Blog of the Week: The Bleat

James Lileks, a journalist in Minneapolis, has a way with words that I can only envy. From today's blog post about His Holiness' speech about world citizenship in Deutschland:

As a lifelong Star Trek fan, I would love to live in an age when the globe was united in peace and prosperity, but I am unwilling to endure the paradigm-wrecking nation-shattering nuclear war and eugenic-master-race tyranny required to get to that point. Absent those factors, the idea that post-national / trans-national ideas represent a glimmering ideal within our grasp seems naïve at best and alarming at worst, a gilded facade erected by those who wish to pursue self-interest behind a new arrangement that defines traditional concepts of culture and national identity as regressive impediments.

I rather like my first and second amendment rights. There are many countries where they don't have these and there are many people here in the USA who would like to take those rights away from me. Most of the freedom-haters are also Obama fans.

That's why I don't want to merge with other countries nor do I want the USA to submerge our sovereignty in any way to some international organization like the UN. Any world government instituted at the present time would be a totalitarian nightmare, as Lileks says.

One last thing: Obama said "That is why the greatest danger of all is to allow new walls to divide us from one another. The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand. The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand." But of course they must, and will, if national sovereignity has any meaning. If he defines the "wall" as the existence of factual reasons why some countries succeed and others do not, it is unclear how these facts will be overcome. There's not a wall around Zimbabwe that creates a special magical inflation zone. There is, in spots, a wall between the US and Mexico; are we to expect he will make a campaign stop at the border crossing, and ask Mr. Bush to Tear Down This Wall? In a sense that would make him the heir to Reagan - in the same sense Paris Hilton is heir to Conrad.

There is a reason why so many people in Mexico, Central America, the Carribbean, etc., find it necessary to come to the USA to find work. It can be summarized adequately with one word: Socialism.

Unless and until certain other countries adopt free market capitalism and their own equivalents of the first and second amendments, it will be necessary to keep the walls up.