Civil war within 8 years?
March 06, 2013
You’ve heard of “The Mouse That Roared.” Sequester is the “Lion That Hiccuped.” Warning: This does not mean America is safe.
Historians have an annoying habit of swinging backwards on new headlines like monkeys, looking for bygone parallels that may or may not tell us useful things. The painlessness of the sequester reminds this amateur historian of the “Phony War,” the eight months of World War II after the Germans swallowed Poland, and Britain and France declared war. The world yawned. Comics in England called it the “Sitz-krieg,” opposite of “Blitz-krieg.”
Author Martin Gross has written several best-selling books on the dismal state of America’s finances, beginning years before anybody had ever heard of Barack Obama. His latest is “National Suicide: How Washington is Destroying the American Dream from A to Z.” Gross insists America could cut, not the paltry 2 percent demanded by sequester, but a full 10 percent without serious pain. Gross calls America’s government “dysfunctional” and proves it with documented sagas of, for instance, his investigating of a federal expense nobody had ever heard of. Apparently, there was a taxpayer-supported “Office of Former House Speakers” complete with furniture and four or five employees doing God-knows-what for those who used to be speakers of the House and sometimes weren’t even in Congress anymore! Can you guess how many overlapping “rural” programs Gross found? There were over a thousand, some passed as long as 80 years earlier.
Martin Gross told a national radio audience last week that he expects a Communist-style revolution, civil war and blood in the American streets, all within the next eight years. Gross isn’t running for anything and isn’t trying to sell his four-year-old book. He was a stalwart of the Democratic Party in New York, ran Adlai Stevenson’s campaign on Long Island and was John F. Kennedy’s floor manager trying to win the vice presidential nomination in 1956.
You can’t dismiss such a qualified observer’s predictions merely because they’re so horrible. You owe him a little wine-tasting and blood-testing first.
The most effective answer to national crisis is setting quarrels aside and pulling together. How well do you think America is doing in that regard? Have you ever seen a mature nation behave worse in a crisis?
In New York City there were two blackouts, 12 years apart – 1965 and 1977. In that first one, New York was drenched with honor. Journalists around the world compared the population of New York to Londoners during the Blitz. The second one will be remembered as “The Night of the Animals.” The police couldn’t stop the looting. They didn’t try. They confined their activity to keeping the looting orderly, so different gangs smashing store windows and walking out with sofas, washer-dryers and home-entertainment systems wouldn’t attack one another.
It’s called “deterioration.”
