December 2, 2020
MY CORNER by Boyd
Cathey
Triumph of the “Pod
People”? What the 2020 Election Really
Means
Friends,
When I was a boy, scarcely out of the first grade, there was
released a film—now a cult movie—titled “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”
(1956). Although my parents would let my
sister and me go occasionally to the old Ambassador Theater or the Colony
Theater in Raleigh, usually with friends or accompanied by either or both of
them, that was one film which was strictly off limits—we could attend a
Saturday Western double bill or maybe something like “Friendly Persuasion”
(with Gary Cooper) or “The Ten Commandments,” but nothing eerily bizarre that
might produce childhood nightmares. Besides, my sister and I were probably too
young to get in, given the old Hollywood Code.
Still, that movie was the subject of a lot of conversation.
And much of it centered on the famous “pod people” at the center of the film’s
plot: those extraterrestrial beings who were transported to earth as vegetable
pods and who eventually took over the bodies of sleeping, unaware human beings,
and possessed them, turning them essentially into robotic creatures who
continued to look like real humans but weren’t. We had great fun pretending
from time to time to be “pod people” back then.
That imagery has vividly come to mind in recent days, indeed
increasingly since the election 2016 and now even more so since November 3,
2020.
With all the growing discussion of “two Americas,” of a
country—our geographical entity—irreconcilably divided in which not only
interests, values and beliefs radically and sharply differ, but inhabitants can
no longer communicate, even though they supposedly speak the same language,
that imagery of six decades ago becomes more a fulfilled prophecy than science
fiction, even if only impressionistically.
No; certainly I am not accusing the minions and followers of the
Progressivist Left of being extraterrestrial interlopers. But I do suggest that
the virus of a highly contagious (post-)Marxist venom in our culture has infected
millions of our fellow citizens and exacted a tremendous toll—that it has been percolating
for many decades in our institutions, oftentimes just below the surface—that its
initial target was our educational system (and media)—and that its major
accomplishment has been to persuade us to accept as undeniable, dogmatic truth,
the idea of irreversible and steadily-advancing Progress which its
self-appointed heralds and standard-bearers continuously proclaim and update as
they see fit.
You know the drill: just take, for instance, the institution
of marriage. From being a holy sacrament, indissoluble, between one man and one
woman, our society has “progressed” from that traditional Christian doctrine.
First, it was secularized, then came easy and widespread divorce, now same sex
marriage as a constitutional right, and beyond, why not polygamy—do not the
laws forbidding it also deny “my human and constitutional rights”?
There are countless other examples, but I submit they are usually
advocated, and eventually accomplished, in the name of “equality” and “human rights,” but always subsumed under the Idea of Progress, that “society must
move forward,” not just materially
but intellectually. And that inevitably means Leftward. Anything or anyone who
stands in its way must be thwarted, cancelled, and eventually forbidden to
write and speak.
In 2016 an upstart millionaire businessman named Donald J.
Trump upset that applecart just a bit; not that he knew what he was actually
doing, not really. But his instincts and his intuition were mostly right, and
like millions of us out in what leftwing novelist Philip Roth once called “fly-over
country,” that expanse of America between New York’s Upper East Side and
Silicon Valley and San Francisco, Trump sensed that something was wrong in “our
democracy,” that in the name of social justice and equality, this country had
devolved into a stratified neo-plantation system in many ways more rigid and more
inhuman than anything my ancestors in antebellum North Carolina ever envisaged—or
would have ever countenanced.
I doubt that “the Donald” had ever read James Burnham’s
classics on the evolving dominance of what he termed the “managerial elite” or
class over American life, and assuredly he hadn’t peeked into Samuel Francis’s
texts developing the same topic (e.g., Leviathan
and Its Enemies, etc.). Nor had most Americans. But the fact is that today—in
“our democracy”—the country is basically divided more or less into three
classes:
--A highly selective and controlling managerial class, composed
mostly of corporate tech millionaires (and their minions) from Silicon Valley,
hedge funders on Wall Street, the academic and media elites, brainwashed
Millennials and soccer moms, and Deep State political pawns and dependents
buried deep in government;
--A broad middle class that ends up footing the bill for the corporate class and enduring its divinely proclaimed ukases and rules of conduct that only seem to affect the “deplorables” and “chumps” who live in Middle America, never in those gated million-dollar estates in San Jose or luxurious penthouses in Manhattan;
--And lastly, a growing dependent class, who are generally bought off by the beguiling promises of the managerial class and the goodies that are promised them.
The past four years—the first term of President Trump—awakened
among many hitherto mostly regular citizens an understanding that the old
republic in which they had lived and raised their families was quickly slipping
away. Trump, however imperfect he was, was seen as a kind of bull-in-the-china
shop, someone who would force the agents of the Deep State and its machinations—and
the role of the managerial elites in our lives—out into the light of day. For
those of us in the hinterland this comprehension was not always that clear.
Yet, among the Big Tech/Big Media/Big Academia apparatchiks and Deep State
managerial class, they understood far better what was at stake: their masks had
been partially ripped off, and what we began to behold were…modern “pod people,”
in every way they looked like us, but
now forced out into the open to protect their positions and authority, they
were increasingly revealed as radically different, programmed, as it were, like
“pod people” from outside our universe determined to control every aspect of
our lives…and regain lost power.
Often those of us who reject the Idea of Progress and the
proposals of its fanatical votaries are labeled “racists” or misogynists, or
defenders of “historic white supremacy”—facile epithets intended to shame and silence
us.
Since the November 3 election those of us who question its
legitimacy, who have noted multiple, literally hundreds of examples of mass fraud
and manipulation of the vote, are labeled “conspiracy nuts” running to-and-fro sporting
tinfoil hats, spouting outlandish and bizarre theories. Yet those “theories”
are not outlandish and bizarre if they are true. And the mounting evidence—and that
is what it is, evidence—is more than convincing.
Those who demand our submission—our obeisance—to their claim
that this election is over, that there was little or no fraud and abuse, who refuse to even examine the evidence, are
engaged in “gaslighting” and projection. They accuse us—as the neoconservative honcho Jonah Goldberg does consistently on Fox—of failing to
acknowledge reality. Yet it is they,
like G. K. Chesterton’s unfettered bird out of its natural nesting place, who have
turned much of America into something outside the laws of God and of Nature. It
is they who have created their own unreality,
the swamp of lunacy which bids to overwhelm us.
And that we cannot and will not permit to happen, even if we
must for a time endure in modern catacombs. To quote the president of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis:
Truth crushed to earth is truth still and
like a seed will rise again.
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