The Truth, it Burns Us!

Bayou Renaissance Man posted an article on his blog a few days ago that I feel is important enough to share. In it he provides links to the two ariticles from which he quotes. One of the articles is by Karl Denninger. The other article is a WSJ opinion piece by Peggy Noonan. Neither one is likely to leave a reader feeling all that happy. Sadly, both are likely to go largely unread or ignored by two groups – those with a vested interest in keeping things as they are and those who most need to read and understand them – the average American voter.

Denninger lays blame equally at the feet of both major political parties and what a corrupt mess the political process has become. He notes:

“Nobody, of course, wants to ask the salient question…That, of course, is because if you were to go there you’d expose the soft underbelly of corruption in the political process — the making of political promises that the maker knows cannot be fulfilled but doesn’t care as he or she is buying votes, not results.”

Many of us who tend toward my end of the political spectrum speak derisively of “the elites” as if education and success are inherently bad. It’s not that black and white, I submit. If you accept that, if only for the sake of argument, Noonan’s words are insightful.

“Our elites, our educated and successful professionals, are the ones who are supposed to dig us out and lead us. I refer specifically to the elites of journalism and politics, the elites of the Hill and at Foggy Bottom and the agencies, the elites of our state capitals, the rich and accomplished and successful of Washington, and elsewhere. I have a nagging sense, and think I have accurately observed, that many of these people have made a separate peace. That they’re living their lives and taking their pleasures and pursuing their agendas; that they’re going forward each day with the knowledge, which they hold more securely and with greater reason than nonelites, that the wheels are off the trolley and the trolley’s off the tracks, and with a conviction, a certainty, that there is nothing they can do about it.

I suspect that history, including great historical novelists of the future, will look back and see that many of our elites simply decided to enjoy their lives while they waited for the next chapter of trouble. And that they consciously, or unconsciously, took grim comfort in this thought: I got mine. Which is what the separate peace comes down to, “I got mine, you get yours.”

You’re a lobbyist or a senator or a cabinet chief, you’re an editor at a paper or a green-room schmoozer, you’re a doctor or lawyer or Indian chief, and you’re making your life a little fortress. That’s what I think a lot of the elites are up to.

Not all of course. There are a lot of people–I know them and so do you–trying to do work that helps, that will turn it around, that can make it better, that can save lives. They’re trying to keep the boat afloat. Or, I should say, get the trolley back on the tracks.

That’s what I think is going on with our elites. There are two groups. One has made a separate peace, and one is trying to keep the boat afloat. I suspect those in the latter group privately, in a place so private they don’t even express it to themselves, wonder if they’ll go down with the ship. Or into bad territory with the trolley.”

There’s more at both links. I encourage you to read them in their entirety. Think about them. And then, for God’s sake, get off your butt before the wheels do come off this trolley.