Thursday, June 19, 2008
American?
Back in 1970 or so, I read a probably apocryphal story about British stoicism. A London reporter pursuing a crime story happened to drive through a small town and found it flooded to a depth of two or three feet. He noticed the people were going about their business in an adapted "normal" way, living on the second floor of their houses, wearing boots, and even pushing baby strollers along the top of retaining walls to keep them dry. Since his newspaper hadn't published or even heard anything about this flood, he asked the locals when and how it had happened. Turns out a dam had burst a month before, but nobody had reported it to newspapers or to authorities. Why not? The locals simply assumed the government had its reasons for allowing the flood, and would fix the problem when it was appropriate.
When I first read this story, I marveled at the fatalism. No American would simply assume that Nature was going to have her way, no American would simply assume that the government would get around to fixing something in its own sweet time.
That was before the environmental religion, before the complete takeover by Communists, and before the ascension of George W. Gore. Now, of course, Nature rules supreme. We are not allowed to build dams, not allowed to seed clouds, not allowed to use our own goddamn resources. We are supposed to take inflation and shortages and permanent loss of industry as IRREVERSIBLE Acts of God. We must tolerate and pay for the "religious" claptrap of the Mohammedan savages who are attacking us, and we must allow our government to run Inquisitions and military raids against Christians.
Now the British fatalism doesn't seem strange at all. ¶ 7:35 AM
When I first read this story, I marveled at the fatalism. No American would simply assume that Nature was going to have her way, no American would simply assume that the government would get around to fixing something in its own sweet time.
That was before the environmental religion, before the complete takeover by Communists, and before the ascension of George W. Gore. Now, of course, Nature rules supreme. We are not allowed to build dams, not allowed to seed clouds, not allowed to use our own goddamn resources. We are supposed to take inflation and shortages and permanent loss of industry as IRREVERSIBLE Acts of God. We must tolerate and pay for the "religious" claptrap of the Mohammedan savages who are attacking us, and we must allow our government to run Inquisitions and military raids against Christians.
Now the British fatalism doesn't seem strange at all. ¶ 7:35 AM
