THE BOY WHO WOULD BE KING

by Task

Fifty or so years ago Eric Hoffer quoted Thoreau from a hundred years earlier: ”If anything ail a man, so that he does not perform his functions…he forthwith sets about reforming — the world.” Very few people recognized the psychology behind mass movements, as did Eric Hoffer. Some of these movements have benefited the human condition, as with our Revolution and subsequent Constitution but the majorities have been very destructive. They all have several things in common. Such movements only rise up when conditions, be they good or bad, have been discredited which requires the intellect of men who can simultaneously establish and articulate dissatisfaction while creating a movement as the solution.  They also share something with Newton’s first law of mathematics, which was based upon the recognition that physical mass resists a change in state whether at rest or moving.  In other words they have inertia and although mass movements may be hard to initiate once they are established they are just as hard to slowdown and stop.

In 2008 America experienced much more than a warning shot over her liberty bow. George Bush had been effectively discredited and the solution designed to fundamentally change America had been elected President. America, long recognized as the place that people of the World wished to immigrate to so they and their children and children’s children would experience enduring success and prosperity had been told to believe that her citizens were sinners, who were unfair, were greedy, were arrogant, possessed too much and that there was a much better way, a fairer way, a more friendly, empathetic and compassionate way to become a great nation which would garner World respect and admiration. Now, it was openly said, for the first time in modern history, that the preacher had finally arrived who would sacrifice himself for America’s sins and redeem the once formerly magnificent nation back into the international limelight.

Far Away, on the other side of the Atlantic, at the top of Africa, in Egypt, a people once prosperous for a seven hundred year continuum, were now facing food shortages related to the high price of wheat products as a result of America shifting agricultural resources to the production of corn to make ethanol. The people were uneasy. It was time for a change.

America and Egypt, dissimilar in many ways but not so dissimilar politically were both being eyed by opportunists and true believers. Egypt, however, had an advantage that America did not have.

In 2008, America was mesmerized by a Pied Piper, who, without any economic or military experience, would lead us down a path toward the vision of a shared Utopia. The child that told his mother that he wished to make the World a better place had never grown up to share the values, hopes, and aspirations of so many Americans by living and working among them; among those that lived the American Dream. Instead, he admired men who wished that “God damn America”.  The child that never grew up among us, to be like us, who wished to change America for the better after he grew up, was catapulted, from a highchair, into the Oval Office as President of the most potent military and economic superpower the World has ever experienced. He was indeed been given the tools and power to fundamentally change America and even to change the World, which, to the World’s chagrin, he has tried to do and miserably failed.

Our entire mid-east policy, since 2008 is proving to be an incoherent disaster for the World and especially for America and her Allies. We are constantly and consistently on the wrong side of stability in one of the most critical and volatile regions on the planet. Not seeing the impending disasters that will affect security for our allies and the possibility of exploding fuel costs which is so problematic to a world economy teething on the edge of the very inflation that created the Arab Spring, the Saudi’s and Russians are, now, nervously doing what the American superpower used to do pre Obama when some intelligent Neocons did things with the future in mind.

Had American agriculture not encouraged and subsidized the production of ethanol the price of wheat would have remained stable and there would never have been an Arab Spring that was then used as a subterfuge for American involvement to remove Mubarak and enable the Theocratic Brotherhood to achieve ultimate power. He (Mubarak) may have been a dictator but for the most part he did not dictate. You don’t condone an election process when the powerful and ill-intended Brotherhood has all the historically acquired advantages to suppress the neophyte opposition.

The US is as guilty of fulminating Egypt’s violence as are the Brotherhood which had been salivating for years to establish a Sharia Caliphate in the Mid-East. They want hegemony with them at the regional top. Morsi, as a democratically elected President, was supposedly an American diplomatic achievement. You can only compare what we encouraged and abetted in Egypt to what Jimmy Carter did in Iran by instigating the removal of the Shah followed by encouraging the democratic election of the Ayatollah who then instituted and executed a barbaric Islamic suppressive rule which has no current Christian counterpart anywhere in the World. And, as was then, is now. We garner even additional hate and distrust, not just from our enemies but also from those, who, although not necessarily our friends, would never have had the temerity to make their dislike and absolute hatred, for America, apparent. Is our policy not a strange diplomatic recipe from a man who campaigned on a harmonious paradigm, a utopia based upon the shared values of democracy and wealth re-distribution sautéed in a Kumbaya international broth minus the arrogant capitalistic American ingredient that the World previously found to be so distasteful despite her shedding her blood and giving of her treasure? And yet while this harmonious play was being choreographed, by those involved, where was the republican leadership such as the McCain and Graham duet and other republican mouthpieces? They actually supported this. Where are the Neocons when we really need them?

In the name of democracy, peace and compassion our foreign policy has been as disastrous as our domestic economic policy based upon a top down structure which determines who should get what and how much and to hell with the entrepreneurial spirit of capitalism and free markets. Now if you are not going to let the World theatre play out, unmolested, and must intervene, for the sake of being liked, or whatever, then at least do something that is not so incalculably wrong. I use that term because the damage that is being done has not yet been fully calculated.

Egypt had one distinct advantage over America. For decades. Gamal Abdel Nasser, Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak prevented the Brotherhood from gaining power. They understood the Brotherhood that most of us don’t; but Obama does. It was Obama, under the guise of democracy, that insured that they would obtain power. It was they, with Obama’s help, that formed the coup to overthrow Mubarak, our ally. How could any thinking and rational politician with but a modicum of international diplomacy not see that contracts with America and Israel would be at risk? And in the process so many people would be subject to forced Sharia under a Brotherhood government. This cannot be an accident.

The Egyptian military, crafted by Mubarak, understood what had happened. The Egyptian press did as well. And so did the Egyptian people. Only the American press would remain deceived while Obama crafted a deal with the Brotherhood in our own White House. The Egyptians have their military to rescue them from tyranny. We don’t. It is time for Americans to awaken and reignite their affection for our Constitution, to demand that our representatives use the power of the principles that they swore to uphold. It is the only protection that we have from the tyrannical dreams of the boy who would be king should we, otherwise, tragically, fail.