What’s in A Name?

Would a rose still look so red?  Hillary Clinton wrote her mini-opus, It Takes a Village,  propounding her political meme that self-determination is bad and collectivism is good. And I just re-read the poem, “No Man is an Island” by John Donne (see: The Poem ) in an e-mail by a “progressive” thinker of a close friend … as a way of showing the way to his nirvana (“It tolls for thee”).  

Now Van Jones, one of Obama’s original Socialist henchmen (and now a MSNBC contributor no less) has coined a new portmanteau term “communitarian” as a way of camouflaging his hard-leftist theology … see: Breitbart Story.  Even Obama’s inaugural address dances around the notion that rugged individualism in the United States is now passé:

Through it all, we have never relinquished our skepticism of central authority, nor have we succumbed to the fiction that all societies [sic] ills can be cured through government alone. Our celebration of initiative and enterprise, our insistence on hard work and personal responsibility, these are constants in our character. [Hey, sounds good!} 

[But, wait!] For we have always understood that when times change, so must we, that fidelity to our founding principles requires new responses to new challenges, that preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action. [The ideological curtain is raised]

I am constantly awed by how persistent a failed political movement can be.  Thirty years ago, we thought Communism was dead.  It had proven itself to be a precursor to totalitarianism over and over again (Pol Pot, Stalin, Castro, Mao, Sukarno, etc.).  Yet on-the-make politicians seem continually to trek back to drink from this tainted trough so as to rally their naive proletariat to a cause that seems so magnanimous and Christ-like.  And, only when the hook in firmly planted in the tender mouths of these fish, do they realize, too late, that they are not to be fed, but to feed.