This Carbon Based Life

By David Glenn Cox

I suppose it just makes me angry. Isn’t it enough just to endure? Must I have to hear scare stories every day as well? Like a meteor is coming and the world is doomed, and someone is running around chirping, “Do you know what else is going to happen?” Yeah, we know.

The King is going to end birthright citizenship! The King will Deport millions! The King will change the way we vote! The King will start a trade war! We’re all going to dieee! You do remember this is the guy who was going to build a wall and make Mexico pay for it? The same guy who suggested bleach and rectal lighting to cure a virus. With such an individual there is nothing which is either simple or not simple. What they tie up on Monday, they untie on Tuesday.

The King and his minions are using the old big, bad wolf technique. “We’re going to do this, and we’re going to do that! And close all the liquor stores and arrest all the Jaywalkers only to Huff and Puff and blow your house down! A simple attempt to try and buffalo the public into submission.

In the media’s defense, they don’t get paid for turning in blank pages. The must fill the page with all the gory details, while ignoring the gory fact. It would be easier and most assuredly more profitable to write about something else. You don’t need to kiss the King’s ass (yet) just be prepared to pucker up. Stick to the scary details and avoid the possible pitfalls. Don’t talk about bluster, courts  or hubris, this is scary stuff! Keep it that way! Sixty feet tall with their eyes on you!

Machiavelli tells us, you can tell the quality of a leader by the men he has around him. On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate the King’s Cabinet choices so far? Drunks, flakes, flunkies TV news reporters. I bet they’ll do great! By having no experience, they won’t be biased or hindered by professional competence.

The King, by throwing down his gauntlets and threatening to fight everyone in Washington is making certain the bureaucracy freezes against him. Firings will do no good; these are the people who make things work. Solzhenitsyn told the story of the guy who kept the Moscow water works running. He did a good job but was sloppy with his paperwork. He kept buying the parts with his own money instead of waiting for the Party to issue him a check. He was finally arrested and sent to the gulag and the waterworks promptly collapsed, while they waited on a check from the Party.

So, the more they fight with the bureaucracy the more likely they will be strangled by it. And if they try to kill it, they will be lost without it. An army needs its sergeants, no matter what the King thinks. How would you like being the King’s choice for Education Secretary? “We’re hiring you for this very important position, just so that we can make a big show of firing you later! Any questions?” Will I be here long enough to get on the insurance?

It’s all fun and games until nobody picks the vegetables. Just imagine, crops are ready to pick, and the workers are too afraid to apply. Legal or not, they’re afraid they’ll get on some government list. Until they stop buying those cars and the houses. “We just can’t get any construction workers!” It’s like a train, if you get it moving in the wrong direction, it’s kind of hard to stop. Tell the press we should stop building fighter planes. And Boeing and McDonald Douglas and all the others will just say, “Okay! We didn’t need all those millions of dollars anyway. I’ll just send my kid to community college. We’ll just make flower pots instead.”

The question becomes simple, change the Administration or chuck the billions invested and just make flower pots until getting fired?

What do you think will happen? You remember November 22, 1963, don’t you? There is another way to change minds, you know. It is very brave and very naive to threaten the livelihood of people who make tens of millions of dollars by making weapons of destruction for a living. Those people think of killing in terms of thousands, what’s one guy to them? There are always copycat killings aren’t there? And maybe that’s the point. It isn’t what the Fascist does specifically, it’s who the Fascists are. The darkness falls on us all equally. There is a new sheriff in town working exclusively for the King. So perhaps then scores could be better settled extra judiciously, like Valentine’s Day in Chicago in Judge Thompsons court.

Maybe you better reconsider your position and be careful not to offend anyone. Not to walk the dog alone at night. Have your bodyguard look twice before you get out of the car. Try to think of someone they didn’t get to but wanted too. That’s what Fascism is all about Charlie Brown. The Nazis had a lousy record on civil aviation, airplanes just kept blowing up in midair. Might makes right when there is no wrong. Justice is just a dollar sign and a cost of doing business. Okay, we’ll build the fighter planes, but we will need a kickback.

What are you going to do about it? Call the cops? That might not be a wise decision, friend.

“In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand-fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.” ― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn