So three days ago I dropped this cryptic clue and then messed around with a lot of non-blog stuff in my life…I have to do that every now and then, ya know. I said this upcoming Friday has something to do with things that should be on our minds, and those things have nothing to do with groundhogs or shadows. Here it is Friday.

So what was I talking about?

I’ll get to that. First, just as a mental exercise, try this.

Suppose there is an imaginary country that is hit by the Islamic psycopaths in a nature similar to the September 11 attacks. And they lose their government — not to the Islamic psycopaths, but to those who are determined to fight the psychopaths. Imagine that this new government is everything our Hollywood halfwits say the Bush/Cheney government is: Refusal to listen to others; rampant incompetence; suspension and removal of constitutional freedoms, people disappearing overnight, dissenters silenced, the whole shebang. And when it’s over, you can’t travel from one place to another without telling this new government what you’re doing there and when you’ll be back…and waiting for the okay to go ahead.

Now…imagine some bright, literate, intelligent young girl-woman lies to the pencil-necked bureaucrats over there, so that she can come over here. She starts a career as a scriptwriter right here in the United States, and after the real September 11 attacks starts to warn us about where we are headed. She warns us that this road to disaster ends in death…and it begins with a surrendering of your ability to noodle things through, as an independent, rational individual, and trusting your government to do that for you.

Sounds like some kind of a screed straight out of DailyKOS, right? Or the skeleton to an unfinished script rattling around in Hollywood. Maybe even getting a red-light because it was too liberal; the blue-state elites down there thought it was great in spirit, but lacking in subtlety. They wouldn’t market it because we would never buy it.

And yet.

Remove terrorist attacks, and replace them with economic disaster, with a touch of anti-semitism mixed in to the new government’s countermeasures. Change nothing else and what you are left with is the early biography of Alyssa Rosenbaum, whom you know as Ayn Rand, b. February 2, 1905.

Throughout her life she described herself as both a philosopher and a writer; in which domain did she achieve excellence? As a writer, to answer that you first have to define the distinction between skill and talent. She possessed an abundance of the former. In this surgical-precision selection of exactly the right noun, adjective and verb, she is in a class by herself. Talent? I have my reservations about this…not that I have much place to talk. Talent as a writer, has something to do with the effectiveness with which one communicates ideas. As an overwhelmingly strong Yin she drew the perimeter around her efforts, and the ability of others to properly interpret her content was decidedly outside of it.

As a direct consequence of this, she wrote like George Will. Or…some guy who blogs away on “a blog nobody reads.”

The three of us have it in common, that the point to writing is primarily just to get the thought out there. Carve the legacy. Take charge of the communication process right up to, and including, the point where ambiguity is eradicated to the most thorough extent possible. Not one single inch further than that, though. How the ideas are absorbed by those who consume them — that is outside of our scope. There is a boundary to the project-at-hand, and a reason for defining where it is. Efforts applied outside of that line are inevitably ineffectual, and could even be damaging.

I have noticed that the tendency to approach life this way, seems to be inexplicably intertwined with the tendency to think as an individual — to hoarde the responsibility and rewards associated with the cognitive and cogitative processes to onesself. Here at the blog that nobody reads, we call this the Yin and Yang theory and have written a great deal about it.

Ayn Rand’s message for us — it is a decidedly post-industrial-revolution message, but I would argue it’s timeless by nature — is this: In matters of government, think like Yin. Define your boundaries. Take charge of your own thinking, for you alone are responsible for the plausibility of the conclusions you reach and the wisdom involved in the actions you take. You are the sole stakeholder there. Necessarily, this involves the reduction of actions taken for “public good”…down to a pinpoint. For who is the stakeholder in those? Breezy, half-assed answers like “we all are” or “the least among us” are insufficiently reinforced to sustain any pursuit of the discussion at hand.

“Public” will…nobody ultimately responsible for the direction of that will, insofar as wisdom, strategy or accuracy…results in things being done that benefit no one, over the longer term. It results in death. And there is a certain direction this takes: Concentration of authority over even the most mundane decisions, into elite groups; the inevitable attack upon individuality, since thinking men only be governed, but never “ruled” in the classic sense; Bathosploration; absurd clean-up efforts at decidedly inappropriate times, of the alphabetize-the-spice-rack variety, kind of like the proverbial rearranging of the deck chairs on the Titanic. A government too infatuated with its own public image, too far invested in appealing to the Yang, over time, begins to desire approval from the Yang and from nobody else.

And this ultimately means the government compels us to recognize and to cogitate all together.

I’m sure our liberals would argue that if Ayn Rand were alive today, she’d have just as much criticism for the Bush administration as anyone else. I’m sure they’re right about that. And yet, I have to ask: Can’t our leftists find a way to speak out against his policies, that would appeal better to her sensibilities? Since this century began, as they have desperately grasped at the votes needed just to present the President with a more hostile Congress, they have made a point of recruiting from the Yang and from nobody else. Their initiatives, at least the ones that don’t deal with attacking the individual, all involve Trudging Toward Zero; endeavoring toward an ideal rather than into a frontier. Captain Kirk’s famous introduction — “to boldly go where no man has gone before” — has absolutely no place for them. They work inward, eliminating injury and discomfort, scolding and chastising anyone who would direct resources to anything else including the inspection of what might be the origin of such injury or discomfort.

They are most threatening when the injuries and discomforts are not re-inflicted, for it is then that they flail about looking for other things to do. Bellies must be filled until they are all full — and then — we must vigorously attack the obesity epidemic. And then we must inspect nutritional balances. And then we must inspect racial and gender differentials; why are women more prone to calcium deficiencies than men? And then, and then, and then.

To keep themselves appealing, they have to talk up only one task in this strategy at a time; to inspect where it’s all going, is to associate it with death. To eliminate all injuries, you have to eliminate all discomforts; to eliminate discomfort, you have to eliminate all exigencies; to eliminate all exigencies you have to eliminate all variants, and to eliminate variants you have to eradicate life. The ultimate goal of socialism is non-existence. The vision it has for humanity, is to behave like the cartoon character who jumps into a hole and pulls the hole itself in after him. To avoid that, socialism would have to progress only a limited distance down its selected path, and then stop; it being an Absolutist ideology by nature, this is impossible.

And here in the United States, liberals have become nothing more than socialists sufficiently clever to throw the word “freedom” around when they describe what they want to do. They want to tell everyone what to believe, so they can make everyone forget that you can’t eliminate all discomfort without eliminating life. They, too, are absolutists. They, too, will never, ever stop. No defeat is ever taken as rejection; defeat is simply a signal that different packaging must be used for the same product. And no victory is ever complete. There is always another discomfort to be attacked, and then another, and then another. Until life ends outright, or is made impossible. This trail does not end short of that cliff, and our “trail bosses” will not abandon it before said cliff. It’s absolutist; it doesn’t waver, yield, or stop. Liberalism is death. We distinguish one from the other, only when we think in the way we are told to think, by others.

This is unavoidable. Our individual achievements, our body temperatures, our pulses…anything out of some kind of norm, which manifests the fact that we still live…these are targets. To be recognized by liberals as an unwarranted discomfort, imposed upon this class if not on that one, and thus to be eradicated. If not now, then later.

They have no choice. Once life is comfortable, the constituents must be prevailed-upon to demand more comfort. No woodworking project is ever sanded sufficiently, to be removed from the lathe. That’s what liberalism has become. Achievement? Accomplishment? Making things work? Bah. We are all here to be made comfortable. The purpose of life is to be happy. And yet…to bring that about, our liberals excite us into unhappiness, in perpetuity. All thinking people would recognize this as inherently self-contradictory — and so — our liberals have a solution for that too. Stop thinking. Let us do all the thinking. “Bush lied” because we said he did, stop asking what the lie was. The terrorist attack was unfortunate, but stop thinking about it. Think about Social Security instead. Bush is opposed to freedom and we are in favor of it…because we say so. Stop asking questions.

Before it is over, they’ll take things away from us that we need, to support the lives we have built for ourselves. They’ll do far worse than ask “Who told you to build that?” They’ll demand that we approve of what they take from us. They’ll demand Sanction of the Victim. Unprecedented? Not by a damn sight. Since 1933, this is the way they have always worked.

A lot of people are going to spend the day watching that Bill Murray movie. While you’re at it, go buy Atlas Shrugged, used & new from $3.95. Try to get it finished by Memorial Day. Read the first three chapters by Valentine’s Day. They, you will find, are exactly like what is happening in the world right now.

Kind of spooky, huh?

Thing I Know #112. Strong leadership is a dialog: That which is led, states the problem, the leader provides the solution. It’s a weak brand of leadership that addresses a problem by directing people to ignore the problem.