On the nineteenth of January, two thousand and ten…
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.
(Longfellow, “Paul Revere’s Ride”)
How great—how poetically just—is this moment!
Let us add up the account.
Edward M. Kennedy spent most of his 47 year Senate career pushing nationalized health care as his paramount political objective for America. “The dream,” he said at the end of his failed quest for the 1980 Democratic presidential nomination, “will never die.”
Then, in 2008, America for the first time in its history elected a radical leftist as President, along with overpowering Democratic majorities in both Houses of Congress, creating the possibility of passing a law that gave the government control over the nation’s health care. Notwithstanding intense and growing alarm at the financially ruinous, incomprehensible, unconstitutional, and tyrannical nature of the measures contained in the bill, the Democrats were absolutely committed to passing it no matter how much the country opposed it, and were on the way to doing so, thus fulfilling Kennedy’s dream, when he passed way. It was the automatic assumption that his elected successor would be a Democrat and a supporter of the bill.
Instead, Kennedy’s state of Massachusetts, the most liberal state in the country, a state that had not had a Republican in the U.S. Senate in 31 years, proceeded to elect to Kennedy’s uncompleted term of office a Republican who was not only committed to opposing the health care bill, but who will be the decisive vote preventing the bill from being passed, thus stymying Kennedy’s dream at the moment of its expected fulfillment. And not only that, but the election of that Republican—one year to the day after the beginning of Obama’s messianic presidency—apparently defeated the principal objective of Obama’s first year of office, along with his larger stated purpose of fundamentally transforming America.
On April 19, 1775, at the Concord bridge in Concord, Massachusetts, “the shot heard round the world” sent the British military reeling back to Boston and set off the American Revolution, leading to American Independence and the founding of the United States of America. On January 19, 2010, in a Massachusetts election, the “Scott heard round the world” defeated, or at least put into disarray and confusion, the greatest leftist attempt in history to turn America into an unfree, statist society.
- end of initial entry -
Anna writes:
My thoughts on a happy moment …
On the Nineteenth of January, Two Thousand and Ten
Thousands of patriots, both women and men,
Gave voice to the glory that was wondering when
Or if it would be heard of ever again.
The story is simple, the facts are all there.
The heart of this glory are words clean and bare.
A Constitution wrought with consummate care;
Checks and balances that no one can tear.
The glory and brilliance of a well-planned nation!
That can only succeed by our participation.
May the glory be heard, may our success be bold!
So this story can again by children be told.
LA replies:
Thank you for this. It’s beautiful—brings tears to my eyes. It strikes me we could do a poem called “Scott Brown’s Ride.” After all, Paul Revere had his horse, Scott Brown his truck.
January 20
James N. writes:
“The dream will never die.”
The horrible Martha Coakley closed her concession speech with this quote. She has a point, and it’s an important one for us to remember.
They will NEVER stop, they will NEVER quit, when we have temporary victories they will continue to work ceaselessly to our ruin.
In my own field of medicine, the dreamers are like termites, gnawing away at the supports of the house, and they never stop.
It’s important to study the dreamers, because not enough conservatives understand what’s going on inside their heads. Bobby Kennedy said it best when he closed a victory speech with “Some men see things as they are, and say why? I dream of things that never were, and say, Why not?” [LA replies: Yes, and that statement was considered the proof of his nobility and greatness.]
As it turns out, there are excellent reasons why “things that never were,” never were. They never were, for the most part, because they violate or contradict the Laws of Nature, and of Nature’s God, on which the Republic is founded. It is this ceaseless, restless dream of things that never were, and which cannot be, that has captivated the enemy.
We need to become educated ourselves, and to educate our children, about the invisible laws on which our Republic, and indeed all healthy societies, are based. But more than that, we need to pray that those who are lost in dreams can awaken. If it can happen in Massachusetts, it can happen anywhere.
Venceremos!
LA replies:
When I wrote the entry, I was not aware that Coakley had quoted the famous Kennedy line.
You’ve explained it very well, but let me add a further angle, which is really just a restatement of what you’ve said.
In recent weeks, we’ve been talking a lot about gnosticism, how it involves the complete rejection of the real world as a false and evil world, and the construction of a dream world—which the gnostics think is the only true world—to replace it.
So, when Kennedy, and now Coakley, declare that “The dream will never die,” they are saying that they will NEVER give up the gnostic hope of overturning reality and replacing it with a gnostic fantasy world. It doesn’t matter that reality keeps asserting itself against their fantasies and showing that the fantasies cannot exist in the real world. They are committed to their fantasies—and to the dream of putting them into effect through political action in history—forever.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 20, 2010 12:31 AM | Send