Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Someone To Watch Over Me


There's a somebody I'm longing to see
I hope that he turns out to be
Someone who'll watch over me
I'm a little lamb who's lost in the wood
I know I could always be good, with
Someone who'll watch over me...
George Gershwin

Everybody's heard it, or heard of it, by now:The line from the DNC video that goes  " Government is the only thing we all belong to." Got that? "...belong to."
Of course, the Obamanistas are clamoring that "We didn't mean it that way, really, really we didn't." Yeah, like Obama didn't mean "You didn't build that."

BULLSHIT.

Nearly every government has owned its subjects. What do you think feudalism, which lasted until the 20th century in Russia, was about? Do you think European serfs could come and go as they pleased? Sell their goods wherever and to whomever they wished? Do you think Asian peasants fared any better? Perhaps the Athenian and Roman republics recognized the idea of a free people, as limited as their concepts of freedom were. Maybe the Swiss.
Certainly not the Brits, whose "sturdy yeomen" were kept from complete serfdom only by virtue of their longbows, the medieval equivalent of the AK-47. They were still "subjects," not citizens.

Throughout the sorry, bloody course of human history there was one, and only one, nation founded on the principle of free individuals with inalienable rights voluntarily cooperating to form a government with carefully defined and highly limited powers. You get one guess as to which one that might be. However imperfectly we have lived up to that ideal it is still what defines the United States of America.

It is understandable, though, how representatives of a political party that takes as its first principle that government is the source of all good, that coerced collectivity is the natural state of mankind, might unthinkingly write a line that reflects their philosophy. Unthinkingly in the sense that they weren't considering how those not sharing their ideology might take it, since they never speak to anyone who doesn't share it. They weren't paying attention, and that's when one's real nature is revealed. 

They think we're all property.

I am astonished that any Jew can subscribe to their philosophy, when so much of our ancient and recent history is about resisting, escaping or simply surviving slavery. How any Jew who supports Obama and the rest of the Progressive mob can read the Passover service without choking on the words is bewildering. I am equally astonished that any black person, whose ancestors were recently property, could hear that line and not immediately understand just how Nat Turner felt.*

I can explain it, though. Read the lines above. Gershwin wrote a sweet though decidedly non-feminist love song, but the words extend beyond romance. Many, many people, men and women, want to be taken care of. Property is taken care of, more or less. You don't need to make hard choices if you're property. You don't need to succeed at anything because if you fail you'll still be taken care of. They want to be pets. Of course, pets have limited freedom. They get fed what the owners think is good for them, or cheap. They run around inside the fence, because outside is dangerous and scary. They get groomed. They're taken to the vet, too, and being neutered is part of the price they pay for security. Of course you mustn't bite...

What those people don't realize is that only a very few are pets. The rest are livestock, producing for the owners. Draft oxen. Plow horses. Milk cows. Owners can use them for whatever purpose suits them; witness the Great Leap Forward, which killed what, 45 million Chinese? Stalin's purges and destruction of the kulaks, which accounted for 30 million or so. The entire nation of North Korea. Every once in a while the herd needs to be culled of undesirables, too, so we get the Holocaust and the killing fields. Sometimes it's just easier to get rid of the whole herd and start over.** 

Why don't progressives understand the facts of history? One, they're ignorant and two, they don't want to. The facts are there if you look, a couple of clicks away, but they don't want to know. It might mean that they'd have to take care of themselves, show some responsibility, and that's scarier than the possibility of the gulag or the slaughterhouse. Besides, the price is paid only in the long run, and as one of the progressives' minor deities once said, "In the long run we'll all be dead."


* If you don't know who that was, look here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nat_Turner

** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacre_at_Béziers











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