The 2014 Independence Day post

I went into the archives to July 2013 to see what I wrote for Independence Day last year.  All I really did was insert a picture of the original Declaration.  Maybe I couldn't face what this holiday has come to signify in this grim age.

The sad thing is that when I use the term post-America, I'm not kidding.  This is something other than the United States of America.

This year, it's time to admit something terrible:  We are living under a tyranny.  Views vary as to whether we can work our way out of it via American political institutions, such as elections and parties driven by principle.  Myself, I feel it's important to stress the primacy of culture in our current predicament. We may find ourselves with solid Republican majorities in the House and the Senate, and a strengthened Republican presence on the state level, already an encouraging realm of political activity.  But consider how loud and ridiculous the howling from the Left has been this week in response to the SCOTUS Hobby Lobby ruling.

That's what must be turned around.  We live in a society in which sound reasoning and that which is obviously sensible gets not just short shrift but invites ridicule of the most vitriolic and abusive kind.  Consider the aspects of everyday life that have been politicized to the point of catalyzing bitter division in any form of discourse: the weather, national sovereignty, restrooms, children's food.

We should have seen this coming - well, a hundred years ago, in the age of Herbert Croly, John Dewey and Woodrow Wilson, when the idea of a policy-setting executive branch, equipped with autonomous agencies staffed by wonky bureaucrats, first took hold.  We should have seen it coming during the New Deal, which, despite setbacks such as the Supreme Court ruling against the Roosevelt regime in cases such as Shechter Poultry, set in place the entrenchment of statism, as seen by the machinations of Frances Perkins, the architect of Social Security and the minimum wage.    We should have seen it coming during the Great Society era, when Medicare, Medicaid and food stamps joined Social Security as programs that we came to consider set in stone, never to be revisited even if they proved to be forces of societal deterioration.

We should have seen it in the 1970s, when, except for a few holdout fugitives such as Ayres and Dorhrn, the radicals came back into the fold and began their long march through the institutions, going to law school, journalism school and divinity school, taking over the record industry and the movie industry, beginning their forays into politics.

If we had seen, with sufficient clarity and in sufficient numbers, where it would lead, we might have been able to avoid the ugly and embarrassing juncture at which we find ourselves now, a juncture at which unelected EPA bureaucrats impose punitive policy on exploration efforts that, unimpeded, would bless us with cheap and abundant fossil-fuel energy for years to come, in which the post-American State Department preoccupies itself with increasing the "transgendered" among its ranks, in which our government, media and educational apparatus use a silly made-up term like "transgendered" with a straight face, in which our taxpayer dollars are used to fly disease-carrying illegal alien children all over the country in commercial airplanes, in which the post-American Justice Department tries to make the simple requirement of presenting a photo ID when voting into some kind of racially-charged hot potato, in which pretty much the entire executive branch goes out of its way to alienate our best - and only Western - middle east ally, while pursuing patty-cake with a mad Islamic regime bent on amassing a nuclear arsenal, in which another type of utterly mad Islamic ideology spreads like wildfire while the despot atop the regime ruling post-America tries to assuages us with blatant falsehoods about the the threat having been vanquished.

So, even if the more optimistic pundits among us are right, and this can be turned around with sufficient application of strenuous effort, the process is going to involve some cataclysmic moments.  The big question will be, if this can go according to some kind of best-case scenario, what the rabid Freedom-Haters will do as they are thwarted.

Yes, I got up and read the Declaration to my wife, as I have for twenty-four years.  Yes, I then filled the house with the United States Marine Band's renditions of The Star-Spangled Banner and Stars and Stripes Forever, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir's version of Battle Hymn of the Republic, and Ray Charles's version of America the Beautiful. We then went for a 17-mile bike ride, and are now headed to the beach.

But it's different this year.  It's more of a remembrance of a blessing we once had than a celebration of the country in which we live today.