“Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,

And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,

Do not go gentle into that good night.”

--Dylan Thomas

“Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”

                                                        --Winston Churchill

“I should have known better,” is the most typical guilty self-admonition indicative of buyers’ remorse. It is one of the most pervasively dominant political emotions in the country today, barely sixteen months into Barack Hussein Obama’s presidency. To paraphrase Churchill: never have so many been deceived so much by so few. Unfortunately, for the few who were not so deceived, an “I told you so” counter-admonition does not afford a respite from the prospect of pain and suffering in the horizon.

Saddled by the inertial burden of a Bush Derangement Syndrome which was engendered by war fatigue, and so maliciously and successfully perpetrated by the treasonous halls of punditocracy, the mainstream media, and the rest of the “blame America first crowd,” the nation proved vulnerable to the most ostentatious campaign rhetoric, which buoyed the thinnest resume a candidate ever had supporting the most liberal voting record in the Senate, all the way into the Oval Office. Fact checking fell by the wayside. The country became both a willing victim and a co-conspirator to her own self-deception.

The maverick brand that John McCain nurtured throughout his career allowed the so-called main stream media to effectively leverage the 2008 nominating process.  This resulted in the anointment of John McCain as the Republican standard bearer.  The Republican brand had been hijacked by the RINOs (Republican in name only) wing of the Party. The elitist country club Republicans lorded it over the conservative base. Not even the engaging charm of Sarah Palin who was far more conservative than MacCain has been for at least 16 years, and had a far stronger executive resume than Obama ever had, could resuscitate the faltering Republican campaign to save the day.

That Barack Hussein Obama ascended into the Oval Office is symptomatic of the political dyslexia that the country has sunk into, thanks in part to sustained assault on American educational institutions perpetrated by the so-called “Progressives,” that goes as far back as the turn of the last century, and the philosophical ideas of John Dewey, purportedly “. . . the most eloquent and arguably most influential figure in educational Progressivism” (emphasis added):

 “. . . Progressive ideas . . . rejected traditional classroom practice in favor of individualized instruction that let children learn at their own pace. . . . believed that all children had a right to be happy and live natural and full lives, and they yoked the needs of the individual to those of the community.”

 “. . . the public school's shift toward an overtly custodial function [w]as both anti-American, anti-intellectual, and, ironically, antidemocratic. . . . the perceived penchant for feel-good classroom instruction, and the . . . anti-intellectualism of adjustment pedagogy . . . marginalized the place of traditional core subjects. . . .”

In short, they converted the school system’s mandate to instruct into baby-sitting chores. Or in the succinctly astute formulation ofGeorge Will earlier this year,

“The dependency agenda is progressive education for children of all ages, meaning all ages treated as children.”

The dynamics of that takeover had been most recently lucidly and meticulously documented by Chuck Roger. Writing in the American Thinker, he chronicled the trajectory of migration of the progressives ideology from its origins as cultural Marxism at the Frankfurt School’s Institute for Social Research to Columbia University and beyond. Among the luminaries prominently involved, most notable was Herbert Marcuse, who grafted cultural Marxism onto  John Dewey’s progressivist pedagogical philosophy and spawned

“A list of ideological progeny [that] reads like a "Who's Who" of collectivist ideologues: Pentagon bomberWilliam Ayers, anti-homework and anti-competition preacher Alfie Kohn, America-hater Noam Chomsky, communistVan Jones, and progressive Bible-thumper George Lakoff, to name a few. Education, social studies, and literature curricula burst with gibberish on social, environmental, and climate justice as well as multiculturalism, diversity, moral relativism, and moral equivalence -- all derived in some way from cultural Marxism.”

The immediate and explicit mission was to deconstruct American society by:

“. . . eliminating social decorum and glorifying perverse behavior in order to destroy the Western middle class and collapse society from within. Translated into today's terminology, the plan prescribed the commandeering of news and entertainment media, religious and financial institutions, organized labor, health care, and education.”

The celebration of decadenceand the sanctification of victimhood and dependency are two sides of the same currency coin which I dubbed as National Dyslexia. Not just in the context of literacy in particular, but in the context of perception in general, i.e., the difficulty if not outright failure to recognize and synthesize visual, spatial, and auditory relationships into a coherent gestalt, reliable and replicable perceptual representation of the outside world.

The first institutional manifestation of this phenomenon came about when MTV first became acceptable in the national polity as a legitimate entertainment venue. It subsequently proved a most convenient vehicle for the evolution of pop-culture, and the morass of mindless entertainment genres such as “reality shows,” etc.  MTV was first introduced in the national scene as a series of musical scores accompanied by video images which the music was supposed to represent rather than invoke.

Traditionally, it used to be that a musical score invokes images in the imagination of the listener, commensurate with how sublime the music is and how sensitive is the soul of the listener. When you furnish the images along with the music, you are presuming that either a) the soul of the listener is too barren to be expected to produce any images; or b) that the music is too impotent to ignite any sparks of inspiration in the soul of the listener.

Thus, while the school system, especially the union-dominated public schools continued to churn out functionally illiterate graduates, in the staggering order of 36% of total output in some localities , the entertainment industry conspired to commercially nurture a mindless citizenry, happily unaware of its cultural illiteracy.  What with instant gratification as the most dominant operational impetus in this age of light speed modern technology, moral illiteracy if not moral imbecility is bound to follow as surely as day follows night.

It is precisely in this context that the election of President Obama fits ever so snugly into the progressivist template for a takeover of the country. The recent passage of ObamaCare into law with its concomitant federal takeover of the student loan program sort of sealed the deal for the federalization of education. Where John Dewey and Herbert Marcuse fell short, Obama is apparently now poised to succeed in one of the most crucial financial aspects of the takeover:

“. . . to convert education into a new ‘right’ that is to be funded with American tax dollars and new bureaucracies.”

“. . . Obama was very open before the election about his plan to fundamentally change American society. The goal is to convert our nation into a European social democracy instead of a free market system with individual freedom.”

That this country has been so dearly loved even by people who were treated so ignobly by it is an eloquent testament to its inherent goodness. Despite some misguided policies such as the criminal internment of Americans of Japanese ancestry while some of their family members were deployed to the European theater in WWII, the paradigm of freedom and liberty that has been its main bastion afforded the unfortunately maltreated citizens the opportunity to transcend the immediately given set of adverse circumstances. 

But when Obama is finished dismantling the private sector, that proven venerable citadel of individual initiative, by downsizing and buying out and co-opting whatever is left to make every man, woman and child the ward of the state, there would be no more individuals left to spearhead and accomplish the most urgently needed transcendence. Only a blob semblance of wretched humanity will be left to wallow in a quagmire of putrid amalgam of malaise and discontent.

Digging out of the quagmire of malaise into the sunshine of liberty requires sufficient extra free energy to inspire the soul. Absent such inspiration, the slouching out should prove to be toilsome, indeed. When your soul belongs to Cesar in its entirety you can only render onto Cesar the entirety of your being. We are better advised to embark on the process of taking back the country before the utopian Obamism has accomplished its mission.  As I attempted to emphasize earlier elsewhere:

“We are at a crossroads when political decorum disregards well established protocols of intellectual inquiry in order to pursue and forcibly implement political agenda as demanded by ideology of the Progressives genre. The will of the governed is completely and unabashedly ignored by the ruling elites so obsessively blinded by their determination to control and lord it over the political landscape.”

“The battle over the acceptance of paradigms encapsulates the crisis of our time. On the one hand, there is the Repugnant Obama Paradigm with designs to fundamentally subvert the ideals which undergird the founding of the Republic. On the other hand, the Conservative Paradigm’s ‘super’ majority of the populace, some undoubtedly having voted for Barack Obama, remain faithful to the Founding Principles as enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, are determined to prevent any such egregious transformation.”

“The electoral process remains to be our most potent weapon against the usurpers of power throughout the political landscape. Until that opportunity to throw out in the midterm elections the acolytes to the Obama Regime in Congress are upon us, judicial challenges may prove as potent vehicles both for stalling the devastating effects of ObamaCare and for formulating a viable alternative to Obama’s designs to downsize, to oblivion, this last best hope of man on earth. “