I love watching those YouTube videos where a young fan of rap listens, mesmerized, to Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin for the first time. Don’t we get a thrill watching someone else get a thrill? But then I thought, what’s the lesson here? Of course Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin are good, and why doesn’t everybody know their music? Does this mean we don’t live in a very enlightened age? Why, when so many walls are coming down, do so many still hem us in? Is living-in-bubbles just the way of the world?
Google, Smart Phones, Video Games, streaming, social media—have they produced a Renaissance? Or, at best, a vast, compartmentalized, politically fractured, orgy of mind-numbing passivity? Would it embarrass you if I ask you: Do you do things? Or just watch?
Success on the planet earth still seems to resemble the way the Ayatollah Khomeini was successful—the narrow and the ruthless prevailing in a mass, hysterical manner. Bits of information flying everywhere really doesn’t matter. In the end, how smart, free, and beautiful is our new computerized world? Will a Zoom meeting ever compete with Shakespeare performed outdoors at London’s Globe theater? Can knowing a lot of stuff compare to fruitful action?
The Khomeini revolution in 1979 began a mobster mentality trend—radical, uncompromising Islam—the Ayatollah’s brand—which oppresses women, is wildly appealing to oppressed races, especially to the humiliated males in oppressed societies crushed by colonialism. Poverty’s insecurity breeds bullies. Likewise, rap, with its bitches and hoes lyrics, grew by leaps and bounds among the insecure and down-trodden. Anxiety caters to anxiety. The swaggering victim replaces the mere victim—is this any better?
Khomeini is significant because he was embraced by liberals, who are now—and even liberals are noticing this—turning into censorious meanies. Despite the fact the Ayatollah was a monster, he symbolized a Third World leader taking vengeance, and winning, against the United States. Jimmy Carter is forever linked with Khomeini and the hostage crisis—the hostages came home as Ronald Reagan was sworn in as president, as if nothing about Carter and Reagan could exist in the same world. The left/right divide of Khomeini/Carter versus Shah/Reagan from 1979 is a 19th century Colonial era divide. But Iran 1979, the most important world event between WW II and the end of the Soviet Union, recalled the Crimean War, when the British Empire fought with the Ottoman Empire against the Russian Empire. The Russian Empire did not succumb to the British and Ottoman Empires, nor did the United States succumb—Russia’s fleets sailed into SF and NY harbors in 1860 as a show of support for the United States on the brink of the divisive American Civil War, with imperial France in Mexico, and her ally (not long ago, her enemy) Britain, hungry to take her American colony (the War of 1812 not a distant memory) back. “If you attack a U.S. weakened by a civil war, we will invade India,” Moscow told London.
Russia and the United States against the World. That World included France, the Ottoman Empire, India, Japan, and China, all either conquered, or allied with, the British Empire. The battle-lines may not seem as simple 150 years later but in some ways they are, if we study Iran 1979, and how it still throws its shadow over the world today. The U.S. defeated the British Empire for good in the 20th century, without a fight, and since it was done without a fight, the diminished but still influential John Bull seized its best option—pretending to be America’s confidant. Texas and Pennsylvania had oil—the resource of the century—this is how the U.S. became stronger than Britain—Britain needed Iran’s oil, and when the Shah announced “time was up” on that deal in 1979, MI6 (with the help of the CIA, the junior partner in Anglo-American intelligence) installed Khomeini. The U.S., allied with the Shah, was now on the outs, and a gradually rising China used Iran’s oil to re-establish a new order detrimental to the United States—one that began to resemble the power dynamics of the 1860s, when the U.S. and Russia were allies—but at that time Russia was the Soviet Union, so that was out; no wonder American influence took a dive in the 1970s (recall the disastrous Carter years, capped by the loss of Iran’s friendship). Then came Reagan, and the fall of the Soviet Union, but the Bushes and Bill Clinton brought American to the brink of disaster, again: the invasion of Iraq (which pleased Iran), middle east terror and chaos on the rise, terrible globalist trade deals which would have pleased the British Empire itself. Also, the continued march of Marxism/Maoism through American institutions, both government and academic. And finally, a political culture featuring Democrats pandering to racial division, and Republicans selling out to globalism with the Democrats—a one party system with one voice in the media more and more Americans no longer trusted. Khomeini taught the Left a wonderful lesson: During the hostage crisis, the Ayatollah freed blacks and women. A cunning monster with a heart of gold. All U.S. contemporary literature and respectable media outlets, by the 1970s, in a fit of rock music excitement, turned Left, (Nixon had helped to make sure of that—you were either Washington Post or an uncool neanderthal) so most immigrants to the U.S. arrived as leftists, since Letters was Left—and that’s what the immigrant, learning the language, and learning the political culture, learned on the path to their new country, even if they were escaping a worse country to come to the U.S. The Democrats were gaining voters.
Meanwhile a new divide, was on the rise in the United States. The colonial, Marxist divide was joined by an ancient, Biblical one.
The wedge that really divides the U.S. more than anything else, more than race, more than climate change, more than taxes, more than foreign wars, is abortion. On one side, those who want to protect innocent life. On the other? The rage of millions of females who have had abortions, and don’t wish to be called murderers. This issue cannot, and will not be resolved, and this is why Donald Trump is hated, and Joe Biden, as criminal and creepy as he is, is loved—and abortion—and no other issue—really explains this feverish division. The answer is so obvious and plain, that it may not register among all the other issues and complexities of contemporary politics—but abortion is the one thing which divides us all.
This is the Biblical divide. It is has Civil War implications. Simple origins never stop being significant and true. The U.S. Democrat and Republican parties are contingencies, vote-getting devices, not archetypes, much less truths. The Democrats are sympathetic to Khomeini’s Iran because the Democrats and their corporate, Wall Street allies are now practicing colonialism in disguise—the globalist expansion of America is ironically being waged by the “progressive” Democrats, while the Republicans (not the Bushes, who are corporate Democrats) especially under the leadership of Trump, belong mundanely (despite all the passionate hatred on both sides) to the America of George Washington which stays out of the world’s affairs as much as possible. After all, the British Empire—which America defined itself against, originally—was globalism itself.
The Democrats don’t understand democracy, which is why they are currently destroying it. Democrats think democracy is a noble speaking tool for the Everyman. Or, in a best case scenario, Democrats think democracy is a way to make all our dreams come true—everyone equal, dancing beneath the world’s tree; but democracy itself doesn’t solve, or advance anything. Innovation does that. Democracy is a purely mundane safeguard. Democracy is protection, and that’s all—it protects “we the people;” democracy isn’t a “voice” of the people, or anything corny like that. Democracy, as both idea and process, is simple, and should be kept as transparent as possible. The Biden voter (their candidate deeply flawed in any number of ways) thinks in the following manner: OK, so maybe I’m really voting for hidden elites. But I’d rather have hidden elites run the United States than a bible-thumper with a third-grade education from Tennessee. This seems logical. But it’s wrong, because democracy protects the “deplorable” with a third-grade education—and they should be protected. That’s all democracy does. It doesn’t mean the guy with the third-grade education will be running things. Those who see democracy as protection against elites will vote Republican, but even those who understand this may still vote Democrat—because Democrats don’t fear elites; (and “elites” to Democrats are just rich people who don’t believe in Climate Change) Democrats don’t really think Hitler or Mao can happen here, and laugh off the idea that America can become Venezuela—while the Republicans desperately warn, oh it can. Not only can it, but the Democrats, with globalist big money on their side, are seeing to it that it does, according to the Republicans.
This is why the Republicans are at a moment in time—in despair, deciding whether they will be forced out of their element, and into the street, to become the party of “protest,” in order to save democracy.
The plan was for Trump to win four more years. Peace deals in the middle east, a good economy, law and order, lower taxes, prison reform, energy independence, keeping the Constitution strong, anti-draconian-lock-downs, immigration reform, opposing China and Iran—this should have equaled a Reagan landslide.
Why didn’t it?
Fraud, some say. Let’s see the evidence. Let’s see what happens. This is another divisive issue which will never go away. America’s got a lot of healing to do. (Forget about outcomes—focus on democracy.) But do the globalists want America to heal? Nah. A divided America is how they roll. A divided everything is how they roll. And, unfortunately, division is a pretty natural state of things. The good is always on the brink of tumbling down.
The Republicans focused on the campaign. Articulating issues. The Democrats focused on the election—how ballots are counted. On election night, when Trump was said to have a 90% chance of winning, the dollar rose and the yuan fell. When it later flipped to Biden, the dollar fell and the yuan surged.
When I was a kid growing up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, my friends and I created our own comic book heroes. My friend Larry Colbert, who was in my sixth grade class at P.S. 145—I was white, he was black—sat next to me in the front row, because the taller kids sat in the back. The character with rippling muscles he created was Steel Storm (after Iron Man no doubt.) China is currently producing 20 times more steel than the U.S.
Larry Colbert’s super hero may be a winner.
China and Joe Biden aside, there is a simple formula which says the Democrats get more votes. The logic of the average Democrat voter goes like this: If I vote Democrat, there’s a chance Biden will take money from the rich and give it to me. OK, probably not, the Biden voter thinks. However, if the rich are left alone to “create jobs,” hey, that’s the Republican pitch—and I still may get that if I vote for Biden. Therefore, in the simplest terms possible, it’s win-win to vote Democrat. It’s actually win-win-win, because the rich also tend to support Democrats, since this makes them look kinder and more generous. In fact, it’s a wonder the Republicans get any votes at all. And if Biden cancels college loan debt, forget it. It’s all over for the Republicans. Come on, Joe! Let’s do this!
In purely pragmatic terms, the Democrats are now too strong—they get votes and they belong to the elites. One party isn’t supposed to be the party of both the elites and the one that scoops up votes—but that is what has happened. The Left gets literature, art, soft-porn music videos, abortion-on-demand, fashion magazines, white-collar jobs, SNL, the NY Times, Twitter, Tik Tok, and intellectual pride. The Right gets race-car smog, hunting expeditions, and Jesus. (And everything the Left has, when no one is looking.) But the Right gets one more thing—pride in the United States of America—great when she stopped the British at Yorktown. But now?