Are We Not Men?

Twist away the gates of steel
Unlock the secret voice
Give in to ancient noise
Take a chance, a brand new dance
Twist away the gates of steel
Twist away, now twist and shout
The earth it moves too slow
But the earth is all we know
We pay to play the human way
Twist away the gates of steel
A man is real
Not made of steel!

I watched the Devo Doc last night, a nice little slice of American Pop culture, the rare bit that actually had some value, straight out of Akron. It has a clip of 1980 Ronald Reagan saying,

"For those who've abandoned hope, we'll restore hope and we'll welcome them into a great national crusade to make America great again."

There you go. In one sentence, American politics for the last half-century, left or right, black or white, red or blue. And you wonder how we've come to be where we are?

Just as vacuously trite and much more despicable are two pieces in America's papers of record. One is by David Brooks at the NYT, whose role has been to make credentialed Dems feel good and justified about the Clinton capitulation. Brooks talks about democracy, which over the last decade has become a popular word among America's "elite," though they know not what it really is and if they did, wouldn't much care for it. When you hear America's political class talking about democracy, they seek to keep a status quo bringing about its own ruin.

The second piece in the WSJ is by Peggy Noonan, one time Reagan speech writer. She's much, much cleverer than Brooks. Like all of America's oligarchy, they both prize cleverness, not so much wisdom, but then there is no wisdom in the 21st century just an overabundance of clever. She writes about that other word commonly passing the lips of America's elite these days, republic. She spends most of the time redefining republic in her own image, even equating it with democracy, Madison rolls in his grave. Though for Ms Noonan democracy is just elections and anyone at this point can see democracy ain't just elections.

We are devo

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