…from abroad. Some trenchant and depressing thoughts from Victor Davis Hanson:
It is wise to navigate through the news and elite wisdom through two landmarks: anything that Barack Obama says will be airbrushed, improved, or modified to fit facts post facto; anything Sarah Palin says or does will be contextualized in Neanderthal terms. Teams of Post and Times volunteers now sort through Sarah Palin’s email; not a reporter in the world is curious about what Barack Obama once said about Rashid Khalidi or the Columbia University GPA that won him entrance to Harvard Law School. Accept that asymmetry and almost everything not only makes sense about these two cultural guideposts, but can, by extension, explain the 1860-like division in American itself.
Go to Europe and see the left-wing desired future for America: dense urban apartment living by design rather than by necessity; one smart car; no backyard or third bedroom; dependence on mass transit; political graffiti everywhere demanding more union benefits or social entitlements; entourages of horn-blaring, police-escorted technocrats racing through the streets on the hour; gated inherited homes of an aristocratic technocracy on the Mediterranean coast, Rhine, Danube, etc., exempt from much socialist and environmental law; $10 a gallon gas; sky-high power bills; racial segregation coupled with elite praise of illegal immigration and diversity; and unexamined groupthink on green issues, entitlements, and the culpability of the U.S. Drink it all in and you have the liberal agenda for an America to be.
We can still change it next year.
We can still change it next year.
We can slow it, we can’t change it. That would require an overhaul of first the academy, then the media and finally, the culture.
I’m not optimistic about that happening, especially with a RINO in the White House.
Never say never, but right now we are not going to pull it out, regardless of the election results. Might recover afterwords, though. But without some major pushback against some things that need changing–not going to avoid the need for the recovery. Not enough time anymore.
Of course, standard predictor’s caveat applies–half my predictions are wrong, and the other half just don’t pan out.
We can slow it, we can’t change it.
The situation will change, because it’s not sustainable in its present form*. Either it changes politically and socially, or the system collapses, and then change inevitably follows, though much more unpleasantly.
*I’m discounting “miracle” tech developments that might be game-changers, because I can’t plan for them (If I would, I’d be rich).
Sure we can change it. I remember the 1970s, and we changed those.
I’m not a huge fan of the show, and the producers create a false sense of “mystery”, but ‘House Hunters – International’ provides a valuable reminder of the “European ideal” for housing, especially when they’re in Europe. The non-international version, when they’re in Seattle, Portland, etc. is also a gentle nudge that shows how close some areas of the U.S. are getting to that “European ideal” as well…
Thank god I live in Iowa…
I’m not going to bet my social security payments on Obama’s defeat. I can’t see that the Republicans have anyone who can beat him. Hope, however, does spring eternal.
Yeah, ‘cos people living in dense urban centers NEVER happens in the USA.
Geezzz… you guys are even more detached from reality than usual.
I shall sit here in my 5-bedroom Edwardian house in northern industrial England, looking out at the Victorian park donated to the city by Ruskin, with the bowling green, the skateboard circuit, the walled garden, the daycare centre, the Tudor house museum, and the allotments for people to grow their own fruit and veg, and ask – what planet are you on?
Oh, and we are a retired teacher and a university administrator. We own our own car, and there’s a yacht on a trailer in the back garden.
I’ve lived in 3 countries in Europe, 4 if you count Wales, and have visited many more. I really don’t recognise your picture of the place. Maybe you should visit rather than thinking that everything you see on TV is real?
And what about those gated, inherited mansions on Long Island?
Hanson’s description of Europe leaves much to be desired in terms of accuracy, even in general terms. Indeed, much of it seems to apply more to modern America than Europe. Who are these Euro-technocrats with their police escorts supposed to be, and where are they going every hour? Even the Queen of England makes do with a couple of motorbike escorts without sirens. Whereas I understand that the mayor of every picayune town in the USA can’t go to the bathroom without a police escort, let alone technocrats like Dick Cheney.
“Lee Holum Says:
June 15th, 2011 at 9:04 am
I’m not going to bet my social security payments on Obama’s defeat. I can’t see that the Republicans have anyone who can beat him. Hope, however, does spring eternal.”
If the Republicans win, you will have bet your Social Security payments, and lost.
entourages of horn-blaring, police-escorted technocrats racing through the streets on the hour
Only someone who never lived in Europe would believe that. The only places where I had seen streets blocked for a VIP procession were US and USSR.
As for “inherited gated homes” — like they don’t exist in US!