Baltic Diary I: Us and Them

It's amazing the things you can get used to. The ObamaCare juggernaut rolls along, threatening to crush us all under the wheel of socialism, and we are as powerless to stop it as the people in a monster B-movie are to stop Godzilla. Obama has to be feeling a bit dizzy from his recent one-two treatment by the rest of the world – first the Olympics slapdown, followed immediately by the Nobel Peace Prize. The message? “Make peace, not gold medals” -- or something like that. And – guess what, just as I predicted, the Dow is back above 10,000, and it's almost enough to make you forget the massive thefts that brought it low in the first place... and the equally-massive thefts that were committed to bail out the guilty parties... and the equally-massive thefts that are being committed to “stimulate the economy”. Seems like with the Dow at 10,000 again, the economy no longer needs stimulating... but will that obvious fact result in the cessation of the program? Dream on. No matter what the Dow does, the American middle class has been raped and pillaged by the big boys on Wall Street and elsewhere, and that's only the beginning, since – as we can see from the rising price of gold – the dollar has caught the Swine Flu and will be in intensive care before long... and the current "Era of OK Feeling" is just the lull before the storm of new, even more confiscatory taxes – once again falling mainly on the middle class, which is too ignorant, trusting, timid, and powerless to defend itself.

So what I'm saying is that the forces of destruction have been unleashed... but like a flood on the Mississippi that takes a few days to move downstream, we don't experience the full impact all at once, on every front. It's the little things that make us take notice – like the pizza I buy about once a month has suddenly jumped from $8 to $10. Stuff like that. And it might be subliminal if we weren't already primed for disaster – the fear of the unknown being, as always, worse than the fear of the known. My worst nightmares are not about fear of specific, nameable things – like wild animals, heights, and so on, but of what I call the “nameless horror” -- things just out of sight, hidden around corners, like some monstrosity from a Lovecraft story. The economic equivalent is what happens when the U.S. dollar finally crashes (with ample help, I expect, from the EU, China, Russia, et al). The equivalent on the foreign policy side is the collapse of the American Empire, which is already underway in Afghanistan, at least, and elsewhere in the Middle East as well as Latin America. Do we know what life in a post-empire America is like? No – because we've never had the experience. But it ought to be interesting. Post-empire and post-dollar – wow, it's going to be a strange new world. And did I mention a level of socialism and collectivization undreamed of even by hard-core New Dealers? And how about the growing realization that, after all, Obama is not his own man any more than Bush was – that he's taking orders from the same people and doing more or less the same things, rhetoric notwithstanding. Nobel Peace Prize – my ass! That's just the way the Regime reinforces a trivial change in window dressing – what I call “political iconography”. But otherwise, do you see, or feel, any real “change”? I sure don't. But this can actually be reassuring, in a twisted kind of way. We always suspected that there was nothing at all “accidental” or “unexpected” about the economic crisis – that it was just, basically, a massive redistribution of income and resources from the middle to the ruling classes – and sure enough, all evidence points to it having been precisely that and nothing more. The “crisis” talk was just a way of getting “buy-in” on the part of the harried and harassed voters, and making them eager to accept even bigger and more intrusive government. Mission accomplished! It was also a way to distract people from the twin wars, and wars to come, by reminding them that, yes indeed, putting food on the table really is more important than what happens to a bunch of rag-heads halfway around the world, so let's just chill out on that issue, shall we? Let the big dogs run and play, and leave the driving to us (and never mind the percentage of GDP that is devoted to war and all the other absurdities of the American Empire). And the fact that the Dow is at 10,000 – that there still _is_ a Dow – that the Stock Market hasn't vanished like the World Trade Center did – this is meant to be reassuring as well. Someone out there is making money; it just isn't you... but that's still better than living under the Red Guard, for example... or under the Khmer Rouge, right? So quit complaining about your incredibly shrinking 401k, and your dollar that's getting its butt kicked in financial markets all over the world. Anyone with any sense dumped their dollars months ago; what's _your_ problem?

You see, this is the essence of political control – not just the “soma” or narcotic of collectivization, Potemkin villages, welfare, and games and circuses – but periodic (and highly orchestrated) bouts of panic, fear, anxiety, dread... the perpetual cycle of hot-and-cold that, with each iteration, makes people more afraid... more fearful of independence, true liberty, competition, etc.... more anxious to turn over all their rights and privileges to the government. The cycle is depressingly familiar at this point: Crisis leads to Panic, which leads to “Emergency Measures” on the part of the government – except those “emergency measures” never go away. But said measures are immediately – even while implementation is in the early stages – pronounced a success, and dire tales are offered of how bad things “might” have been without them. Plus, look at all the new, sparkling “benefits” and “entitlements” you have now – and all you had to do is give up a few pesky “freedoms” that no one ever used anyway. So we curl up in the government's lap while it strokes our fevered brow and says, in a soothing tone, “Now now, everything's OK, don't worry, go to sleep” -- which we do, until we are rudely awakened by the next jangling crisis and the whole cycle starts anew. “Swine flu!” -- or whatever it's called nowadays – leads to “calls (ever wonder who does all this “calling”?) for ever greater government involvement in health care”. “Academic underachievement” calls for even greater government involvement in education. And no matter what you call “terrorism”, it's still out there, waiting to pounce at any minute... and it can come from anywhere... and no one can be trusted, and so we have to have military bases everywhere on earth... et cetera. Yes, there is no shortage of crises that can be called up at a moment's notice; Washington, DC might as well convert itself into a “big box” store called “Crises R Us”. Ah, but – they say – this is just what comes from being a democracy, and the last, best hope for mankind, and prosperous, etc. -- all that old Wilsonian drivel. Except that the earmarks of American exceptionalism are becoming more shopworn all the time... and convincing fewer and fewer people... including ourselves.

I spent two weeks in Eastern Europe recently, and could not help but notice how much better clothed, fed, and groomed the people there are than the people here – and this was in what was, up to 20 short years ago, the Soviet Union! Their cities are cleaner than ours, crime rates are lower, and the signs of prosperity that we like to brag about... well, they are not only catching up, but passing us even in those relatively materialistic categories. And why is this, class? Well, let's start with the fact that Lithuania, for example, doesn't have armed forces stationed in nearly every other country on earth, and is not fighting two wars at once and on the verge of fighting a third. Well – you'll say – that's ridiculous, of course... how could Lithuania possibly do all of those things even if it wanted to? But that's not the point. It doesn't even have a _proportional_ level of “defense” to ours – nowhere near. It's content to watch over, and defend if need be, its own borders – period. How long has it been since we had that enlightened attitude? You'd have to go back to before the Monroe Doctrine at least. And are Lithuanian bankers and businessmen mucking around in the financial affairs and politics of nearly every other country on earth – and thereby inviting them to muck around in our affairs? Highly doubtful. Does Lithuania really give a hang who wins what election overseas -- and do they employ an army of CIA agents to help the "right" people win? Not on an average day, would be my guess. Is “world trade” for them an asset, or a liability, as it is for us? I'll give you one guess. And – have they turned their currency, and therefore their financial integrity, over to the “gnomes of Brussels”, even though they are EU members? No! The litas is alive and well.

Yes, America is grotesquely overextended on all fronts – but this is the most common symptom of an empire on the wane. “Contraction” -- of whatever sort – is never voluntary; it has to be accomplished through dogged resistance, “blowback”, and brute force from the rest of the world. Oh, there have been instances of at least semi-voluntary belt-tightening, empire-wise, as was the case for Britain. But by and large, empires are simply unable to conceive of cutting their losses – because they are unable to imagine that the end is near. And in our case, this is aggravated by the fact that most of us don't even think we _have_ an empire. All of our troubles, in other words, are just random, unfortunate events, and we're innocent and blameless. Well... dream on, folks, but it's not going to change anything. It's been said that America “peaked”, in the aggregate, way back in the 1950s, and that it's been downhill ever since... beginning most obviously with Vietnam. And that our history since then has been one of, basically, kicking and screaming against the fact of our steady slippage and deterioration. Now, one could say, but how about all the huge, wealthy corporations that started here and have the U.S. as a base? “Base”, yes – but these outfits are no longer any more “American” than the U.N. They are international in scope and orientation, and, frankly, the economic and social welfare of the U.S., and of its citizens, is of absolutely no interest to them, despite all those saccharine “public service” ads they constantly bruise our eyes and ears with. You take the internationalists out of the U.S. and what you have left is a Class B (on a good day) economy with a (still – but for how much longer?) Class A military – again, typical of the late empire stage (where foreign involvement becomes a liability rather than an asset). But that Class A military spends most of its time getting the crap pounded out of it in overseas pestholes... and what it should be doing, namely protecting our borders, is not being done by anyone. And I probably should add that vast tracts of the U.S. are, socio-politically, “Third World” in nature, and not even the upper half of the Third World. Does Lithuania, for example, have anything to compare to inner-city Washington DC, Philadelphia, or Detroit? Or any large urban public school system? Or the rural poverty pockets of Appalachia and the Southwest? For their sake, I hope not. Are they crushed under the burden of racial strife and paranoia? Well – they're certainly very conscious of their history and their ethnic identity, but they have nothing even remotely like our obsession with race. Or with gender, either, for that matter – over there men are unabashedly men, and women are unabashedly women. I think I saw, maybe, a handful of “metrosexuals” the whole time I was over there. There are many other interesting aspects of the scene in that part of the world, which I'll try and cover in later posts. For right now, suffice it to say that – as always in the history of empires – suddenly the advantage is to the people who were formerly oppressed, and are now just trying to stay out of harm's way, build up their own economies, and maintain their integrity. It's the places occupying center stage who are in most danger of a precipitous fall – and who are the least likely to see it coming until it's too late.