Sitting Back Is Not Giving Up

     A few Gentle Readers have written to ask, somewhat plaintively, if the sentiments and flavor of this piece and this other one mean that I’ve “given up.” I understand why they ask. (In ClintonSpeak, “I feel their pain.”) But it’s not as simple as surrendering versus resolving to fight on.

     Hang in there. I do have a point. I might even get to it in fewer than 10,000 words. But I make no promises.

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     As I said at the conclusion of this piece, I’m tired – emotionally, even existentially tired. Old men can get that way. It’s partly a matter of bodily fatigue, but to a greater extent it’s a consequence of the sense that time is running out.

     Time does run out for each of us. Sometimes that can sharpen a more generalized fear: i.e., that time is running out for all of us.

     I know myself pretty well. (I should hope so, after sixty-three years of close-range study.) I have a need for results – visible improvements; palpable advances; tangible gains – that forced me out of my original occupation and into engineering. I’m not built for Alamo-like last stands. Others were inspired by those heroes’ example, but the heroes themselves went to grisly deaths. If there’s no prospect of positive results, I prefer to watch, preferably at a great remove, and through an electronic device.

     I’d imagine that mine is a widely shared perspective. How many men are willing to labor endlessly in the vineyards but never, ever get a taste of the wine? Yes, there are a few such – emphasis on few. We even honor some of their names: Tadeusz Kosciuszko comes to mind at once. (What’s that? You had to look him up?? For shame!) But their willingness to fight to the death even when defeat is foredoomed is a rare temperament. I don’t share it.

     So I think I’ll just sit back, cackle, and mutter “told you so” for a bit.

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     When a lifelong freedom advocate’s energies have waned, what then? He won’t – perhaps can’t – exhaust himself further. There’s nowhere to flee. Join the tyrants? Unthinkable.

     If he has anything left to protect – family; home; other material assets; personal autonomy and latitude – he’s likely to “make himself small:” to hunker down into a strictly defensive posture that has a chance of keeping the tyrants’ crosshairs off his back. He might preserve a “firing position,” from which he can launch an opportunistic round or two as circumstances permit. But he won’t march down the avenue toting a big banner. That would draw attention of the wrong sort. Besides, it reaped nothing but weariness the last 2317 times he tried it, so what would be the point?

     He might nurse a lot of regrets, huddled in his redoubt. A few will be purely practical: i.e., “Why didn’t I buy more 7.62 NATO when it was cheap?” But some will be “had we onlies.”

     Had we only realized what Woodrow Wilson was doing to us...
     Had we only realized where FDR was steering us...
     Had we only seized our chances in 1946...
     Or, for that matter, in the Eighties...
     ...today might be different.

     Or it might not. But hindsight tends to be selective, especially when one is mired in the special sorrow that comes of having waited too long.

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     The dance will go on. The Ruling Class Party – Orwell called it only “The Party,” and he was wiser than we knew at the time – will continue to stage WWF-style “cage matches” of Democrat against Republican. The media will continue to ballyhoo each such contest as “the most important election in our lifetimes,” regardless of which “side” the commentator favors. Millions will flock to the polls, firmly convinced that “every vote matters.” Election night parties will be held across the Land of the Formerly Free, with families, friends, and political clubs gathered closely around the Idiot Box as county after county submits returns. But it’s all a sham.

     The true masters of this country will retain their grip. They never stood for election and never will. That’s not how they acquired their power, and it’s not how they keep it.

     They keep it by a system of quasi-hereditary oligarchy, mated to an unelected bureaucracy that answers solely to them.

     America rejected the Kennedys because theirs was too plainly a family dynasty that deemed itself above all law. It might reject the Bushes for similar reasons. But that’s what happens when a family parades its pretensions to royalty right out in front of God and everybody.

     The masters of this country are smarter than that.

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     Those inside the power elite must, of course, understand power. Beyond that, they must understand what it takes to preserve and extend it. The key word is loyalty.

     A power elite is like any other sort of institution: it must operate a mechanism for perpetuation and growth – a successful mechanism – or it will die. But family lines are not the answer, at least in America. Rather, the elite must extend its boundaries by acquiring new members who are:

1. Intelligent and capable;
2. Power-hungry;
3. Amoral;
4. And can be made and kept loyal.

     In one of his books on writing, the great Lawrence Block once demurred to the phrase “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know,” by countering, “It’s not who you know, it’s what you’ve got on ‘em.” That, in a nutshell, is the rule by which the power elite extends itself through time and space. New members must possess qualifications 1 through 3 above, and must be seduced into qualification 4.

     That last part involves having the initiate “make his bones:” He must do something:

• Either illegal or universally understood to be contemptible;
• That serves the interests of the power elite;
• In a fashion that can later be held over his head.

     That ensures that he understands the system, is willing to serve it, and can be kept loyal to it.

     Many a new candidate for entrance to the power elite “makes his bones” as part of the unelected government: as an aide to an elected official, or a worker in an alphabet agency. Some do so in the private sector, perhaps as lawyers or in the world of high finance. Some commit heinous crimes that do no apparent service to the power elite, other than indebting the candidate to it. Whatever route he chooses or is chosen for him, it must be something he would not want brought to light at a later date. Thus he passes from “postulant” to “novice,” and becomes eligible for duties within the elite itself.

     Doubt it if you like. I’m certain of it. And reflect on this: before his sociopathic / homicidal nature became too obvious, the Republican Party was grooming Ted Bundy for political office.

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     The power elite has all the characteristics of a dominant organism within its optimum ecological niche. No other organism – certainly not a patriotic American who loves and understands freedom – can compete with the power elite within that niche. There is only one countermeasure. It’s one too few Americans are willing to embrace:

Destroy the niche.

     Literally eliminate the government as it stands and start fresh. The new basis might be the old Constitution, amended to preclude at least some of the crimes of the last century. It might be a more dispersed form of organization. It might be outright anarchism. But whatever form it takes, it must be utterly cleansed of the power elite and its bastion in the unelected government. Not one stone of that edifice must be left standing on another.

     It won’t happen. There’s a stout, high security fence around the status quo. It’s composed in part of the millions of Americans who are partly to wholly dependent on government for their occupations or sustenance. Those millions will never agree to the amputation of the hand that feeds them. Alongside them are the many millions who believe, whether they express it or not, that “the way things are” is the way things must be. And standing just a little way off are the many – a frightening number, really – whose dearest desire is to gain admission to the power elite and work the system for themselves.

     We have the weapons. We have the numbers. But we haven’t the will.

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     I’ll keep writing; it’s what I do. But I no longer expect sociopolitical improvements in my lifetime. I don’t expect the electoral process to produce anything but further shams that assist the power elite in retaining its grip. I certainly don’t have any powerful new ideas for combating it.

     I still have hope; hope springs eternal in this breast. I haven’t “given up.” But I’m going to sit back. Focus on personal priorities and pleasures. And laugh a lot.

     That, too, is what I do. I must remember.