Mickey Mouse Has Grown Up A Cow

by Danny Aleksandar

“I hate when people say God Bless America!” a conservative, devoutly Christian aunt recently told me.  “God did bless America, and we blew it!” 

Tragically, she is right.  Look at America today.  We have devolved from a once proud nation that celebrated the evolution of our freedoms into a nation littered with dependent mobs of “ask what the country can do for me” ingrates who spit on America. We do not understand what we have destroyed, nor what we are becoming. We do not appreciate the true value or fragility of freedom, particularly free speech, which is non-existent in most of Western Europe, where people are fined and sometimes jailed for using banned words.

Who cares? Europeans get long holidays and they dress better. I want that! I want it NOW!

OK, Veruca Salt. I’m sure you will look tres chic in that German jail cell
after being arrested for saying something banned by the government.

Is this what we want for America? Is salvation even possible?

The unprecedented abundance of wealth created under the blanket of our free, capitalist society means nothing to most Americans beyond the excessive materialism it affords them.  Part of me understands the Islamic worldview of the west and America when seeing our ostentatious lifestyles as our main export in popular media.  It’s good to enjoy nice things, and it’s great to party, but consumption should never conflict with one’s values.  Americans act like entitled, gluttonous pigs on TV and the narcissistic wasteland of social media, flaunting their every new thing, every new fling, every exotic vacation, and in such undignified cries for attention air all of their dirty laundry to the world.  To their credit, the more socially conscious ones do take a solemn thirty seconds now and then to virtue signal on Twitter for the fashionable cause of the day.  This is the extent of most Americans’ efforts today at “keeping our republic,” and we wonder why statues of Benjamin Franklin are at risk. 

Even during these overreaching, government-mandated economic shutdowns, which have clearly been history’s biggest “cure worse than the disease,” many Americans expressed more pain finding themselves suddenly unable to go out drinking at a bar than they have expressed outrage at the innumerable violations of our sacred, constitutionally protected civil rights.  Rights that generations of men fought and died for.  Is it any wonder in this age of unregulated entitlement that urban Americans in particular prioritize intoxication during a “pandemic?”  They line up slavishly, six feet apart, masks on, outside their second nearest marijuana dispensary, its’ windows covered by sheets of plywood covered in spray painted BLM and ANTIFA slogans (the nearest dispensary was looted the night before…this is Chicago, by the way).  Scenes of masked stoners surrounded by boarded up storefronts covered in graffiti are unshakably eerie.  Worse still are images of Girl Scouts and their unforgivably careless mothers selling cookies to starving pot heads outside the dispensaries.  I’m sorry to tell you I’m not kidding.  Is this what those “stimulus checks” paid for? 

The pursuit of happiness once meant individuals were free to endeavor to create their own happiness in a law-abiding society, with government limited in its’ powers by inalienable individual rights.  Today, it means creating overblown unemployment payouts greater than the sum of lost wages in a shameless partisan bidding war for the service industry vote.  It means the taxpayer is obligated to subsidize whomever the government deems worthy.  First priority goes to those who purchase a committee congressman, second priority to those highest on the identity politics hierarchy, and so on down the line, all the way to the bottom (where the masked stoner waits patiently with the help of some Thin Mints). Many of the beneficiaries are already rich, and most of the poor remain poor despite endless handouts, but the greed among them is of the same immorality.  The rest of you, without political clout, should apologize for living and be grateful to pay the bill.  And that is America today. 

The “rest of you” refers, of course, to the disappearing, mostly conservative middle class, who know they are being replaced and mistreated, but cannot conceive the words to describe the injustice because most were educated in the altruism indoctrination camps known as public schools.  In this perversion of the American capitalist system, corporatism has replaced our republic, and equality of opportunity has replaced equality under the law.  Equality of outcome has yet to be fully forced upon us, but we are not far off. 

Whether rich, middle class, or poor, ill-educated and brainwashed Americans no longer know the difference between civil rights and entitlements and, as a direct consequence of our societal ignorance, our fundamental freedoms are slipping away.  We sold our souls for free stuff and we’ve transplanted smart phones where our brains ought to be.  Even those who benefit nothing material or political from this corrupt system are partly complicit.  We have fallen so low.

How did we get here?  How did we blow it?

Let’s ask the people who have been warning us for years of the failures of socialism, “a nice idea in utopia, but an impractical system on earth,” as their weak argument always goes. 

Let’s ask the people we have been voting for all these years who promised to protect the American Dream and our civil liberties from an ever-growing, oppressive central government.

Let’s ask the anti-welfare, anti-affirmative action, anti-public broadcasting, anti-tax hike, anti-lobbyist, allegedly God fearing Conservative Republican Leadership. 

They are the ones who are always saying “God Bless America,” right?

Maybe they can answer for their decades long, abject failure to protect our greatest blessing; the fundamental principles that made America the freest and most prosperous society in world history. 

Better yet, let’s not ask them.  Their answers will never be honest, and they don’t even understand what’s happening, anyway.  In fact, there are no greater examples of how NOT to protect America than those provided by our Conservative Leadership for the past fifty years. 

Conservatives in 1970:  Our public schools and Academia are hotbeds of liberal indoctrination! 

Fast forward to 2020: Liberals have even greater control of public schools and Academia…

Conservatives in 1970:  Hollywood is producing liberal propaganda!  

Fast forward to 2020:  Liberal Hollywood retains full control of movies & television…

Conservatives in 1970:  The media is unfair to conservatives!

Fast forward to 2020:  The media continues to glorify liberals and demonize conservatives…

Conservatives in 1970:  Hippies smelling drugs are to blame for incivility! 

Fast forward to 2020:  Those hippies continued smelling drugs.  They are today’s college professors and you’re paying their salaries…

Conservatives in 1970:  Socialism leads to Communism!

Fast forward to 2020:  America is basically a socialist nation with capitalist tendencies…

If liberals are so immoral, ignorant, and dangerous, what does it say about conservatives that we, knowing what we have always known about the left, let them take full control of every educational and cultural institution in America, and for decades?  How can we honestly expect to hold them responsible for America on fire when we gave the idiot children the matchbox and a fifty-year supply of gasoline?  After all, we are the grown-ups here, right?  We are the ones who saw the signs of what was to come long ago.  We have no rational defense.

“I told you so” doesn’t work.  Hearkening back to “simpler times” doesn’t work.  None of these failed tactics will ever work to transform American culture. 

Persuasion works.  Persuasion works because it sustains.  In what remains the best example of conservative intellectual leadership mastering the art of persuasion, the epic novels Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand imbued her tales with persuasive moral arguments in defense of capitalism, the bedrock of all the freedoms upon which America was founded.  The reason Rand’s immortal characters remain literary folk heroes even today, perhaps more than ever before, is because they speak not only to people’s minds, but directly to our hearts as well.  A common and foolish misconception among conservatives is that appealing to people’s hearts is weakness.  Even Rand, a staunch atheist, acknowledged the importance of touching hearts as well as minds with a clear, rational morality.  She succeeded.       

Most conservative spokespeople do not know how to persuade anyone of anything outside their own political echo chambers.  Lazy, ego-driven, and anti-intellectual in their approach, they resort to scolding liberals and mocking cultural institutions, while at the same time mindlessly (or even worse, consciously) advocating for their version of the same collectivist, altruist morality they pretend to oppose by another name (socialism) which is destroying this country. 

Outside of judging high profile conservatives, young people, who are the future and therefore do matter, see ordinary conservative people as crusty old hypocrites who are greedy, racist, and lacking in empathy and morality (can you believe their nerve?!)  Although they are wrong in their rationale, they are accidentally correct in their estimation that conservatives, by and large, are guilty of something truly bad. 

Paradoxically, that “something truly bad” is the everyday average Joe’s moral crime of knowing he is morally right but choosing to cower in shame as a secret member of the infamous “silent majority.”  After fifty years, Joe, the silence is deafening.  Plain as “America’s tortured brow,” as David Bowie put it, Mickey Mouse has, indeed, grown up a cow.  And you raised him, silent majority old-timer!  Now, good luck convincing the cow that hates you to save your Social Security and Medicare, especially if it means affording less globe-trotting holidays for the cow.  Come to think of it, the prospect of sacrificing one orgy abroad for the welfare of racist old boomers may be enough to convince the next entire generation of taxpayers that socialism is immoral. At the intersection of “love is love” and “punch a nazi,” your own children might rather see you dead.

So, what now?  This is so depressing.  Describing the water in which we are all drowning is not helpful.  Some might say that’s all I’m doing here – that I am without hope. 

Wrong.  I’m telling you to stop doggy paddling.  You’re wasting valuable energy and will soon be dead.

I’m telling you to shut your mouth because you’re swallowing saltwater.

I’m telling you to CONCENTRATE.  Don’t panic.  I am full of hope.   

Bring your chest up to the surface of the water, float on your back, and look up at the sky.

Now, repeat after me:

Talking a big game about patriotism and the power of the free market is meaningless. (now you)

Abdication of the moral high ground is an egregious betrayal more evil than socialism. (your turn again)

It is time to finally lay to rest the failed attack dog strategies, blame-game tactics, and moral cowardice that brought us here. (one more time, my friend)

You see?  You’re floating…

Now, try a backstroke.  It’s never too late to learn to swim.

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