Ashes, Ashes, We All Fall Down >>

This current healthcare debate reminds me somewhat of the Black Death that swept Europe during the Dark Ages. The infection spread from trade routes in Asia, into Eastern Europe, then to Tours, Barcelona, Nuremburg, and eventually London. The continent as we know it lost, according to some estimates, 1/3 to ½ of its total population, and some cities were transformed into ghost towns. Houses were shuttered up and boarded, and people grew paranoid as death stalked the land. Plumes of smoke rose outside of cities and carts wheeled off the dead for cremation.

At the time, the Jewish population came under assault. According to some historians, the Jews were relatively untouched due to their Levitican codes of quarantine, cleanliness, and swift burial. This disparity led many in the populous to see them as suspect, perhaps even causing the plague itself, resulting in Jewish pogroms as a consequence.

Politically, the church and the nobility had lost nearly all credibility with the commoners (both lacking the expertise to combat such a new and aggressive virus). Unbelievable arrogance led the aristocracy to ride out and stay at their secluded and guarded country manors. Families were broken up, while many abandoned one another. Some few even went insane and deliberately attempted to infect the healthy.

Believing that God was punishing the world for its sins, a fringe group broke away from the Catholic Church. Fit for this new age of hysteria, these zealots would travel from town to town wailing and flagellating themselves in a circle, showing penance for their sins and to bring mercy on the towns they visited. Once a person bore a rosy ring around swollen lymph glands, they were marked. Children were given baseless prophylactic remedies like carrying pockets filled with flowers to ward off the pestilence.  During these years of rage, this was all that was left.

Ring around the rosy,
Pocket full of posy,
Ashes, ashes,
We all fall down.

Let's rehash:

•    Officials disappearing to their private estates (Pelosi’s vineyard)
•    Find a group to blame and demonize (insurance companies and doctors, not trial lawyers)
•    Ask the public to sacrifice, ration, and conserve (self-flagellation)
•    Use unscientific and unbiblical voodoo to remedy illness (HR 3200)
•    Repeat aforementioned until the plague subsides, and then take credit for it

..............................

The coverage of the townhall meetings has been outright hostile under the leaky umbrellas of the mainstream media, and the tone became the story.

They told us that we were violent and an angry mob. Well, I wish the Left would hold their Weather Underground President to the same standard. On the Left, when protesting was still en vogue merely a few years past, Chicano brown berets from La Mecha and La Raza were parading through California waving the Mexican flag and burning our flag, Leftist protesters were vandalizing property and hurling bricks, recently an SEIU thuggery squad (dispatched by the DNC) beat a black man outside a townhall on healthcare, and I have been reported to flag@whitehouse.gov. During the Iraq War, Che Guevara (a Stalinist murderer) was lionized by the Left in protests, and effigies of President Bush were hung and burned with signs with his likeness next to Hitler... or crosshairs over his head. European filmmakers even created a movie detailing Bush's fictitious assassination, a fantasy tool with which the Dems achieve climax at Cannes or Sun Dance.  Even Code Pink, all 12 of them, disrupted several federal convocations with no hint of the coveted "liberal civility."

They derided us as corporate shills, too well dressed to be an authentic grassroots movement. And at the same time, David Axelrod and the Obama Administration cut shady deals with Big Pharma to run healthcare reform ads through Axelrod’s Chicago advertising firm, AKPD Message and Media (which still owes him $2 million).

They told us that we only wanted to defend the status quo, even after President Obama’s flat rejection of tort reform. The only people standing to benefit from this are the millionaire trial lawyers who asperse hospitals and bleed them to death by a thousand cuts.

But all of us – real Americans! There, I said it! Not hordes of illegals marching for a mythical Aztlan, not SEIU thugs who would have turned a conservative townhaller into Rodney King, nor the arm-twisting freeloaders at ACORN who ushered in the housing crisis and not the infant grownups that vote and protest for a living while the rest of us work -- the pot-smoking bums that empty out of coffeeshops to push “social justice,” a cipher for liberals achieving economic parity. Chew on that, whiners!

Aristotle spoke of societal extremes in his Politics, and spoke of the need to foster a robust middle class. He noted that the super rich have the money and fame to influence a state, while the mobs of poor have the numbers and the time. He noted that the most productive and essential class (while the most populous) remains arrhythmic to drumbeat of politics, given that they already have families and busy jobs. The least animated to action, this wounded giant known as “the middle class” has become active for the first time. Paying to bail out federally-vesting companies and executive oligarchy on one extreme, and subsidizing the destitute and lazy on the other end, the middle class carries a burden like no other time in history. We stand threatened by both proletarian democracy and oligarchy; both extremes with little stock in American Exceptionalism (one lacks the understanding, one lacks the concern).  The extreme nodes (the rich federal-flirters and the poor federal-beggars) are both hyperliberal. It is We The People who are the beating heart of the Republic. Yet as not to bring confusion to my stance, I applaud the work of corporations and innovators, the majority of which are productive and uncorrupt. It is only the oligarchs seeking to append themselves to the state against whom I inveigh. People can earn whatever they wish for as long as I am not there to cover the taxpayer tab.

But I digress…

Despite a majority of fools in the House and Senate, and a Marxist in the Oval Office – both of which should amount to a clear and polished channel for the DNC to ramrod its agenda – the will of the American people, the conservative giant, was able to shatter their teeth in, shut down flag@whitehouse.gov, and push Katherine Sibelius to waffling on the public option for the first time. That is to say that your disruptions, tea hoisting, and rowdiness blocked and confounded 2/3rds of the Federal Government. Great work.

But something is stirring ladies and gentlemen, and conservatism in on the ascendancy. Never before has democracy been so deeply threatened, and never before has its pulse been so throbbing, and never before has its vitality been so raw. I see it on the streets, I hear it in people’s murmurs, and in the accounts of the people who tell their anecdotes over beer. Sarah Palin made a remark on facebook that rocked the HR 3200’s Senate version and actually caused them to remove the death panels they denied existed. The awakening majority is growing more and more hissing and flared like the angry rattlesnake on the Gadsden Flag, and the flailing Whitehouse, panicked and desperate, shifted their tactic from demonizing doctors to demonizing insurers. Seeing that those ploys have fallen on deaf ears, the secular humanists in DC now tell us that it is a “moral imperative” from the non-descript, uncredited Yahweh that they normally dismiss as a warrior sky god.

Shibboleth newsflash: Christ’s ministry never levied a tax. Remember that the next time you ask us to render to Caesar that which belongs to God.

But I enjoin you to step up your efforts, and remember that your leaders are not above reproof, no matter how many bunkers they hide under. Refuse to return to business as usual, and disprove the fools who think that our movement is a spasm, not a flex. 

Keep fighting! And let’s impale this legislation on a sword of Rearden metal. >>