As everyone knows, I don’t have guest posts here at my back porch. However, I recently received an email from Longtime Reader Preussenotto, and it is of such outstanding quality that I’ve decided to share it here (with just a couple of grammatical alterations).
Been noticing a theme lately with a lot of my fellow denizens of the blog. Maybe it’s hitting you too. [it is — K.]
Not sure exactly where to start but here goes (I’m not as gifted a writer as the Divine Sarah):
I know you are not an American Football fan/follower. I am. My favorite rooting team happens to be the Pittsburgh Steelers. The Steelers have been owned by the same family since the teams founding and have the reputation of a team that does it the “right” way. There have been periods of great success, and periods of not-so-great achievements. All teams go through this. Lately there’s been a lot of downs.
But to listen to the sports pundits and the fans, and we all seem to be falling into the trap: that because the uniforms haven’t changed, and the ownership hasn’t changed, that the quality of players, scouts, executives, and ownership are all still the same championship caliber it was.
Not so.
There are still those of us out there who fall into the temptation, to believe. This belief is because of an illusion created by reputation. Fans/pundits look at the brand name and think it’s the same thing as it was when you cheered them on as a kid.
I know you were in the retail business. Look at that as an example. We fall into the temptation to believe that a Whirlpool appliance, or a Craftsman tool, or an ACDelco replacement part, is the same because they had a reputation of being a quality item, and it WAS, back in the day. But that reputation is now a complete illusion. Modern appliances, modern Craftsman tools, modern auto parts’ replacements are complete shit in quality. By design. But they have been trading off our brand loyalty forever, and when you see the logo on the package, you THINK you are getting a decent thing.
The above is probably something we have all noticed but let’s transfer it to those of us with a conservative political bent.
We look at the situation facing the British Isles. We Yanks fondly remember Churchill & Thatcher, “This was their finest hour” or “Don’t go wobbly on me, George.” But all of that is a complete illusion. The Brits had the reputation of being stalwarts but with the generations of Third World imports, and Welfare State layabouts… It’s just not the same Britain as it was. The way the Tories ran Britain was an absolute crime, and not fundamentally different from the Labour party.
Its not just the Limeys. Frogland, Krautland, all the Euros have fallen victim to this. It seems the Poles and Hungos & maybe the Serbs still have a sense of who they are, but overall, Europe as a power is an illusion. They are trading on a Brand-Name reputation rather than actual success.
It’s most pronounced here in the States by the Stupid Party (Team Elephant). We all seem to think this is the Party of Ronald Reagan, but it isn’t anymore. Apart from the charlatans and rent-seekers that infest any political activity, the party is overrun by the soft-socialist types who fled the hard-left Team Jackass people. You can call them the Reagan Democrats or Flag Waving Union types, but they brought the soft-socialist ideology into the Stupid Party and moved it left as well.
So today you have the Uniparty. We are all failing into the trap of the Republican Party reputation. But it’s a complete illusion. People say today JFK would be a Republican, that’s not just because Team Jackass went bat-shit-crazy left, but because the Stupid Party cranked left as well. It’s not a credit to the brand. Today’s Republican officeholder has far more in common with Woodrow Wilson, LBJ, FDR than Barry Goldwater or Calvin Coolidge.
But we all are tempted to believe that by checking “R” we are at least getting something of what we want. Maybe we are right, more often we are switching from actual cigarettes to lite cigarettes, hoping the tumor will be smaller, or hoping we’ll get raped by those with smaller dicks.
And I don’t know where to go. The Libertarians are a mess; the Democrats are unthinkable, and I’m too old to start a revolution.
Off to the range, I guess. I still at least am armed.
Thanks again for keeping the last interesting thing alive on the internet.
No, all thanks are due to you, old buddy, for expressing what both I and my Readers are feeling right now.
Tomorrow’s post will be very much part of this same feeling.
