THE CENTURION CHRONICLE
Special Issue – Jun 2010
A RISING – PRIVILIGENTSIA– IN AMERICA
(everyone is equal – some are just more equal than others)
Despite the underlying egalitarian foundations of our republic, we’ve always had a class of economic and social elites. Most of the founders of our republic were products of such a class.
But they were self-made elites who, by sheer skill, talent, innovative pragmatism, and strength of character, had achieved such status before the Revolution began, thus becoming its leadership. Even so, they thought of themselves as just models for the ideal that, such status, was an obligation rather than a right to extreme privilege. So they gave as good as they got, to demonstrate and promote the notion of how our society was open to economic and social mobility for anyone who cared to make the effort to achieve it. It was the essence of the America they fought to create, and later, bequeathed to us.
Not so with our leadership of today.
Since the end of WWII we’ve allowed the evolution of a new breed of national leadership that is becoming a more rigidly fixed, and impermeable, caste of career politicos to run our lives. A caste composed of over-educated intellectuals, Party aparatniks, and bureaucrats, all of whom spend their lives feeding from the trough of – public service – as they maneuver their way towards maintaining and strengthening their oligarchic hold on the levers of economic and political power, to the exclusion of anyone else not of their class.
To that end they have created a matrix of inter-connected dynastic political families and alliances, almost feudal in character and dimension, fuelled by a corrupt system of money and influence. A new aristocracy dedicated to having rights and privileges far beyond the norms and constraints imposed upon the rest of us ordinary citizens. Like all aristocracies the world over, they consider such privileges as an unquestionable right, and anyone daring to question that right, is to be branded a rabid anarchist, a godless communist apostle, and thus an enemy of the people, etc., etc..
Meanwhile, their intellectually muddled minds are forever fixated on ideological and social engineering theories, rather than on productive pragmatism and common sense. Much like a parasitic succubus they prefer, instead, to devise ever more devious ways to tax our vast pool of middle class enterprise and innovation, to feed their ideological illusions. In the process they ignore, or fail to realize, that by doing so they are slowly strangling the goose providing them with all those golden tax eggs.
To justify such measures they’ve also carefully cultivated, and played upon, the sense of obligation among those instant millionaires springing from professional sports, entertainment celebrity, and techno-wizardry, conning these into make voluntary “contributions” of much of their wealth, to support their fake populist efforts to help the less fortunate and underprivileged members of our society.
It’s these aspects of their machinations which have the most insidious, if not subversive, impacts on our democratic ideals. Mainly because, by such means, they have now bred and promoted a growing uneducated, unskilled, and highly unstable underclass. An underclass now long conditioned into dependence on government largesse in the form of social programs of one kind or another, while it is kept mired in place with alcohol, drugs, and violence. It’s a latter-day version of the old Roman –bread and circuses – mentality, as the means of keeping that underclass firmly attached to themselves, and paid for, from all those taxes skimmed from the pockets of our working middle class.
Some see all of this as a parallel with what happened to bring about ancient Rome’s demise. In this instance, however, I’m more inclined to the parallels more closely resembling the situation leading up to the French Revolution. A situation where a similar overly-privileged aristocracy of “elites” found themselves facing a new word in their vocabulary – la Guillotine.
Well, old Thomas Jefferson is probably looking down on us right now, grinning from ear to ear, and saying…see, I told you so!
CENTURION
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