The Frog Theory
by John Wolf
If you drop a frog in boiling water he will leap right out. If you slowly heat the water, he will be content until it's too late to get out. That is exactly how history works. It moves slowly and we never really see any danger until it's too late.
The frog theory has gotten many a leader, country or otherwise docile entity in hot water, no doubt. Many compare past presidents and blame them for our slow rolling boil and blame Hollywood for stirring the pot.
Much of the liberal Hollywood movie machine has overemphasized weaknesses in the way our government has acted and made boobs of our leaders, but in many cases didn't do enough to warn the lazy frog. The way America exploited nations by using economic tricks via the World Bank and the IMF is disgraceful. Even CIA agents have come out of the shadows to tell the story, to ashamed to hide it any longer. There is also the business of hiring gangsters to whack South American politicians that we didn't like. There have been many blunders and much shortsightedness, but it wasn't all done deliberately to destroy America. Stupid is as stupid does. Hollywood reflects, for the most part, a gay liberal point of view, and unless you are one, it's not going to make sense anyway. Why would anyone depend on Hollywood for politically sound thinking?
Many chest pounding Americans thinks the world should automatically respect us for our greatness. Since the Cold War ended (or did it?), we have had a series of presidents that produced tongue-in-cheek levels of respect or ridicule, depending on whether you were a democrat or republican.True respect has to be earned. Real respected leaders come from followers allowing themselves to be led by them. They respect him for his deeds and actions. It's not the other way around. The only way a leader that demands respect gets it, is by fear, and that describes all the dictators that have ever existed.
If American continues to do stupid things that don't deserve any one's respect, guess what, it isn't going to be given any respect. On our recent trip I asked several people in Italy and Greece what they thought about Mr. Bush. Every one of them said, he's your baby, but we are all waiting for the day he's gone. We want you to succeed, but we are sad, because it seems so hard for you to find the nose on the front of your face.
Some say that wisdom is dying out with the last generation. Wisdom has been around a long time. You don't have to reinvent it, it's the stuff common sense is made of. But one of the tendencies of the warrior class is they always kill off the intellectuals after each war. Now days you can do the killing with economics. Computers have given the twisted minds in power the ability to slowly cook your frog. The power grab these days is to get all the Monopoly money by pushing people onto Park Place with hotels using statistical mathematics via computers. The problem comes when a glitch gets into the model, the whole nation goes to hell in a hand basket, aka, Jumbo Loans, Savings and Loan Debacle, Sub-prime Loan Debacle, just you name the debacle and it smells of organized White Collar Crime and politicians allowing it, because they've been bought off.
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I really don't think we are getting the best candidates for president that are available. The deck is stacked by the greedy. So all the talk about this guy promises lies, that guy will burn your children, whatever, is silly, because we are working with clay that has too much sand in it. The real talent is pissed off. They would rather play the money game and live outside our little Mayberry fantasy that we have dreamt up of days gone by.
These landlords control our interests from overseas locations. Don't forget we have placed our country in the hands of foreign interests by selling our debt to them via US Treasury Bonds. The fact that the population of the US has gone up by 60 million people in my lifetime and most of them from foreign lands that didn't come here to act American but brought their culture to displace ours has caused a shift away from the "good old days." America as we knew it, culturally came from British and German ethics. Remember George Washington spelled "color" "colour" and worked to a sed-u-all (schedule). The population of the original Colonies was mostly Germans reconstituted into British citizens. During the first Continental Congress, a proposal to make the official language of the new nation, German verses English, failed to pass by one vote. The fact that China and India can graduate more scientists and engineers in a single year than we have graduated in the last 20 years is important to notice.
As the quality of education improves in these places and their economies get stronger, these masses of thinkers become movers and shakers. They may not have our "old school" type of future in mind. Simple deduction will tell you that America is on the short end of this stick. It's not the time to look to the past for answers, it's time to create a very savvy future if we want to be anything else but frog legs on the banquet table of the world.
I say make Washington D.C. a museum and move the seat of government to Denver and not allow anyone over 40 into office and all candidates should be conscripted from the brightest, be that from industry, universities or the school of hard knocks, but politics the "old way" is gradually raising the heat on the pot.
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John prefers to be politically neutral, like the Swiss, but like the Swiss, guards his Vatican and feels the need to pull out the old multi-bladed knife and flash it around sometimes. |
