The Wizard of Oz in America’s Struggles
03/May/2010 09:07 Filed in: Special Report
Two weeks from today, 18 May 2010 will hallmark the 110th anniversary of the publishing of the children’s book “The Wonderful Wizard of OZ.” For most of that interlude American adults have tried to move to OZ, simply because it was a fantasyland as far from the reality of Kansas as they could get. So today, as with real children, they are mad, because the Wizards of Washington and the Wizards of Wall Street haven’t the ability to maintain that fable.
In that context, the Tea Parties, the protesters of Arizona’s new enforcement of immigration laws, and the whining and moaning about the evils of Wall Street, do really little but unmask the reality that all our hoped or hyped wizards are really just men, many times small men, not related to their physical size, who try to maintain at great expense the fantasized illusion of their wizardry they eagerly promote.
I have to give credit for this new found insight into the illusion of America to none other than Glenn Beck. So with deference to Shakespeare, let me set the stage. On Saturday afternoon I returned after a short hiatus to Spokane. This trip, which may become an annual affair, was to commemorate 30 April, which in Washington State is the date that the first half of the year’s property taxes are due. This year for reasons external to this reporting this was a significant and memorable event.
So later that evening I began to catch up on programs recorded on my DVR. On the Thursday show Beck was spun very tight because he believed that all those liberal Progressives seemed out to get him, and furthermore they were trying to turn the United States into a series of Emerald Cities through Cap and Trade. To which my first and continued response is, “Duh?”
For those outside the Pacific Northwest of North America, since the early 1980s, Seattle has adopted the slogan “The Emerald City,” supposedly because of all the green forests and underbrush, but in the context of the Wizard of OZ that slogan goes much deeper than that. In fact it was about that time, living in Seattle, I began popular writing about a Wizard Network as a marketing concept. I still have some of that stuff in a box in storage somewhere, but needless to say, within a few months, I was mature enough to understand the foolishness of the concept, for in Seattle there were way too many Yellow Brick Roads, and none of them led to anywhere significant.
It has long been known that Seattle residents suffer from SAD (Seasonal Affected Disorder) in which everyone is depressed during the winter because of the gray and the continual rainy drizzle. I personally call it Puget Paradox Disease (PPD), the Disease of Depressed Horizons, because the city sits on the shores of Puget Sound and SADs goes away in the summer, but PPD requires residents to have the highest per capita sunglass sales in the world. One might want to talk about the surrounding glories of nature’s blessings, but actually seeing too much of a good thing, might bring about a reality that liberal progressivism is just an OZ like illusion, but I digress.
Beck through his program was going on about how Cap and Trade could lead to the furtherance of all sorts of progressive social ills in this country. In that context, he brought up the name of the wizard who was bringing this whole thing about. The name he mentioned, I had never heard of before, and even after playing a video clip in which Van Jones praised his contributions and his humble demeanor, I was even less impressed, so when the program was over I deleted the episode.
Just like Glenn, I produce these articles on the fly and by checking visitors to The Wonder Springs Chronicle website I could tell that either people didn’t agree or couldn’t understand last week’s conclusion about a divergent split within The Social Darwinism Conundrum. This split occurs between the intellectual collectivists, communists and socialists in opposition with the Ayn Rand Objectivism wing. Objectivism gave us Goldman Sachs and their greedy Wall Street brethren and together with their intellectual counter point, lead us to the pervasive nature of Social Darwinism in American culture.
So I had to go back to Fox News and Glenn Beck’s show to find the name of the Wizard behind this Cap and Trade boondoggle. His name is Joel Rogers from the University of Wisconsin—Madison. I knew you would be impressed, but really Joel’s Ivy League credentials are among the intellectual cream of America. Hence for those who believe in the redistribution of wealth and social justice, Joel is a Wizard that even Barack Obama could emulate, and without all the Chicago political baggage. He also fits very well as the Wiz in The Wonderful Wizard of OZ.
Also from my perspective it all meshes well in the fact that modern Americans would rather live in the illusion of OZ, than a real Kansas, or any real state in these United States. That is especially true last week, where Kansas morphed into Arizona. Sure there are witches and all sorts of struggles to go through in our life, but as long as we don’t adventure too far from the Yellow Brick Road, one day we too may be granted an audience with some real Wizard and he will solve all of our problems.
Just as it was possible to create the movie of the Wizard’s homeland in 1939, near the end of the New Deal and before the beginning of World War II for America, it was also possible to create an honest to goodness, OZ type of homeland right here in America (and even in Kansas), as we allowed the greedy elitist Objectivist Social Darwinists to finally defeat their Cold War nemesis, those collectivist elitist Communists Social Darwinists in the Soviet Union. So in real reality the only place that those collectivists could exist in the harsh cruel world and not become an extinct species, was in the halls of American academia. Such a place like the University of Wisconsin—Madison was absolutely the best OZ this world could offer an intellectual exile.
All of America’s God fearing people find OZ a great world in which to live. As long as the elitist Objectivist Social Darwinists could give them stuff, then what is all this hype about them being atheistic materialists? In my thick Study Bible I learned that God wanted me to be materially prosperous. America truly was the promised land after all, where we received the blessings of Abraham, while dumbing down God’s Law given at Sinai into good suggestions for “having your best life now.”
For a whole generation, Americans have become part of a religious diaspora that would never have to quit their job, lose their natural security, take any risk, quit church, or move to Kansas. How sweet is life in the home of the Objectivist Social Darwinists!
However this does raise and interesting question. If Divine Providence was really the force behind the founding of the American Republic, will God allow this religious diaspora to continue, or will daily events become so stupendous, that they move beyond the scope that human reason can understand or cope with, either as the catastrophic or as miraculous provisions?
There is an old church saying, “Wait for the Lord.”
What all that waiting conversation never discussed was what are you to do once the wait is over?
If you have never waited, that context will take on a new meaning,
For those who have waited this is your opportunity.
In that context, the Tea Parties, the protesters of Arizona’s new enforcement of immigration laws, and the whining and moaning about the evils of Wall Street, do really little but unmask the reality that all our hoped or hyped wizards are really just men, many times small men, not related to their physical size, who try to maintain at great expense the fantasized illusion of their wizardry they eagerly promote.
I have to give credit for this new found insight into the illusion of America to none other than Glenn Beck. So with deference to Shakespeare, let me set the stage. On Saturday afternoon I returned after a short hiatus to Spokane. This trip, which may become an annual affair, was to commemorate 30 April, which in Washington State is the date that the first half of the year’s property taxes are due. This year for reasons external to this reporting this was a significant and memorable event.
So later that evening I began to catch up on programs recorded on my DVR. On the Thursday show Beck was spun very tight because he believed that all those liberal Progressives seemed out to get him, and furthermore they were trying to turn the United States into a series of Emerald Cities through Cap and Trade. To which my first and continued response is, “Duh?”
For those outside the Pacific Northwest of North America, since the early 1980s, Seattle has adopted the slogan “The Emerald City,” supposedly because of all the green forests and underbrush, but in the context of the Wizard of OZ that slogan goes much deeper than that. In fact it was about that time, living in Seattle, I began popular writing about a Wizard Network as a marketing concept. I still have some of that stuff in a box in storage somewhere, but needless to say, within a few months, I was mature enough to understand the foolishness of the concept, for in Seattle there were way too many Yellow Brick Roads, and none of them led to anywhere significant.
It has long been known that Seattle residents suffer from SAD (Seasonal Affected Disorder) in which everyone is depressed during the winter because of the gray and the continual rainy drizzle. I personally call it Puget Paradox Disease (PPD), the Disease of Depressed Horizons, because the city sits on the shores of Puget Sound and SADs goes away in the summer, but PPD requires residents to have the highest per capita sunglass sales in the world. One might want to talk about the surrounding glories of nature’s blessings, but actually seeing too much of a good thing, might bring about a reality that liberal progressivism is just an OZ like illusion, but I digress.
Beck through his program was going on about how Cap and Trade could lead to the furtherance of all sorts of progressive social ills in this country. In that context, he brought up the name of the wizard who was bringing this whole thing about. The name he mentioned, I had never heard of before, and even after playing a video clip in which Van Jones praised his contributions and his humble demeanor, I was even less impressed, so when the program was over I deleted the episode.
Just like Glenn, I produce these articles on the fly and by checking visitors to The Wonder Springs Chronicle website I could tell that either people didn’t agree or couldn’t understand last week’s conclusion about a divergent split within The Social Darwinism Conundrum. This split occurs between the intellectual collectivists, communists and socialists in opposition with the Ayn Rand Objectivism wing. Objectivism gave us Goldman Sachs and their greedy Wall Street brethren and together with their intellectual counter point, lead us to the pervasive nature of Social Darwinism in American culture.
So I had to go back to Fox News and Glenn Beck’s show to find the name of the Wizard behind this Cap and Trade boondoggle. His name is Joel Rogers from the University of Wisconsin—Madison. I knew you would be impressed, but really Joel’s Ivy League credentials are among the intellectual cream of America. Hence for those who believe in the redistribution of wealth and social justice, Joel is a Wizard that even Barack Obama could emulate, and without all the Chicago political baggage. He also fits very well as the Wiz in The Wonderful Wizard of OZ.
Also from my perspective it all meshes well in the fact that modern Americans would rather live in the illusion of OZ, than a real Kansas, or any real state in these United States. That is especially true last week, where Kansas morphed into Arizona. Sure there are witches and all sorts of struggles to go through in our life, but as long as we don’t adventure too far from the Yellow Brick Road, one day we too may be granted an audience with some real Wizard and he will solve all of our problems.
Just as it was possible to create the movie of the Wizard’s homeland in 1939, near the end of the New Deal and before the beginning of World War II for America, it was also possible to create an honest to goodness, OZ type of homeland right here in America (and even in Kansas), as we allowed the greedy elitist Objectivist Social Darwinists to finally defeat their Cold War nemesis, those collectivist elitist Communists Social Darwinists in the Soviet Union. So in real reality the only place that those collectivists could exist in the harsh cruel world and not become an extinct species, was in the halls of American academia. Such a place like the University of Wisconsin—Madison was absolutely the best OZ this world could offer an intellectual exile.
All of America’s God fearing people find OZ a great world in which to live. As long as the elitist Objectivist Social Darwinists could give them stuff, then what is all this hype about them being atheistic materialists? In my thick Study Bible I learned that God wanted me to be materially prosperous. America truly was the promised land after all, where we received the blessings of Abraham, while dumbing down God’s Law given at Sinai into good suggestions for “having your best life now.”
For a whole generation, Americans have become part of a religious diaspora that would never have to quit their job, lose their natural security, take any risk, quit church, or move to Kansas. How sweet is life in the home of the Objectivist Social Darwinists!
However this does raise and interesting question. If Divine Providence was really the force behind the founding of the American Republic, will God allow this religious diaspora to continue, or will daily events become so stupendous, that they move beyond the scope that human reason can understand or cope with, either as the catastrophic or as miraculous provisions?
There is an old church saying, “Wait for the Lord.”
What all that waiting conversation never discussed was what are you to do once the wait is over?
If you have never waited, that context will take on a new meaning,
For those who have waited this is your opportunity.