941 that they could not beat America in WWII; those with knowledge of the truth saw the writing on the wall after the Battle of Midway; almost everybody in the Japanese government knew the truth in their hearts after the fall of Saipan; and everybody in Japan knew the truth after the firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945. The last six months of slaughter and cruelty, capped off by the atomic bombs, was all about convincing the Japanese that they had lost. Nothing more than that. World War I ended with the Germans unconvinced that they had lost, and so, in spite of the wasteful slaughter of that war, we had World War II. FDR, for all his faults as a president, wanted the Axis powers convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that they had lost this time around, and millions of innocent dead people later, it happened. But the world wars were not repeated.
And perhaps our current catharsis will do something similar for economics, demonstrating even to the most stupid and brain-damaged collectivist liberal that their philosophies are worse than bankrupt: they are The End of the World. Ideas are pernicious things, and sometimes, you need a huge tragedy to expose that concept and teach even the True Believers that they are wrong. I thought until last year that the fall of the Soviet Union had accomplished that goal, but I was wrong. This reasoning is small comfort for those of us who will have to live through the devastation that Obama is bringng us daily. And it is a terrifying prospect that our children will have to fix it. (I am glad, for the first time in my life, that I don’t have children.) But perhaps even Obama, in his own hideous way, will bring on the atomic bomb that will show everyone in the world the folly of the liberal creed.
That’s as much hope as I can derive from Obama.
