Dear Reader (including – but just barely – those of you who send me spelling corrections and grammatical fixes to the G-File even though you know that I can’t recall the e-mail and fix it after the fact),

I’m not in a great place mentally to be penning this journalistic-tidings epistle – normally referred to as a “news”letter.

I find politics pretty depressing, even though as a matter of conviction and constitution I believe in being a happy warrior. Part of the problem is simply the news climate. I hate “budget showdown” stories. They’re kind of like Swedish cinema: tedious on the surface but deeply depressing underneath. The tedious part is obvious enough (“Baseline!” “static scoring!” “Chuck Schumer said . . .” “Medicare reformmmmmzzzzzzzzzz . . .”).

(Note, I’m not saying it’s unimportant. One of the great mistakes of youth is to conflate boringness and insignificance. And one of the great signs of maturity is understanding that just because something is a chore doesn’t mean it’s unimportant. Biology bores me. But biology is important. I’m not hugely interested in food-safety issues, but food safety is hugely important. Indeed, a lesson I hope to impress upon my daughter is that if she thinks history is boring the fault lies not in history but in her.)

The depressing part is that the forces of truth and light always seem to lose. Always. Sometimes those of us who want to constrain government lose less badly than other times. But at no point do we ever win, at least not not for long or in my lifetime.

M.E.O.W.: Now, and Forever

Off the top of my head (and the G-File is nothing if not off the top of my head), there were only two times in the 20th century when the size and scope of the U.S. government were radically pared back: after World War I and after World War II. It turns out that the desire to “return to normalcy” after horrific total wars is a great boon for limited government. What complicates things is that we don’t have total wars anymore (which, in itself, is obviously a good thing).

Also, since the dawn of the progressive era, liberalism has been about trying to make “normalcy” as indistinguishable from war mobilization as possible. For the history part, you can read one of my books (or one of countless columns and G-Files I’ve written on the “moral equivalent of war” thing). Or you can listen to Barack Obama in his last State of the Union address.

He said of the military:

At a time when too many of our institutions have let us down, they exceed all expectations. They’re not consumed with personal ambition. They don’t obsess over their differences. They focus on the mission at hand. They work together. Imagine what we could accomplish if we followed their example. Think about the America within our reach.

Ah, yes, what a wonderful country America would be if we would just all shut up, fall in line, work together, and suppress our personal ambitions. All that would be required is mothballing the individual pursuit of happiness, not to mention several items on the Bill of Rights.

The dream of progressivism is to make our domestic life like that of a warlike nation without actually going to war.

Crickets

Anyway, what was I talking about? Oh right, the ennui of budget battles. What inevitably happens is one of three things. Either both sides decide that real cuts are just too politically painful, and they kick the can down the road. Or, they decide that real cuts are just too politically painful and opt simply to raise taxes instead. Or, they do come to a real and meaningful bargain whereby tax hikes are traded for significant cuts to non-defense spending, putting our country on a path to fiscal sanity. The only hitch? It turns out that the Democrats were lying about the spending cuts, but the taxes hikes are real enough and go into effect immediately.

Now, like pulling fur from the rump of a polar bear, this sort of thing can’t go on forever. Eventually, the bear will turn around and eat your face and nibble on your savory organ meats. It’s Stein’s law: “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.”

At some point, America’s political leaders will have to address our problems in a meaningful way or they will go down with the ship. But waiting for that to happen can be a huge drag. It’s like someone telling you that cricket is a really exciting sport, all you have to do is watch thousands of hours of boring nonsensical “action” for the payoff. Except, watching budget battles isn’t like watching cricket. Cricket is televised. Budget battles take place behind closed doors. So, it’s more like watching cricket commentary, which may be slow but it’s also indecipherable and beside the point. And you know what? The commentators can’t really see the action either. The best they get are reports from the players about what the players claimed happened or is happening. At this point the cricket analogy is about as played out as the final season of The Brady Bunch, and introducing cousin Oliver won’t save it. But you get the point.

Math, Horrible Math

The other day I watched a presentation by Nicholas Eberstadt, my colleague at the American Enterprise Institute. I sat next to Dick Cheney, which was very cool. Eberstadt delivered a Powerpoint-fueled buzzkill based on his new treatise A Nation of Takers. He began by telling the audience that he had only 20 to 30 minutes to make us all depressed. He used his time well!

The gist of his very short book is that the nature of American society has been transformed by an entitlement explosion. I don’t want to get too deep into this because I’m thinking of a bigger piece for the magazine on a related subject, but the data he ran through was just so depressing, I was sorely tempted to ask Dick Cheney to take me hunting, if you know what I mean.

Anyway, if you want to see some of the slides from his presentation you can find them here. One of the charts not shown here is the one comparing entitlement spending to military spending. As you know from all of the cricketbudget commentary, defense spending is often cited as if it’s the right-wing equivalent of entitlement spending. This is nonsense. First of all, defense is a core constitutional function. Funding disability fraud? Not so much.

Moreover, defense spending as a share of GDP has been trending down for a very long time, while government – and overwhelmingly, entitlements – have been growing as a share of GDP. As Eberstadt explained, the debate over military spending is really an argument about “how to make the world safe for our entitlement spending.”

Faith Lost, Faith Restored

So about my funk. Some of it has to do with stuff not ripe for sharing in this “news”letter. But part of it stems from a very real exhaustion with the nuts and bolts of everyday punditry. The loss in November means many bad things of greater significance than my ability to maintain my professional joie de vivre,never mind my ability to read to the 37th paragraph in the Washington Post analysis of the budget talks. But, the prospect of looking at four more years of this guy in office has me, well, bummed. Yes, in my more high-minded moments I’m bummed for the country and for my daughter’s future. But in my self-indulgent states of mind, I’m bummed because I just don’t want to see or talk about Barack Obama anymore. There’s nothing more draining than the Wheel of Pain. But coming not too far behind is the prospect of living in a country where the president and his party are making the country worse while listening to the self-appointed cognoscenti insist you’re a fool or a racist for saying so.

At the same time, our supposed leaders – some decent, intelligent, and wise, some not – just aren’t that good at changing the conversation, never mind the actual direction of the country. What’s depressing is not the fight, but the nature of how it will need to be fought.

I have no desire to become one of those inside-the-Beltway pundits who starts to look like what he writes about – heck I never planned to do this for a living in the first place. I wanted to write comic books and sci-fi novels. Contemplating the columns I’ll have to write for the next four years conjures that old line by Nietzsche about how when ”you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.”

But then, like when the waitress tells Tommy Boy she can turn on the buffalo-wing fryers after all, there’s a glimmer of hope on the psychological horizon (and the hardening of spine that comes with it). You know what? I haven’t lost any of my idealism, what I’ve lost is a certain amount of patience with the people who claim to share my ideals. A man on a quest may grow frustrated with the inadequacies of his map or exasperated with the incompetence of his guide, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s lost his desire to reach his destination.

As with nearly all things, Chesterton said it best (when speaking of a liberalism very different from what goes by that name today):

[BLOCK]When the business man rebukes the idealism of his office-boy, it is commonly in some such speech as this: “Ah, yes, when one is young, one has these ideals in the abstract and these castles in the air; but in middle age they all break up like clouds, and one comes down to a belief in practical politics, to using the machinery one has and getting on with the world as it is.” Thus, at least, venerable and philanthropic old men now in their honoured graves used to talk to me when I was a boy. But since then I have grown up and have discovered that these philanthropic old men were telling lies. What has really happened is exactly the opposite of what they said would happen. They said that I should lose my ideals and begin to believe in the methods of practical politicians. Now, I have not lost my ideals in the least; my faith in fundamentals is exactly what it always was. What I have lost is my old childlike faith in practical politics. I am still as much concerned as ever about the Battle of Armageddon; but I am not so much concerned about the General Election. As a babe I leapt up on my mother’s knee at the mere mention of it. No; the vision is always solid and reliable. The vision is always a fact. It is the reality that is often a fraud. As much as I ever did, more than I ever did, I believe in Liberalism. But there was a rosy time of innocence when I believed in Liberals. [BLOCK]

Anyway, I may need to mix up my pitches – just like my metaphors – for a while just to stay sane. But I still believe in conservatism, it’s just Republicans I’m having trouble believing in.

Various & Sundry

Sticking with the themes of exhaustion and boredom, here’s my column today on the triteness of the Left.

Oh, and just for the record, I’m kind of fascinated with boredom (I discuss it in both Liberal Fascism and Tyranny of Clichés). Here’s an intriguing piece on the subject.

So I posted this in the Corner yesterday. I learned from the comments section that it’s a goblin shark. Remember the old joke(s) about how the bestselling book ever would be something on Abraham Lincoln’s Nazi dog? Books about Lincoln, Nazis, and dogs sell, so clearly a book about all three would be boffo. This thing looks like someone thought merging Jaws and Alien would be the perfect idea for a movie. All it’s missing is a light saber.

Anyway, I find it impermissibly, outrageously, creepy.

A while back I expressed my patriotic outrage that more wasn’t being done to protect us from giant frick’n snakes from the country formerly known as Burma. Well, it finally looks like there’s a little progress.

Obviously, the real answer is to genetically mutate the goblin sharks to eat the Burmese pythons.

Fun times at AEI! Both Ramesh Ponnuru – yes that Ramesh Ponnuru – and Tim Carney have joined me at AEI. They’re both visiting fellows, but I’m hoping the visiting part will change. I know everyone is talking about Heritage these days because of the DeMint news. But the truth is AEI is the most interesting and influential think tank in the world, and I’m delighted it’s only getting more interesting and influential thanks to additions like Ponnuru and Carney.

Hey, if you sent me a self-addressed-stamped-envelope and never got a signed bookplate can you let me know? It was a bit of a logistical mess, but I think I’ve taken care of all of the requests. Oh, and the Tyranny of Clichés does make a great stocking stuffer (or if you prefer a “Chanukah sock filler”). Indeed, speaking of ToC, the new Claremont Review of Books has a review by none other than the great Steve Hayes. He concludes (I know, spoiler alert!):

[BLOCK]One suspects that readers will be left thinking of these Golbergian deconstructions long after they’ve finished his book, in much the same way that readers of William Safire’s On Language columns remembered his exhortations on the proper use of “begging the question” or “hopefully.” Consider “let them eat cake,” for example. Not only did Marie Antoinette probably never utter the phrase, it meant pretty much the opposite of what modern liberals intend when they use it to suggest conservatives are stingy aristocrats.

As a follow-up to his best-selling and deeply researched Liberal Fascism (2008), Jonah Goldberg’s new book confirms his reputation as one of the sharpest, funniest, and yet most serious of contemporary conservative writers. Coming as it does in the heart of this political year, and dealing as it does with the kinds of hackneyed aphorisms that have come to define contemporary political discourse, The Tyranny of Clichés provides an indispensable and enduring field guide to the arguments the Left makes – and the ones it tries to avoid. [BLOCK]

Goodbye!