W hat the @$%&! just happened to America? What the @$%&! happened to our strength and greatness? What the @$%&! happened to our powerful free market system? What the @$%&! happened to our traditional rocket path of growth? What the @$%&! happened to American jobs? What the @$%&! happened to our prosperity? What the @$%&! happened to the greatest health care system in the world? What the @$%&! happened to our constitutionally limited government? What the @$%&! happened to our superpower status? What the @$%&! happened to our ability to be respected and feared? What the @$%&! happened with multiple bailouts and unprecedented spending? Sixteen trillion dollars in debt?
What the @$%&! just happened?
This is the question most Americans are asking. Its the question that has been driving us bananas since November 4, 2008, when a newly elected president and Democratic Congress went full steam ahead with a radical plan to transform the United States into Absurdistan. Americans have greeted each day since with an incredulous What now? What epically anti-American, destructive, and weird policy, announcement or development are we going to get hit with today?
Team Obama and his determined band of leftists have played a skillful game of political whack-a-mole (or Barack-a-mole). They would pop up with one insane policy and before anyone could even begin to address it, they would pop up with another crazy initiative, and before anyone could begin to address that, up they would pop with yet another maniacal proposal. Nobody could keep up with the leftist madness, which of course was the point. Before we knew what actually hit us, most of us felt like strangers in a strange land.
The last few years have been a bizarre stroll through a surreal landscape. America hasnt been looking like America. Its been looking like an America painted by Salvador Dal, all dripping landscapes, liquid clocks, and warped reality like what Paul Pelosi sees when he wakes up every morning. Its as if America has fallen down the rabbit hole. Its America in The Twilight Zone.
More important, America hasnt been feeling like America. Everything we once thought we knew for sure is no longer true, and that in turn has rocked us to the very core. We used to know that if we lost our job, we would be able to find another one. Or that if we chose to, we would stay in the same home over the course of a thirty-year mortgage or longer. Or that after a recession we would have explosive comeback growth. Or that our children would have it better than we did. Or that despite downbeat times, we would return to our sunny national outlook soon enough. None of those things holds true today.
The shattering of those assumptions has shaken us. We arent used to feeling this strange kind of prolonged uncertainty and fear. We arent used to being off-kilter, wobbly on our feet, unable to count on our exceptional nation to buoy us.
The Tea Party grew out of this irrepressible sense that something isnt right, not because of an external threat, but because of an internal one. Thats why the Tea Party went from being an incipient movement to representing mainstream Americait stood in opposition to all of the things that lent to that sense that something was wildly off: out-of-control spending, taxes and debt, bailouts, widespread government intervention in the private sector, and explosive government. Many Americans, looking at this long litany of offenses, decided to do as William F. Buckley once exhorted, and stand athwart history, yelling, Stop! Which, incidentally, is the same directive most massage therapists utter when former vice president Al Gore disrobes.
The American ability to self-correct is one of the most elemental reasons for our nations survival. The Declaration of Independence is famous for its high-concept principles of individual liberty and basic human dignity as well as Thomas Jeffersons lyrically beautiful prose. But the core of the document is actually the lengthy list of abuses committed by King George, which served as the rationale for the taking up of arms against England in the name of independence. We have a different kind of fight before us now, this time for the very survival of what the Founders built.
What the @$%&! just happened to theirourcountry?
One day in 1984, Michael Jackson made a visit to the White House. He was at the height of his fame, with his album Thriller well on its way to becoming the best-selling album of all time. The Reagan White House had asked Jackson for permission to use his smash hit, Beat It, in a campaign to combat teen drinking and driving. Jackson obliged, and he arrived at the White House to receive a public-safety award and personal thanks from the Reagans.
The now-iconic photograph of the three of them reveals much about the towering personalities and even more about America. Jackson stands between the Reagans, wearing a tamer version of his famous sequined faux-military costume. Hands clasped in front of him, he waits silently as the president finishes making a point to Mrs. Reagan and she responds. His eyes as wide as saucers as he gazes up at the president, Jackson makes obvious his legendary offstage shyness as he stands mere inches from the Leader of the Free World. The worlds greatest performer had discovered himself on a stage even bigger and more profound than the ones to which he was accustomed. His awe is palpable. And Reagan, the experienced showman, looks just as dazzled to be in the presence of a young man who had set the world (and earlier, his own hair) on fire with a raw, sheer, devastating talent.
The boy from Tampico, Illinois, standing with the boy from Gary, Indiana: two children of the Midwest who went on to become among the most influential people the world has ever known. Both men had recognized and seized the uniquely American opportunity that great risks could be met with great rewards. They also understood that great risks could be met with great failure, that there were consequences to risk and chance, to decisions and gambles, to ideas and the execution of them. And still, they chose to hone their talents, work hard, sacrifice, and persevere until they had achieved their wildest dreams. Because, after all, wasnt that what America was all about in the first place? The wide-open space to succeed or fail? The land of opportunity, where government was small so individual ambitions could be big? The country in which there was no such thing as dreams too wild to pursue?
America cleared the path. Whether you succeeded or failed was up to you. The one thing this country would never prevent you from doing was trying.
During the 2008 presidential campaign, candidate Barack Obama once referred to his biracial background and itinerant childhood and said, In no other country on earth is my story even possible. True. But then in 2009, while attending the Group of 20 (G-20) summit in Europe, he was asked if he believed in American exceptionalism. He replied haltingly, I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism, and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.
