Good boys no longer.

This started out as a comment on Fran Porretto's "Trump And “Let It Burn:” Further Thoughts" over on Liberty's Torch but I decided to expand my comments into a separate post here and at Liberty's Torch.

The thoughtful and observant Mr. Porretto suggests that Donald Trump's candidacy has a certain "bread and circuses" aspect to it and that the elites have exploited Trump to distract the American people. This will have unpredictable results given the existence of a burgeoning "let it burn" community among our fellow Americans.

I don't see the hand of the elites in Trump's appearance and rise that Porretto does. Where the media bread and circuses are concerned, however, that hand is very visible indeed. Behold "America the Propositional Nation," even though not one person in a million can say what those propositions are for sure. But it -- and "diversity" -- are the war cries of just about every media (and academic and political) luminary. Where movies, sitcoms, commercials, and new rooms are concerned, all look like a meeting of either the United Nations General Assembly or of the annual convention of the National Organization for Wymyn. The media imperative is to portray an America that doesn't exist. Yet. It's much worse than that, as you know.

Trump's just not the kind of man to waste his time playing such games, especially as he's not shown much interest in broad public issues before, so far as I know, with the exception of his toying with the fraudulence of Obama's "birth certificate" and his earlier warnings about immigration and the national debt. It's quite a stretch to think that Trump's playing the role either of witting shill or unwitting puppet. Really?

Porretto is right on the money, however, in saying that we'll not like what follows after the unpredictable consequences of this now-unmodifiable "bread and circuses" dynamic become visible. People can only take so much flapdoodle but not many of us have thought much about what America 2.0 should look like. Pandemonium will be the best of all options in the short term and long term we're like to get FDR 2.0 with a leavening of the political insights of Minister Farrakhan and his recently conceived of black Sturm Abteilung.

In a certain late 1980s (?) book, whose author and title I can't recall now, the author suggested that the unwashed had a deal with the smart set. The latter could dabble in national affairs and play soldier all they want provided they don't fisk with how the former lived their lives.

If such was the understanding, it is no more, as the smart set now want to tell you that a pond on your Colorado property is a possible mooring site for a river barge or Coast Guard cutter and that if you lay in a few extra beans for the forecasted long, cold winter you're a fisking terrorist. One, btw, whose castle can be invaded by a squad of mechanized infantry to apprehend any scofflaws therein who have unpaid parking tickets. (Think flash bang in your daughter's crib.)

Call it The Invasion of the Dweebs. Twerps, who go full-rhapsody at some Bartokian screechfest or a punk rock guitar smash, are calling the shots in the south 40 of American life and it's not been going well. Cue the Marlboro Man. For God's sake, cue the Marlboro Man!

There is clearly a bread and circuses flavor to modern American life. In 1966, Carroll Quigley, in his Tragedy and Hope: A History of World in Our Time wrote:

All of these ideas [intuition rather than analysis, existentialism], reflecting the disjointed malaise of the century, permeated the outlook of the period and left it hungry for meaning, for identity, for some structure or purpose in human experience. Insanity, neurosis, suicide, and all kinds of irrational obsessions and reactions filled increasing roles in human life. Speed, alcohol [and drugs], sex, coffee [?], and tobacco screened man off from living, injuring his health, stultifying his capacity to think, to observe, or to enjoy life . . . . As his capacity to live or to experience life dwindled, he sought to reach it by seeking more vigorous experiences that might penetrate the barriers surrounding him. The result was mounting sensationalism. In time, nothing made much impression unless it was concerned with shocking violence, perversion, or distortion.

But the appeal of B&C is diminishing because of the former point and because a lot of "ordinary" people – the "extraordinaries" who built and maintain this country – are waking up to the fact that the political system isn't as benign as they and their parents may have thought, and that the trolls in the schools and the press really DO want to snatch their kids and turn them into authority-loving nitwits and dress-wearing sitzsprinklers.

The duplicity, pusillanimity and passivity of the Republicans after the 2014 elections really WERE that 4th of July Orange Death Blam Shower blazing in the sky for all of us that politics are a pointless exercise, leaving only the dog-in-the-manger option to the civic-minded voter.

Trump is the last chance of the non-lunatic, sellout elite to turn the ship around. The demographic, vote fraud, and corporate/billionaire political bribery realities that will take hold in earnest in this and all future times guarantee that this nation will not survive as a white, European nation. It must survive as such or all the horrors of third-world savagery and stupidity will turn America into a formless glop. An interregnum period will begin that will end only in the inevitable formation of an aggressive, killing ethnic majority that will put an end to the futility and irrationality of our moronic pursuit of "multiculturalism" and "diversity." This is night-follows-day stuff, Chachos.

Not that anyone with the unbridled, official discretion greater than a dog catcher's seems to notice, mind you. Ethnic and racial inundation, globalism, tra-la-la fiscal fiddling, and full-tilt pursuit of fisk-you socialism ARE the present flight plan . . . and ten tons of cautionary, common sense evidence suggesting a different course, delivered every day to every inbox and browser on the planet, bounces off like a tennis ball hurled at a tank.

The productive, sane segment of the populace see Trump for what he ISN'T – a slack-jawed, pudgy, sellout, fund-raising, tanned, coifed, mewling, dissembling, obfuscating place-holding sack of baloney. Some posit that Trump is some kind of a shill for Mrs. Rodham or that's he's being supported by some cabal of the Deep State. On which points (including the B&C one) I note simply that the elite mismanagers of this once-great experiment in self government ought to contemplate the wisdom in the phrase "too clever by half." As H.G. Wells observed, in The Shape of Things to Come:

The whole world system heretofore had been sustained by the general good behavior of common men, by the honesty and punctuality of clerks, workers of every sort, traders, professional men.

General security depended upon habitual decent behaviour in the street and on the countryside. But the common man behaved well because he had faith that his pay was a safe, if sometimes a scanty, assurance of a certain comfort and dignity in his life. He imagined an implicit bargain between himself and society that he should be given employment and security in exchange for his law-abiding subordination, and that society would keep faith with his savings.

He assumed that the governments would stand by the money they issued and see that it gave him the satisfactions it promised him. He was not a good boy for nothing. Nobody is.

Sooo the untouchable, irresistible political class may pull off another four years of popular passivity but that's not the way to bet. Erich Maria Remarque in one of his novels included a minor observation that a large number of German troops had disposed themselves on and about the tracks of a certain railway station. The station master, with undisputed control of the station's public address system, would periodically announce the imminent arrival of a train but the troops never moved a muscle to remove themselves from the tracks. You see, they had had a great deal of exposure to "official" announcements and knew very well that the station master could safely be ignored. Owning a $40 billion media empire can't change that perception, once it takes hold. Except if it started to broadcast the truth -- crazy talk if ever there was.

Figure there's a similar media fatigue at work today where all the give, forbearance, and benefit of the doubt vis-a-vis what the ruling class cleverly constructs for us has sometime back been wrung out of the equation. Not for nothing are or were Obamacare or the current odiferous, security-destroying, sovereignty-busting trade deals or nuclear "deals" with Iran assembled in conditions of utmost secrecy. Only the most bloody-minded and obtuse can fail to note that the Iranians know what the terms of the total deal are but the American people don't. BUT . . . FoxNews spends 30 minutes of million-dollar-a-minute air time on Deflategate. This gets noticed.

The elite have a normalcy bias of their own and that is that the "common man" will continue to be a good boy.

However . . . .

The appearance of the Tea Party out of nowhere, the surge in popularity of Trump, and the well-developed and increasing public understanding of

• public debt,
• unfunded liabilities top and bottom,
• the crime and unbreakable dysfunction of the black "community" and its "leadership,"
• open borders fanaticism,
  
• MSM dishonesty and manipulation,
• Muslim savagery and commitment to subversion and treachery,
• Muslim "refugee" resettlement,
• mad off-shoring and outsourcing of manufacturing and services,
• monetary blindness,
• strategic imbecility, and
• Supreme Court betrayal

all hint that such normalcy bias is unwise.

Porretto has written lucidly about "let it burn" thinking and Trump is the present focus of such thinking. He announces to any and all the arrival of (1) a desire to break furniture on the part of the unwashed and (2) a rather serious weakening of the desire to be "good boys."

It's clear the world is in the last throes of the failed socialist utopian experiment of which our educated classes and many willing citizens are so enamored. Further economic deterioration, especially, the squeeze on the middle class and unemployed citizens displaced by cheap illegal alien labor, will act like a catalyst for the arrival of America 2.0.

Think "inflection point" in our lifetime, but without the A/C, the buttered popcorn, or the special effects.