Masochistic statism, its twin handmaidens to the left and right – those who war against us for the world, and those who war against the world for us – has come alive.

Today, it is only a parody of what will come for the bulk of people living in America. It is also a warning, and I suspect some are waking up to it.

College students, aiming for four or more years of subsidized liberty, some libertine fun, possibly even preparation for a future of service and prosperity, have gotten a little smack of statism right in the kisser.

Even those accustomed to being bossed, manhandled, lied to and abused by public and often private schooling for over a dozen years are starting to question it.  The injustice and sheer stupidity of it all is becoming obvious them.  I doubt these dear young people are thinking about the oh-so-real health risk they pose to their professors and administrators.  God Bless Zoom. The Silver Disobedienc... Griesel, Dian Best Price: $17.96 Buy New $23.14 (as of 05:17 UTC - Details)

Many, with their parents and benefactors, are also beginning to directly discover the glorious racket of traditional higher ed – politically correct campuses with light filled architecture, yet in many ways filled with addicts, walking suicides, sexual predators and others driven by physical and ideological urges rather than intellectual … and that’s just the administrative and teaching class!

Statism is the problem here, because statism is the melding of men, morality, market and monopoly on the use of force into a single blob.  To be relevant, you must be inside it, of it and for it.  This used to be Mussolini’s definition of fascism, but no need for history here.  History is so irrelevant.

Imprisonment of speech and expression – we’ve observed and lived this for decades as political correctness, maturing into blanking, canceling, me-tooing and doxxing the other.  Strait-jacketing critical thought and destruction of the tools of debate, complete.  Instead of looking forward we look at the fearful horde beside us and wonder what it is thinking and what direction it will take in order to inform our decisions – which will be to conform with it, lest we become oblivion.

To not conform is to be intellectually, financially, and even physically ruined.  Because there is no history, we think we only get one ruination in life, making the threat a monstrous one.  Better to go along, to be imprisoned, to sit in our dorm rooms alone watching a babbling screen. The Power of Now: A Gu... Tolle, Eckhart Best Price: $3.40 Buy New $9.94 (as of 05:17 UTC - Details)

I can’t help but look for the wonderful side of our coronavirus statism – and it is difficult not to get carried away.  I mean, it used to be illegal to wear masks in Virginia except on Halloween – now it’s the law to cover your face 24/7.  We must continue this theme to require masks on all REAL ID driver’s licenses, as it certainly would be unsafe for an officer to be exposed to our drooling mugs in a casual traffic stop to check our papers.  We are all bank robbers now!  It’s liberating if you look at it in the right light!

It occurs to me that a longer term benefit to us, to America, ideally for many American republics and independent states in the empire’s post-financial collapse, will be in art.  Solzenitsyn, Pasternak, and Russian novelists and poets under the tsars left a legacy of, and for, humanity.  Much of the angst and the art was a reaction to injustice and sheer massive stupidity of the state – its wars, its rules, its corruption, its sadism, its inhumanity.  Many of the most influential authors experienced abuse and imprisonment by the state, and a theme of individualism emerges.

Unlike Marx and even Rousseau, and our modern American rioters, whose angst relates to how little they were given compared to how much they deserved, we see the poetry and the remedies of actual victims of the state lean away from joining it, and towards abandoning it. The Four Agreements: A... Don Miguel Ruiz Best Price: $2.24 Buy New $4.98 (as of 05:17 UTC - Details)

I wondered if the victims of Mao’s great leaps forward produced the kind of stories, poetry and art that we know of Russia.  Indeed they did – a new kind of poetry, hated by the state, and valued by those who lived under the state’s irrationality, abuse and arrogance was produced by the so-called “Misty Poets.”

Turns out, this is a well-known form and style of communication that undermines the state.  It’s a thousand jesters blooming, and novels and poetry from all over the world, in many eras, share some of the same characteristics.

Misty because they wouldn’t, and couldn’t just come out and say what they were complaining about.  Poetic and artful because it required the observer, the listener, the reader and the recipient to process a little something, and to personalize the recipe for each individual, creating in the process an alternate definition of society than that offered by the state, than that society permitted by the state.  Creating in the process a gift that honors the recipient’s mind, experience and judgement, a gift that can be shared again and again, a gift intended to be shared, and a weapon against which no state can fight.

A weapon because the poetry, art and communication goes just far enough to antagonize but not far enough for the state –  resting like a plate on a juggler’s cane, in constant fear of loss of balance and control, a shattering collapse in front of everyone – to act without looking ridiculous.

One of the worst things that can happen to a state is to appear ridiculous.

Especially in the eyes of the young, who have had their expectations disappointed, their plans disrupted by mandate, their elders shown to be idiotic and frightened, their government greedy, avaricious, sadistic.

The state itself has assisted the liberty movement, with its lumbering broad-brush sadism.  It far prefers physical destruction, marches and riots, police brutality and the outright rage of its citizens to the cuts of a thousand poems – and 40 million awakening children who suddenly become aware that the King is buck naked, ugly, angry, vile, and simultaneously weak and wasted.

At this point, students can still walk away, and experiment with disobedience to the state, test the boundaries of what may be allowed, test state relevance to their own lives. They are being presented with a wild kind of freedom many have not yet experienced, nor even dreamed.  Regardless of what they do, the future is theirs, and I expect great things.

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