Treehouse for Punks

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

Van Jones (see post nearby) is the latest dunce in the opera bouffe production known as the Obama Presidency. Like a lot of Obama's friends and appointees, Jones is leftist riff-raff - another scale from the rotting fish of Ivy League radicalism. He's the tough guy to Obama's Urkel, which is something like a pattern with this President.

Jones is also a Truther, which puts him in a class with short dolts named Sheen, and hectoring hags named O'Donnell and Garafalo. Good company. He also speaks in Marxist cant, which puts him in a category with millions of simple-minded misfits for whom Marx was the signpost to temporary attention, abusive power and permanent irrelevance.

That anyone even reads, much less believes in, the ravings of a 19th-century failure and crank, is amazing in itself. Marx was an idea thief who harvested his gruesome mechanistic theories from his collaborators, contemporaries and Hegel. He added some utopian egalitarianism from Rousseau and a bit of communard silliness from thinkers as far back as Plato.

Lucky for Marx, his ideas floated - rather than sank - atop the froth of a rationalist age that would include, eventually, Freud and Darwin, who added their own work to the scientific observation of mankind. He would have disappeared entirely if his crackpot rumination didn't have the prevailing intellectual mood (and European malignity) on its side.

But it was the beginning of a modern age, and we know the ruinous results of Marxism's imposition by Lenin, Stalin and others, in the name of progress, modernism and technology. When you picture human society as a clockwork mechanism, people are just screws, levers and wheels, and their blood is just another lubricant.

Why would anyone be a Marxist today? Marxism is to the study of human aspiration what phrenology is to the study of the brain. First, it's stupid, but even worse, it inhibits real knowledge by overwhelming its subject with simplifications. It's the dogma of the attention-hungry, ignorant, beligerent fool. Obama seems drawn to these fizzing bad boys; not being courageously bad himself, he delights in their company .

Every now and then, the drool from pop culture spills into politics and we end up with a Barack Obama. We have to tolerate him for at least four years. But we don't have to tolerate a wrathful punk like Van Jones. Resistance is the only rational response to a goon who speaks the language of defunct 19th-century authoritarianism. He can sit on Marx's tombstone and rotate to ground level, but Liberty is the new radicalism, and it always will be! Dress-up revolutionaries can go to hell. We've seen their future, and it doesn't work.