Q: Multiple choice: Who said this?
“Who’re you going to believe?…me…or your own damned lying eyes?” Richard Pryor or Barack Obama?
A: Richard Pryor, from a comedy routine in which he had been caught in flagrante with his wife’s best friend.
But the line does fit Obama, Hillary, the #MedusaTwins at the State Department, Josh Ernest, and a host of others in the Administration. And I’m sure you’ve asked why the Washington press corps continue to sit back, roll their eyes when Ernest or the Medusas regularly speak of the sun revolving around the earth, as if this were still a pre-Galilean world in which everyone is afraid to speak up against the holy writ of a medieval Church who simply refuses to do the math.
Infants, you can’t live with ’em and you can’t shoot ’em.
Have you seen some of the cherubic faces in the press corps these days? Many journalists nowadays have to go to Wikipedia for background about Monica Lewinsky. Seventeen years is outside their world history bank. One of the things that defines this generation is their short window on the past and I’d wager 75% of all the blogosphere is under 35, which means when Bill and Monica were frolicking under the desk they were still in high school, and didn’t even know who Jimmy Carter was. (For reasons I won’t explain here, the over-40 crowd seems to have an awareness going back centuries. They’ve even read books, I’m told. Maybe that’s it.)
How did a single generation of Americans get into this shape? Where’s the “show-me” that made America America? Most of all, where is the natural skepticism of Satan’s one invention that can be always be relied on to lie…government?
Why I write on this is that this lack of historical foundation isn’t just a problem of the children of the left, the so-called “low-information voters” who inanely flit around the internet, but is also found among some of the brighter young minds inside conservatism. It’s not just the exclusive realm of guileless C-students who show up on Jimmy Kimmel’s on-the-street Lie Witness News . It captures the full spectrum of the generation, it seems.
Bombastically cynical about events today, they are equally gullible about things that happened before they struck college age, when history officially began, I assume. Many young African-Americans will call you a liar if you tell them Martin Luther King was a Republican. But they will also refuse to look it up. At least most know Dr King did not make a speech on MLK Day earlier this week. An interesting test will be to see how many young white and black Americans, mostly college kids, will refuse to believe the Department of Justice’s agreement with the St Louis grand jury in the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson. Or will ever know it? But two years from now take note of how many of those kids, then still under 30, will still believe the “hands up” story.
This isn’t stupidity, this is post-hypnotic suggestion and this is how it is conditioned into Americans now.
The growing distance between discernible, eye-ball facts and “official facts” is growing, and very scary, in part because it is proved by many conservatives who are supposed to be critical thinkers and generally able to tell their ass from their hat. In law, the first rule of evidence in a courtroom is eye-witness testimony; sight, touch and smell, things we know because they have touched our senses. But even those rules seems to have been suspended for the under-40 crowd. When critical thought automatically takes a back-seat to a government revealed truth among conservatives this should be a cause for serious concern.
Witnesseth, as the lawyers say: A while back I posted an article here entitled “Chemtrails and the Great EPA Conspiracy”, about this very subject…the automatic belief in government “truth” in the face of clear demonstrable facts proving otherwise. In this I took an innocuous “conspiracy theory” which almost no one even knows exists, and cares about even less, to prove the power of government edicts these days, for chemtrails can be proved simply by looking up into the sky in most any part of the country on most any cloudless day, and applying a two-step deductive reasoning process. But the power of government suggestion has been conditioned much deeper, not so much that chemtrails don’t exist, but that people who believe they do are kooks.
Fact: Fifteen years ago, in 2000 (the Clinton era) the EPA stated chemtrails do not exist, and all those streams of vapor we see across the skies are the normal vapor exhaust from commercial aircraft, called contrails. I’ve seen both kinds of vapor trails, and can say without equivocation they are not the same. I can’t guess as to their purpose, good or bad, but I do know what the EPA said in 2000 was false. And when the government lies it’s likely hiding something.
But since few people read this site, I wasn’t expecting to start a stampede against yet another government conspiracy. Instead, I was addressing the broader subject, already alluded to, and about which I’ve written for years, and that is the dangerous arrogance of younger conservatives these days, for they remind me very much of the young liberals of my own generation in the 1960s, who would discard all their critical faculties if it would allow them entry into a tonier club of elitists. They came from all directions, in the name of Civil Rights, social justice, jobs to end poverty, ending the war in Vietnam, clean air and water, and even a return to Stonehenge. Even without the Druids, I found it hard to square this alliance, until the early 70’s, when I noticed that the only common denominator among these disparate interests was a general disdain for the same sorts of people, who, for brevity’s sake, I’ll call C-students. Liberals’ total self-identification, and what bound them together, was that they defined themselves by who they are not….not one of those guys. And sell those “higher beliefs” they did, for a few pieces of silver. To achieve and enjoy this fraternity, they handed civil rights over to the race-baiters and LBJ Democrats, who promptly put blacks in a nicer (for awhile) poverty plantation, gave clean air and water to Marxists who wanted to destroy private enterprise, and dumped military defense off to those who could justify genocide in Cambodia, and firing squads in Cuba, while beating the drum of peace. They sold their souls without so much as an argument, and instead accepted a Judas-bribe, that they could be a part of management, where they live well today. I left their company in 1971 and joined the Army.
This psychopathy destroyed classical liberalism, and turned it into the self-congress it has become today. And so it might with conservatism unless some adults step in and administer some remedial comeuppances and jerk a few knots in some shorts. I still consider any conservative under 40 to be professing only, a “probie”, and up-close experience these past four year has confirmed the wisdom in this assessment. They ain’t conservatives until they have a few miles under their belt, and by miles, I don’t mean staring into a computer monitor, an iPhone all day, or hopping from one office to another. Conservatism is about free life, and you have to live it in order to defend it.
The purpose of my chemtrails article was to prove how easy it has become for the government to declare an “official truth,” then wait a few until dissent has been quieted, and then subtly embed the suggestion that future dissent is sheer kookery, right up there next to flat-earthers, 9/11 conspiracists, and birthers. In another 15 years, the climate change debate will have quietened because all the dissenters will have died off or given up, with all the gullible school kids today controlling (actually patrolling) the truth waves, to denounce and mock future naysayers as “conspiracy theorists.” This is why the government feels it can ignore every revelation of climate fraud today. They know they have time on their side to make it become truth.
But who knew conservatism’s purported best and brightest would aid and abet them?
The Three Amigos
If you even scanned the chemtrails article (above), most of the adults in the room would have gotten its gist straightaway, but a few in the conservative knee-pants crowd out there missed it altogether, actually thinking the article was about chemtrails, and not the absence of healthy skepticism of official government doctrine.
Most stunning to me was that three of them are part of management of a nationally known, high-profile political blog. I wasn’t really baiting them when I wrote this article, but I was baiting the Know-Nothing Club, just never knowing they might be members. They evidently read no further than the few lines where I exclaimed that chemtrails are real, then, going no further, shut down their critical faculties, and went straight into mockery mode as has probably been conditioned in them to do since 5th grade. Or they could just be stupid. both are common among youth these days.
In full disclosure, I have a history with these Three Amigos. pictured here on their jackass, Bill. They don’t like me, in part because I despise mockery (go figure) as a kind of get-even playground strategy children learn to employ who aren’t allowed to come home from school with dirty clothes or bloody noses. I have two sons older than all of them, and their boss, so encountered this phenomenon in the flesh thirty five years ago. Mockery really is unattractive on grown-ups, and is a principal reason I can’t stand to listen to Glenn Beck.
But there’s more psychology to their animus, I think. I’m grown up (actually, old) and have seen and done a lot things around the world…and they have not, I suspect. By the time I was 30 I had inspected coal mines, briefed a governor on a state crisis, defended a Vietnam war deserter in court, been shot at and hit, climbed mountains in Japan, weathered a typhoon up there for two days, then carried an injured man down, saw the Bolshoi ballet, and shot a 73 on the toughest golf course in Asia. I even played chess with a three-star general (who’s in the history books) on an overturned footlocker with a loaded .45 beside us, in an underground bunker in Korea. Why that general liked me I never knew, but he gave me a great lesson in telling the difference between big people and small ones, and I’ve been taking notes ever since. The vain and pompous are more often than not small, as we know Obama to be, and their façade is more likely a disguise for their not actually having done anything of any real interest, let alone merit. They will go to great lengths to hide it. “Pianist envy?” (Bruce Willis, Moonlighting, 1988).
By the time I was 30 I thought I needed to go out and build a real resume by gathering more profitable practical experience, which took me to the corporate world for ten years, then to the Cold War world for another 25. But as with my sojourn in Asia, I walked the other side of the street, instead of the fast lane where everyone wore blinders, driven by career. I got to see the Hammer & Sickle being pulled down over Kiev, and heard “Ave Maria” sung in Ukrainian for the first time since 1930, and saw soldiers in uniforms cry as the tenor sung it. I watched ancient women teaching their great-grand children to cross themselves when the churches were reopened for worship, because neither their children nor grandchildren had ever been in one. I watched Soviet law professors cry as I read them portions of the Declaration of Independence at a birthday celebration. I helped old communist small businesses grow at a time when it was still a covert operation, and still is in Russia, where every vendor “hopes he can get a good mafia.” I’ve arm-wrestled with gypsies, danced with Arab men in their chaikanas, and swapped toasts in the huts of goat-herders. From them I learned how to sneak down dark alleys and trick the government.
And I embedded these tales into articles I wrote with a more contemporary political or cultural slant. And, yes, I confess I did this knowing it was put-offish to the promenades of young wannabes trying to get noticed on the sidewalk.
But I still speak with a twang, am still unhandsome (thanks to Mick Hensley) and I don’t smoke cigars or drink Dos Equis. But I am still pretty interesting.
In every way I’ve been blessed, except one. I have the gift of foresight, and I tremble when I can see where our culture is headed once we pass it off to a generation unable to tell a horse from a mule.
Therefore, the all-too-quick willingness to suspend critical thinking when mockery is afoot by such illustrious individuals is the real theme of this article, for it’s symptomatic of a much deeper cultural affliction, for you see, these aren’t ordinary smarmy school-yard games. My adult friends referred to them affectionately as the Three Amigos, led by our favorite, Captain Kneepants, also the youngest, mouthiest and (probably) the most substance-less, except for maybe the jackass. A young Skippy-aged lawyer known back in the day for his false beard-stroking, wanting oh, so badly, to appear adult, wise and well-traveled, alas and alack, he never acquired any while I knew him, and it showed like a fly that was unzipped. Try as he might, he could never seem to quite pull that fraud off. I expect he still hasn’t. Real world experience involves more than office-hopping. There’s still time, of course, which is the one thing the young have I don’t, but as Pascal noted, if you aren’t looking, you’re not apt to find anything. The approval of strangers, or learning the code words on the key pads to membership on a sinking boat does not sound like a seaworthy plan to me, especially since all the vacuous minds in the world seem to be wanting to get aboard that same ship. Another Amigo is a highly-skilled techie, a wunderkind at one time, I’m told. He is a common enough type, an introvert in public, but a real assassin once safe in his man-cave, where he’s wielded the big stick for several years. A master gamer, no doubt, his best friend his joy-stick. You know the type. The other attorney I know less about other than he has a dislike for me. He’s never said a kind word, and seems to take delight in talking down to total strangers, as if he were getting even for some slight suffered in fifth grade. I have never seen him in any thing other than mock-mode, yet am told he is a skilled attorney and writer.He may be the saddest of the lot, and I’ve had to revise my original assessment of his legal acumen downward, for apparently his skills at the rules of evidence are lacking as well, if he actually read my article, for all I suggested was that he “look out the window, and assess what you see”. I now envision him as being a documents lawyer, you know, pouring over estate plans, taxes, regulations, etc, letting some litigator in the firm worry about debating evidence in front of a judge.
I’ve concluded the Three Amigos are too young to be taken seriously, which worries me, for, like the liberals of my day, they may never be forced to grow up in this modern world. When the best and brightest of a generation can have the gall to call themselves “conservative” but act more like faux-libertarians, who look down their noses and mock all the C-students of the world, on that account alone, there is not a Ben Franklin to be found among them. Nor an Adams, nor a Jefferson. Probies all, it remains to be seen then, when they must finally decide (and that day will come) whose side they will come down on, the people, the Constitution, or the King Establishment.
In the meantime, they are all Tories-in-the-making, and will remain so, so long as they can so easily be seduced by the same big government they are forsworn to make smaller, and less important in people’s lives. My generation of liberals jumped at the chance to get in that big boat, and in the process, left Martin Luther King hanging in the wind.
If conservatism goes down that infantile path, America is in deep trouble.
Thus endeth the lesson.
