A Mirabilary of the Passing Parade: Amerika after the Independence Day Parades

by Cynicus Americanus (August 2017)

 

 

A Mirabilary
 

Signs And Wonders of The Devolution Of Man And The Decline Of Western Civilization In The Wake Of Obama In The Age Of the Gnostics In A Republic of Dunces, A Federation of Twits, An Accommodation Of DumbAsses.
 

And The Rise Of The Criminally Insane Class
 

The Passing Parade
 

As Observed by Cynicus Americanus

Cynicism

The best of cynics doubt the good of government; the worst of them doubt the good of people.  — George Pal

God had not created government for the certain knowledge that it would corrupt Creation. Man thought it worth an effort. God was right.  —Cynicus Americanus

Amerika

or,

The UGA . . . The United Governments of America

The truth is that the State is a conspiracy designed not only to exploit, but above all to corrupt the citizens . . . Henceforth I shall never serve any government anywhere.  —Leo Tolstoy

 

The Country That Disappeared

It is the gloaming of our discontent. The night comes, and just as surely, day follows. What awaits has much to do with our preparations for tomorrow, the bright man presumes—not so; no, no, no. It’s not so much our plans that more make our futures; it is our expectations.

 

The wellsprings of all great regrets are great expectations.

 

The United States, a decade in gestation, four score years in its prime, and now a century and a half and three counter-revolutions later, is our great regret. Ol’ Ben Franklin warned us but . . . wiser . . . well . . . smarter . . . well greater . . . oh hellfire . . . ideologues showed up. There was the rail-splitter who could not stand a split. He would not stand for what four score and seven years before our forefathers fought for. He would not suffer independence at the cost of a loss of a tight grip on a budding empire. It was principle to free oneself from the autocratic monarch; it was treachery to disentangle oneself from the elected autocrat. Things are just different in a Democracy—they just are.

 

First Conservative
 
Otto von Bismarck
 

The Progressive era of the West arrived by way of Bismarck and Germany. Otto, being a conservative, was, by that characteristic alone, a natural born progressive. He sought to stay the power and the rise of the Socialists in Germany. He did so thinking like a socialist, calculating as a socialist, and preempting socialist aims by providing what Socialists had not yet the wherewithal/power to dole out.

 

Bismarck elevated, politically, the march of “progress”, to the plinth “tradition” had rested upon and, in turn, made it the primary purpose of government. By this politically-prompted epiphany, Bismarck became a most cherished luminary in the pantheon of America’s great Protestant/Puritan progressive reformers. I believe George Will has, somewhere, an altar or shrine to Otto.

 

God had not long been dead. Rumors had it He’d been done in by some German thinkers. There was a vacuum and it had to be filled—the State enthusiastically volunteered. The self-contained and all-powerful, and all but eternal, secular state of Government was born. The late nineteenth century progressives had paved, either ingeniously or ingenuously, the road for the counter-revolution of the 20th century—Leftism.

 

Long long before the educrats allowed Bill Ayers to intellectually molest children socially, culturally, and pedagogically, John Dewey operated to the same purpose. Great exponents of progressive education, in more enlightened times, would have been run out of a merciful country; or set to smoking in a public auto-da-fé in a serious nation. Here, in the age of Government, he is given the master key to public schooling. The final revolution was the fundamental transformation of America. No longer a nation, or country, or people, the United States of America was now and forever to be the The United Governments of America. A directorate, not at all unlike a politburo—just bigger—was in charge of “directives and compliance” and all other measures and contingencies. Finally! Someone was going to fix . . . everything.

 

All that had been internalized in the people over the course of a century by the efforts of the American Longshanks, Abe Lincoln, John Dewey, Woodrow Wilson, up to the tag team of Eleanor and Franklin, had been externalized by Obama. Government had fully, successfully, made the transition from last resort to first.

 

It is understood now that Government owes most everyone something. For the discharge of that obligation, Government comes to own most everyone. This is governance. Governance is slavery. Slavery is servitude. Servitude is citizenship. Citizenship is indebtedness. Indebtedness is obligation. Obligation is now the shoe on the other foot. This is tit-for-tat. It has always been thus you say. True. But it, tit-for-tat, is now in the hands of the UGA, and this America lives by,  “more, bigger, faster, better.”

 

I Pledge Allegiance

I pledge allegiance to what precisely? The flag? The Stars and Stripes . . . that, if held to near the same definitive priggishness as our heritage’s custodians demanded from the Stars and Bars would be just as contemptible?

 

The Republic? We’d lost that some time ago. Our apologies, Mr. Franklin.

 

One Nation? We haven’t a nation, what we have is a menagerie.

 

Under God? God has been usurped, we are now under the aegis of our United Governments. The Government is also trinitarian—Federal, State, and Local. That seems, at least, one too many; at most, aggressively ostentatious.

 

Indivisible? There are more factions in Amerika than there are political Parties in the discreet geopolitical parliaments of all EU European semiautonomous territories. This, (needless to say, one would think) is not, in either case, a good thing.

 

With liberty and justice for all? Yes, for all; for all the world. And democracy also—the ‘Golden Calf’ of Amerika. Americanism is messiah-ism and has been since the time of the Prophet/Evangelists—Abe and Woodrow.

 

The beholden, put upon, ersatz citizen undergoes, incrementally, the tests of Job. His bitter lamentations come to nothing. His faith in the goodness of government has been downgraded. Yet through all his tribulations a glimmer of unwavering . . . something . . . remains. It is no longer so much faith as it is hope. He votes because he can do nothing else. He hopes for . . . yet another election.

 

Want More?

Who would say this country has not prepared itself for tomorrow?

 

The United Governments employ some two million federal workers, mostly bureaucrats but no small contingent of law enforcement/investigation, uniformed patrolmen and sorters and deliverymen . . . and uniformed military, and contractors and grantees—their employees—another . . . well . . . let’s do some reckoning.

 

Professor Paul Light of New York University has the data, mined from government procurement databases (contractors for material, construction, and services). The sum of the numbers is befitting a leviathan. There are, in reality, twin governments—the ostensibly transparent that is essentially opaque and routinely obfuscates for any number of reasons; and its shadow, basically, a provisioner for the first, which is opaque but essentially transparent, routinely obfuscating in order to make a healthy profit. The opaqueness of the latter, the contracted for government, is explained:

“Contractors and grantees” don’t tabulate or disclose the number of employees per contract “because doing so would allow the government . . . to estimate actual labor costs.” 

 

The numbers are seven to ten years old, their age an implication that things have gotten worse (czardoms)—such being the nature of centralized government—from distension to blubbery bloat to cancerous metastases.

 

As a matter made official, as of 2009, the federal government employed 2.8 million individuals out of a total U.S. workforce of 236 million—just over 1 percent of the workforce.

 

Add to that the aforementioned million and a half uniformed military personal and we are well over 4 million.

 

With the addition of the contractor/grantee labor estimates, the true size of the federal government was about 11 million: 1.8 million civil servants, 870,000 postal workers, 1.4 million military personnel, 4.4 million contractors, and 2.5 million grantees.

 

But wait! There’s more!

Leviathan (DC +) is easily dwarfed in numbers by state and local (municipal/county) direct employees. By U. S. Census Bureau numbers, there are 3.8 million full-time and 1.5 million part-time employees on state payrolls. Local governments add a further 11 million full-time and 3.2 million part-time personnel. This means that state and local governments combined employ 19.5 million Americans.

 

When we add up the true size of the federal workforce—civil civil servants, postal workers, military personnel, contractors, grantees, and bailed-out businesses — and add in state—and and local-government employees—civil servants, teachers, firefighters, and police officers—we we reach the astonishing figure of nearly 40 million Americans employed in some way by government. That means that about 17 percent of the American labor pool—one in every six workers—owes its living to the taxpayer.  —Ian Murray

 

We shall leave the NGOs out of the reckoning even though they are in bed with government and blatantly parrot government narratives. Quid pro quo lives and thrives at the intersection of government and non-government organizations.

 

Is That Lightning I Hear?

The dark cloud and lightning flash in our silver lining is that the taxpayer contributes pennies to a dollar’s spending. The future is on the hook for the rest. The conceits of four generations that had perpetrated the transmogrified Ponzi scheme of collecting a dime for every dollar’s worth of obligation will be the most reviled in history. Lucky us; we have the original Keynesian to remind us of the silver lining in that now dark cloud: in the long run we will all be dead—and will have escaped a hanging.

What could anyone make of so great a number of local, state, and federal employees?

 

That we are thereby looked after, cared for, cared about? Liked? Respected? That life abounds? That our borders are secure? That our cities and towns are electric but not explosive? That peace guides the planets and love steers the stars?

 

By any measure, all seem not to be the case. Life seems to superabound, irrespective of the Western world’s birth dearth. The calls for a smaller global population, more abortion, euthanasia, assisted suicides is a call by #TooManyLivesMatter. Borders had not so little meaning since . . . ever. National borders had been nearly done away with in the EU; until Gypsy and fuzzy Muslim cultural squatters reminded Europeans that once upon a time, when there were borders, there was no need to consult the narrative to know if your nation was being INVADED.

 

Here, in the land of bilk and money, the NAFTA signees had no need to play hide and seek with the borders. Mexico was still a second world country (on its best days); and Canada . . . no one yet has figured out what it is. It had always been friendly, and had some small affinity for this country, but winds change.

 

Mexico, in a headlong dive from a cliff higher than those of the tourist traps, became a fourth world narco-kakistocracy. In the US, the labor theory of value was stood on its head and took hold throughout the capitalist troughs and democratic precincts. Producers, for the most part, had now a low value for being expensive; peons now had high value for being cheap. Their value grew generously as their wages were supplemented by taxpayers subsidizing the cost of public education, so far as it could be called an education, along with health, medicine, and most all else on the welfare state’s bill of fare. Transfer payments to Mexico burgeoned and almost everyone was happy—or sleepy.

 

Daring Young Americans On The Flying Trapeze

What has America the most of after guns and butter? Social nets. No high wire act, nothing dicey, not a lifestyle, or behavior, conduct, or bad habit, will have much in the way of consequences. We had determined, as a society, that all consequences be ameliorated. How this works exactly is: do as you like, you may fall, but you will not splatter. It’s all fall and bounce. Let’s see . . . unemployment, disability, food stamps, welfare, AFDC, rent control, social security plus supplementals, healthcare, Medicare, Medicaid, psychological counseling amidst “tragedies,” school lunches and breakfasts, subsidies, grants, and so on and on and . . . BOUNCE.

 

There’s talk, most especially from the tech citadels, of a universal basic income for everyone, ostensibly to ease the dislocation of humans from the work place by robotics. How wonderful that Government, not a producer of wealth but a consumer of it, take up the call. At best, this is redistribution gone mad. At worst, it is sheer madness. Within one lifetime, a year’s worth of concern and consternation is wasted because . . . BOUNCE. ‘Don’t worry, be happy’ might well be the Government anthem we are enjoined to sing before athletic events—but everyone seems either too damned malcontented, pissed, or too damned dour to sing. Go figure.

 

This I know: when living was not provided for, empires and civilizations arose. When provision was made for living, down to everything but eating, personal waste management and breathing, empires and civilizations crumbled. Priorities had once been something. Now, they are an encumbrance to our “Right” to . . . whatever.

 

Never was there such a nirvana as ours. When you’ve travelled this far and fallen this deep, what’s there to keep anyone from imagining Utopia? Remember? . . . BOUNCE.

 

Yet, though we have prepared for tomorrow’s Utopia, we have not great expectations of it being either great or even much good. Is life better? No. It’s easier. Is that enough? Why isn’t it a good life that will afford you time to brood, sulk, wallow in bitchiness and pique, always vexed? And more, always wanting m-o-r-e. What do you expect? Whatever it is, it is bolstered not by faith in tomorrow, but by the crossed fingers of hope. What, in such a case as this, is faith without good works? The making of children is the mark of faith in tomorrow. The unmaking of them does not auger well for tomorrow and mocks all utopias. Want to quicken the churches, revitalize Christianity, revivify communities, resurrect hope, promote the traditional, and restore value to what is good? Resurrect GOD?

 

MAKE CHILDREN.

 

No-one, but no-one is more mindful of good, and the good of tomorrow, than mothers and fathers.

The fact of the matter is, there where there are few children, there is little faith and little more of hope. As things stand, there’s little need of any tomorrows but our own. The rest of the young sods are on their own. Right! . . . right?

 

Still Not Enough! Want More?

Who would say the United States is not prepared for war? Nothing could thwart this war machine. It is the technological marvel of the ages; the envy of generals and emperors well past moldering in their graves. There is nothing it cannot smash, but, alas, few it will defeat. In this theater, the expectations are that the politicians will jelly up in the use of it. The military is a show time piece; a calliope that belches steam, smoke and sound and fury; it is shock and awe. Anyone would think it’s sole purpose was to frighten the enemy into surrender. But what good had it done any American?

 

It left many dead, many injured, many disturbed, many suicidal, and too, too many to the un-tender mercies of the Veterans Administration. The fauna of an ordinary American zoo are better looked after than a veteran of America’s foreign adventures.

 

That’s not the end of it. Whether it’s murmurs, or cries, or clamors—it wants more . . . war.

 

There’s a soft spot in nearly every conservative’s obsidian soul for shock and awe. Armament dealers had not so lusted after war as Republicans and conservatives. See war mac daddies Senators. John “Bomb ‘em” McCain and Lindsey Graham.

 

Conservative Culprit
 
Robert Kagan—Liberal Interventionist
 

“I would say all Republican foreign policy professionals are anti-Trump,” remarked Robert Kagan while attending a foreign policy professionals for Hillary fundraiser.

 

A conservative would bargain his soul to Mephistopheles for a “good” war.

 

Mr. Kagan is co-founder of the neoconservative think tank Project for the New American Century. The name is yet another conniving pretense and suggests a motto—Make War, Not Peace.

 

The more the Government insinuates itself across the world, the more the world wobbles on it political axis.

 

This government had instigated numerous regime changes, not one of which had been salutary in any aspect. Not a one had resulted in greater stability or security geopolitically—locally, regionally, or internationally. In fact, collaterally, they have been utter disasters fostering sectarian civil wars, religious and tribal genocide/cleansing and the specter of Islam, whooshing about dispensing the only thing it had ever mastered—barbaric violence.

 

In one particularly egregious escapade, the government of the United States helped overthrow a legitimately elected president of Ukraine and cheered at the elevation of his successor, a real life despot. And the area of contention was? The previous president had been solicitous of Russian interests. The new democrat properly despises Russia and Putin, respectively, the bugbear and Keyser Söze bogeyman of fevered Western Establishmentarian minds. Want to keep the kinder in line? Tell them the lurid tales of Russia and the ogres that reside in the onion domes.

 

The old Soviet had never so routinely devised pandemonium throughout the world as new America.

We have now as many Generals in 1.5 million man army as WW II needed in a 14 million man army fighting a two theater global war. And we have . . .

 

Tanks–divisions of tanks—think tanks. Think of our thinkers and all they think about. The thinkers in the tank, “right” thinkers, Right thinkers, alt-Right thinkers, conservative thinkers, neo-conservative thinkers, religious thinkers, liberal thinkers, radical thinkers, deep thinkers, blinkered thinkers, tinkering thinkers, tinhorn thinkers . . . you get the gist. There are not so many types of thinkers as individuals who think, but the numbers are in the same vicinity. In one respect, all modern thinkers have this in common, they arrive there where they had started—for they are the circle-jerk thinkers.

 

The first rule of modern thinking is: you’ll never get lost on a roundabout, so never get off. First subsection of the first rule: linearity leads to confusion, doubt, mystery, unknowledge, error.

 

One of the great wacky comic political phenomena of our times: the faithful of that creed that believes in the inexorability of historical determinism are the Inquisitors that would hate, indict, and condemn the very thing that guides their theory along its path—historical linearity. i.e., progress.

 

A ‘modern age’ in which the thinkers who ought to be philosophers prefer the role of imperial entrepreneurs will have to go through many convulsions before it has got rid of itself.  —Eric Voegelin

 

Democracy—Spawn Of Government

 

Democracy is America’s cottage industry. It is so proud of it that it will start wars to export it to benighted cave lands, dark pits, and black holes throughout the world.

 

At home, we are subsumed by democracy. We haven’t, in essential meaning, a country, nor states comprising a country, nor have we a nation, neither a republic, we haven’t a people, neither a society, nor a social compact. We certainly haven’t a Union of any sort. What we have is government, great heaping putrid mounds of government. Thank you, democracy.

 

Right this moment most all of the government is at work on how to get reelected, and how best to expand and distend the breadth, depth, and scope of . . . government.

 

It is daily more apparent that one of the government’s primary roles is not governance of a nation, but provisioning all that is aberrant with legitimacy. If you ask of it something easy, like winning a war, or balancing a budget, it is worse than inept. Macaques armed with rocks could sooner win a war than our Government. But the impossible—yes, that it can do. It can, de jure, turn men into females; it can make of same sex couples a father and mother; it can make of marriage variations on a twosome, even threesomes, foursomes, fivesomes, it can make of gay couplings the paradigm of domestic tranquility. It can make my yearning for ewe, normal; it can make the continued production of children a burden on the people and a carbon footprint too threatening to the planet.

 

For decades now, the United Governments of America have been devoted entirely to Gnostic insanity. The most recent national election has not yet persuaded the perpetrators of this corruption to mend their ways or retire further efforts. Resistance to ‘draining the swamp’, if successful, will condemn government to illegitimacy in which case a revolution will have never had more just cause. And should the revolution fail, the corruption would warrant heavenly justice. The Perseids might rain down meteors, destroying Washington on the Potomac—to the everlasting delight of ‘we the people’.

 

Quo Vadis?

What are the great expectations for this nation? Don’t ask, do tell. What can be done to remedy the situation?

 

Nothing that is palatable—at present—to the great majority, and nothing within the pale to a significant plurality.

 

We are, none of us, so smart that we might undertake to making the world a better place; nor even something so modest as making a nation perfect, i.e., politically correct, culturally integrated, communally in agreement, and all guided by a social compact. Corporately, in our committees, councils, and braintrusts, we are even stupider. It is incumbent we shun all who make an effort of it, even more so those who would make a vocation of it. One needs not mull the merit of the advisory, merely look around and view the parade for yourself and see if it is not just so.

 

Scouring the stables clean after a half-century accumulation of ordure would be the place to start a renaissance. The revolution, some kind of revolution, and perhaps not a revolution but a third civil war is not far off if something tremendous is not made of an election that had all the moment of strong presage of one last chance.

 

Man is called by his very nature to govern himself. To the extent he will not, someone, or thing, will.

 

GOD BLESS AMERICA (the Government will not).

 

_____________________________

Cynicus Americanus was born, had as marvelous and happy a childhood as could be imagined, went to school, got a job, and several more, retired, was torn between wiling away the time writing or exposing rubbish, gibberish, claptrap, balderdash, hogwash, baloney, rot, garbage, jive, tripe, drivel, bilge, bull, guff, bunk, piffle, poppycock, phooey, hooey, malarkey, hokum, twaddle, gobbledygook, codswallop, flapdoodle, hot air; bunkum, tommyrot, bullshit, and crap. He decided to merge the projects. He is not as cynical as he appears… but almost.

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