February 23, 2012
If you hang out at dissident-right websites you surely know the Berthold Brecht quote: “Would it not be easier…for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?” This is offered on those websites”I mean to say, on those shameful digital cesspools that no decent-minded person would even think of visiting”in the context of Britain and America’s ongoing demographic revolutions. As the story line goes, a secretive cabal of elites, insufficiently stimulated by our nations’ inadequate diversity, or irritated by their demands for better wages, or shocked by their insistence that their interests trump those of foreigners, has decided to replace them with as much stealth as such a project can muster.
I wish I could believe it. Being allergic to conspiracy theories, I can’t. Being also at an age when I can regard the future beyond the next few summers with calm indifference, I think if the root stocks of Britain and America”nations blessed with representative government”were so stupid as to let wily elites drive them to minority status in their ancestral lands, the fools deserve the race war that’s probably coming to them. I do feel some mild regret on behalf of my kids, who I suppose will spend some of their adult years in a continent-sized version of 1970s Lebanon or 1990s Yugoslavia or 1960s/70s/80s/90s/00s Congo/Sudan/Somalia/Ethiopia/Zimbabwe, but at least I’ve taught the little Derbs (him and her) how to use firearms.
So I’m not normally an easy sell for the evil-elites story line. I believe that rank, unorganized human stupidity and selfishness explain well-nigh all deplorable social phenomena. But there are times when I wonder whether the conspiracy theorists might be onto something. There are times….
Item: I was sitting in the man cave Sunday evening with a slice of my wife’s incomparable pecan pie and a glass of supermarket plonk, watching 60 Minutes.
One of the segments was titled “Trapped in Unemployment.” It was about some middle-aged, middle-class people in Connecticut who’d been laid off in the 2008-09 recession and have been unemployed ever since.
Never in the last 60 years has the length of joblessness been this long. Four million people, a full third of the unemployed, have been out of work more than a year.
There’s a stonyhearted cadre of commentators who respond with: “This is capitalism. We don’t do jobs for life, certainly not middling-ability paper-shuffling jobs with benefits.” I kind of see their point, but having spent much of my own working life among the modern business office’s cubes-“n”-tubes people, I’m sympathetic on tribal grounds. These are my people.
The segment dragged its weary length for over 12 minutes while I howled at the monitor: “Mention immigration! Go on, at least mention it! Tell us about the H-1B scam!”
