Briefs, January 24, 2025
Pope Francis
Pope
Francis is moving closer to his maker. We will not know until death
has put a period on Francis’ pontificate whether the current pope has been
a faithful messenger of God’s word.
The
quickest way of disposing of popes politically is to point out their
attachments to worldly pursuits. When the highly political Cardinal Richelieu
of France died, the pope of the day was asked to comment. He said, “If there is
no God, Richelieu will have lived a successful life. And if there is a God, he
will have much to answer for.”
Indeed,
there is a space between God’s world and the world of men that is in some
instances unbridgeable. The accounting is different in both spheres. Soren
Kierkegaard used to say, “Between God’s purposes in eternity and man’s
purposes in time, there is an infinite qualitative difference.”
Trump and the uses of hyperbole
It
has been (55) days since former President Donald Trump was sworn into office –
and the American Republic, as republics through the ages have been understood
by men and women of goodwill, yet stands, battered and torn by
neo-progressivism, which is profoundly anti-republican, but unbowed.
Trump
always has used hyperbole, wild or mild exaggeration, to antagonize the
opposition and throw them off their game. This is the real secret weapon of the
Trump’s business deals, and Trump has not varied this successful approach in
business or politics. Mohamed Ali deployed the rope-a-dope to good effect.
Trump’s hyperbole serves the same purpose. The reaction to an overreaction is
often comically inappropriate. Comedy also relies on a distortion of reality.
The end of comedy is to produce a laugh. The end of exaggeration is to produce
a greater exaggeration. Seen in this light, Trump’s much battered “border wall”
ended, in the Biden administration, with a laughably thoughtless overreaction
on Biden’s part – and the evisceration of the U.S. southern border.
Trust in government
We
are told that Americans have lost trust in “government.” If so, it may be a
loss that is a blessing in disguise. There are, in fact, three different kinds
of governments in the United States: federal, state and municipal. Not all of
them are equally untrustworthy. As one moves from municipal to state to federal
government, trust appears to diminish, and it is a question worth debating
whether Americans should trust their governments. Is it
not better to nurse our quite reasonable suspicion that there will be among us
deceptive politicians likely to act on P.T. Barnum’s certitude that, here in
the land of the free and home of the brave, there is a sucker born every
minute? Abraham Lincoln did after all note – though some notable historians
quibble with the attribution -- “You can fool some of the people all of the
time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the
people all of the time.” Though he rarely lost his sense of proportion, the
Civil War made a skeptic of Lincoln, his cautious skepticism rounded with a
glowing hope.
Do words matter?
George
Orwell, who sought most of his life to defend the proposition that words
matter, sent out his book Animal Farm to various publishers
and received back from one a dispiriting note: “We do not publish children’s
books.” Orwell was right about the abuses of language. Tortuous abuse precedes
every 20th century aberrant use of force among the lords of the
earth. “Government,” George Washington told us, “is force.” Force is sometimes
necessary, but it should be dispensed sparingly so as not to overthrow the
natural order of things. When force itself is abused, the natural order of
things is overturned, and the result of this subversion is always – cultural
chaos.
Examples
of the abuse of language are too plentiful to mention. It is difficult to read
the graph below taken from Connecticut’s U.S. Senator Chris Murphy’s “Newsroom” without
arriving at a provisional conclusion that the author of the sentiment has
fallen into a conceptual mare’s nest of his own making.
“He debunked Republicans’ claim that the extending the 2017 tax
cuts will help working people: ‘It's a scam. Trickle-down economics is
a scam (emphasis mine). When you put this much money into the hands of
the wealthy, it does not trickle down to everybody else. When you give
corporations those enormous tax cuts, it does not trickle down to everybody
else. It stays in the pockets of the wealthy. The corporations use it in order
to do stock buybacks, in order to inflate CEO salaries. It just separates the rich
from the poor. It is a scam. It is a scam.”
Just
to begin with, when a tax cut is extended to all, money otherwise appropriated
by the federal government remains at the disposition of
“working people,” the greater proportion of them non-millionaires. The
reduction in taxation, in other words, falls on the just – ordinary workers –
and the unjust – millionaires and billionaires who do not stuff their own
earned wealth into their pillows before they sleep at night. In a free market
system, money is used to produce money.
Murphy
is pleased to call the process of allowing people to keep and dispose of their
property – wealth is property – “trickle-down economics.” But under Murphy’s
scheme the wealth trickles down only because property is first seized by
government. If fact, Murphy is arguing in favor of a “trickle-up” economic
theory, new to our republic, that profits should be expropriated by government
and appropriated by Murphy. Those disappointed in the collectivist “virtues” of
a socialist economy should have no difficulty calling such a process a “scam”
when it is engineered to help scam-artists achieve permanent or semi-permanent
office so that they may, in words attributed to Lincoln, proceed to “fool most
of the people all of the time.”
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