Politickles

Why, once Jakes went out to cover a revolution in one of the Balkan capitals. He overslept in his carriage, woke up at the wrong station, didn’t know any different, got out, went straight to a hotel, and cabled off a thousand word story about barricades in the streets, flaming churches, machine guns answering the rattle of his typewriter as he wrote, a dead child, like a broken doll, spreadeagled in the deserted roadway below his window….

That day every special [reporter] in Europe got orders to rush to the new revolution. They arrived in shoals. Everything seemed quiet enough, but it was as much as their jobs were worth to say so, with Jakes filing a thousand words of blood and thunder a day. So they chimed in too. Government stocks dropped, financial pains, state of emergency declared, army mobilized, famine, mutiny — and in less than a week there was an honest to God revolution underway, just as Jakes had said. There’s the power of the press for you. – Scoop, Evelyn Waugh

Sounds like what Obama and his comrades are trying to do: talk us into chaos and revolution.

While conservatives have been working to improve our democracy and our free-market economy, liberals have been working to replace our democracy with a dictatorship, and our free-market economy with a command economy controlled by the government. The liberals couldn’t say this aloud, because if they did the American people would have tossed them out of office on their ears. So the liberals worked covertly, feigning support for democracy and for the free market while working diligently to undermine both. – Herbert E. Meyer, former Spec. Asst. to the Director of Central Intelligence

Though the Republicans in Congress will not offer any significant opposition, Meyer believes that we can still stop this revolution by the ideological heirs of Hitler and Stalin, but we must do it ourselves, beginning at the grassroots level. No dictatorship in America! No American dictators!

Benedict XVI has set for himself the most difficult mission. He wants to heal the evil consequences of the Church’s Revolution of 68 in a non-revolutionary manner. This pope is precisely not a papal dictator. He relies on the strength of the better argument and hopes that the nature of the Church will overcome that which is inappropriate to her if certain minimal assistance is provided. This plan is so subtle that it can be neither presented in official explanations nor understood by an almost unimaginably coarsened press. – Martin Mosebach

I have a knack for missing out on revolutions. I started college in 1972 as the campuses were calming down. I stopped going to church about the same time, as self-expression was besting reverence. I briefly lamented the stifling of the growls of academe, but the changes in the Church, even then, seemed ridiculous.

I returned to the Church, 15 years later, uncontaminated by novelty.

The universities are lost now, I believe, and no longer necessary, but the Church is forever and its sense of the sacred is being restored.

Feel free to publish, post, or pass on Your Weekly Politickle by F.R. Duplantier:

HAPPENING
Our Republic he will rearrange
And the rights of the people estrange:
Yes, it can happen here
And it’s now all too clear
What Obama intended by “change.”

From the archive:

ALONG CAME JONES
He played green but was red to the bones
In a White House chockfull of his clones.
It is good that Van goes
And the public now knows
What to make of the man who hired Jones.
(2009)

ALIENATION
“We misread what the candidate’s ‘change’ meant
And rejected the prior arrangement;
Having now had our fill
Of this radical’s swill,
We are feeling a growing estrangement.”
(2009)

HOPE AGAINST HOPE
By nefarious allies surrounded,
With socialist nostrums propounded,
Obama has won,
The change has begun,
And I hope that my fears are unfounded.
(2008)

GOODBYE, BAD MEN
The future’s decidedly grim
For Fidel, for Saddam, and for Kim,
Because sooner or later
Each demonic dictator
Must get what is coming to him.
(2003)

FAILING MARX
Socialism is dead!
Done in, the indomitable Red!
Or so it would seem,
But in academe
One had better check under one’s bed.
(1998)

Last week’s verse:

PAYBACK
If Pelosi can get enough votes
To shove health-care “reform” down our throats,
You can bet we’ll remember
And cast votes in November
To be “reconciled” with Judas goats.

USSR, 1959: I am a “young pioneer” in school. History classes remind us that there is a higher authority than our parents and teachers: the leaders of the Communist Party.

USA, 2009: “Progressives” control the government. Children in some public schools sing songs about the president and study his directives. – Svetlana Kunin

Is anyone paying attention?

When Honduras’ President Zelaya was deposed from power by order of the Supreme Court of that country, and with the majority support by the congress, Honduras was fast moving toward a Chavist dictatorship, transgressing the constitution and the laws. In addition to Honduras’ highest judicial body, the most prominent political and religious representatives of that country were warning about the Chavist risk. – Armando Valladares, El Heraldo

Obama follows the path of Jimmy Carter, fomenting Marxist takeovers and betraying our allies around the world.

It’s a sad commentary on the quality of our educational system that so many Americans seem to think that Bastille Day is simply the French version of our own Independence Day. It is nothing of the sort. The American Revolution was a fight for individual liberty and against oppressive government. The French Revolution, 13 years later, produced the mindless Reign of Terror dramatized so well in Charles Dickens’ great novel A Tale of Two Cities and Baroness Orczy’s romantic adventure The Scarlet Pimpernel (both made into excellent motion pictures, starring Ronald Colman and Leslie Howard, respectively). – “Celebrate Bastille Day Without Me,” F.R. Duplantier

“Going from the frying pan into the fire.” It’s a cliché, but a good one — and it applies to most of the revolutions of the last 200+ years, beginning with the overthrow of the French monarchy in 1789. A few examples:

• Louis XVI –> Robespierre
• Nicolas II –> Lenin/Stalin
• Battista –> Castro
• The Shah –> The Ayatollah
• Somoza –> Ortega

Clearly, in each case, things went from bad to worse. So, if you want peace, by all means work for justice, but steer clear of the radicals and the revolutionaries. Tyranny is not repugnant to them; they just want to be in charge of it.

It has been said before, but it bears repeating, that freedom itself is not free, and that eternal vigilance is the price of it. What needs to be said, however, is what freedom really is. In truth, there is no freedom but the freedom to serve. Freedom consists of nothing but a choice of masters. We will serve God, or we will serve Mammon. We will obey the promptings of our hearts, or we will follow the dictates of our livers. There is no other choice; there is no other freedom. And if we do not make a conscious decision, we will serve the devil by default. – “Free to Serve,” F.R. Duplantier

Monday I posted a politickle entitled “Non Serviam.” Perhaps it was the July 4th weekend that prompted me to write on the subject of rebellion, distinguishing between the legitimate and illegitimate versions. The week and a half between Independence Day and Bastille Day is a good time to reflect on that difference. Yesterday I posted a video of the oldest living Congressional Medal of Honor winner, a wonderful example of a man who served well. Tomorrow’s post will be devoted to his antithesis.

While conservatives have been working to improve our democracy and our free-market economy, liberals have been working to replace our democracy with a dictatorship, and our free-market economy with a command economy controlled by the government. The liberals couldn’t say this aloud, because if they did the American people would have tossed them out of office on their ears. So the liberals worked covertly, feigning support for democracy and for the free market while working diligently to undermine both. – Herbert E. Meyer, former Spec. Asst. to the Director of Central Intelligence

Though the Republicans in Congress will not offer any significant opposition, Meyer believes that we can still stop this revolution by the ideological heirs of Hitler and Stalin, but we must do it ourselves, beginning at the grassroots level. No dictatorship in America! No American dictators!