Through a Glass, Blurrily
This week’s celebrity Republican in the mainstream media is John Boehner, who has dragged himself out of his drunken stupor long enough to slur his way through some sort of memoir in which he aggrandizes himself and begs for media love by taking potshots at every other prominent Republican from his musty corner, as the loudmouth bum at the end of the bar is wont to do.
As I have said many times before, though never as strongly as I mean it, the decay of Washington as the former center of late modern civilization may be blamed on many things — the temptation of money, the allure of power, the desire for adulation, pure tyrannical impulses — but the practical lubricant that allows all those other causes to run so freely through the political machine is drink. Drinking friendship, the camaraderie of fellow drinkers, blurs all lines of rational and moral disagreement — lines never more necessary than during a time of institutional siege by subversives — not by creating a collegial atmosphere for compromise, but simply because fellow drinkers value their drink more than their country. They love to drink more than they love to be free. They desire the next chance to bend elbows together more than they desire the public good — or their own private good, for that matter. Drink is their mother and their god, their best friend and the lover they dream of every night. They would, and they do, sell everything for it; conversely, they would not sacrifice the sweet oblivion of their preferred drug for any other good. For in the hierarchy of their weak, addicted souls, alcohol is the highest good. Everything else is measured against it, every other man or woman judged on the basis of whether he or she is a good drinking partner. People who drink together, by which I mean those for whom drinking together is essential and indispensable to the relationship, will always and forever view one another with a knowing wink — “We few, we bleary-eyed few.” They are controlled by a monster — and so, therefore, is anyone at the mercy of their decisions, such as anyone these “drinking friends” have been elected to represent.
John Boehner is a “drinking friend” of the bipartisan lush fund that is Washington, D.C. I have not read a word of his memoir, and I will never need to. In this case, the book is easily judged by its cover, featuring a photo of a dimly lit room in which there sits a man obviously ravaged by decades of hard drinking — the sort of addiction that makes a man oblivious to what his visage reveals about him — tipping a glass of wine to the reader as though that nectar were his personal nametag. Of course, for all intents and purposes, it is.
Will Donald Trump’s supporters ever have the courage to admit that they were successfully played by the most transparent and infamous flim-flam man in American history — and by the Republican establishment’s clever exploitation of that flim-flam man’s appeal to bring “grassroots conservatives” to heel by thoroughly denuding and humiliating them?
Will those who voted for Joe Biden as a protest against Trumpism ever have the courage to admit that they took the bait, and that they now own a share of the trap which has closed on their country — all for an indigestible bit of moldy cheese?
Over the past two years, opportunistic Marxists from the Democratic Party and its activist grassroots have repeatedly exploited media-manufactured outrage over isolated police killings to call for an end to policing, the disbanding of police forces, and so on. Why not call their bluff? End policing — the government’s practical agency for using violent force against private citizens — not just in circumstances in which it would be politically convenient to do so, but right across the board, “without discrimination,” shall we say.
I know that these subversives are merely trying to undo local police forces, in order to remove the middle man of coercive force separating the federal government agencies themselves from every private life in the country. But let us deny them this hypocrisy. If police powers are a threat, they are a threat from all similar sources. And if local police are a negative force in society, then an even more powerful, unchecked, nationalized police force can hardly be regarded as a solution to the problem of an overly powerful and unchecked coercive authority. Thus, if the radical leftists want to abolish the police, then let them do it — with the one simple condition that this mean not just the police forces they wish to undermine this month, but all police forces throughout the country.
To end government policing, not just when and where you do not like its results, but truly and absolutely, would mean ending confiscatory taxation — for who would enforce the government’s coercive demand for your money, should you choose not to pay?
To end government policing, not just when and where you do not like its results, but truly and absolutely, would mean ending redistributive justice — for who would have the authority to force anyone to relinquish his property without the threat of the state’s gun?
To end government policing, not just when and where you do not like its results, but truly and absolutely, would mean ending the infinitely expanding regulatory state that increasingly suffocates voluntary exchange, private speech, the open debate of ideas, and, in general, the principle of self-government. It would mean ending compulsory schooling laws, gun control laws, and any other such restrictions on private community life that have no enforceability without the government’s legal monopoly on the use of aggressive force.
Goodness gracious me, to end government policing, not just when and where you do not like its results, but truly and absolutely, would mean ending forced lockdowns and “stay-at-home orders” and mask mandates and all the rest of the tyrannical overreach of our current Pandemic that Ate a Planet.
I’m in! Where can I sign the petition? Abolish the police. Let’s get on with it.
