Perhaps it won't be amiss to post this little piece alongside Capt. Fogg's now since we've gotten onto the subject of cynicism, snark, Irene and Ron Paul. So here goes....
It was bound to happen, you know. While Ron Paul is by no means what you'd call an extremist – at least not, that is, if you go by a sufficiently rigorous definition of the term that involves forcing people to accept your beliefs and being willing to kill or imprison them if they don't – at a certain point the out-thereness of the man's philosophy, the almost infinite impracticability of it in the real world, couldn't hide under all the copies of Atlas Shrugged in the world piled up in one blessed spot.
I believe we have reached that point in the current presidential campaign. If you weren't too busy battening down your own hatches against H/TS Irene today or worrying about how poor old Uncle Harry and Aunt Matilda are doing over there on the East Coast, you may have noticed Rep. Paul popping up on your tv screen (here's an MSNBC clip, for example) explaining with patient passion that FEMA really shouldn't be involved in this whole operation since there's "no magic" about that outfit whatsoever. It's unnecessary, you see, because as we all know, helping people is a task best relegated to the various states and local government entities. That apparently remains true even when the help may need to be provided to millions across a huge swath of the country swamped and blasted by a storm itself the size of Texas or California.
When Ron Paul makes such a statement, he might as well have just admitted that he likes to cuddle up every night with a big stuffed bear named "Aynie the Pooh." The effect on anyone's ability to take him seriously is approximately the same. The word for the day is "Galveston," where a huge hurricane took thousands of Texans' lives back in 1900 – a period back to which Mr. Paul evidently looks nostalgically: "We ought to be like 1900…."
Perhaps his recent pronouncements are admirably consistent of Rep. Paul, but they're also apt to be taken rather badly by the 99.99999999% of the American public who don't insist on their libertarian ideologism in the middle of a monster storm that's pelting them with uprooted trees and flooding their homes. The healthy core of libertarianism has always been that its proponents genuinely favor civil liberty -- government shouldn't be snooping on you in your bedroom and meddling in your private life generally. But if the bed that was in your bedroom yesterday happens just now to be bobbing wildly in debris-strewn storm surge with you hanging on for dear life atop it (and the bedroom itself is you've no idea where), I think you really WANT some nosy government types on the lookout for you – as many as possible, to be precise. Even if there's nothing "magic" about them.
When libertarian philosophy meets the real world, the former almost invariably comes off looking mighty foolish and ineffectual, the helpless victim of massive forces like hurricane-force winds and corporate monopoly that it simply cannot process, not even in its dreams, if it has any. This is the proper stuff of college kids hashing out pure ideas in their dorm rooms, not something that belongs in the company of serious political deliberation for the benefit of anyone with a fair amount of life experience.
Actually it will be the big hazard insurance companies who will be coming to Big Government hat in hand whining about how many damage claims they have to pay out and how that will eat into executive management's bonus this year. You watch, it's happened before.
ReplyDeleteDino,
ReplyDeleteI never met a hurricane carrying a sign that read: “Bound for Texas only – Feds keep out.” Most hurricanes I know have never been content being a local thunderstorm, a Mom and Pop operation, small potatoes. Like most hucksters these days, hurricanes have high ambitions, and interstate commerce is where the action is!
Of course, once you cross state boundaries, the Feds have jurisdiction, and every freshman tropical depression knows this. Of course, in order to have free reign to terrorize larger populations at will, ambitious would-be hurricanes need to keep the Feds off their back … which is why I think Ron Paul is a tool for Hurricane Irene. It makes me wonder who blows off more hot air these days, our politicians or their windstorm benefactors.
Octo,
ReplyDeleteThat sounds right to me -- after all, I'm a believer in the Greek Gods as well as the Dinosaur Gods, and they have Aeolus and the Winged Lord Quetzalcoatlus, both of whom seem pretty savvy to this lizard.
Robert,
I know what you mean -- I remember when we had a big disaster of some sort in California years ago, and there was trouble with payouts. I don't think insurers are exactly saving up the quarterly proceeds for a rainy day.
They cried and screamed after 2004 and 2005 which were record hurricane years and of course posted record profits anyway.
ReplyDelete"The healthy core of libertarianism has always been that its proponents genuinely favor civil liberty -- government shouldn't be snooping on you in your bedroom and meddling in your private life generally."
That's why it breaks my heart that we can't seem to produce Libertarians with a full bag of marbles. When Ron Paul began to talk about staying out of drug wars and real wars and consnsual behavior of all sorts, it was music to my ears, but when he argued that we don't need to inspect food because the magic market will take bad food off the market eventually, I had to doubt that he was not an extremist like the rest of them. Basically these folks do not believe in democracy, but in rule by dogma and that's extreme enough for me.
I've got no juice left for Zeus and I'd rather have a bottle then depnd on Qeutzalcoatl. The really old gods are for me -- Cthulhu, Yog Sothoth and the like. A country that's like a gothic horror story needs gothic horror story gods.