PART II:
    When you woke up Wednesday morning you may have been surprised to see it all seemed like business as usual. There were no burning cars in the streets. Regis was still on NBC yammering mindlessly on about how well Kelly looked in her new pumps. Only on 24/7 news stations was there that little afterglow, like a recently de-virgined bride the day after her wedding night. You can expect the media's oral congress given this story to last another 6 weeks, but if you're not a news junkie, things will seem altogether normal.
    And it will be the same on the day after Obama is inaugurated.
    But soon after that things will begin to change. There is actually a plan (we don't know what it is, but have two-three ideas as to how it might play out) and if things are allowed to go according to plan, the changes will be subtle, or least reported to you subtly, as no big deal. That will be the new role of the national media, to pull a veil over
    We report this in three parts. Yesterday we looked at those things that can throw the Plan off course from acts outside the US. Today we look at the soul of socialism.
   
     America becoming a socialist nation is a case of first instance, as the lawyers call it. It's never happened before. So how we will navigate the seas of socialism will be a work in progress. To be sure, we've had some heavy doses of socialism since the New Deal, in the 1930s (only we didn't know it) just as we had some smaller doses of fascism in the early 1900s (according to some history revisionists) where, once again, we never knew it. But we've never had the Full Monty.
    But first a little background, especially since part of the game that is about to unfold will be based on 1) how many people know what socialism is but don't like it, 2) but do like it, 3) how may people don't know anything about socialism but heard it was bad because they heard their daddy say something about it at the dinner table, 4) how may people don't know anything about socialism but don't care as long as the check's on time, or a black man is finally in the White House, or Dick Cheney finally gets his, 5) how many people believe they're  finally going to get to go over and kick their rich neighbor's behind, or 6) how many would change their minds if we called it "communism" instead of "socialism".
    Once upon a time we were run by kings, and a lot of Americans died to be free of that king, but rather than just hang enemies (or chop off their heads) those early Americans sat down and crafted documents listing what the king had done wrong, and why, in God's nature,  it was fit an proper to rise up in arms and throw him out. Once done, many of those same men then crafted a document that established principles by which they chose to live by and govern themselves. They were built on the freedom of the individual and reciprocity with his neighbors, and the limitations on government, especially its powers to interfere with those men's private lives.
     I know you know all this, but this is no longer commonly accepted, much less approved history in America. If you know these things, and you are under 40, you probably learned it somewhere other than school. Even a lot of kids in college don't know this simple stuff.
     The ideal of freedom is as ancient as Man, but it has never been expressed as well as those men who crafted the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution. What probably has never been taught well enough in school or at home is that this new ideal of freedom was always considered to be a bad thing in many parts of the world and parts of our own society. For one, clearly nations with a history of royalty and aristocracy don't like the idea of common men and women managing their lives without their oversight. Even among men who became rich by pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps, many become so full of themselves they believed what they had accomplished could first be bottled, then second, force-fed to others...at a price, of course. Elitism and wannabe-elitism.
      Karl Marx, however came at this kind of elitism from a different route. But he was no more, no less an elitist than JP Morgan. He hated what European capitalists were doing to their workers. You would, too, come to think of it, but German capitalism never quite caught on in America. For one, some of our finest engineers in 1890 were Germans who came here to escape it, just like Indian engineers come here today to avoid India's political "merit system". But Marx never saw this. He never had a chance to see American capitalists go through their paces, which totally invalidated many of his most solid "laws" of how capitalism worked. Marx missed entirely how middle management "added value", or how through stock markets ventures turned into risks that earned rewards when they succeeded. Marx never understood risk. Marx missed entirely how money was actually created in American capitalism, especially by the middle class. Marx only saw the middle class as petty bourgeoisie; retailers and middle man brokers, who he generally associated with Jews...who he also despised. He saw the middle class as adding price without adding value. He was wrong. In fact, American capitalism totally repudiated Marxism from the git-go...except at the university, where, unless you haven't been paying attention, they all, even the good ones, produce nothing except better minds who do.
      Karl Marx missed it, but being an elitist, he would never have been able to admit this, even to himself. But his error was not based of miscalculating the technical aspects of capitalism (Das Kapital is a dreary read, one of the few books we suggest Cliff's Notes as a preferred substitute.). Marx's central error was in his general disdain for the proletariat (the working classes) he said he hoped to see raised up...to his level. (In a kindly, narcissistic way, I think he actually meant it. although, in much the same way the French say to be French is to be francaise.). Marx believed he could design a type of government that would some day raise the working classes up to be more like him, in harmony with their intellectual potential, where one they too could all sit in a coffee house debating the topics of the day, never stopping to seriously wonder just who it would be that would be cutting the coffee bean, grinding it, setting the table, laying in the glass windows, sweeping the floor, and finally cleaning up after he'd gone home. Like his counterparts today, Marx never stopped to think where his physical world ever came from in the first place. He never stopped to think where the mental acumen to create a simple bar of soap, and the need for it, came from.
      But at a more personal level, he never stopped to think that of the hundreds of people who actually knew him, not to mention the millions who didn't, not one ever wanted to be like Karl Marx. For you see, no one liked him. He was an arse...and we've found this to be the case with most socialists as they wind their way through academe and the bureaucracy. They are very unlikable and come into puberty with a Them versus Us attitude fully developed.
     So it figures, Marx's suggestion, called communism, became an instant hit with people just like him, especially in universities around Europe. They were all intellectual prigs, arrogant losers anyway, who assumed, because they couldn't get a date with the Homecoming Queen it was because they were oh, so very smart...instead of being just oh, so very boorish. The great irony here is that Marx hoped to create a society built on true equality and harmony, but in order to get there it required a government built on massive layers of bureaucracies, almost completely armed with minions whose greatest hatred were for the same coarse, brutish masses (the working class) they were charged with elevating and saving...and who always seemed to get the girl. You can't get there from here.
     Consequently, in America, men and women who actually went out and built a thing, or worked for men who built things, a business, a hotel, a car, a bridge, a highway, etc, etc, etc, by 1890 found war being made against them on two fronts. Every generation has had its nouveau riche who believed they had a better idea about how men's lives could improve, but once they wrote the book the mood usually passed. A few moved onto Congress. We also had our Leona Helmsley's and John Kerry's (the mere spouses of others who built things...or with Kerry, the spouse of a spouse, which is as close to gigilo as Senate rules will allow); Lady and Sir Disdain. But then came this rising tide of ne'er do well bureaucrats, professors, and other clip board carriers, who bore a deep seated resentment, a la, Karl Marx for people they considered to be beneath them in intellect and perception, but who nevertheless, always seemed to make more money, drive bigger cars, find time to play golf, go fishing, laugh, and get a date with the Homecoming Queen. Damn their eyes! There has to be something wrong with any system  that allows this sort of fundamental unfairness exist and persist, where the boobs have all the fun. After 100 years this has turned into a sort of pathological narcissism, and as we wrote in these pages earlier, has now become part of a consensus majority in America.
       Trust me, there is a difference, although often hard to see, between say John Kerry and true socialists in America. This is why we predict some interesting internal struggles in this New Messianic Era that would be fun to watch, if only we could.  But we doubt we'll be able to, and, unlike tell-all books when administrations end, those sorts of squabbles usually are not reported until the whole regime falls, which may take 40-70 years, if at all.
       Socialism at its heart is all about getting even  about fundamental unfairnesses in society, not the economy, and while it pretends to elevate, it demeans...everyone... to the lowest common denominator to a kind of suffering you may not be familiar with and which we will spell out in Part III. Socialism is and always has been about the rule of the many by a select few, and this is where, for awhile at least, 1-2 generations, there will be common ground between the John Kerry's of the America and the brown shirts of thug socialism.
BChumm