OBAMALUNACY IN A HISTORICAL CONTEXT

First the anti-historical context.  Talk to the average teen-ager to learn about it.  A couple of our 17 year-old son’s friends were over at our home the other day, and I told them a story that mentioned Wyatt Earp.  Blank stares.  "Who’s Wyatt Earp?" they wanted to know.

Due to pictures in our home of Ronald Reagan, they asked me about him.  I related a few tidbits, then explained that presidents are remembered for one or two famous (or infamous) quotes.  Harry Truman’s was, "The buck stops here."  Richard Nixon’s was, "I am not a crook."  Ronald Reagan’s was, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall."

Blank stares.  Wall?  What wall?  The Berlin Wall, they were informed.  Oh, yeah, they had some vague memory of that – it was in Germany, wasn’t it?  But who’s Gorbachev?  The leader of the Soviet Union.  Oh, yeah, I heard of him – didn’t he win the Cold War?

These kids are not dumb.  They are nice, polite, and bright.  One of them attends Sidwell Friends in DC, the prestigious school for Washington elite (the Obama kids go there).  But what happened in the world before they were born is really, really not in sharp focus for them.

Maybe, though, we should cut them some slack.  They, and all of us, are trying to remain afloat amidst a deluge of information that none of us can keep up with.  It’s hard enough to make sense of what happened last week, so what happened decades or a century ago seems to lose any relevance.

The problem, of course, is that you cannot understand what is happening now if you’re in a historical vacuum, if there is no knowledgeably historical perspective with which to make any sense of it.

So – has the world always been as crazy as now?  How common or rare are episodes of lunacy sweeping through America?  How does the ObamaLunacy we are currently enduring compare?

Let’s ask some Boomers.  Folks of Boomer age – do you remember how literally crazy – leftist, Marxist, anti-American, drug-crazed – the sixties were?  Lyndon Johnson & the fascist con of the Great Society?  Rap Brown, the Black Panthers, the Weathermen, Malcolm X, tens of thousands of America’s best dying in a Vietnam War its commanders had no intention of winning… How nuts do you want?  

How about the seventies, with Watergate followed by a nebbish for president so spineless he makes Zero look like John Wayne?  The disaster of Jimmy Carter’s presidency was across the board.  Double-digit inflation, double-digit interest rates, double-digit unemployment.  The Soviets had acquired so many new colonies (such as Nicaragua and Afghanistan) that Henry Kissinger was being consulted on what would be the most graceful way to surrender to them. 

A bunch of Moslem crazies had taken over Iran and made hostages of our diplomats – and America could do nothing.  The Democrats exulted and did everything they could to make America even weaker, gutting the military and intelligence agencies.  At the end of Carter’s presidency, there were more KGB agents in New York City than there were CIA agents in the entire world.

As bad and as dangerous as you may think things are now, we aren’t remotely close to the bottom of Jimmy Carter’s barrel.

Crises?  You want crises in America?  How about the Civil War?  That’s like comparing the Atlantic Ocean to the Lake Okeechobee of what’s happening now.  Hundreds of thousands of fellow Americans slaughtering each other like barbarian savages – and for what?  To free something that was for sale?  Slaves were property the owners of which could be remunerated via the process of eminent domain and just compensation.  Sure a lot less costly than 600,000 dead.  But no, we had to do it the crazy way.

Or take the freedom-destroying reign of "America’s first fascist president," Woodrow Wilson, from the creation of the IRS and the Federal Reserve in 1913 to the incredible abolishment of constitutional freedoms by Wilson as he got us into the stupidest and most disastrous war of modern times, World War One.

Then talk to someone old enough to remember living and suffering through the Great Depression – they’d have to be in their nineties and still thinking clearly – and they’ll laugh at us whippersnappers for having the ignorant gall to compare now with then.

There is no need to locate lunacies throughout millennia of ancient history for a historical perspective – for there has been an overabundance of lunacies right here in our very own last century and a half.  

Now let’s try some "what-if" thought experiments.  Not easy ones like what if event X or Y had occurred before the lunacy so that it never happened in the first place.  No, let’s suppose that it’s already underway.  What would it have taken for people to come to their senses in 1862, 1914, 1931, 1966, or 1978? 

You can spin out all kinds of what-ifs.  The bottom line for all of them is that if millions of folks had back in those years collectively said, "Wait a minute… we’ve been suckered!  This is crazy!" – then the lunacy could have been shut down.

And that is just what happened in the last instance, when America finally came to its senses and replaced Jimmy Carter in the White House with Ronald Reagan.  The key word in this last sentence, however, is "finally."  It took Americans four years to figure things out. 

They remained clueless by the 1978 mid-terms:  the Dems lost only 3 senate seats (from 61D-38R to 58D-41R) and 15 house (from 292D-143R to 277D-158R).  By contrast, the Dems lost 12 senate seats and their majority in 1980 (53R-46D), plus 35 house seats.

Thus – the historical lessons to draw here are:

1.  There have been even crazier lunacies in recent American history than ObamaLunacy. 

2.  The principal difference between ObamaLunacy and its predecessors is that Americans have come to their senses in record time – less than 12 months.  In time to prevent or severely retard the lunacy from doing further damage.

3.   The ObamaLunacy provides a similar opportunity, as did the CarterLunacy, to not only reverse its damage, but restore America as better than before.

The key lesson is #3. 

There is an unfortunate battle cry of some TeaPartyers:  "Take America Back!"  Taking back means recovery, recapturing our country from the heathen infidels of the Hate America Left like the Reconquista of the Spanish Christians recapturing their country from conquering Moslem invaders.

But the battle cry also implies the desire to return America to some time in the past, some golden age of nostalgia.  This is a big mistake.  Ronald Reagan never talked that way.  He didn’t want to take America backwards, but forward.  He intended for America to be a country of the future, not of the past.

Nostalgically pining for some lost Golden Era – the most recent one being the 1950s – is a totally counter-productive waste of time. 

First, realize that Golden Ages have always been short and temporary.  They never last long.  The Glory of Greece – 5^th century Periclean Athens – lasted little more than 30 years, from the 450s to the death of Pericles in 429 and the suicidal Peloponnesian War. 

The Renaissance flourished for less than 100 years, from the 1430s with the rule of Cosimo de Medici (1389-1464) in Florence to the 1530s with its destruction by the Reformation.

The Enlightenment lasted less than 60 years, launched by Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet 1694-1778) in the 1730s and swept away by the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror.

And the Fifties lasted not much longer than, well, the 1950s.

Second, you can never repeat the past.  It’s over and never will be again.  A country cannot relive its past anymore than you can relive your life.  All we can do is learn from them so that we can do our best to create a better life for ourselves and future for our country.

The ObamaLunacy gives us just this opportunity.  It and its Dem perpetrators are so wildly and egregiously corrupt, thieving, arrogant, power-mad, anti-American, anti-freedom, and treasonous towards protecting our national and economic security that we now have the opportunity to toss them into the dustbin of history.

Yes, a majority of American voters went temporarily insane and elected a man who had accomplished nothing and about whom they knew nothing except that he went to a church that preached "God damn America." 

Yet, as we all know, it’s not the sin that counts but the redemption.  (Except for sins that are irredeemable. There is no forgiveness, no exculpation for a Saddam Hussein or Osama Bin Laden.) 

This year, 2010, can be truly historic, a year of true redemption, a year of recovering and saving our country from lunatics bent on destroying it.  We Americans have it within our grasp to create a Golden American Age of the future, not of the past.  We must not let this historical opportunity slip through our fingers.

That opportunity is to create a Constitutional America – an America that adheres to and abides within its Constitution and founding principles.  Without the stark contrast of the ObamaLunacy, we might never had had this opportunity.  History has given it to us right now, this year, 2010.  Carpe diem.