The great unraveling
Roger Cohen describes the current state of affairs quite accurately, although I’m surprised to see his piece in the NY Times. However, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, because Cohen has been somewhat of a hawk post-9/11, and a columnist for the Times since 2006, although he obviously represents an outlier:
It was the time of unraveling. Long afterward, in the ruins, people asked: How could it happen?
It was a time of beheadings. With a left-handed sawing motion, against a desert backdrop, in bright sunlight, a Muslim with a British accent cut off the heads of two American journalists and a British aid worker…
It was a time of aggression. The leader of the largest nation on earth pronounced his country encircled, even humiliated. He annexed part of a neighboring country, the first such act in Europe since 1945, and stirred up a war on further land he coveted…
It was a time of breakup. The most successful union in history, forged on an island in the North Sea in 1707, headed toward possible dissolution ”” not because it had failed (refugees from across the seas still clamored to get into it), nor even because of new hatreds between its peoples. The northernmost citizens were bored. They were disgruntled…
It was a time of weakness. The most powerful nation on earth was tired of far-flung wars, its will and treasury depleted by absence of victory. An ungrateful world could damn well police itself. The nation had bridges to build and education systems to fix. Civil wars between Arabs could fester…
It was a time of hatred. Anti-Semitic slogans were heard in the land that invented industrialized mass murder for Europe’s Jews. Frightened European Jews removed mezuzahs from their homes…
But what really puzzles me is Cohen’s own puzzlement. He describes the dreadful situation, but keeps asking how it happened. And he provides no answer.
Now that I’ve gone back and read his column once again, though, I see that he talks about generic “people” not having the answer. Who are these “people”? His fellow journalists at the Times? The liberals he meets at cocktail parties?
I’m really not sure. But it’s certainly not conservatives, because they’ve been describing the causes of such things for many years now, and are not particularly surprised because they have long been predicting many of these events. Maybe Cohen should run in different circles.
He writes:
Nobody connected the dots or read Kipling on life’s few certainties: “The Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire / And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire.”
Until it was too late and people could see the Great Unraveling for what it was and what it had wrought.
Nobody? I first quoted that poem on this blog in 2006, and have mentioned it time and again in the years since. And I actually was a relative newcomer to the game of quoting Kipling, at least on the conservative side.
But in a larger sense—and one perhaps unintended by Cohen—he’s right, because although the specter of the unraveling was seen looming on the horizon long before he thinks it was, it may have already been too late to effectively stop it.
When is it really “too late” to do anything about such an unraveling? I don’t think it’s absolutely and for certain too late even now, but it is extremely late indeed and the remedies would be incredibly difficult to implement and far less apt to be successful than had it been caught earlier. But how early was early enough? The 60s? The 30s? The 80s (1880s, that is)?
Or is the problem inherent in the human condition?
I have seen the Kipling poem quoted even earlier, probably at least back to 2003 or 2004. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the people Cohen knows mostly live in a closed intellectual circle in which they all read the same books and get excited simultaneously about the same things.
My husband and I watch a lot of old movies and we comment on how the same problems (economic, social, political) existed pre-1940. Sometimes it is surprising how applicable the dialogue would be for our present times.
The longer I live the more amazed I am at the legacy of Ronald Reagan. Not perfect by a long shot but a near perfect “vision” for his time. Oh that we could find a “modern” Reagan. Although I suppose a dedicated liberal would say that Obama filled that role… sigh…
This has always been the Leftist’s problem, they are really good at identifying problems it’s their solutions which are dangerous!
Maybe the Great Unraveling started with Wilson or FDR? FDR for sure ignored the Constitution with impunity. Other nations? They never got it right to start with.
My “I don’t give a shit” moment came when W spent money like it was free.
I’m waiting for the end.
Todd, Do you have children? Grandchildren? No excuses on giving up. Any historical insight proves that we owe those who didn’t give up before us, for the benefits we’ve enjoyed. Better circumstances didn’t just happen, and they have always involved sacrifice and contending.
David, My earliest political memories include my grandfather on the Italian side (full-blooded Sicilian) declaring “FDR set this country on the road to ruin.” I could not have been more than 4 or 5. It was accepted truth in our clan.
Certainly not all humans. But a large enough number in most social arrangements that when they are allowed to politically implement their neurotic life preferences and institutionalize their dysfunctions, everything starts sliding downhill. The trick is to step back and let them catch it … if possible.
But of course preventing your ability to achieve that distance is what their entire life is focused on … apart from massaging their malfunctions.
Does anyone really care – care enough to join them and share their pain for the sake of human solidarity – if liberals determinedly run face first into a brick wall of their own, or nature’s design?
If you do, then what business have you in pretending to be mystified at the social outcome?
Hey, would that be the Roger Cohen who was so upbeat about the Iran’s mullah-tocracy?
I guess he’s the perfect guy to talk about “unravelling”…
…especially since the Obama administration together with the EU have avidly bought his foolish optimism lock, stock and barrel, even if Cohen has found himself backtracking a bit.
But then, everyone knows—as in EVERYONE—that the real villain is Bibi and the Zionist Entity.
After all, it’s in the narrative.
There’s a difference in saying on the one hand, “I don’t give a shit if ISIS gets its hands on enemies of freedom like Joe Biden or Amanda Marcotte, or Nancy Pelosi and then features them in their next episode” , and saying on the other “I don’t give a shit about anything anymore because these malevolent idiots are poisoning healthy social arrangements.”
That latter is sort of like complaining, as someone around here does, that feminists won’t let you be a man.
Before you throw your hands up and quit, why not try telling some of those around you and who are aligned with the ideas you despise, just what you think?
Liberals do all the time.
Benjamin Franklin:
“[O]nly a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.”
George Washington:
“Religion and morality are the essential pillars of civil society.”
Gouverneur Morris, Penman and Signer of the Constitution:
“[F]or avoiding the extremes of despotism or anarchy . . . the only ground of hope must be on the morals of the people. I believe that religion is the only solid base of morals and that morals are the only possible support of free governments. [T]herefore education should teach the precepts of religion and the duties of man towards God.”
I think we are well-schooled in what the Republic is like run by amoral people who encourage amorality all around us.
Leftists live in fantasy land. They have wonderful good intentions and they are always so surprised when their good intentions produce awful results. Remember LBJs war on poverty that was going to end poverty in a generation?
I can’t fully agree that “Roger Cohen describes the current state of affairs quite accurately”. Though it is a time of unraveling, that state of affairs is directly attributable to the left’s machinations, liberal gullibility and low-info ignorance.
And the unraveling has been predicted by thousands on the right for many years. Cohen’s ignoring of this is at the least, willful blindness.
The “time of beheadings” is a direct result of the West’s refusal to identify its enemy and the left’s sedition and treason.
The “time of aggression” by the leader of the largest nation on earth is the result of Putin taking Obama’s measure and concluding that he is another Chamberlain.
The “time of breakup” is the result of a belief by socialist Scotland that independence and their remaining North Sea oil will allow them to greatly increase their entitlement State and that, if the State seizes all the money through nationalization, they will never run out of “other people’s money”.
The “time of weakness” in the most powerful nation on earth, “tired of far-flung wars, its will and treasury depleted by absence of victory” is the direct result of the left’s machinations and lies. The leftist MSM and democrats made victory impossible, and destroyed America’s will through constant yammering of propaganda.
Nor has the nation under Obama built any bridges despite obscene levels of debt and our education system’s need ‘to be fixed’ is also the direct result of the left’s machinations.
The “time of hatred” with anti-Semitic slogans rising in “the land that invented industrialized mass murder” is the direct result of the left’s demonization of Israel and apologia for Islam’s barbarity.
It is impossible that Cohen doesn’t realize that the right has been predicting this state of affairs for years, as actions having predictable consequences has formed much of the arguments against the left for Cohen’s entire life.
Thus, this is just apologia for the left and gullible liberals. To now ask, ‘who could have known it would come to this?’ is sheer hypocrisy and just another attempt to avoid responsibility so as not to be held accountable. Just another semi-facile attempt to avoid consequence by another of the left’s minions. This man’s intellectual dishonesty is a perfect reflection of all that has gone wrong in America.
GB-The left is always above the circumstances, as though looking down on the masses and lamenting that all their measures are for naught, as in, we won’t be helped. Obama continues to be embraced because he is seen as above the fray. This, a President who has postured himself against half the electorate from the inception of his administration (actually even while campaigning for the Presidency) and is viewed as though circumstances are below him. The willful blindness and state of unreality in the liberal arena is incomprehensible.
Reminds me to ask: Have the Democrats elected as President even one man not seriously troubled by hidden back-story issues which he was working out in public, since FDR? Truman to some extent maybe? And there, by an accident of history?
A wealthy cripple with a lesbian wife; the privileged, wealthy, and driven but physically degenerating son, of an immoral and ruthless father; an amoral man whose aim in life was to win social acceptance and revenge by getting back at the successful ranchers who showed his ineffectual father no respect, and who figured social justice legislation was his way to do it; a droopy faced guilt-ridden weakling with lust in his heart and malaise on his mind; the quasi bastard son of a bigamist (I actually feel sorry for him, on a personal level); the mother-abandoned product of a precocious atheist college kid and her exchange student one night stand, legitimized by a pro-forma marriage and raised either by leftist grandparents or … well you know the story.
The question is: Does this not truly constitute what the Democrat party is in essence, rather than reflect traits that are merely incidental?
A political unraveling?
Hell, they are unraveled humans to start with. And the political effect is nothing more than a generalized expression of these moral and psychological broken wheels rumbling along in social aggregate.
Geoffrey Britain: “It is impossible that Cohen doesn’t realize that the right has been predicting this state of affairs for years”
It is possible because that political class and their followers have disqualified the Right from consideration at step one. Cassandra.
“”Nobody connected the dots or read Kipling…”
Pauline Kael, is that you?
I’m re-reading Paul Johnson’s “History of Christianity,” and have made it through the medieval ages. I was struck by a parallel between the attitude that prevailed and was both cause and effect of the dark ages mentality and the attitude of postmodernism, although by far, I give the latter greater possibility of horror and abuse. If you can call postmodernism an “attitude” as if hate for life, existence and purpose was an attitude! Nonetheless, the pessimism of Augustine, which came to dominate Christianity, created “the dark ages,” and it’s understood that that is a great simplification.
Hopefully, the black arts of postmodernism will not prevail and become the dominant faith. I don’t think they will. Gratefully, although Obama may not be exposed, he is not exactly gaining honors, accolades or trust.
At least Augustine offered hope and salvation whereas postmodernism offers something only to those so dispossessed of hope and salvation that destruction and annihilation are welcomed. This is beyond C.S. Lewis’s “Abolition of Man” in particular, “Men without Chests.” This is just demonic glee and irony of ironies the demons are observed mostly in academia and the degraded spiritual churches of yesteryear who have abandoned God’s chosen people. The common people don’t want to have anything to do with demons.
waitforit-That book is one of my all time favorite reads. If I could only own one book other than the bible, that would be the one, for its first chapter alone. I have probably re-read that chapter 6 times.
I have that book sitting unread on my bookshelf. Looks like it will move up the list rapidly now that 2 posters have endorsed it! I get such an education reading this blog.
I am going to echo Sharon W’s 11:39 am comment. I have 3 children and their spouses who are also my children now, and 5 grandchildren, and a sixth and seventh due in the spring. I am not giving up, too much is at stake, but that said I am also preparing for the great unraveling. Yeat’s rough beast slouches and it remains to be seen if we have the resolve to slay it.
I meant to say, last time “The Gods of the Copybook Headings” came up, that I have this blog to thank for my finally understanding it fully. I had read it before, and got the general idea, of course, but because I didn’t know what the “copybook headings” referred to, I wasn’t entirely sure exactly what these “gods” were.
“It was the time of unraveling. Long afterward, in the ruins, people asked: How could it happen?”
Because the left and their media called anybody who tried to tell them crazy…and the LIVs believed them.
Wendy, 4:31 PM —
Nice and succinct, in a nutshell. All the rest is commentary. And as an added bonus, it’s *true*.
As usual, Geoffrey Britain nailed it.
For “Abolition of Man” fans (that is, fans of the C S Lewis book, not of the liberal abolition), Lewis wrote a novel, “That Hideous Strength,” which explores the themes of that book at greater length and in fictional form….it’s an important book which deserves to be better-read. I reviewed it here:
http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/43802.html
As an Armenian and an avid history buff, I can tell you that the meaning of life is: to work hard, love God, provide for your family, and get killed by Turks. It’s no crime to wish for better, but in the longer term it might not be realistic.
how did it happen?
progressives achieved cintrol over
family, government, economy, religion, and, education
Medicine too…
And they did it with the things a few endlessly crowed about, and were mostly ignored, as ignorance trumped experience deferal was trumped by narcissism, and masturbatory stimulation edged out work ethos
“that state of affairs is directly attributable to the left’s machinations, liberal gullibility and low-info ignorance.”
Actually, it’s much simpler than that.
It’s the rampant, out-and-out dishonesty.
The dishonesty that has infested the political classes, but more so, at this stage, the left of center than the right of center.
It’s the rampant dishonesty that has been purveyed and disseminated and proliferated by the MSM, of which Cohen is himself a most culpable member (and purveyer).
It is the lies and especially anti-Semitism that has been spread globally by the media and the web, and which has been lapped up by so many.
Rampant anti-Semitism was such a good idea for Europe 70 years ago! I suppose the only possible conclusion is that if spread globally, the results will be that much better.
And Europe is, in fact, breaking apart. Pervasive dishonesty does have that effect…
Auden wrote of the 30s as a “dishonest decade”.
Curiously, the current poet laureate of Belgium is an out-and-out Jew hater and writes poems about it.
The cancer has metastisized. The disease has become an epidemic.
Though for some, it will be all worthwhile—if the goal that eluded the Nazis will finally be achieved.
Tidbits to ponder:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2oUJGVwRADU&feature=youtu.be&list=UUpBvIBfZ-foo5ZbLH5O0N4g
http://hurryupharry.org/2014/09/16/sky-news-arabia-bskybs-faustian-pact-with-the-uae-government/
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