Michael Oberndorf
The Democrat dystopia
By Michael Oberndorf
We often hear the claim that the end result of Democrat/progressive/Marxist policies is a utopian society where everyone is equal on every level, no one is ever offended, much less racist, everyone has meaningful, self-fulfilling employment, and we all eat cake and live happily ever after. I've always wondered, though, that if this is the natural outcome of Marxist communism, why does it always need to be enforced at the point of a gun by a totalitarian police state? And since the progressive Democrats, currently led by Barack Hussein Obama and associates, are implementing just such a system here in America, what exactly are the quantifiable results of their laser-like focus, their "I've never worked harder in my life," efforts?
Since the ever-so cogent and comprehensible House Minority Leader (snicker, snicker), Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is a major cheerleader for taxpayer subsidies for artists and the arts, let's take a look at what the last 50 years of the Democrat welfare state and Entitlement Plantation she claims is so successful have achieved.
Who, for instance, are America's current great painters? Andy Warhol? Nope. He hasn't done anything worth mentioning since the 1970s, and many would argue that his stuff then was just commercial art with a twist. How about Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko? Nope, again. Done by the 1970s, and many have trouble calling what they and their lesser-known colleagues produced, art. In fact, perusing a list of hundreds of contemporary "artists," it's unlikely that the overwhelming majority of Americans would recognize more than a couple, if any, of the names (http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/American-artists-20thb.html).
The same can be said of sculptors. The last well-known sculptor whose work was displayed in public was a guy in the 1960s named Jacque Lipschitz. His work mostly looks like gigantic piles of dog poop, but Democrat city governments like Philadelphia's paid big bucks for it. Recently, the State Department, presided over by ever-so-sophisticated-and-enlightened John Kerry – who, BTW, speaks French! – paid out $1,000,000.00 for a "sculpture" that is a stack of rectangular rocks, made by someone you've never heard of. This stuff is a far, far cry from Frederick Remington.
Playwrights and novelists have suffered the same fate. No one has written anything that even remotely could be considered classic plays or novels since the 1960s. The smutty, perverted garbage cranked out now may be here today, but will be gone by day-after-tomorrow. Great architects have suffered the same fate too, albeit at a somewhat slower rate.
The cinema, too, is a crass, crude, coarse shadow of what it used to be. Departed are movies like Gone with the Wind and Casablanca, along with the actors who starred in them, actors who understood that their wealth, derived from their stardom, came as a result of working in a free, capitalist country. Most were proud patriots, grateful to America for the riches bestowed on them. Today's actors, directors, producers, etc. are mostly inconsequential, elitist pipsqueaks who think that providing people with a couple of hours of mindless, escapist, largely leftist entertainment entitles them to vast wealth and privilege, and makes them qualified to demand that the rest of us submit to collectivist progressivism.
America's politics and politicians, too, reflect the degeneration brought on by decades of Democrat decadence. Other than Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, we have not had a federal politician or political appointee that could even remotely be classified as a statesman. Far from it. Instead, we have been subjected to evermore self-serving corruption and incompetence, with a tsunami of evermore restrictive laws and regualtions forced upon us, mostly unconstitutional but allowed to stand by an equally corrupt and incompetent judiciary, and a Congress that has ceded most of its constitutional powers to the executive branch, thus destroying the checks and balances that were the heart and foundation of the American Constitution.
Politicians today see themselves as a new ruling class, a new aristocracy, once elected forever entitled to endless re-election, regardless of the fact that none of them do squat for constitutional America and We, the People. Political "dynasties" are becoming more and more common, with the offspring of politicians like the Kennedys, the Clintons, the Carters, the Landrieus, the Bushes, and the Cheneys, to name some of the better known ones, and globalists, every one.
Add this to the rise, particularly since 2009 and the advent of the Chosen One "coming among us," of what many see as an emerging police state, e.g., https://www.rutherford.org/a_government_of_wolves/; an educational system deliberately aimed at dumbing down and indoctrinating America's children e.g., http://michellemalkin.com/?s=%22common+core%22; an economy intentionally taken to the verge of collapse; a burgeoning welfare state; a government giving aid and comfort to the radical rise of Islamic Jihad; the encouragement of Shariah Law in the United States; the suppression of Christianity and the promotion of amorality and atheism, and you have the unmistakable harbingers of a New Dark Age. The question for We, the People is, can we prevent this coming Democrat Dystopia? It seems to me, that while we must surely pray to God for rescue from this sinking Ship of State, it is just as sure that God expects us to actually pick up the oars, and row for shore.
© Michael Oberndorf
December 8, 2013
We often hear the claim that the end result of Democrat/progressive/Marxist policies is a utopian society where everyone is equal on every level, no one is ever offended, much less racist, everyone has meaningful, self-fulfilling employment, and we all eat cake and live happily ever after. I've always wondered, though, that if this is the natural outcome of Marxist communism, why does it always need to be enforced at the point of a gun by a totalitarian police state? And since the progressive Democrats, currently led by Barack Hussein Obama and associates, are implementing just such a system here in America, what exactly are the quantifiable results of their laser-like focus, their "I've never worked harder in my life," efforts?
Since the ever-so cogent and comprehensible House Minority Leader (snicker, snicker), Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is a major cheerleader for taxpayer subsidies for artists and the arts, let's take a look at what the last 50 years of the Democrat welfare state and Entitlement Plantation she claims is so successful have achieved.
Who, for instance, are America's current great painters? Andy Warhol? Nope. He hasn't done anything worth mentioning since the 1970s, and many would argue that his stuff then was just commercial art with a twist. How about Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko? Nope, again. Done by the 1970s, and many have trouble calling what they and their lesser-known colleagues produced, art. In fact, perusing a list of hundreds of contemporary "artists," it's unlikely that the overwhelming majority of Americans would recognize more than a couple, if any, of the names (http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/American-artists-20thb.html).
The same can be said of sculptors. The last well-known sculptor whose work was displayed in public was a guy in the 1960s named Jacque Lipschitz. His work mostly looks like gigantic piles of dog poop, but Democrat city governments like Philadelphia's paid big bucks for it. Recently, the State Department, presided over by ever-so-sophisticated-and-enlightened John Kerry – who, BTW, speaks French! – paid out $1,000,000.00 for a "sculpture" that is a stack of rectangular rocks, made by someone you've never heard of. This stuff is a far, far cry from Frederick Remington.
Playwrights and novelists have suffered the same fate. No one has written anything that even remotely could be considered classic plays or novels since the 1960s. The smutty, perverted garbage cranked out now may be here today, but will be gone by day-after-tomorrow. Great architects have suffered the same fate too, albeit at a somewhat slower rate.
The cinema, too, is a crass, crude, coarse shadow of what it used to be. Departed are movies like Gone with the Wind and Casablanca, along with the actors who starred in them, actors who understood that their wealth, derived from their stardom, came as a result of working in a free, capitalist country. Most were proud patriots, grateful to America for the riches bestowed on them. Today's actors, directors, producers, etc. are mostly inconsequential, elitist pipsqueaks who think that providing people with a couple of hours of mindless, escapist, largely leftist entertainment entitles them to vast wealth and privilege, and makes them qualified to demand that the rest of us submit to collectivist progressivism.
America's politics and politicians, too, reflect the degeneration brought on by decades of Democrat decadence. Other than Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, we have not had a federal politician or political appointee that could even remotely be classified as a statesman. Far from it. Instead, we have been subjected to evermore self-serving corruption and incompetence, with a tsunami of evermore restrictive laws and regualtions forced upon us, mostly unconstitutional but allowed to stand by an equally corrupt and incompetent judiciary, and a Congress that has ceded most of its constitutional powers to the executive branch, thus destroying the checks and balances that were the heart and foundation of the American Constitution.
Politicians today see themselves as a new ruling class, a new aristocracy, once elected forever entitled to endless re-election, regardless of the fact that none of them do squat for constitutional America and We, the People. Political "dynasties" are becoming more and more common, with the offspring of politicians like the Kennedys, the Clintons, the Carters, the Landrieus, the Bushes, and the Cheneys, to name some of the better known ones, and globalists, every one.
Add this to the rise, particularly since 2009 and the advent of the Chosen One "coming among us," of what many see as an emerging police state, e.g., https://www.rutherford.org/a_government_of_wolves/; an educational system deliberately aimed at dumbing down and indoctrinating America's children e.g., http://michellemalkin.com/?s=%22common+core%22; an economy intentionally taken to the verge of collapse; a burgeoning welfare state; a government giving aid and comfort to the radical rise of Islamic Jihad; the encouragement of Shariah Law in the United States; the suppression of Christianity and the promotion of amorality and atheism, and you have the unmistakable harbingers of a New Dark Age. The question for We, the People is, can we prevent this coming Democrat Dystopia? It seems to me, that while we must surely pray to God for rescue from this sinking Ship of State, it is just as sure that God expects us to actually pick up the oars, and row for shore.
© Michael Oberndorf
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