these assholes still don’t get it.
No, they don’t, and there is no current reason to believe they ever will.
I like to look for oddball and unexpected parallels in history between one thing and another, Austin Frank. You seem like a man with a disciplined intellect along with a brash tone when it serves you, and usually I find those traits combined in individuals who have picked up some knowledge of history as it really is along the way.
So bear with me here: your statement I quote above, when I read it just now, reminded me of the book I read not long ago about my adoptive home here in the high plains, in nearly the geographic dead-center of what came to be called “The Dust Bowl.”
The book, and I highly recommend it if you haven’t read it already, is
In it, author Timothy Egan shows some true journalistic acumen in the finest sense of the term, and examines causes, effects and aftermaths from as many angles as he could manage.
What makes the book come to life for me (aside from it being the tale of how this nondescript region hardly anyone ever thinks about unless one lives here, came for a brief time to be the site of probably the worst man-made ecological catastrophe in known history), is how he dispassionately recounts the ideas and the practices of a new kind of gold-strike speculators who descended on this country after the first world war, known as “suitcase farmers.”
These were people who had heard something somewhere, just as others had heard rumors of Sutter’s Mill or Dawson (or Cibola, or Cathay, in antiquity…) and had abandoned home, family, career and all good sense, to go far away and make what they thought would be an easy fortune, in the local case here by planting wheat. A Europe with eight million of its farmers stuck in the mud of man-killing trenches awaiting orders to go over the top or be slaughtered in place by artillery or poison gas, had created this new kind of gold, the kind one makes bread with. And from far and wide, idiots and ignoramusae and itinerants made their way into what was then one of the most stable and ancient tall-grass plains on earth, and started plowing it up to make their easy fortunes in the wheat trade.
For a few years, it paid off. There was this myth of the prairie country that had been propagated by the land-office crooks of a former generation during the Homestead Act’s ignominious reign out here, that “rain follows the plough.” Of course it does, for a few years, when you release all that moisture held in place for eons by grass roots and buffalo manure twelve feet deep, into the atmosphere. After that, the land becomes a desert, and rain a sentimental memory of former and better times.
So rain followed the plows of the suitcase farmers for a few years, as they lived it up in the town hotels (hence the name) and paid starvation wages to the displaced cowboys and Indians and Mexicans whose ranch economy they were wrecking systematically; prices in Chicago stayed high a few years after the war ended, and life was good.
Until it wasn’t. First the prices started to plummet on the world’s trading floors, as Europe’s farm economy rebuilt itself and new forms of technology like gasoline tractors came to produce an actual glut of wheat following the extreme wartime shortages a few years before.
And so what did these suitcase farmers do, as the prices dropped and it became more obvious with each passing cloudless day that their Eldorado motherlode was about to dry up forever?
these assholes still don’t get it.
They planted more wheat. They bought more land. They plowed up more ancient topsoil. They hired more hands. The price has to go back up again, they figured. It’s gotta start to rain again one day, they reckoned.
And the rest, to use a cliche, is history.
I see the same ignorant hubris, the same speculator’s blinkered opportunism, the same fortune-hunter’s outsized over-confidence, in the self-destruction of the gold rush that was the Sixties, and the advent of Great Society programmatic federal tyranny over all of American life. The rain of other people’s tax dollars, followed the plows of endless and seemingly unstoppable creation of more and more programs, bigger and bigger bureaucracies, greater and greater numbers of people coming to be totally dependent either on welfare programs or the bureaucratic incomes that come with administering them.
They took over our schools and universities, and thus the training of young minds. They took over our police departments and our courts, first seducing them with big federal grants then making them junkies of them along with the nonsense propaganda that came with the money and the requirements that they enforce federal policy at the local self-governing level. They took over the roads and bridges, the commodities markets, the retail economy; all with the same gold-rush mindset, that To Regulate is To Prosper, and the hidden costs and consequences be damned.
It never was bound to last. It was a fraud from the beginning. Just as with a gold rush, the very first ones to arrive in the field go into business, not digging gold but fleecing the rest of the suckers to follow who think digging in the ground will do anything but kill or impoverish them.
The unions and their mafiosi enforcers, the bureaucrats and their make-work careers, the mortgage lenders and personal-credit financiers who skin them all alive on a daily basis, the professors and pundits whose lofty middle-class status comes from their bloviating constantly about how Big Government benefits everyone, they are all seeing the rain not follow the plow any more, the demand for their ill-considered commodity of Too Much Officialdom drying up and just about set to blow away, just like the Worst Hard Time right here in my new back yard nearly a century ago.
Or put another, simpler way:
Democrats. (and the broke-down jackass they rode in on…)
And,
these assholes still don’t get it.
Their gold rush is over. And they don’t get that. It was a racket from nearly the day it started that nobody can even remember by now. And they don’t get that. The public sees them mostly in terms of the harms they have done and not the goods they may have ever delivered. And they don’t get that.
I hate to think what any accurate continuation of my metaphor here would look like. Here, the land just got up one day and walked away across the sky, sending dust clouds as far away as those very fields where all those other farmers had lain waiting to die in Belgium and France. And the dust storms, and the worst hard time that came with them, went on for a decade. The economy I live in around here now, is the one that was rebuilt by the ones who stayed, the ones who learned, the ones who did after all, get it about what had been done to their home by strangers with dreams of avarice blinding their vision.
But to look eastward to that foreign country full of brain-dead office-holders calling itself DC, all folks in places like around here can think of that lot is,
these assholes still don’t get it.
*you will never, ever, EVER see me post a link about a book, taking you back to Amazon. Never. Ever. I do have my reasons.
