Most of us need an occasional breather from current eventsbut our political adversaries do not. To the progressive realitys school is always out… so who needs a vacation?
Glenn Beck almost ruined my day last Thursday. Having listened to the first ten minutes of his radio show as I dressed for work I heard about how the economic countdown to the Weimar Republic (as defined by economist David Buckner) has already reached zero in our tattered remnant of a nation. Somehow with a boy halfway through his first semester of college and Obamacare clouding up my silver years like a gathering hurricane I was supposed to deliver three hours of lectures lively enough to compete with Facebook. I pulled it off the way an opposing ballplayer pitches in Fenway Park during the play-offs: I stayed in the moment" becoming so absorbed in the matter at hand that all the background chatter failed to reach my ears. (Not that I pried most of my twenty-year-olds loose from Facebook: nothing will do that short of a meteorite impact or free food.)
Baseball as it happens is one of my favorite escapes. I dont particularly care for other sports. Baseball is the one that binds me closest to the days of my youth while also lending itself most to a lifestyle of improvement based on minute analysis (I like to think I do everything that way). I love both the games nostalgia and its rationality. Teaching leaves me little time for other diversions. Reading itself though which never drifts far from my job description (since Im a generalist and can usually integrate various times and customs into one of my spiels) is also a great pleasure. Such amusements allow me to forget the hard facts in which Glenn Beck deals to escape" as I wrote abovejust long enough sometimes to keep from plunging into despair and hanging myself.
I have heard Glenn speak tearfully about his religious faith over the air in a way that our great-grandfathers used to call enthusiastic". Maybe thats how he survives constant immersion in the rotting carcass of our nation and culture. I myself cant draw upon that strategy. I had my charismatic phase thirty years ago and I found that it at last only magnified my despairoften to truly frightful proportions. I do not believe that a divine hand is poised over us protectively. I do not believe that any amount of prayer will save us from the consequences of our fellow beings lunacy and depravity. Free will is rather like a tornado. It unleashes terrific stresses until atmospheric equilibrium is ultimately reestablished: in the bright sun of the following morning may lie the ruins of entire cities. The spring which we postmodern Westerners have coiled up through our collective will must at some point burst its catch and fly out. God has well informed us of our destructive tendencies and He has also promised us that true rest peace and justice await us in a higher dimension. Therein do I find the solace of faithand when your childs life rather than your own sits in the balance that solace can seem pretty cold.
So I have my personal means of escapism. I imagine most sane people do: I imagine even Glenn Beck does (for only a religious fanatic or a one-in-a-million saint could smile serenely as the Gestapo descends upon his children). We are fully open to charges of frivolity at these escapist moments without doubt. Upon therapeutic frivolity depends survival. I cant function if I allow current events to occupy me around the clock. I have to come up for air.
Lately I have realized (though the evidence of this has stared me in the face throughout my life in academe) that the progressive mind does not thus escape. Ever. It doesnt breathe. Its every waking thought and motion is preoccupied with the cause"; and if such a mind dreams it must surely dream the cause as well. The cause after all is a dream. It is a program that chafes against harsh realities at numerous points: hence life is an unending game of neutralizing facts removing or circumventing obstacles spreading disinformation undermining the natural sequence of things... and in short launching all manner of make-believe escapades. No need of escape when the fabric of ones universe is already strands of puffy white cloud!
And so these people never relent. They never take a day off. They are monomaniacal: they are insane. The rest of us cry out for an occasional rest. Our minds and spirits have to grapple with real concerns that offer real resistance. Occasionally brain and soul must release their hold and go slack just as a physical muscle gets a better grip upon some highly resistant task after its allowed to fall limp for a moment. To us real expenditures incur real debt. Real resources have real limits. Real commitments bring real obligations. Real mistakes carry real consequences. Real peaks are flanked by real valleys. High" cannot be defined if there is no complementary low". Achievement cannot exist without strain nor pleasure without pain nor youth without age.
Draw any issue from the hat offer it to a progressive and then try to hold on to the tigers tail. Foreign affairs… cultural clash… the Taliban. Religious dogma cannot be branded morally wrong even when it encourages fathers to execute wayward daughters and husbands to cast off complaining wivesnot unless we settle for a wrong that applies equally to every religion for having any dogma at all. But (you say) if such acts do no wrong because all moral claims are relative then violence of the stronger against the weakeras of an adult against a childcannot be ruled bad. It may be they say in certain cases such as the use of poison gas. And besides they say you must not designate women the weaker sex" (but why the must" if all is relative?). Well then (you say) wife-beaters have committed no moral foul; and even less should we consider women victims by the same token just because the boss has a Playboy calendar on his desk. Your provocative notions they say are pure hate speech. For now you are dismissed with a warning: the next time you lose your job and report to re-education camp.
So spins the top: so whirls the dervish. From one issue to another to another in the impulsive associational fashion of a wild dream or a spoiled childs fantasy or a drug-induced fit… sheer lunacy. Things can become their opposite from one word to the next. This kind of discourse this manner of agenda is beyond illogical: it is definitively insane.
In the progressive we have an adversary who is out of his mind. He insists upon more and ever more freedomand he sets about securing it through more power of an ever more arbitrary character. He howls down like a possessed prophet upon the well-to-do who step over their societys poorand he hatches charitable" schemes that must dry up in mere years leaving millions to starve without skill or shift to produce a morsel of food. He passionately defends the right of the planet and all its clawed and feathered species to continue their way unaltered for another eonand he advocates with equal passion the need to exterminate extraneous fetuses and to impose sterility upon vast urban populations. He makes up grammar anew with every sentence. His laws are an incoherent jumble the sum total of their penalties and prohibitions amounting to Let the leader lead! Let the Chosen One choose the way! Enough protesting! Silence! Obey! Yield or die!"
It is with such tireless sleepless lunatics that we must deal. And when we seek our breath of fresh air they stay behind suffocating on their gaseous rancid dreams. Whether they wage war upon us by outlawing our very air and taxing our lung activity or by mangling stray facts in the editing room" to resemble their dreams colors their delirium always feeds lack of oxygen with an emptier void. They plunge deeper into darkness with every step: they are irredeemable. Like Miltons Satan they have convinced themselves that a sulfurous Hell faintly responsive to their whimsical tinkering smells sweeter than a Heaven not in their control.
We must understand two things about this insanity. One is that it is indeed incurableit is the most objectively verifiably progressive aspect of the progressive mind: a cancer that consumes until it kills. It cannot be reasoned with or led to meaningful compromise. It is insanity and it remains insanity during each of its uncomfortable temporary brushes with reality.
The other thing of maximal importance given the former truth is that the sane mans occasional and necessary escapes into diversion must not delude him into thinking that his enemy is also resting at that moment or that he will return from his recreation to find the other less of an enemy. One of the two must die. I mean this in a political not a literal sense; but the sane man must grasp that his opponents hazy plans stray ceaselessly between the figurative and the literal. Should the lunatic prevail secular material death on a massive scale will likely follow.
Then we shall have only the faith of condemned prisoners to embraceand it is a glorious hope; but I prefer nevertheless not to rush to the slaughter as long as children yet need defending.