Blogging at the Ruins

Southern California is today in its glory. Sun warmth, mild air, deep blue sky, the faintest breeze, the scent of freshness, in the distance snow-capped peaks, and the great semi-circular wall of mountains that keep out the bad Winter weather that afflicts the rest of the nation. It is in such a scene, perhaps as a romantic painter contemplating the fallen and disordered stone blocks of a Middle Eastern city, some decrepit, ancient capital of a vanished empire, a bubble moment in history, that we view the political ruins of President Obama's world.  Sunlight now illuminates all the faulty architecture, badly mixed mortar, ill-designed thoroughfares, inadequate plumbing of a minor potentate. His brief presidency has been a long exercise in self-defeating futility, the futility of applying the antiquated, out-dated, disproved  fantasies of the 1960s and 1970s new Left, of post-modernism, to the real world. He absorbed bad philosophy out of academic humanities and social sciences like the pot-head he was, dopey and high, infatuated with the sound of his voice and the immature fatuities he recited to illiterate audiences. The academic elite took him for an affirmative action ride. He was presentable in public and could be dressed up for parties in the reading rooms of their clubs. They filled him up with nonsense and he parroted it back, reading their scripts from his mental teleprompter. And then he was elected President. I and many other observers said that nearly every public policy he proffered was an ill-advised, unwise assault on economic, social, and political reality; but he was an ideologue, surrounded by sycophantic ideologues, and could not be dissuaded. ObamaCare, stimulus, financial regulation, middle class entitlement, were--are--regulatory statist fantasies that cannot work and already are not working. His foreign policy is littered like an overused Camp David picnic ground with the detritus of failure, opened discarded food cans stinking up the pine groves--failure in nuclear nonproliferation, in Iran, in North Korea, in conflict between Israel and the so-called Palestinians. Handling a gun for the first time, his war policies on Iraq and Afghanistan are shots to his body and bleed and smell gangrenous. His outreached hand has been spit upon everywhere. Foreign leaders laugh behind his back at his silly rhetoric. His political instinct was--is--a calloused carbuncle, not a finely tuned instrument. He had and has no idea what America is about, a program of ignorance he displayed to an uncritical public in the book, "Audacity of Hope", that somebody else undoubtedly wrote for him. The result of his children's crusade is the trashing of the American economy and the accelerated pollution of American society. So there he sits, Ozymandias, amidst his self-inflicted ruin. Bitchy, self-pitying, belligerently blaming everyone for his fate. Obama has become the anti-Midas. Everything he touches turns to shit. I blogged the decline and ruin. A comedy in Aristotelian terms, not a tragedy, for no leader on the stage has died. Political blogging I must now begin anew.  What ideas and themes will describe the penalties Obama must now pay the ferryman? The story will not be about the capital, but about the countryside, about the vital creativity and energy roiling up like winds from the prairies, the towns, the dynamic provincial cities, blowing dust and leaves and debris about the intellectually deserted streets of the ruined legislative metropolis. Turn around, mount the small hill, look away to the horizon. See the camps of Americans reclaiming their nationhood. I'm ready for 2011. I can see forever in this clear air.