Last night’s spectacle was as monstrous and dispiriting as expected. Have you ever noticed how intensely self-important people like to be announced? “Mr. Speaker, the Undersecretary of Bumfodder!” Depressing stuff, and a mark of shame on all who participate.
But what’s really striking to me is how old-fashioned all this nonsense is. The assembled worthies really ought to be wearing lace collars like figures from a Joachim Wtewael portrait. Ronald Reagan joked that there’s no one as conservative as a union man renegotiating his benefits, but Barack Obama might be giving him some competition, with his insistence that our current menu of Bismarckian social programs, the roots of which are in 19th century organizational thinking, are uniquely fixed points in the social universe. Social Security is a product of 1934—do you rely on many other products designed in the 1930s for anything that’s important? (Even the venerable Colt 1911 has been significantly modified over the years.) Of course not. Why would you want a 1934 standard of retirement security, or a 1934 standard of much of anything?
Very strange that Americans driving around in hydrogen fuel-cell powered cars that produce no emissions other than water are forced to rely on an antique and dysfunctional financial product for a significant share of their retirement incomes, and on another equally defective program for much of their health insurance in old age. And there’s President Obama in his Mosaic pose, pointing us toward the sunlight uplands of . . . the 1930s.
Most peculiar.