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| Duke parent 2004 | Aug 30 2008, 05:07 PM |
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HALF A LOAF . . . “I knew a very interesting . . . lady last winter, but now she is married." (Percy Bysshe Shelley) In selecting Sarah Palin to be his running mate, John McCain may deserve even more credit than he’s getting from his friends and neighbors. McCain’s announcement came the morning of the “first day” of the long Labor Day weekend. The television Janes and Johnnies are now running their mouths at NASCAR speeds, and the bloggers appear to be working ‘round the clock either celebrating or eviscerating the governor of Alaska. All this intense activity should translate into fewer folks heading to the beach for summer’s last hurrah. Or if they’re going anyway, perhaps they’ll spend more time in front of monitors than on waverunners or in motorboats. Presto! Consumption of gasoline drops, greenhouse-gas emissions abate. Who said McCain and the Republicans don’t care a lick about the environment? Mrs. Palin is an energetic woman who has packed into her forty-four years a range of interests, activities, and responsibilities that, in a just world, would win the respect of even the most virulent of her political opponents. Her friends and (newfound) boosters have already transcended mere respect; they are advancing Palin as the ideal synthesis of Annie Oakley, Laura Ingraham, and Phyllis Schlafly—in short, as the feisty all-American bombshell who will revitalize the enervated Republican Party and confound the nefarious schemes of the Obama-Biden Democrats. The Democrats will need little encouragement to disparage Palin, for her freshness and high spirits pose a substantial threat to their “audacity of hope” mantra that every day reveals itself to more voters as just another empty slogan. Let’s assume that the Democrats, enfeebled by their shock at McCain’s selection of Palin, fail to slow the momentum of the juiced Republican ticket, that McCain and Palin roll to victory in November. Do not fret, my Democratic friends. You haven’t lost as badly as you fear, for the victorious Republicans will have once again fought the battle on your terms, terms that have been in play since no later than1913, when the 16th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution was ratified. The thirty words of that amendment empowered the Congress to tax incomes. The expansion of the central government that inevitably ensued naturally expanded our expectations of the leviathan to which we send ever more of our dollars. Should it surprise anyone that we’ve also come to expect more of our elected officials, that we ask them to do for us what we once asked, if at all, only of our families and sometimes of our best friends, that we look for qualities and character in our politicians that our grandparents hoped to find more appropriately in bishops and generals? Long before “bloated government” became a redundancy, Americans rarely mistook politicians for saints or miracle-workers. Even at the local level, officeholders often needed to defend themselves from charges of serving the devil rather than their constituents. Libertarians applied the ambient skepticism to the institutions of government itself, which either conveniently accommodated already corrupt men or abetted the corrupting of innocents exposed to the public trough for the first time. Here, for example, is Albert Nock discharging his cannon in an essay from the 1920s: It was once quite seriously suggested to me by some neighbours that I should go to Congress. I asked them why they wished me to do that, and they replied with some complimentary phrases about the satisfaction of having some one of a somewhat different type “amongst those damned rascals down there.” “Yes, but,” I said, “don’t you see that it would be only a matter of a month or so—a very short time, anyway—before I should be a damned rascal, too?” Much has changed since Nock’s time--but in ways that hardly undermine his misgivings. For example, who would argue that politicians have become more modest and the perquisites of office less tempting? How many voters still ask the question that Friedrich Hayek and others asked decades ago: What sort of men (and women) seek office in the expanding central governments that have become the rule since the Second World War? Before you answer, consider these two questions first: How important is your privacy and that of your family? How much of your past would you wish to see sliced and diced on national television and on innumerable websites? I suspect most of us put a premium on privacy, or we would be posting at Liestoppers under our real names. And if you’re at all like me, you’d not want political operatives dredging up those two arrests for shoplifting items of intimate apparel. (Of course, if you’re the newly installed governor of New York, you just divulge your dirt yourself on day one, proving to all what a trustworthy fellow you must be.) Oh, yes, I almost forgot: What sort of person would subject members of his or her family to dramatically increased risk of physical harm from all the nuts and nobodies lurking in the shadows? Back to the beginning. . . . Long before television and the Internet became ubiquitous, long before Google searches came to unearth first-grade love letters--and restroom security cameras to distinguish those who wash their hands from those who don’t, Hayek gave to his question this answer: second-rate. On the “VP Sarah Palin” thread of the “Current Events” section of Liestoppers, a poster laments: There should be some function whereby the American electorate can call for a "mulligan," a do-over. We should be able to say "these people all suck, suggest someone else." Instead, the overly entrenched and combative political parties decide who will make some pathetic attempt to lead us. I don't know whether to laugh or cry. Whenever possible, I prefer laughing. But understand, dear reader, that more times than not I’m laughing at myself, typically for lapsing into some reverie of exalted “leadership” that should be alien to any self-governing people. I wish Sarah Palin the very best. I’ll almost certainly vote for her in November. Should she win, I hope this mother of five manages to work just one miracle: remain to her children a very good mother. Should she win, I hope her children don’t resent losing to their mother’s ambition a settled life among friends and familiar surroundings. Should she win, I hope that substituting “elected” for “married” in Shelley’s witticism at the top of this essay will blunt the point of that barb. But should all my hopes for her be dashed, I’ll most assuredly not be surprised.  Edited by Duke parent 2004, Oct 18 2008, 10:47 AM.
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| Musings of a Superfluous Man · DUKE LACROSSE - Liestoppers | |
1:40 AM Nov 27
