(State of the Union Word Cloud. Image courtesy The Atlantic.)

“Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.”

V. I. Lenin

I took a great amount of hope from the State of the Union Address from the President. Mr. Obama can give a great speech. He may not be able to govern very well, but he sure as heck can give a stirring presentation.

I am pretty sure that he cannot possibly do anything like what he talked about. I could go point by point through the speech, but you either listened to it, read it or ignored it. In the end, it doesn’t really matter.

It appears we are going to tread water for a couple years. Of all the things he talked about, I give immigration reform a good possibility of happening.

Now that the matter of the President’s re-election is settled, the House may be able to work with the Senate to do something. It will have little to do with the White House, except for some speeches from the Chief Executive out there in real American some place.

But of course this is not rational. It is delusional. I have to scratch my head each time we hear about some wild ass scheme that is just “common sense,” or “We know this works.”

Wherever you start on aspects of the agenda, somehow you wind up at the central tenet of the canon: we have to act now to protect the children.

The centrality of the myth of saving the children is justification for just about everything in the agenda.

The root argument is about human nature. Capitalism is rapacious and evil. Climate Change is a direct result of human activity. That provides the justification for a comprehensive approach to solve the human problem. I have seen some of the logical results of that line of reasoning. We should not have children at all, thus saving them.

You know the mantra. We all do. We have been well educated. “Fossil fuels cause increased greenhouse gases in the air. That causes the temperature to go up. Then, we are doomed.”

Slight problem with that, as you know. It has not warmed anywhere beyond the margin of error in more than a decade. CO2 has continued to go up. There appears to be only a tenuous linkage at best between the two, and a much more decisive linkage between the level of solar energy, the orbital mechanics of the earth, and the effect of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.

Important disclaimer: I don’t “deny” climate change- that is what it does- and despite the relentless tinkering with the historical record by the alleged climate scientists the global temperature has risen a whopping degree and a half, Fahrenheit, since the dawn of the industrial age. The warmest summer on record was in 1934.

There is no clear and immediate reason to dismantle our society.

There are a lot of problems, of course, and continuing the disclaimer, I recycle and favor fuel efficiency. I do not pretend I am doing it for the kids. I am doing it because it is the right thing to do esthetically.

But if you are an alarmist, it naturally follows that we should be renouncing our evil industrial ways, shutting down cheap sources of energy, and preparing to shiver in the dark, or be stranded behind the wheel of an electric car that has run out of charge. People are evil, and must be forced to change.

You know, that whole New Soviet Man thing.

I was talking to Natasha yesterday morning. She grew up in the USSR and raised her children there before escaping Moscow in the days of perestroika. She noticed the President’s call for universal child care for four year olds, and the eerie similarity to the Soviet system in which she grew up.

She said: “I did not leave Soviet Union to come to America to live under communism again.”

Her words, not mine.

Everything old is new again. Walter Mondale tried this with the Comprehensive Child Development Bill back in 1971. Dick Nixon vetoed the bill, saying, among other things, that it would implement a “communal approach to child-rearing,” tying it to broad-based fears of Communism. He also said it had “family-weakening implications.”

Back then, the United States literacy rate was 98%. Today, according to the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, the number is 77%.

Like the President said, “We know what works.”

Everything old, freshly re-minted. Forward!

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com