Fix It Yourself

one of several new inlets

Mr. Perry vows to make the Federal Government invisible when he gets to the White House.  My guess is that this pledge will not include our overseas military footprint, nor will the Federal Government be invisible to women in need of medical services.  Minorities will also notice the Federal Government.  But how about folks like those living on Hatteras Island.  Think you could get your shovel and fix this, Mr. Randian Superman?  It's a certainty your Randian brothers--the ones who don't live on Hatteras--will not come to your aid.  Solidarity is not in the Randian dictionary, and even if it was, you simply can't get to Hatteras any more: the church bus will not float across the Pamlico.  In Raleigh, our Governor had to argue that since folks on the Outer Banks pay taxes, they deserve to have their roads repaired.  That's a pretty simple equation, and one that used to go without saying.  After all, it's not like the Outer Baniks don't contribute a lot to the economy (although making that point immediately takes us to a slippery slope).  I'd at least like to hear what OBX Randians are saying this week.

While we're at it, let's hope the next hurricane flattens Rush Limbaugh's Florida estate.  His message this week--that Irene wasn't a disaster and that it was just the usual liberal news media hyping a situation requiring big government intervention--is about as close to the can't trust your lying eyes argument as it gets.  What's going on is a strategy.  Since it's pretty much impossible for everyone to actually be in a disaster area at the same time, that is, disaster victims are always a minority of us, why not diminish them and the whole idea of a disaster.  Because the problem with a disaster is, it requires a large solution--something a Federal Government has the ability to provide.  If we can just reduce the capability for people to feel empathy, we'll keep more money for ourselves.  And so they toil on.  Talk about exposing children to pornography. 

Mr. Paul referred to the Galveston Hurricane of 1903 the other day.  We didn't have no big gubment intervention back then, he said.  Yet somehow Galveston survived.  What a load.  Check out the fine book "Issac's Storm" for the details of that disaster.  One part of gubment we didn't have was good weather forecasting.  Spanish weather folks on Cuba, which we'd just conquered a couple of years before '03, told our folks that the storm was going to go straight across the Gulf.  Our folks brushed their cautions aside, believing that hurricanes always turn north at Florida.  After the disaster, which killed over 6,000 people, they had to burn funeral pyres.  Free whiskey was passed out to the survivors to help them cope.  That is gubment you can drown in a bath tub.  

It's about time we started seeing the Right Wing for what it is.  A radical anarchical program aimed at destroying the country we've slowly created since them thar good old days that never were.  The fact that this program is conceived by venal and shockingly stupid people doesn't mean it can't succeed.  Ms Rand, after all, succeeded in becoming a best-selling third rate philosopher, and they made a movie of one of her bad novels which starred the very good actor Gary Cooper, and the very good actress Patricia Neal.  What will follow the Tea Party success, however, is an utter unknown.  Just because you blow something up doesn't mean whatever replaces it will be better in some sense.  And if you have any doubts about that, do some more reading.  About the French Revolution, and about Stalin.  Rick Perry?  He's the beast, slouching towards Golgotha to be born.  And right now he's leading the race, rolling down hill like a snowball headed for hell, as a better philosopher than Ms Rand once aptly put it.

(I made some additions to this post on 9/1/11.)