Motus Mentis

Over the transom tonight comes a link to Victor Davis Hanson’s latest: a summary of just how dangerous the bloat and rot and corruption of our Executive Branch has become.

We read:

Government has become a sort of malignant metastasizing tumor, growing on its own, parasitical on healthy cells, always searching for new sources of nourishment, its purpose nothing other than growing bigger and faster and more powerful ”” until the exhausted host collapses. We have a sunshine king and our government has become a sort of virtual Versailles palace.

I suppose that when a presidential candidate urges his supporters to get in someone’s face, and to take a gun to a knife fight, from now on you better believe him. And, finally, the strangest thing about nearing the threshold of 1984? It comes with a whimper, not a bang, with a charismatic smile and mellifluous nonsense””with politically correct, egalitarian-minded bureaucrats with glasses and iPhones instead of fist-shaking jack-booted thugs.

Yes, things have gotten really, really bad, and in exactly the way that the Framers foresaw, so long ago. Either there must be be a serious reaction, a great convulsion of resentment and anger — and it had better happen soon! — or we will descend meekly henceforward into servitude and ruination.

A story: once, when I was a teenager, I noticed a wart on my finger. It got bigger, and soon there were several more, all over my hands. It got worse and worse — until one day I noticed they were all dying. Within a week or so there was nothing left of them. I’ve never had one since.

I realized that the problem had to rise to a certain level — in this case, it had to get pretty bad indeed — before it prompted an immune response. When that response finally happened, though, it was swift and effective. This realization has stayed with me, and I have often described our civilization’s wasting disability as a disorder of the immune system. (Most recently here, for example.)

I’m hoping that the same thing is happening here: that our condition has now become serious enough, and obvious enough to all, to provoke a long-overdue immune response. Even Piers Morgan, if you can believe it, seems to have noticed that all that “tyranny” stuff he’s been mocking so caustically for so long is actually starting to happen. (That’s a very hopeful sign, because he’s about as obtuse as they come.)

We’ll see. I’m strangely optimistic, all of a sudden (well, a little). There may be some backbone in this nation yet.