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Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Go to Hell.
You
young'uns don't know the nightmare to come.
THE POLAR BEAR SCAM. One of my younger email correspondents -- with whom I've had a bruising ongoing debate about the meaning of conservatism -- recently threw me an unexpected bouquet but asked me a troubling question: "I think you're amazing, although not old. What is up with this new old fart/curmudgeon pose? I'm being taught parliamentary procedure and political organizing by a team of people that were Goldwater and Reagan national delegates. They're oldddd. Maybe you're just wiser than you thought you'd be at your age, although the McCain thing makes one doubt."
Well, he's winning on the McCain front. (Does that make me youthfully flexible?) But it doesn't answer the real question. Why do I feel so old in the current political environment? And I do. Even though I'm not racing to find a wheelchair in which I can ride out the rest of my years and still feel quite perky and vital most days, I also feel like a yellowing chapter of yesterday that will never be read by anyone but historians as atavistic as I am.
The answer is actually pretty simple. I was raised in an environment where facts actually mattered. Then I went to college during the period when facts ceased to matter and became grist for the political mill which ground them into whatever consistency was convenient for the cause of the moment. Stripped of its pretensions, that's all post-modernism is: the deliberate perversion of facts into solipsistic bumper stickers. I'm older than most of the elder statesmen (and women) of the mass media, and so I'm aware that for the most part they don't even know what they're doing as they slant their coverage, undermine objectivity in the name of hidden agendas they believe in passionately, and treat facts as the malleable clay of a truth they honestly believe they can reveal through clever videotape editing and politically correct editorial rhetoric.
I'm old because I can look at Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, Brian Williams, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Katie Couric, Jonathan Chait, Glenn Reynolds, Markos Moulitsas, Ace of Spades, etc, etc, and perceive the limits of their experience, the incredible dimness of their relation to the continuum of American life. They claim authority, swell with that authority like cornered toads, and then prove that their self-professed wisdom, altruism, and lofty perspective are nothing but adolescent braggadoccio. In a word, they're kids. Ambitious, obnoxious, repetitive, predictable, ill-educated, attention-hungry, opinionated but not terribly perceptive kids.
Sooner or later, the tyranny of even aging kids results in disaster. That's the deal with today's government determination that polar bears are an endangered species. They're nothing of the kind. The classification, though, is one of those silent catastrophes that truly wise folk fear the most -- the kind of invisible turning point that almost no one sees at the time but proves in retrospect to have been the first irrevocable step toward ruin. To find an equally dire precedent, one would have to go all the way back to the banning of DDT precipitated by Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring," which has killed upwards of 30 million people and is still racking up malaria casualties at this very minute.
That's the difference between smart and wise. Smart sees the short-term advantage of seizing on a popular cause-celebre to drive home the reality of a danger they think they perceive based on bumper-sticker scripture. Wise sees the danger of holding entire nations hostage to an invented crisis that has the potential to deprive the only free societies on earth of fundamental liberties, even life itself -- in a fraudulent, cold-blooded conspiracy to manipulate good intentions into a surrender of political and economic freedom. To more, bigger, and hungrier government. You won't believe what we'll be asked, and told, to do to save the polar bears. Until it's too late.
I feel old because I can't believe such naked machinations succeed. Without even a whimper.
I'm not worried about the polar bears. They can take care of themselves. I'm worried about us. The ignorant fools who can't be bothered to learn the facts and happily consent to halfwit Byzantine plots against our way of life.
Today was a turning point. If you don't know that, you're a child. A remarkably backward and not terribly worthwhile child.
And I am older than Methuselah.
