(French Philosophe Julien Benda, 1867-1956. Sort of reminds me of Jim at the Willow)
I was going to jot down some notes about the general state of things this morning before I take my leave. Following the bombshells last week there is a rumor going around that the Administration is going to suspend the health-care mandate thing for three years, punting it over to the next Administration.
Based on the general incompetence of the opposition, at this moment in time, that would be Mrs. Clinton.
Ironic, don’t you think, that we will wind up with HillaryCare after all?
I can’t get myself that worked up about it this morning. I have the winter blues and am going to try to get away from it all for a while- take a quick break and wear shorts and flip-flops for a few days. Even a short amount of time away from winter will do wonders, I hope.
I was thinking about that while going through some boxes in the garage at the farm looking for summer clothes that got packed with the sale of the condo at Big Pink last year.
Time capsules in cardboard. It is more than a little like that Andy Warhol performance art thing. The legendary pop icon would make a weekly box of the detritus of his life- paperclips, dry cleaning, objects d’art and toss them into cardboard boxes and taken away to storage.
His whole life is being cataloged at the moment, paperclip by paperclip. If cans of Campbell’s Soup can be re-imagined as art, why not trash? That is precisely what I found in the boxes. Coffee cups and plates and cheap silverware and battered pots and pans; some things useful and a lot that is not.
I gave up looking when my fingers got numb- it is cold in the dimness of the winter-time garage- and wandered back up to the farmhouse in the dusk to get warm. It was there that I read that social security is now predicted to be bust in 18 years- or right around my 80th birthday, should I get there. That is more ironic than HillaryCare, since we all knew this was coming.
I don’t wonder that we have not got around to fixing the problem. It would involve honesty and some sacrifice, two traits not commonly found in Congress. Fixing it could have been done with much less travail than we are experiencing with the Affordable Care Act. That leads me to the title of today’s screed: La Trahison des Clercs.
The phrase was coined for Julien Benda’s interesting 1927 book, “a work of considerable influence,” according to the cognoscenti of the day. The title of the English translation was The Betrayal of the Intellectuals, although “The Treason of the Learned” would probably have been more accurate.
You can imagine the context for his writing the way he did- Goldman Sachs (Yes, the very same Goldman that blew the bottom out of the housing market) was about to blow the bottom of the stock market in The Crash of 1929, and all sorts of patent nonsense were floating around the UK, France and Germany as revealed wisdom.
Remember the “better Hitler than Blum” slogan thrown around in the 1930s as part of the long slide into the second installment of the Thirty Years War of the last century?
The intellectuals embraced all sorts of crazy things back then, just like today. We have the ability to look back and say that State Socialism, be it fascist or Communist, have some fundamental flaws, based largely on the unwavering force of human nature.
Alas, we appear to have lost the ability to reason dispassionately about political and social matters. Benda’s France paid a huge cost for the mass delusion.
So did everyone else, though it also resulted in The American Century. It was a treat to grow up in that, and Gen X and the Millennials will never have the opportunity to remember a time when things made a sort of sense.
I think the answer this morning, is not to try to fix anything. That is quite beyond us, I think.
Rather, the answer is a thoroughly Gallic one: surrender to reality and flee from winter and see if warmer climes chase the blues away.
Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303