Paco's Diary

There is a specter haunting our nation, a dark harbinger of ominous things to come, one of the more frightening portents of our descent into chaos and old night.

No, I’m not talking about our president and his aspiration to the status of caudillo, or his abominable health care legislation, or the economy-stifling deficit (all bad enough, to be sure). I’m talking about the disturbing trend in male fashion featuring the combination of navy-blue suits and brown shoes – and the even more horrifying variation which couples brown shoes with gray suits. It is the kind of sea change that reminds me of that Yeats fellow, and his poem, “The Second Coming”. “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world”…something, something, something…and then that bit about a rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem - no doubt with pinstriped gray cuffs slapping the tongues of his brown wingtips. What next? The return of the Nehru jacket? Green carnations? Floppy Lord Byron ties? Another poet – that Eliot cove – remarked that the world would end, not with a bang but a whimper. I suspect that it might just as easily end with a gasp of offended sensibility, when the last man of refined sartorial taste sees his lawyer or bank president walk into a conference wearing Sansabelt slacks and purple Crocs.

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On a more serious note, I tremble at the prospect of a revival of conservative prospects having to depend on people like Senator Mitch McConnell. He seems pretty establishment, to me, and – Oh, dear! Aesthetics, again – whenever I see him on television, I am immediately struck by his resemblance to a scholarly, but naïve, bream that has just bitten down on a baited hook. Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio, on the other hand, appear to be principled, eloquent and telegenic spokesmen for limited government, and I hope they will prosper in their political careers.

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Kathy Shaidle has a wet blanket of a post that underscores the limits of any analogies we may want to draw between the Teapartistas of today, and our founding fathers. Indeed, it is difficult to argue with her conclusion that the demographics of modern America, in conjunction with the existing scope of dependency on government, bode ill for attempts by adherents of personal liberty to derail the Socialist Express. Such comfort as I can derive from these exasperating times lies in my belief that nothing in life that is of man’s making is preordained. It is not a forgone conclusion that the productive classes will stack arms and meekly surrender their flag, even if the calculus of democracy does wind up translating into a plan for the wholesale looting of the middle class.

Which raises this week’s provocative question: what happens if those of us who believe in the unalienable rights referred to in our Declaration of Independence do, in fact, become a minority? Are we morally bound to submit to a government because of its fidelity to the mere machinery of democracy, if democracy, itself, has become nothing but a tool in the hands of predators and parasites?