Reflections From a Murky Pond

This aptly and poetically sums up one of the fundamental, intrinsic, a profound ways that America is exceptional. It may, indeed, be the cornerstone of the truth of American Exceptionalism.

Militia Is Only a Bad Word If You’re a Tyrant

It is true that, in America, militias are by and large a good thing for the People and only a bad thing for those in the government who would be tyrants. In other countries this is not always the case – e.g., the Basij of Iran and the various “irregular” forces raised and employed by the hamula in Israel’s West Bank and Palestinian Authority zones.

This may well be the core of American Exceptionalism. We can arm and train the civilian population with confidence in their loyalty to the People, whereas in many other nations and cultures militias are an arm of tyranny and work against the people.

Tangentially, it’s also part and parcel of the reason why those who disbelieve and refute American Exceptionalism – Liberals and Progressives for the most part – fear and hate American militia groups so much.  As they cannot see Americans as being different from- or better in this manner than other peoples, they cannot believe that our militias would act differently than those of of other peoples.

Steampunk brings us back to the individualism and optimism prevalent before the first world war. As such, it reminds us of a romanticism that is sorely lacking in the modern, mass-produced, mass-marketed age.

Hence, I’m steaming things up a bit here at Reflections From a Murky Pond.

That’s How It Is These Days

There’s not really that more that needs to be added to this cartoon. That’s just the way it is now in what is left of America. Normative religious faith is vilified and sexual abnormality is lauded. That doesn’t mean, however, that that’s how it should be.

If we are to believe Obama and his handlers and overseers, Obama is the most ignorant and sheltered President in America’s history. If we are to believe what his propaganda corps tells us, he’s nigh on completely oblivious to anything that his underlings do.

The O-Blivious POTUS?

Truly, if Americans give Obama the hand-out of credence, he’s better suited to being a member of the Know Nothing Party than of the Democrats. There is, after all, more than passing similarity between the Obama Presidency and that of Millard Fillmore.

As President Fillmore is known only for his bathtub, it seems that Obama may well be best remembered for his television, since the TV seems to be, by his own repeated assertions, the boy’s sole source of information about the actions of his regime.

Of course, believing what Obama says is a mental disorder that should be included in the next Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) alongside Racial Anxiety Disorder.

While it’s not implausible that Obama is, in effect, a stranger to his own Presidency, it’s much more likely that the boy is knowingly benefiting from plausible deniability. Most likely Obama knows far more of the bad behavior of his regime than he’s admitting and what he doesn’t know is due to his and his handlers and overseers having deliberately set things up so that we wouldn’t know the details.

The boy’s carefully crafted aloof and isolated demeanor coupled with his rhetorical tone certainly created a tenor to his would-be reign that fits this model.

One thing, however, must be remembered – in this, as in every other bit of the Narcissist-in-Chief’s tenure in politics, Obama is neither original nor transformative. The boy has merely expanded upon the behaviors of his predecessors, pushing them down the next step along the entropic curve. Maintaining the POTUS’ plausible deniability has been a growing trend in administrations over the last few decades with President Reagan being notable as the first serious and public uptick in it.

Whether you call them Negroes, Colored, Black, or African-Americans, the question of what to do with them has sorely plagued America’s collective consciousness for almost two centuries. It was on the minds of the Abolitionists long before the Civil War and many decades and generations later it is still on minds of the vast majority of Americans.

It is a question that we, as a whole, have not been able to answer to our satisfaction. There no consensus on the answer to this question.

What we should do, after so much wasted effort in trying to find an answer to what we shall do with the Negro, is stop being so bloody arrogant and filled with The White Man’s Burden, and simply accept the answer that was given to us in 1865.

“What shall we do with the negro?” I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are worm-eaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall! I am not for tying or fastening them on the tree in any way, except by nature’s plan, and if they will not stay there, let them fall. And if the negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone!

— Frederick Douglass
What The Black Man Wants (1865)

Frederick Douglass told our predecessors what to do with his people less than month after the end of the Civil War. Yet, to this day, we refuse as a people to heed the wisdom of his words. Indeed, were a Black man to declaim those words in the public sphere, he would be vilified by many of both his race and the White race and be subject to the vilest insult.