The Wonder Springs Chronicle

Bobos in Babylon

20 October 2010

Volume 12, Issue 41

Access now the “The Wonder Springs Chronicle” Front Page. Be sure to check out the grizzly times wisdom and fresh insights of Brute’ Griz every Friday and our Monday Cult Football series article was “The Great Evangelical Punt.” This column also now appears each Wednesday on Deep Woods Moola and Redux Rendezvous.

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If you want to get some context of stupendous change, attempt to recall what our world was like back in early 2001, before 9-11, the financial crisis, the meltdown, the bailout, and the wars, first in Iraq, to rid the world of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, and then Afghanistan, to destroy the Taliban rule of the country.

About that time I was attempting to buy a very nice business near Kalispell, Montana. Before I left Seattle for one of those trips I needed some piece of outdoor gear, so I went to the flagship store of Recreational Equipment Incorporated (REI) to pick up the item. Since parking is free in their under store garage a short purchase trip can quickly expand into a number of hours, just looking at the wide variety of outdoor gear, basically designed for people who attempt to take their affluent lifestyle out to the boonies. After all you can have your cake and eat it too, if you save some weight by getting a titanium cook pot to carry it in, and then use the pot for cooking all your gourmet freeze-dried meals.

The piece of equipment I was searching for was in someway related to a gold mine I would be looking at east of Missoula, after I had finished my business in Flathead country. That mine required a trip up the Blackfoot River before heading south up into the mountains where the mine was located. The Blackfoot became famous as the basis of the book and the movie, “A River Runs Through It.”

Since this trip would be many hours in the saddle of my trusty Dakota and I had a coupon for a free download of an audio book, I decided to listen to “Bobos in Paradise,” by David Brooks. In case you missed the book, Bobos stands for bourgeois-bohemians, the entropic hybrid formed from the merging of the 1960s counterculture with mainstream or main street materialism.

After finishing my excursion to the mine and this time heading down the Blackfoot, I began to get to the point where David got to his research of Bobos in the Puget Sound area of the country, by describing his visit to the REI flagship store. As I approached Missoula to again get back on Interstate 90, he continued these environmental thoughts with his decision to visit the Blackfoot to see if the river could provide a mystical experience, which in someway would help him understand the Bobos environmental ethics. The vision trek however, had to be cut short because he at to return to Missoula in time to meet friends for dinner.

Needless to say David didn’t find the transcendence he sought watching the river flow by him, but perhaps his analysis does fit with the paradigm of Bobos that says our hunger for nature must fit within our time budget allotted on our PDA.

“God, if you are out here in the woods you need to speak to me, between 2pm and 5pm, because I need to get home by six, so my friends and I can go out to the quaint multicultural restaurant and then take in a comedic movie.”

Where have all the aging Bobos gone?

In the words of a flower children song, all the young girls are now grandmas. The husbands have been to the cardiac unit of the hospital more than once, and wonder what happened to their dreams. Furthermore after Vietnam we no longer have the draft, so absolutely no one has any concept of national service — other than as a means to do as little as possible, for as short a time as possible, and then retire as quickly as possible, with a substantial pension that many people would consider a decent income from a job.

Furthermore the graveyards haven’t returned to flowers, because the Bobos have so much angst about not living eternally and having blown away their lives, that they have been recently looking for political candidates to take them back to the twentieth century, where Bobos had it all and really did little of substance to get it; other than flip real estate and borrow against everyone’s future.

If you want an excellent description of the United States and the world for that matter, the following statement is really prophetic about the world, as it now exists, just a short decade after the American Dream was essentially “Bobos forever!”

“Our government fears its own citizens,” when the patience of the citizens with “a swamp of stagnation, indifference and corruption” may eventually snap. “When people finally realize that their opinion is ignored and that nothing depends on them, they’ll go out on the street,” he said.

The person who recently said those words was Mikhail Gorbachev the last head of the Soviet Union, discussing the current regime in Russia. However if you look at the civil unrest in Greece and France, the death of multiculturalism in Germany, and a quaking president of the United States, as he attempts to face a political disaster, you see almost a transcendent vision of our developed world.

What happened, so that reality of heaven on earth was so short lived? Probably the best description would be; a stupendous world change to Biblical Babylon (Genesis 11). Globalism, as the touted salvation of the world, through the reality of mutually assured economic destruction, is in the process of falling off a cliff.

So when you put our wishes into that Babylonian context that kept the last half of the twentieth century without major wars, what you find is the reality that negative reinforcement doesn’t work that well for all that long. It began with, “If you nuke me, I will nuke you, and then we will both be dead.” That was replaced after the fall of the Soviet Union with, “If you screw up my money, I will really screw up yours, and then the whole world will be bankrupt.

Therefore, if humans really “could teach the world to sing, in perfect harmony,” we would have done that long, long ago. That reality, even if a Biblical post Genesis flood myth; needs a way to understand a world with multiple nations, thousands of cultures best described as tribes, and tens of thousands of languages and dialects.

Globalism, as currently practiced through crony corporate colonialism and imperialism doesn’t work, not only because it denies the energetics of the world, it also denies the reality of survival. If I have to make a choice between surviving and fulfilling the needs of those who want only a handout rather than a hand up, guess who is going to survive?

What we should be looking at seriously is the cultural diversity of the world. To assume both ad hoc and ad hominem truths behind the statement, “If we just all work together there is nothing we cannot achieve.” is worse than an argument from ignorance, it is truly a myth of the power of the human will as well as the importance of historic moral codes.

The problem with what is defined in the United States as progressivism, both liberal and conservative, is that it is an illusion, based upon a lie, springing up from a misplaced hope in material human potential.

The sad thing about America’s midterm elections is that they will do very little to change the cohesion of the country. Pundits still debate whether president Obama will move to the center when whatever Republican gains will change the Washington, DC political landscape. The real problem however, is our current understanding of federalism and the extremes that foster its continued descent into irrelevance. That is after all the message of Babylon.

In that illumination, if you look at “The Fruits of Obama’s Rage,” you could see how his anticolonialism view of the dreams from his father could turn into a distinct asset. No other leader of the developed world has that paradigm from which to develop a worldview for the twenty-first century. Obama’s problem is that he carries the burden of his father’s African Marxism.

Hence moving to the center is really an undefinable idiom. What is really required is his ability to lead people beyond their dependence upon essentially colonial capitalism and finance, into a new reality of the world that has existed since the creation of distinct languages, to insure the continued diversification and stewardship of the earth.

Huh?

After God created the heavens and the earth, created mankind (Adam) in his image, and told them to be fruitful and multiply, that is the last thing we have really wanted to do. Sure we procreate, but in reality that is just the natural fruit of something we really enjoy doing. In that selfishness we really don’t want to be fruitful, just to get ours.

In Babylon what really happened, through the creation of different languages was a forced diversification of elitism. If you can’t communicate you really can only build empires within tangible communication limits. Therefore when Angela Merkel states that multiculturalism has been a failure, she is simply stating an absolute truth for the current state of the world.

For Germany to be a successful Germany, the nation has to speak Deutsch. For the United States to again become successful we all have to speak English, or more precisely American English. Now where this really requires leadership is to keep these differences of language and culture from degrading into racism.

On my mother’s side of the family her Danish grandparents settled in the small town of Wilbur. In Wilbur there was a neighborhood called Dane Town. I can still remember when my great grandmother died her funeral was held at the Danish Lutheran church. The regular Lutheran church was a few blocks down the street and was predominately German.

When the Lutherans finally got together, the Danish Lutheran church is now Four Square, the German Lutheran is now part of the museum complex, and the Wilbur Lutherans build a new church on the other side of town. This union was not brought about by multiculturalism but rather assimilation into a new type of nation, of basically nationalistic Americans.

What I find interesting is that those who trace their ancestry back to Germany don’t know how to cook sauerkraut and those who’s roots come from Denmark have never tasted properly prepared Lutefisk. In other words there is a certain blandness that is part of American culture, and in true reality that “muttiness” is the American gift to the world. Furthermore that diversity of roots is really the source of American exceptionalism, both good and bad.

Historically the United States was not designed to be an empire and still is very reluctant to be the world’s policeman. To the consternation of both the political extremes that is Barack Obama’s political weakness. In reality that specialization is also his greatest strength, provided he has the ability to adapt to basically this foreign country outside the universe of the intellectual political class that still divides Chicago into a city of haves, and haves not.

In reality the hybridization of American immigrants essentially bred a nation of wealth creators, as they left the stagnation of the old world, wherever that might be and however that may be defined. Progressivism as attempted to take us back to the old country, and be content with that old culture, those old limitations. The demise of the old forms of federalism naturally fade away, or run out of gas, look at the new nations in the old Soviet Union, a better example the old Yugoslavia.

The result of the demise of these old empires, the United States being the first and foremost descendant of the British Empire, is the opening of new frontiers of liberty, freedom and opportunity for the common people. The pending midterm elections in the United States will be a step toward that redux, and not the destination.

These next few years will require leadership in the United States, like not needed since the American Revolution. Whether the current and soon to be elected political leadership, including the president, is up to that pending task, time will tell.

The interesting thing about this outworking of the natural law and common grace of God toward humanity, if current leaders don’t or won’t have that ability, or learn those traits and make that effort, God will raise up others who will; and everyone will have to make a true choice of the path they will follow.