Wednesday obliged us to attend the funeral of an old and dear friend. The melancholy chore involved driving along back roads through fifty miles or so of God’s glorious Kansas countryside from Wichita to Hutchinson, one of those pleasant and picturesque small towns that people have somehow fashioned out of the rough prairie soil, and the drive took us past endless acres of corn that had withered on the stalk in this summer’s relentless sun as well the green sprouts of various other crops that looked like they might just make it to harvest. Along the way we contemplated the past life of an unknown but excellent American individual and the possible futures of our collective America.
Rush Limbaugh was holding forth on the AM radio, and as is our wont we were tuned in with rapt interest. The leftward segment of America regards Limbaugh with an ostentatious disgust and loudly accuses him of being hateful, but we’ve always found him an endearingly upbeat fellow who giddily champions a system that would allow anyone to follow his dreams even when Limbaugh thinks those dreams are a bunch of namby-pamby politically correct nonsense. On Wednesday he was uncharacteristically downbeat, though, and admittedly worried that the country might soon be choosing a wrong path.
We share that concern. We see that in the past four years the country has been dragged more than five trillion dollars further into debt, and five trillion dollars closer to the impending economic catastrophe that has already befallen Greece and Spain and every other nation that ever followed such a path. We see that millions of our countrymen are out work, and that millions more have been tempted into a degrading state of dependence on the labors of strangers. We see that the promised stimulative effects of such profligacy have produced only economic stasis at best and steady deterioration at worst, and that the subsidies for failure and disparagement of success have hastened an already precipitous cultural decline. We see the country on a road to serfdom, and we see polls showing that a near majority of the country prefers this to the frightening uncertainty of freedom and mere opportunity.
Some clamor for a third way, one that would keep the checks coming for the rest of their lives without resorting to ever more confiscatory taxation and totalitarian regulation of the private sector, but no one can say where that way lies. The only real choices available are the collectivist society on the left and the individualism of the right, and they cannot be reconciled. Conflict is the inevitable result, and though we have been blessed with a political system that allows us to resolve such conflicts peacefully there is nothing to prevent it from getting very ugly. Already the left has resorted to the most outrageous slanders to discredit their opposition, including false charges of complicity in the unfortunate death of a woman whose widower has allowed her to be used for the most disgraceful sort of political propaganda, and even worse can be expected. People who believe they are creating a utopia feel justified in using the most ruthless tactics against those who would impede them.
Still, we hold out hope that it all ends up with one America. The fellow we bid farewell to on Wednesday was one of those on the other side, and we wish he were still around to cast the wrong vote. He was a quirky sort and an independent thinker, and he shared our downright Burkean traditionalism on matters of language and aesthetics, but we never did succeed in persuading him to adopt a similar view of government, economics and politics. Somehow we didn’t mind that he was a bleeding heart pinko, and he forgave our cold-blooded conservatism, and we got along together very well.
— Bud Norman
The Central Standard Times 