Mr Obama Wins Reelection
The Mass Media has won yet again. I do not recommend despair. I do not recommend stoicism. I recommend singing.
Let me explain.
Back when I was a Libertarian, such a ill-starred event would have had me wondering when it was morally permissible to raise the Jolly Roger and begin slitting throats. Fortunately, the Christian religion, which places no faith in Earthly kings and regards no worldly dismay as inconsolable, also commands utter obedience to worldly authorities placed over us.
In a civilized and Constitutional Democracy of our particular nature, when the rival party achieves victory, the proper thing to do is bow in graceful submission to the will of the Electoral College, and not to descend into ungrateful grumbling about the supremacy of the popular vote. That is not how our Republic is instituted.
Therefore, congratulations to the Media, and to the Democrat Party which they have so loyally served lo these many years.
Come now, my fellow conservatives. We would expect the rival party manfully to show faith and fealty to the laws and administration if our party had prevailed, and, as patriots, we can do no less when they prevail.
That is the bargain; that is the deal; that is the social contract. Let them break it and go to the lowest and frozen floor of hell where traitors languish; let us keep it for our honor’s sake, and for the reward of the soft applause of angels.
The laws of civilization have protected our lives and goods, lo, these many years, and we owe the laws that same love and obedience we owe a father and a mother, who protect and sustain us. To break the law is as parricide.
Even to be grim and sulking is uncouth, and stirs the generous heart to laughter. Have we learned no good sportsmanship? Let them be the party known for its ill temper and lack of grace in defeat, as they are known for their ugly and ungainly vaunting and self flattery in victory. Let us bear both the temptation of defeat, the allure of despair and wrath, and the temptation of victory, the allure of pride, with stoic indifference and philosophical detachment.
Are we not men? Indeed, this night has proved we may be the only adults left in the nation. I pray you act it.
Let us shake hands and congratulate the incumbents, and wish them well, and pray for wise counsel to bless their leadership which is also ours, and pray for the enmity born of rivalry to be forgotten.
Let us vow obedience and good will to the regime who rules and reigns over us.
Lest I be accused of mawkishness, or false sunshine, I assure my readers I have no illusions about the meaning of this vote.
The American Republic just voted itself away. The American Dream just voted itself into the comfortable morphine overdose of financial euthanasia.
Life and Death was set before us, and the majority chose death.
We faithful Christians should never have had faith in the wisdom and common sense of the fallen Sons of Adam to begin with: it is in our fallen nature to chose death over life, because life makes demands and requires much of us, painful duties and the wild glory of love, whereas death is hoped to be a dreamless sleep, and a rest from a restless conscience.
(And the wise know that hope of oblivion is vain, that eternity awaits, of shockingly wakeful joy or shockingly wakeful woe. We shall not sleep in death. We sleep now.)
Do I exaggerate when I say America chose death? I have a ferocious poetical heart, which I attempt at all times to keep in check by my cool and rational Houyhnhnm brain, and so I hope this is an example of exaggeration.
I pray to God that I be proven a false prophet, and would be delighted to be the laughingstock of all right thinking and comfortable people, if only, O my Savior, I be proved wrong. St Isaiah and St Daniel, patrons of true prophecy, let these my words be shown vain and false.
I sincerely hope I have made some grave error in my dark and unlovely prognostications for the years to come.
If not, and if I have made no great error, then expect an appointment or two to the Supreme Court of unqualified radical activist Justices of the Frankfurt School who will enact such changes destructive of the integrity of the Constitution and of the legal system, that it will never recover. Objectivity in law will then be dead beyond resuscitation: the law thereafter be a tool of one faction to oppress another faction, or the instrument of bureaucrats to perform mindless and meaningless acts of malign regulation.
If not, then the new industrial revolution which cheap energy would have ushered in, and the corresponding loss to the Oil Sheiks of petrodollars to fund International Terrorism, shall be strangled in its cradle by environmentalists and microregulation.
If not, expect further American funding, encouragement and applause for Islamic Terrorism, and expect the rise and solidification of further Islamic Republics, further betrayal of Israel, and perhaps the ignition of the first of many Jihadist atom bombs.
If not, expect a twenty percent unemployment rate; and expect it not to be reported in the press.
If not, expect the ruination of the health care system.
If not, expect Catholic charities and institutions to close their doors as they are driven out of public life relentlessly, and woe to the orphans, the poor, the widow, the prisoner in goal. Their suffering shall increase in order that the hideous and Lovecraftian idols of Political Correctness be appeased.
If not, expect more, far more, rule by fiat, where bureaucratic agencies will simply ignore Congress, and enforce regulations for which there is no legal mandate, and ignore the enforcement of laws they are required to enforce.
If not, expect totalitarian anarchy.
If not, expect a law that reaches to every nook and corner of your lives, every jot and tittle, but a law divorced from public weal, precedent, common sense, or due process. It will be a law of utterly arbitrary process. The law will serve the aristocrats of “pull”, a new class of courtiers and donors who find favor in the eyes of the powers that be, and the law will grind the faces of the poor and dispossessed and nonconformist and the rich who find no favor.
If not, expect that the whining, lying, self-righteous, churlish, and childish spirit of the Socialist shall become the final and permanent spirit of the age.
If not, the idea of an independent man, an independent idea, will be not so much unfashionable as unfathomable. Future conservative victories here in America will be roughly as meaningful as the victories of so called conservative parties in Europe.
If not, the US Dollar will no longer be the world reserve currency.
If not, expect hypertaxation. Expect hyperinflation.
If not, expect no honest elections ever to be held again. The Chicago Way has triumphed.
This is what the Americans voted for.
Gullible, aren’t we?
Despite this, it is not the End of the World, even if it is the end of the American predominance and prosperity.
Life will continue, if not as pleasantly. The American Dream will not continue.
Despite all this, we still live under a better regime and better leadership than the early Christians, who endured Nero, Marcus Aurelius, Septimus, Maximin, Decius, and the various Arian Emperors in the East. Let us utter no complaint.
Christians now, this day, this hour, suffer humiliation and deprivation and death in lands overseas under regimes American administrations of both parties have funded and supported. The count of martyrs is higher in these modern years than any ancient persecutions boasts. Let us utter no complaint.
Christians must yield to the will of heaven, and obey lawful authority, and Americans must abide lawfully and faithfully by the will of the majority.
In this case, it is akin to the duty of the Captain of the Titanic to go down with his ship without complain or undue expressions of emotional excess. We must stay at our posts, loyal Americans, while the decks are awash.
For I believe in miracles. The sunken ship of civilization after the Fall of Rome rose again. Our civilization has not even fallen, albeit I, at least, hear the timbers creaking. She may not yet fall: for perhaps Heaven has decreed otherwise.
Let us still be grateful that we live in a freer nation than our neighbors, and some mechanism still exists to correct and amend our nation without the need for bloody revolution.
I can see no way, once a people is corrupted by government dependency, of recovering our ancient liberties. The majority will vote themselves bread and circuses until the funds run out, and vote themselves ever deeper into debt until the credulity of lenders runs out. It is an addiction which relaxes the nerve of discipline, and a moral disease that leads to mental blindness.
But with God, all things are possible.
Perhaps I grossly overestimate the damage that has been done and will yet be done. Perhaps some new economic activity able to escape the Lilliputian cords and bindings of our enviro-hyperregulatory anticapitalist state will bloom where no man looks to see it, and produce such a blinding abundance of wealth as to enable us in, say, only ninety years rather than nine hundred, to pay down the national debt. Perhaps the horse will learn to sing hymns.
Let us be grateful for all the blessings the gracious Lord has bestowed upon our unworthy heads; the His blessings are still many and deep.
The Lord of Heaven did not turn His face away from Israel, even while He permitted her, for the sake of her sins, to fall into captivity.
We have become strangers in our own land. Our fate is more generous than theirs, and, all all accounts, they were a more pious and righteous people. God is gracious.
Let us sing a song:
By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.
We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.
For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.
How shall we sing the LORD’S song in a strange land?
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.
If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.
Remember, O LORD, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem; who said, Rase it, rase it, even to the foundation thereof.
O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us.
Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.