I don’t know when Solstice was this winter. I think it was around the 23rd.
However, I do know I woke up at my normal time this morning – 6:30 am, and thought it must be three. The darkness around the room was impenetrable, a combination of snow and being close enough to the winter Solstice as makes little difference.
I could say that I understood why our ancestors might think the sun would never come back, except I don’t think our ancestors were that stupid. It flatters us to think so, but no.
Even before we were “human” as we understand it, our ancestors had some form of symbolic art, which implies a form of communication. Yes, it’s possible that like one or two tribes in the Amazon, they had no language with concept of time, and no memory of events.
I beg to doubt it. In all but the most favorable of environments, the inability to communicate from generation to generation dangers and patterns and habits would have made it unlikely we’d survive.
To put it another way, that caveman had a grandfather whom he might very well have met. He knew in his grandfather’s day, in his father’s day, and in his own day, since we’ll presume he was older than one, the light diminished to this point in the year, and then it came back slowly.
That said, having woken and looked at the clock, and seen no glimmer of light, I can say there is something of awe to the feeling. The night has passed, but the darkness persists. And there is a very foolish inner thought that goes “what if it were never to come back again.”
One knows better but one still thinks it.
Of course, I’m not sure Mike Walsh knows better. At least, one wouldn’t think it from his post.
Oh, sure, it’s not as easy to read history – and real history at that, not the expurgated strangeness of school books – as it is to remember the sun does eventually come up. And historical epochs and movements take longer than that.
However, if he spent some time reading, oh, the bound periodicals of WWI or a biography of Woodrow Wilson – a real one – or of FDR or even LBJ, he would see what we’re seeing from Obama is really nothing new. Oh, sure, it’s a new way of being a little tyrant, but it’s not particularly menacing and scary, particularly because unlike the people dealing with his wanna-be dictator “ancestors”, most people in America don’t buy what he’s selling. And fewer and fewer believe it every day that passes.
Mr. Walsh, however, is upset that we haven’t had bloody revolution, yet.
(Makes gesture of slapping one hand with the back of another, in a way that her mom forbid her to do when she was six and imitated a fisherwoman.) I ask you – is this sane?
Let’s add to the history Mr. Walsh hasn’t read in any depth an history of the American revolution.
I keep running into this “it’s time for another revolution. Why isn’t anyone rising?”
Because the people don’t rise that easily. Not even in a nation that had its birth in blood and revolution. Arguably the people don’t even when a majority of them is starving. Revolutions are not usually – most of them – a thing of “the majority of the people rose up and took up arms.” Sorry. Hollywood has lied to you.
Revolutions are usually – and this is why most of them end in horrible – the work of a small, privileged, organized band of intellectuals and conspirators with some ability to raise some muscle. The French revolution was an uprising of the bourgeois. What it unleashed was the elements of any civilized society that are always hoping to do mischief: the psychopaths, the sociopaths and the radical losers. It put them in charge and tied back the forces of order. This is because the bourgeois of the time were taken up with the idea of the noble savage, partly because it upended a social order that kept them unfairly down.
The result was a beast that ate itself.
Look at any of the South American revolutions: the “revolution” usually was a small cardre, usually military, who seized power and made it clear the wobbly week knees should be on their side. That’s it.
Americans… are different, and made of different stuff. And our revolution was different. That thing in the declaration of independence about the outrages? Yeah, there was a sloooooowwww simmer. Even when some hot heads – the Sons of Liberty—started committing counter-outrages, all the right thinking Americans shunned and condemned them. Until things got so bad that they had to rise.
Even then, it is estimated only 3% actively fought for independence.
People like Mr. Walsh – and many of his commenters – need to take a powder and read some real history. If there were a revolution NOW it would be a revolution of the upper classes against us. They are the ones organized and in position to deploy force rapidly, with overwhelming force.
This is not out of the question. It’s not likely, mind, because their acquaintance with the real world is, mostly, through television and Marxist tracts. Which means the real world has as much resemblance with their imaginings as cheese has to chalk. Or maybe less. So the actions they initiate hoping to bring about the same sort of flare up as the French or Russian revolutions will only work in the imaginary France and Russia they’ve seen in movies and read about. “The oppressed population will rise up” – and pose fetchingly for the wide angle shot. (Now I think about they should talk to Mr. Walsh. I predict they would deal extremely.)
Their first attempt was OWS and yep, that is their vision of a starving population, may G-d have mercy on their souls. Now, like good internationalist Marxists, they have decided real oppressed peasants are those who can tan, and they’re doing their precious best to ignite a race war.
I’m not going to say they can’t do mischief. Oh, they can. For one they can costs the lives of countless young people who can tan slightly better than I can, because the young are foolish and don’t always know when they’re being gaslighted. And they can cost a million black-on-white and vice versa friendships and marriages. They can make our social interaction gritty for a generation. (More if some hothead rises up and kills Obama, which will give agitators the ability to paint all white people as hating all black people for generations. No? Look at Kennedy murdered by a communist and the right in this country still being blamed for it.)
But even if they managed – they won’t – to make all of the black population rise up (instead of mutter, write unconsidered editorials, act like asses, and ignite a Muslim convert to kill two innocent cops, what would it gain them?
Nothing. Except maybe giving the white supremacists the upper hand for a generation.
Guys, a minority is called so for a reason. And in the melting pot, a lot of people that call themselves black do so because they had a black great-grandparent. It won’t work. You’ll never get those riled enough to do more than make a speech on campus.
The ones the left can get riled up enough are those who have no sense of time or the future, those living in the urban hell holes the left has created.
They’ll rise up. And set fire to their own neighborhoods. And it will make for interesting footage, but G-d forbid their revolt goes out of their enclaves. Because they’ll be destroyed and suddenly white supremacists will have credence.
Armed revolution is even less likely to happen from our elites against us than us against our elites. Revolutions are great for books and movies. But REAL revolutions which bring about a change anyone wants are few, slow, and most of them usher in worse stuff.
I know to a certain type of mind the idea of us all setting to and fighting each other till the last remnants of the sixties ethos are six feet deep is a great fantasy. Heck, even to my mind, at my worst moments. BUT what is the rest of the world doing, while we’re all killing each other? Has anyone thought of that?
There is a reason Heinlein’s revolutions are in planets hard to reach by the rest of humanity. Our Civil War was ALMOST a war of partition among foreign powers. That we managed to bring it off without the continent being divided between France and England is another of those reasons to believe G-d has a soft spot for us.
Yes, Obama is intending to govern by memo and executive order. Yes, he can do a horrible lot of damage in that time.
But, like his attempt to make the black population (or college students – snort) rise up, the results will be more unintentionally damaging than intentionally. No, I’m not saying he’s not doing it on purpose. It’s just that to do the damage he’s trying to do, we’d need to be a world out of a Marxist cartoon, where those who have less are permanently SIMMERING at their oppression, rather than you know, watching TV and working and having love affairs and stuff.
Most of his intended damage will fail, but most of his orders will do other damage, like his wife’s precious lunch program is doing damage to school budgets and students’ health. His orders have already bound out economy up in so much red tape we’re practically immobile.
But most of the damage he’s doing is to himself and his own party, in the long run. Look, it used to be if you heard strangers talk, in store or street, they’d say things like “Well, Obama means well.”
There was never the swelling of love for the Obamas that the press portrayed. The popularity of the name Michelle FELL when he was elected. (Interestingly, despite all the articles about the love for the Clintons, the first first lady’s name to FALL in popularity during the president’s tenure, was Hilary. Which makes you wonder what the people REALLY felt.)
However people either gave him the benefit of the doubt or said so in public.
No more. It’s impossible to be out in public for long without hearing someone near you rant about the “socialists” who are destroying the country. Sometimes they rant TO you – a total stranger – and dare you to say anything against it. I imagine this is what my husband’s ancestors were doing around the seventeen sixties, “D*mn King George and d*mn his eyes, and I will not drink his health, and I don’t care who knows!”
Yeah, I know what the polls say. You believe them? You tell the truth to a stranger over the phone? Besides, you’ve seen what the main stream Izvestia does with more solid numbers: production, consumption, employment. And you think they’re HONEST about the polls? Oh, child. Go over there and talk to Mr. Walsh and the commies. You’ve seen too many Hollywood movies.
I’m told vast swaths of the population most hit by Obama’s actions, doctors, nurses, tax preparers, students, are becoming radicalized. I don’t know. I get this third hand at least. But they’re becoming radicalized in a “read drudge and reason and go to the range on the weekend, and I ain’t afraid of nobody.”
The more he piles on, the worse it will get. Already, as Glenn has pointed out once or a hundred times, Irish democracy is setting in. “Yes, I know what the regulations say, but we can’t live that way.”
Look – people have always done it. This is why caught between minimum wage and immigration laws they hired illegals (and why we have an illegal immigration problem) when the alternative was going under. Also, I remember in the late seventies (I was an exchange student) most handy men would offer you half off if cash. Irish democracy.
And then there’s ingenuity and thank the Lord American can do. Which has denied the tin-pot president a chance to make our energy costs “skyrocket.
Let me say it: things are bad. Things will get worse.
But by historical standards, Mr. Obama’s actions are nothing new. Oh, the means are different, partly because we pay closer attention to our presidents and because he hasn’t – malgre him – managed to create a world war under which to sweep what he’s doing as “special powers.”
They’re also rare, which is a good thing, as too many of these presidents a century and it would eventually destroy us.
But that’s the thing about America. The branches are always trying to usurp power to just one of them, and the executive is the worst for clever foolishness.
But Mr. Obama will be ignored, contravened, built around and built under. People who think he’s followed with absolute devotion are reading too many articles from Izvestia and get all their news from Tass.
This has happened before and will doubtless happen again.
But beneath the would-be dictator’s actions, there is the real action. The real action is that the tide of public feeling is turning harder and faster than ever and is a complete rejection of the statism of the twentieth century.
Will we win the next election? Who knows? There’s fraud and the GOP’s Boehner for suicide (Jeb fracking Bush? Are you kidding? Christie? Are you high?)
But possess your souls in patience. If we elect (for given values of “elect”) Hilary it will just complete our transformation into “H*ll no, to socialism we won’t go” nation.
And yes, it might come to revolution. But if it’s our revolution, like the first one it will be decades in the making and it will be the revolt of those who just want to be left alone to make a living. A very effective moment, but by its nature taking decades of simmering. Because “the people” don’t “spontaneously” do anything. And it’s most likely to come in reaction to a frontal attack from above, to be fair.
So let’s hope it doesn’t have to come. Let’s hope either in the next two years the socialists totally discredit themselves, or if not that in the four after. You see, that which nourishes destroys them.
They have been beaten everywhere else and the process of kicking them out of Europe is starting. (Though what replaces them will be statist, of course, it’s Europe.)
But paradoxically they’ve come here. They’ve come here and squatted in our colleges, our bureaucracy, our upper classes, in those places that are so well off no cold breath of reality intrudes.
Which is the only place they can survive.
Even now the artistic class and the upper class and the “radical chic” class are their refuges here.
But because those classes have clout, our people have come to believe “socialism has a point.”
Seeing them in action is not only destroying that illusion: the economic disasters they create are making people too uncomfortable to aspire to being chic.
I’m not saying it won’t get worse. It’s not yet solstice in politics, and it makes sense to wak in the dark and be fearful.
But this has happened before, and light came back. And light was brighter than before. And we found our balance again.
And we will this time.
Better than in the twentieth century, we know that statism doesn’t work, that the rule of the “technocrats” is a lie. Our technology, our lives, our beliefs don’t lend themselves to that dream of the past that these people are trying to impose. 1984 is an unimaginable ideation in the States, with our open spaces, our guns, our personal technology. Farenheit 451 is more believable, but I think mostly we’ve turned the corner where it’s no longer possible. Not with our personal communications technology.
Stop shivering in the dark and muttering of revolution.
Socialism had to come here to die, because like an infection hiding in a far-flung organ, it had come here to live. Ours is the honor and the glory of defeating it.
It will get darker before the light comes.
And when the great battle comes, it might not be the big clashing of weapons in a battleground attended by Valkyries. In fact, it likely won’t be. The great battle will be “oh, ignore that, or we can’t live.” It will be “F*ck king George and F*ck his edicts.” It will be Washington losing power because no one is doing what it wants us to do, and raving like King Lear – in vain.
It’s not yet midnight. It’s not yet solstice. It’s going to get very dark.
But we know history and we know the light will come again.
And we also know we’re blessed with 4th generation red diaper babies which, like the kings of old are so dumb they couldn’t put a crown on their own head if you gave them ten tries. More likely they’d either wedge it on their foot or eat it.
Be not afraid.
If it comes to revolution, it will, but the time is not anywhere near yet. And if we end up doing that it will be because they started it.
But if they start it, we’ll win. And if they don’t start it, we win, anyway.
Reality is on our side.
It will get dark, it will get scary. It might get bloody and deadly. But we operate in the real world, and they don’t. That gives us an enormous advantage.
In the end, we win, they lose.
According To Hoyt 