CRASHING THE UTOPIAN BUS

SCRAPING THE BARREL and putting in buckshot, hey, get your hands off my scripture, and help me out from under this utopian bus, please. No, I didn't stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night, but I did find this tasty bit of humor at the clutch hitting Confluence site. Man, will I be glad when this election is over, EVEN if it means that REAL HOPE becomes as rare as the great spotted owl, also. The suspense is killing me! Anyhoover, read on...

Came into work today and saw this notice in the employee lounge:

Notice to All Employees

As of November 5, 2008, when President Obama is officially elected into office, our company will install a few new policies which are in keeping with his new, inspiring issues of change and fairness:

1. All salespeople will be pooling their sales and bonuses into a common pool that will be divided equally between all of you. This will serve to give those of you who are underachieving a “fair shake.”
2. All low level workers will be pooling their wages, including overtime, into a common pool, dividing it equally amongst yourselves. This will help those who are “too busy for overtime” to reap the rewards from those who have more spare time and can work extra hours.
3. All top management will now be referred to as “the government.” We will not participate in this “pooling” experience because the law doesn’t apply to us.
4. The “government” will give eloquent speeches to all employees every week, encouraging it’s workers to continue to work hard “for the good of all.”
5. The employees will be thrilled with these new policies because it’s “good to spread the wealth.” Those of you who have underachieved will finally get an opportunity; those of you who have worked hard and had success will feel more “patriotic.”
6. The last few people who were hired should clean out their desks. Don’t feel bad, though, because President Obama will give you free healthcare, free handouts, free oil for heating your home, free food stamps, and he’ll let you stay in your home for as long as you want even if you can’t pay your mortgage. If you appeal directly to our Democratic Congress, you might even get a free flat screen TV and a coupon for free haircuts (shouldn’t all Americans be entitled to nice looking hair?)!

If for any reason you are not happy with the new policies, you may want to rethink your vote on November 4th.

Okay, that was a wonderful parody of the Obama Doctrine, but did you ever wonder where all this bright-eyed and bushy-tailed utopianism of the Uber Left got started? Here is a scholarly look at this utopianism and its more recent by-product that is currently sweeping the globe, and why incidentally, Barack Obama seems to feel that he is not necessarily America's first Black President, but he expects to be hailed as the first Black Global President by general acclamation, titular head of the United Nations, one presumes.

Don't you just LOVE the truth! Here is a short excerpt from the Lee Harris lengthy essay—The Intellectual Origins of America-Bashing (The Utopian Leanings of Latter-day Radicalism).

America-bashing has sadly come to be “the opium of the intellectual,” to use the phrase Raymond Aron borrowed from Karl Marx in order to characterize those who followed the latter into the twentieth century. And like opium it produces vivid and fantastic dreams.

This is an intellectual tragedy. The Marxist left, whatever else one might say about it, has traditionally offered a valuable perspective from which even the greatest conservative thinkers have learned—including Schumpeter and Thomas Sowell. But if it cannot rid itself of its current penchant for fantasy ideology of the worst type, not only will it be incapable of serving this purpose; it will become worse than useless. It will become a justification for a return to that state of barbarism mankind has spent millennia struggling to transcend—a struggle that no one felt more keenly than Marx himself.

For the essence of utopianism, according to Marx, is the refusal to acknowledge just how much suffering and pain every upward step of man’s ascent inflicts upon those who are taking it, and instead to dream that there are easier ways of getting there. There are not, and it is helpful to no party to pretend that there are. To argue that the great inequalities of wealth now existing between the advanced capitalist countries and the Third World can be cured by outbreaks of frenzied and irrational America-bashing is not only utopian; it is immoral.

The Left, if it is not to condemn itself to become a fantasy ideology, must reconcile itself not only with the reality of America, but with its dialectical necessity—America is the sine qua non of any future progress that mankind can make, no matter what direction that progress may take.

The belief that mankind’s progress, by any conceivable standard of measurement recognized by Karl Marx, could be achieved through the destruction or even decline of American power is a dangerous delusion. Respect for the deep structural laws that govern the historical process—whatever these laws may be—must dictate a proportionate respect for any social order that has achieved the degree of stability and prosperity the United States has achieved and has been signally decisive in permitting other nations around the world to achieve as well. To ignore these facts in favor of surreal ideals and utterly utopian fantasies is a sign not merely of intellectual bankruptcy, but of a disturbing moral immaturity. For nothing indicates a failure to understand the nature of a moral principle better than to believe that it is capable of enforcing itself.

It is not. It requires an entire social order to shelter and protect it. And if it cannot find these, it will perish.

Read it all.