When you woke up November 5th you may have been surprised to see it all seemed like business as usual. Even though you knew there had been a momentous "Change" (The official mantra of this new era, expect to see it on a stamp w/i four years), as promised, there was a comforting sameness in your world; on television, in the newspapers, at the mall and grocery store. Only on the news shows does the beat go on, and seriously, who bothers to watch that anymore?
    It will be the same on the day after Obama is inaugurated.
    But soon after that things will begin to change, if ever so subtly. In Part III, about the flow of information we described how this seeming lack of change in your life is supposed to play out, and why, over time, you will actually know less and less about what's really going on...anywhere.  The first 20 years are crucial. For socialism to work, even in Sweden, there has to be a veil of secrecy between the real players and the people.
    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), and we never really did get rid of...70 years worth. But we've never had the Full Monty.
    So how "Change" will occur depends on 1) the true intentions of the in-coming Players, and 2) how deftly they manage their manipulations in the early days, and 3) how much resistance they get first, from the people, and secondly from the de-frocked useful idiots in the press, Congress, and the public at large donors once they find out that instead of a wedding all they got was a wham-bam-thank-you-ma'm with the Messianic Army. (I never get tired of poking a finger into the ribs of those about-to-be jilted maidens, that while Lenin and the Bolsheviks fought a vicious 4-year civil war with the tsarists... first, he dispatched all the liberals and mensheviks and other commie-lites that had helped them attain power...just so he wouldn't have be looking over he shoulder and listening to all that caterwauling.)
     There are three basic types I can think of on short order. First, and most prominent in the minds of wannabe-American socialists is the European model, what I call Swedish Lite. All over Europe now, it's a benign, cancerous sort of nanny-socialism, where everyone just sort of goes around in a life of tranquil bliss with never a worry in the world, as long as that life isn't too broad. Imagine how much nicer that would be in a country where there was sunshine nine months out of the year? That's how the Americans Left sees European socialism. They have better wines, manners, history...but we have more sunshine and beach houses. Swedish-Lite is where the state doesn't own the means of production but controls most of it. You can still be rich, but only with a state license to be rich. That sort of thing. (More on this, as we go along.)
     Second is the Soviet model itself, communism, which is Socialism Dark, where everything is torn down, then rebuilt from scratch....and usually by people who don't know much about building. But what they do build, the state owns it all. This is how most Americans growing up in the 50s saw communism, and because of  the USSR, the Iron Curtain countries, and Mao's China, it was all very real. We can dispense with this model rather quickly....unless there are some real paranoid psychopaths behind this new Change. (We doubt it.) Euro-Socialism Lite's beef with Soviet-style communism is that the USSR was run by (duh!) Russians who, by European standards were oafish and barbaric in the first place. ("Scratch a Russian and you'll find a Tartar" didn't get into the lexicon of put-downs accidentally.) They handled Marx like an ape might handle bone china. To most left leaning Euros and Americans, it was homo Rus and it's imprimatur that brought down the USSR. (We disgaree.)
     The Soviet experiment was closer to the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror than anything seen since. We don't think that can happen here.
     The third possibility is what I call Socialism Amber, socialism with an edge. That edge can come in all sorts of varietals; just look at any Sam Adams menu and you'll see how many you can have. I remember a little mini-brewery beerhaus in Estonia where, it would have taken a month just to try all the different brews. (That was a post-communism addition to the city, by the way.)
     We've already been given some hint as to the edge the Obamailis may bring to government, most prominent among them "getting even". Only how, and on what account? Getting even itself carries on many different shades of dark...er, amber...as there is the getting even as expressed by Reverend Wright, who we consider no more than a carny con-artist (but who may prove to be just the opposite) and Louis Farrakan, who has shown time and time again (in the Sudan) that blackness is always subordinated to his version of Islam, especially if the blacks are Christians. He is a virulent hate-monger. Both have deeply guarded secrets, but both also have gotten rich by telling other people they can "get even" just by watching others being brought down. Talk about cheap pick-me-ups. The election of Obama, with nothing else, was an act of getting even for millions of Americans...who now must reap the whirlwind. They won't like it, but it will be too late. So we will see all the ways getting even will play into governance in the coming days.
     One will have to parse very carefully the words of Obama and his closest associates; to Obama's openly expressed favor for Islam if he had to make the choice, to the notion that many of the poor, welfare dependent blacks will have to sacrifice under the New Change. He said it, and of course they weren't listening, and clearly never thought was part of the bargain, but it remains to be seen how those straight words and twisted perceptions finally become untangled. (We also note only as an observation, that as soon as the election results were known, beginning with that speech in Chicago, Michelle has taken 3 full steps back, into the shadow of her husband. Just like a dutiful Muslim wife? Our first words on Obama almost a year ago was that his connections to Islam were simply too many, albeit murky, to trust. We will watch and wait. But if so, then getting even may become very dark, indeed,)
     With that in mind, getting even can become even a greater source of concern if, as hinted, those young men who are suddenly going to have to go out and find work, find that work in the new national police component of AmeriCorps, a la Farrakhan's private army. When a president enters office already feeling the need for a Praetorian Guard, there is room for worry.
     (We're making a list of get-evens which we may report later. Feel free to submit.)
     Finally, I note in a serious but also mocking way about Bill Ayers and other old 60's radicals who may now be Players, and who will haunt the back porch of this administration (Sol Alinsky's works and deeds need to be looked at more clearly and with more dispassion, considering the fact he may have defined the only way constitutionalists will be able to retake their republic, i.e., community action); their brand of Marxism is also a get-even Marxism. But in truth, get-even Marxism in America is pure Marxism, for most radical Marxists bear the same social pathologies and insecurities as did Marx himself; an incredible, almost narcissistic self-love and selfishness, a despising of any achievement and rewards by any man he considered beneath him intellectually (which was almost everyone). This covered the entire economic spectrum, from industrial capitalist to the petty bourgeoisie, excluding only the poor lamentable worker. They were the only people Marx could both feel superior to and rest assured who would never rise above him economically, although he was a terrible mooch. Communist noblesse oblige. Ayers probably couldn't get a date with the Homecoming Queen either.
     The social psychology of hardcore Marxists and Swedish Lites alike are an interesting subject, which I've enjoyed poking fun at for years. Both came from that group of Americans who Moses Sands described as defining themselves entirely by what they were against and who they were not; the banal, the  mundane, the common...and just why is it those guys still get the bigger car, house and the prom queen? Isn't it ironic that those who worship Darwin the most like the applications of his natural selection laws least?
     We expect a competition between the Swedish Lites and Socialist Ambers in the coming months. It all depends on where Obama stands and we are fairly certain he is Amber. While they share certain views about the hoi polloi, the America mob, the masses, and the entire idea that men and women can do very well all by themselves, thank you, there is a real difference in wanting to rule the mob out of envy and wanting to rule the mob out of revenge. It's a deep psychological difference, but in coming months it will be palpable. The Lites, Al Gore comes to mind, who we've called the Calvera the Bandit of the environment, sees all this stuff that someone else built and suddenly thinks he can manage it better....for a 10% cut of the pie. Lawyers do this all the time. What a sweet gig! The Clintons, Pelosi, Reid are all cut this same way. Their compassion for their fellow man is as shallow as a pool of warm spit. "Liberals cubed", we once called them. Meists, one in all.
    In the European model of Swedish Lite, we saw an ancient privileged royalty and aristocracy replaced not by the mob, but by a group of layabouts with law degrees just as the Democrat Party represents today. Although originally created to be a buffer between the aristocracy, who certainly wanted no repeats like Paris in the Terror, by the 1950s, with a diminishing privileged class they became the permanent state class, but with a taste for the aristocrats' Privileges, which they like very much.
    But America had no such aristocracy, so we had to create one out of our private sector industrialists, who around 1900 seemed to fit that insufferable model very well. But Bill Gates?...who still eats hamburgers and wears blue jeans? Can anyone buy a $10,000 hamburger? The European models for aristocrats go so far back almost no one can remember their more common origins, when they still ate roast with a bowie knife. Their sense of superiority and privilege really seems like it's in the blood line. So, how can you replicate such a hatred for the upper crust in a short 200 years? Easy, in America we had to teach our children to pee on the shoulders they stand on. Teach them to hate, and hate with gusto the very people who gave them every sensibility and every comfort they own. We've been doing this for about 40 years now. Bill Ayers was in one of the first graduation classes.
    That is one reason Swedish Lite was never likely to work here, even with our failed public school system dedicated to indoctrinating children that their parents are fools. Socialist Amber, however, will be a bit more harsh and therefore longer-lasting, although it too will face some serious crucibles. Socialism was designed in Europe for more or less homogeneous white societies, only now, since nobody there wanted to do menial labor, they have taken a dusky hue from all their guest workers, mostly from the Middle East. Their one-size-fits-all, cookie cutter bureaucracies could not respond to the social and legal waves this has created, but also has denied the people to take direct action themselves. Bureaucracies always tend to ignore that which they have no answer to, and which requires new or resourceful thinking.
     In the the end what will kill both Swedish Lite or Socialist Amber, is what killed the USSR and is now drowning the EU, both singularly and collectively. It is not homo Rus but homo Bureaucraticus.
    This is why socialism, like the bad guy, always gets it in the end. The only question: What will be left in its wake?

    Oh, as a footnote, you'll note that fascism and nazism are also forms of socialism. The difference between fascism and Swedish Lite, quite frankly, is little more than temperament, namely one is in northern Europe (Apollonian) while the other is in southern Europe (Dionysian) and so are more prone to wearing black shirts and carrying night sticks...when sober. Obama has shown several traits similar to the "sawdust ceasar" of fascism, but we'll wait and see. Nazism is a brutal, totalitarian version of fascism (also with a serious get-even edge) but not something we sense just yet. But as early studies showed with marijuana use back in the 60s, i.e, that a high rate of users went onto harder drugs the same can be true (we believe) about socialism in general. When things unravel or go bad, rather than look for solutions in more democracy, the tendency is to go onto to the harder stuff. A rereading of William Golding might be in order. Just a note.
VB