Americans have completed their long goodbye to Joe Biden. After a life spent cheerleading and facilitating wars, interventions, conflict and corruption, Biden blew through money that wasn’t there, declared a constitutional amendment that doesn’t exist, and took credit for a joint Israel/Hamas interim pause in the wholesale slaughter in Gaza that could and should have been approved 13 months ago, but for the fact that Biden, Blinken and Sullivan wished to continue that slaughter.
Over a year ago, the newly elected House Speaker could not get a meeting with Biden for months – and when he did, Biden’s staff was reluctant to allow alone time with Speaker Johnson. Not because mild-mannered House Zionist and spendthrift was dangerous to the president, but because staffers had no idea what Biden would say to him. As it turns out, Johnson recalls that Biden didn’t know, or couldn’t remember, what was in bills and orders he was signing. Johnson said, “I walked out of that meeting with fear and loathing ….We are in serious trouble—who is running the country?”
Yet, Johnson did nothing. He didn’t meet with colleagues and cabinet members regarding invocation of the 25th Amendment. He didn’t talk to government leaders or the press about his experience and what it meant for national security. He didn’t do anything but continue to spend like a drunken sailor, relying on Democrat votes as needed to push through spending extensions and additions.
The country dodged a bullet and survived Biden’s presidency. Sadly, we could say much the same for many past presidencies – knowing that those most deadly to the Constitution have been in the distant past, with Lincoln, Wilson and FDR. But with every statist ideologue, every war-loving interventionist, every moralizing hypocrite and every power hungry sociopath in the Oval – the constitutional republic has been harmed, diminished, and starved.
The “Wolf You Feed” proverb might be helpful here. Can we imagine America as a self-governing republic, with a constitutionally limited federal institution easily supported by a union of consenting states, themselves free to separate from the union at any time? Can we imagine a decentralized restoration of human and economic liberty that would celebrate, rather than dread, modern technology and artificial intelligence? Can we imagine peace between neighbors and around the globe?
Most of us cannot. The wolf in Washington we have been feeding is the evil one,“full of rage, jealousy, arrogance, greed, sorrow, regret, lies, laziness, and self-pity.”
One cannot think of rage, jealousy, arrogance, greed, regret, lies and laziness without thinking of Joe Biden – not because he is a standout in these categories, but because he is the most recent president in a long line of similar creatures. Who can imagine that any other president, or presidential candidate, would not match Biden in these characteristics? Hillary Clinton? Mike Pence? Kamala Harris? The evil wolf is the norm of our modern politicians, a rule made evident only by the rarity of its exceptions.
The rise to executive power of a somewhat chastened Donald Trump doesn’t negate the fact that we have no agent in Washington who fundamentally understands that the state is the evil wolf. To nourish the state, we feed it our minds, our energies, and our children. We are frightened of it and by it, and we behave cautiously around it. We fully expect it to act on its worst emotions, its greed, its rage, its arrogance, and it never disappoints. MAGA embracing American empire, overnight? Well, yes, and we better go along with it.
Trump was elected to put the evil state wolf on a diet, but the wolf holds the key to the larder. Like many who struggle with compulsive addictions, the evil wolf is the first to tell you how hard they are trying, how everybody else gets it wrong, misunderstands. Humility is not part of the evil wolf’s makeup, just as it is no part of government. Anyone listening to the government representatives in Los Angeles or Sacramento wax eloquent on all the mistakes they didn’t make has gotten a perfect sampler of the 24/7/365 mentality of the state at every level.
As we grip our armrests, check our seatbelts, and say a prayer, a new captain of the state enterprise takes the helm. The two wolves are particularly ravenous, one because we have fed it with abandon and it has grown powerful and insatiable. The other – the one that embodies “love, joy, peace, generosity, truth, empathy, courage, humility, and faith”– has not been fed at all, but it is trotted out periodically during election season to inspire “voters,” only to be locked away, unfed and openly ridiculed until the next election. The former is the oligarchy-driven state, obsessed with foreign and domestic intervention and control, simultaneously seeking conflict and omniscience. The latter is simply invisible.
We have a US government intolerant of criticism, completely unable to distinguish between personal and ideological danger. That not a single fellow journalist in this press briefing interfered with the state goons escorting Max Blumenthal and dragging Sam Husseini out of the room indicates US state totalitarianism is mature, and widely accepted.
Another recent revelation illustrates how the evil wolf operates to ensure its bowl is always filled, to overflowing.
How then do we feed the good wolf, or more to the point, can we even nurse it back to health at all?
The first step is to understand the danger the state poses to all life, and all liberty. Perhaps those silent and passive reporters in Blinken’s press room the other day were correct. Perhaps they assessed the danger, and their nervous failure to directly act in love, in generosity, with empathy, courage and truth – as their fellows were manhandled and ousted for challenging the state narrative of the day – was justified.
Somehow, I think not. The danger of the state, that evil wolf today, requires that we not only observe, but act.
While the evil wolf eats much of what we all produce every day to maintain its heft, its most necessary and critical nutrient is not our money. It is our respect, our trust, and our obedience. Perhaps we should withhold all of that, in every possible way, on a daily basis. Happily, many are on this track, and we should applaud them, assist them and join them.
The good wolf thrives on whatever we can do to express love and empathy, humility and faith, and courage. The good wolf is fed by our demand for truth. Every one of us is made for this! These qualities are the essence of human survival, they are what is left when everything else has burned away, and collapsed into ruin. As western Carolinians and eastern Tennesseans rebuild on their own after the floods, as Southern Californians return to sift through the embers, and as two million Palestinians return to the rubble that US weapons rendered, they are kept alive and sane through courage, humility, faith, love, and truth – this is the only way to survive. It is the only way to win.
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