For US, Gradual Ruin Is About to Become Sudden
By Roger Kimball
TheEpochTimes.com
President
Joe Biden delivers remarks in the State Dining Room
of the White House in Washington.
I am not a particular fan of Ernest Hemingway’s
novel “The Sun Also Rises.”
But there is one exchange between two of
the characters, Bill Gorton and Mike Campbell, that
has stuck with me. “How did you go bankrupt?” Bill
asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually
and then suddenly.” That passage has been running
through my head a lot recently.
I thought of it last week when I learned that Dr.
Seuss Enterprises had decided to stop
selling six books by the famous children’s
author because—according to the bureaucrats at the
concession—they depict various ethnic groups in ways
that are “hurtful and wrong.” I thought of it again
last week when Disney decided that some of its most
popular shows didn’t pass muster with the “woke”
wardens of political correctness and restricted
access to Dumbo, Peter Pan, and other children’s
classics because they, too, were “racially
insensitive.”
Closer to home, Amazon, the self-described world’s
largest bookstore, joined the censors by
delisting a book I published a few years ago at
Encounter, “When
Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender
Moment,” by Ryan T. Anderson. While
the book is a thoughtful and scholarly analysis of
the psychological costs of treating gender dysphoria
with drugs and surgery, Amazon suddenly and without
any explanation dropped the book because, they said,
they no longer “sell books that frame LGBTQ+
identity as a mental illness.” Anderson’s book
does no such thing, but no matter. Amazon is in this
respect like the Lord: man proposeth, Amazon
disposeth.
These little cultural markers—and there are plenty
more where they came from—suggested to me that we
are about at an end of the gradual phase of cultural
decay and were about to embark on the sudden part of
the journey.
Elections
Then, there is the more serious stuff: the nearly $2
trillion so-called COVID relief package that all but
guarantees a spike in inflation but shovels
much more money to teachers’ unions and favored
racial groups than to people who have suffered from
the government lockdowns during the CCP virus
pandemic.
There is the passage in the House of H.R. 1,
the so-called For the People bill, which will
effectively assure that is never another fair
election in this country. It would do this by all
but obliterating voter ID requirements. You need an
ID to board a plane but not cast a vote, mandating
same-day voter registration, at least two weeks of
early voting, and by requiring states to provide
unsupervised drop boxes to receive completed
ballots. In other words, H.R. 1 will
centralize presidential elections, taking
responsibility for oversight away from the states,
where the Constitution placed it, and
arrogating it to the clutches of the federal
government and its sprawling bureaucracy.
If, as seems almost certain, H.R. 1 becomes
the law of the land, it will be the final nail in
the coffin of electoral integrity. The widespread
irregularities (that’s “fraud”) that attended
the 2020 election would be codified into law
assuring that, for as long as anyone could envision,
2016 would have to be counted as the last free,
fair, and open presidential election.
It used to be that American was the land of the free
and home of the brave. A robust culture of free
speech was every American’s birthright. We had free
and fair elections, unlike the banana republics we
were always called upon to bail out or police. We
also had borders, and even politicians eager to
increase immigration understood the difference
between entering the country legally and opening the
floodgates to the hordes massing on our Southern
border.
That’s all behind us now, or at least those
traditions appear to be on life support. No, the
patient was on life support, but someone came to
euthanize him and pulled the plug. The signs and
portents are many and they are not encouraging.
Perhaps the most disturbing episode last week was
President Joe
Biden’s alarming performance, when he announced
the elevation of two women to the status of combat
generals. Biden went on to underscore the “intensity
of purpose” with which his administration would be
pursuing “body armor that fits women properly,
tailoring combat uniforms for women, creating
maternity flight suits, updating their hairstyle
requirements.” This wasn’t from a Saturday Night
Live skit: it was the President of the United
States live
in front of the cameras.
I say “live” but I really mean “not prerecorded.”
Joe Biden is “live” only in the sense that he cannot
legally be interred. Biden went on to demonstrate
that sad contingency when he strained,
unsuccessfully, to remember the name of his own
Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, who was standing
right behind him, or the name of the building where
Austin works, the Pentagon.
‘Ruin in a Nation’
Adam Smith once remarked to a disconsolate
correspondent that there’s a “deal of ruin in a
nation.” I quoted that remark to a friend some years
ago, when America was reeling from the twin assaults
of the financial meltdown and the ministrations of
Barack Obama. “Especially this nation,” my friend
replied, and I had to agree.
For a moment, during President Donald Trump’s
tenure, it seemed as though we’d returned to the
sunlit uplands. Leave aside his partisan successes,
the judges, and tax cuts, for example. Concentrate
instead on what he did to secure the borders, to
upgrade the military, to make America energy
independent. It’s only mid-March 2021. In just six
weeks, and with 60 plus executive orders behind him,
Biden has largely unraveled all those
accomplishments and more.
This is the reality: Biden has set us on a collision
course with tyranny at home and armed conflict
abroad. He has proclaimed his political opponents
“domestic terrorists” and directed the FBI to harass
and arrest them. He has done everything with his
considerable power to surrender the country to the
woke mob.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world isn’t standing
still. Look for a kinetic clash with Russia, China,
or Iran soon. It’s coming to a theater near you by
the end of this summer, and I do not mean a movie
theater. Expect the velocity of our declivity to
increase. The gauge is set to move from “gradually”
to “suddenly” now, and there will be plenty of shock
and awe when it does. Is this alarmist? Maybe, but
that is appropriate when the situation is alarming.
It’s going to be a wild ride.
Roger Kimball is the editor and publisher of
The New Criterion
and publisher of Encounter Books. His most recent
book is “Who
Rules?
Sovereignty, Nationalism, and the Fate of Freedom in
the 21st Century.”