The road ahead (the trench ahead): who the hell knows?
Squinting at grim prospects and hunkering
down; two contending takes from the Founders
An optimistic meme has been making the rounds the
past ten days, with Thomas Jefferson posthumously advising us that this too
shall pass:
A little
patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells
dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government
to its true principles.
It
is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring
the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt.
If the game runs
sometimes against us at home we must have patience till luck turns, and then we
shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this
is a game where principles are at
stake.
All very well and good, but Ben
Franklin's remarks at the end of the constitutional deliberations are also
germane:
In these
sentiments, sir, I agree to that Constitution, with all its faults, if they are
such, because I think a general government necessary for us, and there is no
form of government but what may be a blessing to the people if well
administered; and believe, further, that this is likely to be well administered
for a course of years, and can only end in despotism, as other forms have done
before it, when the people shall be so corrupted as to need despotic government,
being incapable of any other.
To which
I respond, channeling my inner Young Person, we are
like so
there.
To
readers of my own demographic (all six of you) I can only say that we're in for
a long, mean period of public discourse. The generations we Baby Boomers
launched ourselves against have now largely passed from the scene, but a
sufficient number of our own (apart from those who never signed on to those
glorious and admittedly unrealistic ideals) have turned coat, and we failed
signally to enlist our figurative and literal younger siblings and children.
Twice in my lifetime—with Nixon's ruin (of a piece with the fall of our
client in South Vietnam and with the defeat of Gerald Ford, an innocuous figure
whose administration is now seen in retrospect to have been strewn with dragons'
teeth,
cf
Rumsfeld and Cheney) and with Clinton's election—we have imagined
ourselves to have put paid to the foe, but from each setback it reappeared with
renewed strength, and now appears poised to make such institutional changes as
will secure its power for decades.
I
may have more to say on this when I've had a chance to collect my thoughts, but
until then I can only advise the enlightened enclaves to stand fast and prepare
to endure the assault of the ayatollahs, which will certainly
come.
Posted: Sun - November 14, 2004 at 04:43 PM