Speaking of ivory tower academics, this article by Victor Davis Hanson is an excellent summary of the problem we face as a nation increasingly divided between a political class of officials and courtiers those who manipulate images or move pixels and the country bumpkins who actually dirty their hands creating concrete objects people have to have to survive.
Obama has surrounded himself with legions of ‘fixers.' Bright men and women who have Ivy League law degrees, business school credentials, PhDs in the social sciences, and academic pedigrees in science, humanities, and engineering. Quite impressive, these Platonic Guardians of the soon to be perfect state. But most of their careers in finance, government, business, and academia have been well-paid jobs critiquing, administering, regulating, nuancing, writing about, and hectoring those who create things-builders, developers, industrialists, farmers, truckers, transportation execs, retailers, lenders and investors.
We are being run now by film critics, not directors, book reviewers not writers, music columnists, not musicians. And it is far easier to fault than to birth, nuance rather than build. The irony is that the muscular classes carry the regulating and talking classes on their backs. They don't mind being whipped occasionally and even bridled, but like any good mule will suddenly stop and no longer move when they feel the rider either does not know where he is going, or is going to kill the mule with his switch, spurs, and yanking on the bit.
It sounds like Hanson knows his mules. The courtiers keep talking about 2010 and 2012. I worry that the mules may not be willing to wait that long. Mules are remarkably free from pretense, self loathing or masochism.
Obama is the creation of the political class and I fear they have badly miscalculated what the rest of the nation expects from its leaders. The entrepenuer who brought the smaller version of the Gadsden flag to the Asheville Tea Party was doing a very brisk business on Saturday. That there wasn't a single representative of the local media in evidence suggests that some people are in for a very rude awakening one of these days.
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