Bankruptcy: Red is the New Black

Tyranny is always whimsical.

--Mark Steyn

So Dad made me read this article by Mark Steyn, a Canadian emigre who has an excellent grasp on political issues and who will, incidentally, make you laugh your butt off. (It's ok--it reattaches fairly easily.) In the article, "Live Free or Die!", Steyn argues that America has entered the first of five stages in the death of a free democracy. Stage One, in his view, is when we start accepting governmental "help" with things that have never been the government's true responsibility--things like childcare, care of elders, and housing. Steyn sees this progression as something like what happens when you give a middle-schooler cigarettes: at first it seems so harmless, but then you're hooked and the outlook is not so good.

Anyhow it's a great article and you should read it, but what it got me thinking about was politicians one can compare PBO to. Steyn makes the point that the changes we've been making lately are much larger than the past presidents we can compare PBO too--they're bigger than the New Society, the New Deal, or Carter's attempts at sweatering the nation. So I got to comparing and contrasting PBO with some presidents of the past whose reach might have exceeded their grasp.

(Apologies if any of ya'll voted for him; I'm not trying to be disrespectful. Take what I say with a grain of salt, but just think about it for a bit.)

The most obvious comparison, in that it even occurred to the dudes at Time Magazine, is with FDR, whose campaign slogan should have been "As Different from Teddy Roosevelt as You Can Get While Having the Same Last Name." Roosevelt, of course, is the one that some folks who were not paying attention in high school economics think saved us from the Great Depression. Sadly it is likely his fiddling and Hoover's actually prolonged it, but Hoover was usefully out of office and thus could be blamed for many things while Roosevelt got accolades for anything good that accidentally happened. The media felt it was their duty to report things as encouraging, to get people to spend money and not riot in the street demanding bread and so forth. In this way, PBO is like Roosevelt. Things are still President Bush's fault.

He can be forgiven; blaming your predecessor has a long and noble history in politics, although the blame is usually not done this crudely (i.e., hopping up and down and pointing one's finger and shouting, "he started it!"). PBO also resembles Roosevelt with the whole fiddling with the economy bit, although he has far out-fiddled Roosevelt, who could only dream of nationalizing entire industries and the country's banks.

(Incidentally, the fifth amendment to the Constitution forbids nationalizing the country's banks. Nobody seems to have noticed this.)

PBO resembles Wilson, Carter, LBJ, and a number of other political figures to a greater or lesser extent. What troubles me, however, is less how the man himself performs his duties than the characteristics of events lately.

It ought to always make us prick up our ears when people say things like, "we need to dispense with this piddly check or balance because we are in a great emergency, and the government needs powers it doesn't have". The argument wasn't good when it applied to the Patriot Act, and it still wasn't good when it came to the Stimulus. It becomes far less believable when, months later, we are still being asked to dispense with checks, balances, and even good business sense in order to bail out various chunks of the private sector. Anyone with a nose should be able to get why you need to obey checks and balances even more in an emergency. Nobody ever says, "Sure, I don't have any problems right now, but I have some extra freedom and money laying around--why don't you guys take it." There always has to be at least an attempt at an excuse, because most people will resist brute force at first.

Today I was bothered by the proclamation on the morning news that the recession is lifting--oh, and they also expect unemployment and foreclosures to rise, but not to worry, the administration says the recession is definitely on the way out. Getting rid of problems by re-naming them (anyone remember how we've re-branded "The War On Terror" as "overseas contingency operation"?) is troubling because it's only one step away from getting rid of problems by blaming a handy scapegoat group. Then you have to go after the scapegoat group, and then when you still have problems and no group, you have to say that the group is somehow still managing to affect you and build up even more rhetoric against it (those dang bourgeoisie/Jews/immigrants/Irish/rich people/poor people/fill in the blank). Not helpful in actually solving problems and involves a lot more expense, usually, what with having to build camps and whatnot.

Then there is the fact that everybody that this administration has been associated with in Illinois politics seems to be doing things the old-school Chicago way. It's possible that the administration can have a bunch of corrupt friends who forget to pay their taxes and yet be pure as the driven snow, but the fact that no one is even given pause by these associations is a bit weird, don't you think?

The Husband and I were talking, and the Husband jokingly said that If These Trends Continue to their logical conclusion we are on the road to communism. I responded that no we weren't, technically, headed toward communism, since communism is the centrality of the collective. In other words, the government has to be totalitarian in communism ostensibly to make sure everybody has equal stuff. When you have a totalitarian government that does not pretend to enforce equal stuff, what you have is not communism but fascism. The unfortunate tendency to equate fascism with National Socialism confuses people. The Nazis were only a particular breed of fascist, but fascism itself is just centrality of the state, unvarnished with anything except possibly a twisted patriotism. (Therefore, the idea the political beliefs are a spectrum, with fascism at the extreme right and communism at the extreme left, is false. For one thing, Republican principles {if not actions} espouse small government with limited power.)

This should make us stop. Americans still remember the Soviet Union too well to be wooed by overt promises of Making Us All Just As Good As Anybody Else, but we are easily swayed by promises that we will be kept safe and out of wars--that the name of America will be respected abroad--that the economy will be fixed--that only the really bad people will be hurt by innovations in our basic principles.

I'm not comparing PBO to Hitler, ok? That would be silly and melodramatic and anyway you would stop listening to me. But put it this way-- I can't think of a time in history when the current political strategies were used that led to MORE freedom and peace. I'm just sayin'.

Cheers,

Breanna

Guess Who Hit Ten Pounds?

I knew it wasn't my imagination that he was eating all the time. Brother has had his one-month doctor's appointment finally, and has confirmed that he is a chunk.

Ten pounds, 22 inches. That's 3 1/2 pounds and an inch he's grown in a month. Yikes.

And by the way, this is how we've been napping lately--our special "nap bed" on the couch. You'll notice we didn't want to take off our gardening hat for napping. Because, you know, you might need to get up and garden quickly.

Cheers,

Breanna

"Adapt"

"Well, when my nephew came last summer we played a game with him called 'Adapt.'"
Harold: "Oooh, that sounds exciting! 'Adapt!' How do you
play that game?"
"The adults basically do whatever they want and the children have to adapt."

--Red Green

So I promised, a while ago, to write a second post about the decline I think America might have in store. I started to write a high-falutin' one about how people in dark ages manage to make beautiful things, etc., and then it occurred to me, as I started to enumerate attitudes that I thought would be helpful At Such A Time that said attitudes were always helpful. So you'll just have to take my word for it that, although anticipating a new Dark Ages might be alarmist, I'm not actually terribly alarmed about it. Talking about that would make the post too long. Instead, I shall talk about the attitudes, since they are helpful anyway and not alarmist. :)

The game "Adapt", which a lady I know who has a broken foot has been playing, is a very useful game, and this is the game we should all be ready to play. In other words, although you do a thing a certain way right now, what if you couldn't and had to do it another way?

A very easy one to play with is, say I had no electricity. How would my clothes get clean? Clothesline for the drying, natch; I'm not so jazzed about washing clothes in a five-gallon bucket with a plunger. I have heard recommendations on another blog that is no longer up to wring laundry that you must wash by hand in an industrial-grade mop bucket wringer. Since I love industrial-grade mop buckets (if one absolutely MUST have a mop bucket--I don't have enough moppable floor to justify one) this made sense to me. Will I run out and buy a mop bucket, just in case? No; but I bet that mop buckets are not going to be the first thing people mob onto in the stores in the event that our electric system becomes more like, say, Columbia's or New Orleans's and I could get one if I needed it. Anyway, I do have a five-gallon bucket and a plunger, currently on other assignments.

I think it's probably healthy to always play a little Adapt, even if you never have to actually adapt. I don't mean just things like how would you get along in an extended power outage, but also how would you get along if you had to move in with family, or they had to move in with you? How would you celebrate if you always buy an ice cream but now you can't afford it?

So the central attitude I think is helpful is, of course, "be ready to adapt." The others flow from this and can be treated in less lengthy form.

1) Don't expect the government to help you. It's not really their job, and at any rate they're not very good at it. (See: New Orleans reference above.) If you get help from them, awesome, but think of it as gravy and set about building relationships with family, friends, neighbors, and church folks. This is a much better hedge against eventualities than Social Security. Of course, don't depend on others either--depend on the strong Son of God, but I'm saying if you have a choice between which temporal things to form relationships with, go with the people you know rather than the state.

2) Remember that sooner or later there's always a blizzard. Or a flood. Or a glorious revolution. In other words, we live in a world of sin and sorrow, so preparation for the manifestation of sin and sorrow is a good thing.

3) That being so, always keep some necessaries put by. Food, medicine, lamp oil, Snickers bars, whatever you'd want during a week-long blizzard/flood/hurricane/civil upheaval. This is not alarmist, it's just how people have always lived until really recently when they started moving into apartments with microscopic pantries and great big TV nooks.

4) For Pete's sake, keep cheerful. That's been the hardest struggle with this foot o' mine--the temptation is to complain all day long because every time you go to do something, you're reminded that you can't do it the right way or the easy way. However, complaining won't make my life any easier, and it won't make my family's lives any easier, and it won't make the situation change faster, so all it accomplishes is that we are all that much more miserable. So don't fuss when you play Adapt. It means you lose 67 points.

5) Pray. This is one of those you-should-do-it-anyway things. I had a professor who was a flake but who was right a lot accidentally; she said that it's called a "spiritual practice" because you practice it in daily life so it's there when you need it. Ignoring the fact that spiritual practices that are solely for our own benefit are probably not valid, it makes the point that it will be a lot easier to rely on the Lord for hard things in the eventuality if we rely on Him for less-hard things right now. Try trusting Him for the grocery budget or your irritating second-cousin who is coming to visit, and then I imagine it won't be quite as hard to trust Him if you ever find yourself in Corrie Ten Boom's shoes, hiding Jews in the upstairs closet.

Now I must go read to Miss Boo, so that's all for today.

Cheers,

Breanna

Sanity

"Discipline at first seems hard, not only to the person being disciplined, but also to the person doing the discipline. So often we shy away from the reality that of those choices up in that list of what motivates actions, we have to choose the hard ones."

--Like Mother, Like Daughter

In a world (or internet) where I've seen everything about discipline from using a switch on 1-year-olds (honestly, who thinks that's okay?) to never speaking firmly to your child lest it harm his developing psyche, here from a mom of many is an article on spanking that makes a bunch of sense. It pretty much says what I think about spankings but I have never been able to put it so well.

You should go on over to Like Mother, Like Daughter (in the sidebar) and check out THEIR sidebar for the rest of the discipline series. Most well-written, most sensible.

Might I mention for the record that I only ever spanked a kid I babysat once... when he kicked me in the chest. Hard. The spanking wasn't hard, it was just instantaneous. He, his brother, and his sister all stared at me as though I had suddenly acquired a third head. Then I snuggled all three of them very lovingly, we watched cartoons, and I never, ever got sass (or a kick) from them again. Something to think about.

Of course, MY children will never need/have never needed spankings...

(...I'm lying...shamelessly...)

...but it's good to think about all this anyway.

Cheers,

Breanna

Apple Blossom Time

So the apple trees are in blossom, and my thoughtful husband took a picture of them since I can't easily wander out and smell them, what with the gimpyness and all, but here is a very sweet picture first:
Mmmmmwah! (All Miss Boo's kisses have sound effects, especially when we kiss Brother. And Miss Boo pronounces that "Broba", by the way.)

Here is the garden, waiting for things to spring up and fill the bean poles. Those wall o' water tomato dealies look impressive but the tomatoes are still scraggly little babies. We'll see if they spring to life or not. But aren't the pavers gorgeous? Who has paved English-style paths in their garden, I ask you? Someone whose husband works for a cement company, that's who.

Here is one of my pretty apple trees. Considering that there were about ten blossoms last year and almost no apples, I'm thinking we might have a more apple-intensive year, wouldn't you say?

Here is little man in his sumo pose.

Just in case you were wondering how diaper-changing is happening when it's very inconvenient to haul a poopy child and a broken foot all the way into the nursery--well, we are playing the game "Adapt."

May I just say, for all the fam to hear, how awesome the Husband has been through this whole gimpy episode of my life? I don't know how many husbands there are out there who do things like work hard all day at the office ("the office" being a place where you have to wear steeltoes and a hardhat) and then come home and change babies, cook dinner, and clean up after a wife who's been tootling around bumping into things in her wheelchair all day--but I bet it ain't many. And when it comes to doing all this without an inordinate amount of fussing, I bet there's only one. That's my man. :)

Happy Tuesday, ya'll,

Cheers,

Breanna

P.S.

Did you know that when we were little, Kenny, Uncle Dunkle, and I all used to say "Happy Memorial Day"? Because it was, like, a holiday and of course you were happy on Memorial Day? Kids. They just don't understand the deep connection between picnicking and the dead.

Yay! Clean Clothes!

So it's not gardening pictures, but nevertheless we got a lot of indoor work done as well today. My wonderful inlaws were up for the weekend. (See Opa sleeping with his grandson on his knees? Aren't they just the cutest thing?)
Some kinds of help are the kinds of help that helping's all about...

... and some kinds of help...

...are the kinds of help we all can do without. Thank you, Miss Boo, for putting the folded laundry back in the basket.

Turn around and let Mama take your picture!

*sigh* Fine. I'm turned around. Happy now? I need to get back to my laundry-folding duty!

(Actually, this was not a snotty face--it was a I'm-anticipating-getting-flashed-in-the-eyes face.)

We've got the garden half-planted and we're only one day into the long weekend. Tomorrow we plant the other half and then sit around for the rest of the day, sipping beverages.

My floor is vacuumed.

My laundry is in the process of getting done--with a woman's touch! (Nothing against the Husband, but male laundry is rather... utilitarian, isn't it?)

Miss Boo is getting chased, dirty, cleaned up, and happily exhausted without much input from me and my foot.

It's a good weekend. :)

Cheers,

Breanna

Planting a Garden & Baked Beans

...Are taking up all my time today. With any luck we'll have some cute Miss Boo gardening shots later. Just a note to let you all know that I'm still still alive and--er, kicking. One-footedly.

Cheers,

Breanna