Coming Apart at the Seams

In case you haven’t noticed, the world is in turmoil, with Nature shaking her fist at puny mankind in places such as New Zealand, and with people in the Middle East rising up in blind rage against their rulers.

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Here in the formerly tranquil United States the citizenry in places like Wisconsin are engaging in a very public battle between the folks who teach in the public schools and the state’s Republican governor, and the issues that divide them are becoming a casus belli in other states. It’s all about money – in this case the public’s tax dollars and who gets how many of them, proving Lord Melbourne’s assertion that once you give the key to the treasury to the public you can never take it back. And they’ll want more and more of it’s contents until it’s been emptied by their cupidity. My onetime colleague at National Review, the late Whitaker Chambers, once observed that "Man without God is a beast, and, never more beastly than when he is most intelligent about his beastliness." He’d have no trouble recognizing the beastliness on display in the mobs of labor skates in a series of so called protests at the state’s capitol. The angry rhetoric though aimed at the governor has been pointed at the throats of the state’s taxpayers who foot the bill for the salaries and benefits. God is notably absent within the mob scenes America has watched on television. In His place there has been, among other things, outright criminal fraud with doctors betraying their Hippocratic oath to provide striking teachers with phony diagnoses excusing them for their absence in the classrooms. To me, a member of a notable American medical family where the doctors among my uncles, granduncles and cousins treated their profession with the same reverence priests exhibit toward Holy Orders, the behavior of the Wisconsin doctors is nothing short of sacrilegious. They have seriously lowered the reputation of a once proud profession. Overseas the unrest across the Middle East keeps spreading as whole populations rise up against their governments, seriously undermining the stability of regimes with control of major oil sources. Ordinarily Americans would watch such events and shrug our shoulders, but since we are a nation whose leadership has refused to drill baby, drill in our own vast reserves of oil in the Gulf, ashore on the mainland, and in Alaska we have allowed ourselves to be held hostage by events in the far away and often unstable Middle East. Then there’s the unpleasant reality that we – federal, state and local political entities – are broke. Stone broke. Most of the money we spend nowadays must be borrowed, either from nations such as cash-rich China, or from future generations of Americans who are facing a new version of the old curse in a new form – taxation of our offspring without representation, since they remain unborn. Portraits of their ancestors – us – will become dartboards – if they can afford one - against which they will be able to vent their resentment over having been beggared by their forebears before they were born. Our forefathers warned us against allowing this Republic to degenerate into a democracy where the public eventually get their hands on Lord Melbourne’s key to the treasury and the spending of borrowed money lacking intrinsic value except for the flimsy paper upon which it is printed. Uncle Sam thus becomes a counterfeiter, printing intrinsically valueless currency. It has been said that this era will die not with a bang, but with a whimper. If you listen carefully, you can already hear it.