Out Here Anything Goes

Now where Beauty was are the wind-withered gorses,
Moaning like old men in the hill wind's blast,
The flying sky is dark with running horses,
And the night is full of the past.

(Masefield - Night On The Downland)

Maybe it's New England winter that has me in this mood. It happens, but usually not until late February, which is the most painful winter month. But maybe it's not winter at all.

This week, the despicable Chris Dodd said he was "sickened" by the outlook that Ted Kennedy's seat could go to Scott Brown. Dodd gagged on democracy, don't you see? Then Schumer said something just as vile about Brown, confirming that there is no hell molten enough to reward the evil phenomenon known as Chuck Schumer. These two rodents don't even scurry for the shadows anymore, they exhibit their wet snouts dripping with crumbs for all to see.

There are plenty of others like them. The school of chum feeders around Martha Coakley were just as detestable. Then Obama wiggled a deal with the unions to lighten their tax burden on Cadillac health plans - demonstrating his monarchical disposition and scorn for The People At Large. Next, ACORN and SEIU dispatched their flying monkeys to speer and stomp representative government in places here and there.

Everywhere, the wretched vendettas of liberalism against popular rule, and against decency itself, proved that the Lockean rule of law is being replaced by the Hobbesian rule of Man. To modern liberals, representative government is but one system among many to have their way. There's a moral in here somewhere, several morals, in fact. One that comes to mind is that an ideology which holds, as a first principle, that all values fluctuate, will eventually deform and fluctuate itself to anomie, brutality, madness, corruption and the motives of the beast. Rhett Butler, at the end, went in search of a world of manners and grace, "if it still exists!" Does it? I don't know. It used to.

The Enlightenment, as an epoch and as an attitude, made us what we were, and in some places still are. Five hundred years of struggle, of magic turned to science, of sacrifice, religious synthesis, of dreadful wars and peaceful compromise have pulled and pushed us bleeding to the place called Western Civilization, and its glittering summit in the reality and principles of America. This is where I'm supposed to say "we're not perfect"; if you think so, screw you.

All of the dead, all the nameless people who adapted themselves to the future; and surrendered bit by bit, their cherished but obsolete ideas - and their lives - for the unproveable conviction that their offerings would make a better world, are mocked by this generation of spineless "progressives". By their conduct, they've once again put human nature in the dock, with the old, once-settled trial about Who, Whom?, also known as Hammers and Nails, or Hammers and Anvils. Liberalism is arguing the case that "anything goes" in order to win; that the jury must find the ghastly compulsions of Human Nature guiltless, and its claims self-evident. This is the philosophy, if it rises to that level, of brutes and barbarians.

This is depressing, and alienating. I'm not alone in my disgust and revulsion with our rulers, their groveling factotums and menials, and the howling moral wilderness they've cultivated. The conservative alienation is superimposed on the phony, entirely fraudulent, infantile and legendary melancholy of progressives - the lit-set, the intelligentsia and cognoscenti, their poets and fools, the mythological Common Man - and their rejection of norms and normality, bourgeois culture, and contempt for the wild uncertainties and injustices of a free society. Now, the savage facts of this struggle between two (at least) unreconcilable discontents is this: Once a fighter believes he has nothing to lose in a fight, and everything to gain, anything goes. It's possible, indeed easy, to fight when you're depressed. It is, in fact, necessary.