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Thursday, August 04, 2011

A Ballad For Our Time

The thing is, the stuff that's falling out really has to fall out. There's very little to be done but to put the cows in the barn, knowing full well they won't survive a direct hit from the storm, and collect the family and get in the fruit cellar.

Because this whole long line of nonsense is crashing into reality, and the thing about reality is that it just keeps getting more and more powerful the more you pretend it's not there.


Comments:
"There's very little to be done but to put the cows in the barn, knowing full well they won't survive a direct hit from the storm, and collect the family and get in the fruit cellar."

I have good news and bad news.

Here's the bad news. The barn doors were already bolted shut once the horses escaped!! It's going to take hours to get them open again.

Here's the good news. It's Miracle Day!

Sorry. Gallows humor again. It's how I cope.
 
I've been thinking about your words and how they might improve my haiku skills (or lack thereof).

The first line I borrowed from your post. The rest I borrowed from Japan. Sigh.

stuff that's falling out
it seems a lot like fallout
nuclear summer
 
Must be something in the water in the U.K. - this guy sounds and plays so much like Mark Knopfler, it's spooky.

I'll see this and raise you one:

Chris Rea "Road To Hell" Live

Complete with relevant lyrics:

"
And all the roads jam up with credit
And there's nothing you can do
It's all just bits of paper
Flying away from you"
 
Here is the thing that worries me...the people that came to the US were tough, hard people. They knew how to deal with times like these. I see too many soft, clueless people out there. Those folks will frighten easily and will demand protection from the storm. They'll give up anything to feel all safe and cozy again.
 
Teri - that's it exactly.

People don't know how to cope and they are just panicking, and the more privileged they are, the more deeply they're panicking. There is nothing more feral and vicious than a government employee whose pension COLA is threatened.

It is not the truck drivers and farmers and grocery store employees who are going feral on us. It is the Thomas Friedmans and the college professors - the self-described intelligentsia.

Any moment now the NY Times will decide that it is a liberal position to round up the unemployed and drop them by air on Mexico.

Once the libertarians go totalitarian on us, all bets are off.
 
Bob - good one, but I was looking for a bit of wistfulness.
 
"Once the libertarians go totalitarian on us, all bets are off."

Is that supposed to be a reference to me? I am just someone who wants to maximize freedom, and realizes that reality places various limits on the kind and quantity of freedom achievable (including unavoidable tradeoffs between one person's freedoms and another's).

I suspect your use of the word "totalitarian" is in reference to the suggestion that criminals could be ejected from the country. But if the decision to eject or not eject is based on what preserves the most total individual freedom (weighing the freedoms lost by those forced to pay for the criminal's stay vs the freedoms lost by the criminal if ejected rather than incarcerated), then calling that totalitarian is 100% wrong. And of these two groups whose freedoms are being weighed, only one of them committed the crime and thereby forced such a decision to even be necessary in the first place.

But feel free to call people fighting for freedom "totalitarian" while our country continues its transformation into a total totalitarian democracy: A totalitarian democratic state is said to maximize its control over the lives of its citizens, using the dual rationale of general will (i.e., "public good") and majority rule.

And it continues that transformation with the help of people who argue to hold people hostage to "social contracts" they never agreed to. (Call theft whatever you like. It doesn't change what it is.) Once you accept the premise that the state can take liberty for any purpose other than the preservation of greater liberty, there is no longer any line over which they can not cross.

This cartoon seems fitting.
 
If you really want cheery stuff, here's James McMurtry doing an acoustic version of "We Can't Make It Here Anymore":
YouTube link
 
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