In August, 2011 I penned a piece by this same title, kicking off a new site called “Unified Patriots”, which was made up mostly of a group of Baby Boomers, all born before the Beatles came to America, who just didn’t seem to fit in with the modern vision of the wunderkind who managed RedState.com at the time. Learning why they didn’t like us would be called a “teachable lesson”, hence the title. Three of us were locked out, so we created a site, “Unified Patriots” (2011-2022) that was more representative of our generation’s perspectives, vis a vis not only what we were staring down then with Barack Obama and his handlers’ Alinsky-ite plans to re-make (take over) the United States…
…but also highlighting our experiences, which were wide and varied, and ourinherited perspectives about America’s underpinnings going all the way back to the Founding…noting how we were losing it among the younger generations.
Think of this as a fundamental “How Things Work” equation.
After Baby Boomers, there is a connection, from GenX, through Millennials, and now GenZ, that has been diminished as an element of our “To Be American” culture since the 1970’s. Finding this decline’s roots in Education, Communication, Pop Culture and even modern ideas about “Family-Time”; joint meals, church, extended family gatherings, where those cultural exchanges take place, to the very meaning of “Family”…many of those post-modern changes appear to have been by design, while in the broadest sense of Natural Law, are clearly not “survival enhancing” for any culture. They were designed to benefit only a select few.
World history is replete with examples, from the rise and fall of royal dynasties lasting mere decades to empires lasting centuries. Each collapse contained forms of natural degeneration, which led to eventual self-destruction, most often based on their abuse of power, privilege and class indifference…and more often than not over often a relatively short space of time.
I often invoke a 3-generation rule for these collapses, or roughly 70 years, which is not biological, but rather administrative, the best 20th-Century example being the Soviet Union, which went from feudalism-to-world-power-to-bust from 1918 to 1992…which I was lucky enough to study about in college in the 60s then actually be on the ground there when their Times Square ball finally dropped for the last time in 1992.
I like to compare their generational law as applied, with the United States, which is in its 235th year only now facing existential choices royal dynasties probably never considered since all their royal variants were from the top-down while ours have been from the bottom-up…by design.
All of those royal states died from variants of the same “survival endangering” gene that eventually kills its host….as a law of nature.
By contrast (and this can be proven) America is unique because our Founders had found (stumbled upon?, Divine intervention?, or simply discovered, as scientists in a laboratory?) a survival-enhancing gene hidden to those 5000 years of royals, and was able to place it into a code of law that would enable each succeeding generation to “re”-discover its healing power anew with each succeeding generation.
A la Liberty!
Do you have any idea how difficult it is to explain this, as representatives of a generation who’d actually been there, done that, to a group of Gen X’ers and Millennials who also have advanced, even law degrees, but the most they can relate about their life’s experiences is having taste-tested at least seven (count them) seven single-malt scotches?
My Boomer-generation is probably the last generation to have a sense about the importance of appreciating the shoulders we’ve been standing on these past 300+ years. So I take this aspect of history very seriously; in part because we’ve all touched as many as five (5) generations, gathered from tales at grandparents’ knees, holiday family gatherings, and leafing through family Bibles and old picture albums. And history books (encyclopedias) that give context…all stuff families no longer seem to do. Or share.
We Baby Boomers can now see the last pages of our individual life-stories being written, and the need to up the ante on encouraging a new awakening to youngsters to repair-and-replace the broken parts of our national anatomy…which is found in the heart-and-soul of America, and not in its institutions in the front offices of government.
This includes many Asians (mostly Chinese) and Latinos (mostly Mexicans) have been been here for over 150 years, six-plus generations, and remarkably more than you know are fully invested in “being American” (ser Americanos), not to mention African-Americans who been here over 340 years, many of whom, a majority I’ll wager, who are still church-going, family oriented, values-centered middle class Americans, and who are facing the same same issues of our culture sliding into the abyss.
America wrote the book on acculturation. Not Google.
So we had a mission in putting “Unified Patriots” out there to the public. And with no corporate backing “UP” acquitted itself pretty well for the next decade, until the 2020 election debacle, when this national split between “establishment, conservative thinking” with the more grassroots-based populist thinking really came to a head.
Clearly, since November, 2020, everyone has known this is a fight for national survival between America Version #1, 1787-2020, and a new untried America Version #2, only with much of the old establishment GOP wondering whether they can get on with the new Marxist-Fascist version of America #2, because they sure don’t want to rub elbows with the country rubes Trump brought back into the picture.
This fact puts America’s younger generations in the same kettle of fish as those 5000 years of royals always found themselves in when their gene pool turned stinky (think William and Harry…and the whole Nature vs Nurture debate.)
Preserving our history, and presenting it in the cause-and-effect manner in which it occurred as good laboratory science…is the true value in this Grander Plan to restore America…and my principal purpose here is just to sit on people’s shoulders and whisper in their ears. And we did this for free at “Unified Patriots”. Benjamin Franklin sat in on both the Declaration of Independence debates in 1776 and the Constitutional Convention in 1787, and was the senior ombudsman in both, (“quality control” if you prefer), simply because he could add enormous historical depth to the issues they were discussing. None of those documents’ printed words are his, but his essence is found in both.
If you think of America’s creation as happenchance (a fluke) or a lab experiment, I remind you, the nobility of Europe by 1787 believed it a fluke, only one that had to fail.
(I argued that case in 2021 here, in an essay “Science vs Natural Law and The Thin Red Line”, which David Poff was kind enough to include as a chapter in his book, A User’s Guide for Our Imperfect Union, available at Amazon, and a set-up for a future volume carrying the God-theme even further. Look for it.)
But that lab experiment began with about 150 years of small, single experiments in Virginia and New England, each of them forming their own local governments, and each building up their own identities, some based on farming, others on trade and small business, and each with their own brand of religion, albeit Protestant. Primarily English, there were also small German and Dutch laboratories.
How they all came together as partners…and never forget this…was the growing interference over their local control and their earned money by the royal houses than ran England from 1607-1776. The colonies were stimulated to join together not by goodness but by evil intentions by the royals in England who purported to believe they owned them.
People today forget (it’s rarely taught anymore) that other European monarchs had placed their royal seals on all the adjacent properties in North America; the French in Canada and the Spanish in Florida and the West, and both had carried out major explorations into America’s interior, laying claim to all the lands west of the Mississippi River. It would take the better part of three generations after the United States was formed in 1787 to fill in that map. The French would lose Canada to the English with their Seven Years War in 1763, the North American part of it called “The French and Indian War”, in which the American colonies played a pivotal role in defeating the French plus recording how George Washington first gained his reputation as a military commander.
The coming together of America began over the next decade, 1763-1774, all because England actually wanted the American colonists to pay their “fair share” for the cost of that war with France. Suffice it to say that no European royal house was ever solvent in the legal “bankruptcy” meaning of the term. They were notoriously in debt simply because, by rank and education, they had never earned an honest nickle in their lives. If they needed more money they simply taxed more, such as taxes on tea; resulting in our Tea Party, which was planned and executed by my head-and-shoulders most-favorite Adams, a cousin of John’s, named Sam, who actually did try his hand at brewing beer, but was America’s prince of “dark alley” planning in the years leading up to the Revolution.
Most of my generation knew this stuff, current generations don’t, unless they’ve read about it in Schweikart and Allen’s Patriot’s History of the United States, for it is rarely taught even in public schools these days, and certainly not with much rah-rah! enthusiasm, and was once even required core curricula in public universities when I attended in the 1960s.
But across the board, there is much more than just a handshake across the generations lost here. And it’s more than just a loss of facts and information. There is the loss of knowledge about “how-things-work” are connected, and nearing three generations, loss of knowledge about how those things are passed on. Schools no longer do it, kids are no longer encouraged to read..real books…and no one in families tells them about the shoulders they stand on or how their family came to be in America in the first place….in part because they no longer know, and soon will no longer care. The saddest person is “one who is lost, only don’t know he/she is lost, because they are not seeking to be found.”
So, for this day only, I want to wax poetic about experience, wisdom, and adultery (Radar O’Reilly) which 80%, perhaps even more, of the political blogs on the internet, simply don’t have, and maybe causing great harm because of it.
The Ship of Fools
Did I mention that internet political blogging first began to hit national prominence in the Obama years? Coincidence? Or that most of it’s key practitioners are GenX or younger? Or that many of those pundits have a real world resume almost as thin as Barack Obama?
That’s right, all they know is recent politics or some subset, like law. 9/11 is ancient history to many.
The Ship of Fools is a 15th Century allegory that has continuing relevance in our modern world, for that seems to be where the disgruntled seem to take their ball and glove and go when they can’t have their way, turning over the field to their enemies. Jonah Goldberg comes to mind. It also seems to be the home of the snide, the condescending and the mocking.
Sadly, many don’t go out to this ship on their own. Many are led or enticed, and these we have to try to rescue.
In 2011, in a private email by a known internet blogger I received, “If Romney gets the nomination, I’m outta here.” Holding himself out to be a leader of sorts, he seemed to be asking others to hop into his rowboat oaring out to the Ship of Fools as well. Twelve years later we’re hearing the same refrain about Trump running again, or DeSantis trying to squeeze Trump out, or vice versa, as if we were even remotely still inside a “politics-as-usual bubble”. I see no outreach to that 80% of Republicans, including former-Republican Independents (and 60% of Americans in general) as if to say that ALL politics is now defined by this political-opinion class and the People haven’t a goddamned thing to say about it!
Only on the Ship of Fools will you find such thinking.
More important than the emergence of a thumb-sucking wing of conservatism, however, is that they’re accompanied by millions more know-nothing voters, younger citizens who had never involved themselves in even common sense politics before, or, absent military service, ever even been taught about loving red-white-and-blue America. Their politics and patriotism is by echo, and who ever gets to them first, gets them.
Fortunately, we have people like Dan Schultz and his @PrecinctProject, who was preaching street level, door-to-door Get Out the Vote in 2010 (when I watched him present his plan to Herman Cain) and his invitation to becoming Precinct Committeemen to broaden grass roots involvement, to take over the GOP from the street level, and Scott Pressler, a street activist and his @ThePersistence, both of whom are working with Steve Bannon’s War Room.
This is the up-side, but it needs to be contagious, and made to become generational.
I see very little lip service given these efforts from the talking heads that represented the old, or the new RedState.com, for, to be perfectly honest, there is no fame that can be gained by winning by direct appeals to the bottom, or working one’s way up, which, not that many years ago, in my generation, was how actually one did move up, by learning “the business” from the bottom-up, gaining the support and respect of the people who he/she worked alongside, collectively building and holding their customer base.
Today one does that with face-time marketing.
Today, because my Vietnam War generation is passing at a more rapid rate (I’m at the front end, born 1945), and the following generations are being reduced in numbers of children born, numbers of families that stay united, numbers of families that church together, or even sit around the dinner table and talk together. All continue to diminish.
I have seen only a few wordsmiths (Limbaugh has passed, RIP) who take note of the chords that Donald Trump struck with the working classes.
What people miss about the rise of the 2010 Tea Party, enlarged by the 2016 MAGA’s with the arrival of Trump, was that its core were Boomers, mom-and-pops, retired factory workers, and many of them rescued by Trump because they saw what a mess they’d made with their owns kids.
Today most of them go by the name of “MAGA”, because Donald Trump provided those 2010, 2012, 2014 Tea Parties with the one thing they did not have while taking back Congress for the Republican Party; a national leader.
And between 2017 and 2020 we were treated with a progression of Boehners, Ryans, McConnells who really never, never got the depth of the evil that the Democrats had in store for the American people. Then, in 2020, with Republican state (GA, AZ) complicity, all over the country, millions of votes were stolen, with one express purpose; to provide permanent safe haven for those wastrels on the Ship of Fools.
Natural Law: Conservatism can be played on several levels but Wahr, only one.
The American people came to fight and win a war. Nothing more, nothing less. They did not come to joust. They did no come to jockey for a better position on the next go-round.
The conservative political pundit class has been befuddled as to how to herd these cats, or manage them. Or even predict them. There are no statistics, no analytics, so Karl Rove can’t help. There are no templates to pour over, so RedState, Hot Air and Town Hall also are grasping for new clues. What to do? What to do?
For the sake of God and Country, avoid children acting childishly. Loose Lips Launches Ships…of Fools.
