Posted on 10/19/2021 3:03:46 AM PDT by Kaslin
You need to understand that in a society where religion has gone out of fashion, the elite has to canonize secular saints as examples for the people it proposes to rule. The elite needs a quasi-religious justification to feel superior, and if it is not divine right that grants them that dispensation, it must be their own inherent superiority. This is why is so vital for them to feel smart – and why you see nonsense like signs reading “We believe in science” on the lawns of suburban wine women who contend that Kaden has become Katy through the power of wanting to be a girl. But our current elite, especially the Boomer establishment, was much less smart than it thought, and it has a track record of failure that requires an accounting. Therefore, when an aging Boomer within the upper reaches of the elite passes on, it is worthwhile to examine his life closely.
Colin Powell is a prime example of that passing generation of the elite and the current crisis of leadership in our country. Many who knew him respected him greatly, and attempts to turn him into a comical failure are as meritless as those who seek to make him an icon. He was a mixed bag, as most of us are – though Washington seems to have more sacks of unmitigated Schiff than anywhere else.
The general died of COVID after, as all the elite-simping people writing the news reports assured us, he had been vaccinated multiple times. They had to get that in – they had to reassure the faithful that the general was no heretic despite his sad end. His passing was noted exactly as one would expect for a mandarin of the elite. The mainstream hailed him; the rebel media pointed out his faults. Predictably, his obituaries put great store in the fact that he was “the first black” whatever, reducing his achievements – and he did have achievements – to a mere accident of birth. Moreover, the repeated reassurances that he had been “fully vaccinated” only served to highlight the lie we were sold that the vaccine was perfect protection.
Powell represents the mixture of good and bad that makes our boomer establishment’s failure so troubling. He performed adequately – decades ago, in Vietnam, and in the Gulf War where soldiers in it (like me) found him a firm and reassuring leader. The guy was brave in battle. He got wounded and he was a competent general. But so was Robert Mueller, except the general part. Lots of the Boomer elite surfed achievements from the sixties all the way in.
Back then, the elite at least had an entry turnstile that was more than just getting some worthless degree from some allegedly prestigious college. Powell stepped on a punji stick, which strikes me as a pretty good qualification for future leadership. Hell, all I got in my deployments was a sunburn and appendicitis.
But let’s be very clear about Powell’s total failure once he became one of the Washington wise men. He accepted the false WMD narrative and put his prestige behind it. Now, to be fair, I believed it too – I worked in that field during Gulf War 1.0 and understood the capabilities Saddam had then. But it turned out to be baloney a decade later, sparking the disaster that was Gulf War 2.0. From his public actions afterwards, Powell seemed outraged not so much by the war itself than the fact that being caught falsely pushing the meme damaged his credibility.
Powell became a reliably Democrat-voting Republican, the kind CNN would wheel out every election cycle to explain how actual Republicans are terrible. He was beloved in Washington as one of the wisemen because of this; it certainly helped wash off some of the stink of being caught up in the mustard gas fraud. Grimly, at the end, his passing exemplified the worst of the people he thought were the best and enjoyed being one of, with focus on his race and his taking of the vaxx sacrament and a soft-pedaling of his flaws.
Like many luminaries of the Boomer establishment, Powell provided a certain gravity and dignity to an elite rapidly filling up with young, woke, unaccomplished hacks. Though he was firmly on the side of the woke pronoun people by the end, he was not one of them. He picked up a rifle; they picked a gender. Powell was a serious man who found himself allied with unserious people.
But what did Colin Powell have to say to the rest of America? Sorry about the maimings and all the KIAs? He never gave any sense that he understood the forces that pushed Trump into the White House, and why would he? He was a four-star general, then the Secretary of State. These are potentates, and their encounters with the plebs are both rare and uncomfortable. He never had to make a payroll, never worried about the next mortgage payment. He entered West Point and never left the warm embrace of the establishment, whether as a soldier and diplomat in the government or in the quasi-governmental world that followed. So, it was no shock that the rise of Trump was a shock to him.
Powell gave no indication that he had any sense of the betrayals normal Americans felt, of the security stripped from them both economically and culturally by the policies of people like him. After all, the target of their populist anger was the insular ruling caste that he was a huge part of. Instead, it was easier for him to ascribe the rejection of people like him to their knuckle dragging ignorance or, more darkly, their racism.
But the American people did not reject Colin Powell and his ilk because the American people are bad, but because the elite is so bad at being elite. In DC, they will mourn Powell as a secular saint. In the rest of America, people will shrug.
At least he tried. He was a patriot, even if that fact was overshadowed by his membership in the Boomer establishment. And the generation of the establishment that follows his has already proven to be even worse.
Colin Powell, RIP.
I like the article, but have one issue with it. People older than 75 are not Baby Boomers. They come from the generation born prior to 1946, the first baby boom year. So please don’t blame boomers for people like Schumer, Pelosi, Biden, Maxine Waters and, yes, Colin Powell.
Not Boomers?
Same technicality might be applied to the musicians at Woodstock etc. The 1945 birthday technicality is not the way this generational sociology works, as livius seems to me to acknowledge.
Sociology is a science of generalizations that can still hold useful though the conclusions can be attacked in just such a way. If you do not accept sociology as a science, then that is fine. My son is so. We cannot discuss sociology without first laying ground rules. He thinks that any generalization can be defeated with a single counterexample, but he has agreed that on some level there is “something there” when it comes to sociology, so he mentally adjusts himself and then we have a good discussion.
Really there is nothing about Powell or Mueller emblematic of the Boomers. And spare me the condescending prattle about sociology: I’ll leave it to your son to be stuck with that.
True. We got burned bad by “free trade”, aka free flow of goods. Ross Perot was right though. Many of us didn’t imagine that production would be moved off shore.
Rush was always a populist. Frankly, I don’t recall where he stood on Nafta. However, he didn’t rigidly conform to inside the belt way “conservative” thinking. One example is immigration.
I can't disagree more on that. Perhaps, to your ears. But, he was never a populist, that's why he got alot of flak from the other tribes on the right.
As I told my kids, he was a good soldier and a lousy politician.
He was apparently instrumental in the career of a friend of mine while he was climbing the ranks in the Army.
“But our current elite, especially the Boomer establishment...”
This man really thinks that his “Boomer establishment” meme, that he mentions much to often, is a never-before-noticed piece of genius that he, only, has discovered that unravels and explains what is wrong in the United States, but it is sheer stupidity.
“...it certainly helped wash off some of the stink of being caught up in the mustard gas fraud.”
I am no fan of Powell’s, but I talked with a soldier in that war; he said they were hit with mustard gas.
“Are you willing to pay for those that can’t,..”
We pay for other people’s kids regardless of their ability to pay. And we get a crappy product.
Your kids are your responsibility. And that includes educating them.
L
“Condescending prattle?”
9Lurk gives me reason to be condescending now. Using the birth date technicality would be a misunderstanding of how these generational generalities work in sociology. One not capable of understanding may call this prattle, or it may be prattle. An emotionally weak person may be stung by being corrected when no ill is intended, but his feeling about it is more important to him than me.
“Nothing...emblematic...”
If the birthday point makes his point, no need to say this, but anyway, granted for the sake of argument that Powell is too old to be a Boomer, as Avalon Memories says, Lurk did not understand that the current ongoing celebration of the man is certainly a Boomer phenomenon! livius’ comment #3, his observation of him as a leader of that generation is sound.
“Your son to be stuck with that...”
That was cute, I think, so Lurk shows he has some level of sophistication.
7thson comment #11 acknowledges that Powell is not a Boomer and then goes on to participate in the discussion in an admirable way if the admiration of such a prating, condescending coxcomb such as I has any currency.
Another great post by Kaslin. Very thankful for all of you.
Baby Boomer | Definition of Baby Boomer by Merriam-Webster
https://www.merriam-webster.com
Baby boomer definition is - a person born during a period of time in which there is a marked rise in a population’s birth rate : a person born during a baby boom; especially : a person born in the U.S. following the end of World War II (usually considered to be in the years from 1946 to 1964).
The musicians at Woodstock were mostly not Boomers, nor were the “Generation of ‘68” who led the European riots, nor were people like Abie Hoffman.
The actual Boomers were young and impressionable enough to be whipped up by them...and they were also being taught by some awful anti-American leftists, including some who had come back from WWII and gotten their degrees under the GI Bill.
Believe me, I’m a legitimate Boomer who grew up in NYC and went to public school and even one of the “elite” schools. It was a solid indoctrination in anti-Americanism by people at least 10 years older than we were.
Good points, thought provoking thanks!
Rush was indeed a supporter of the Clinton era NAFTA agreement. He spurned and mocked Perot and his prescient warning of the “giant sucking sound” of disappearing American industrial jobs. His later emphatic, chilling monologues on Clinton’s selling out of our country and the White House to Chinese criminals in exchange for millions and reelection in ‘96, fell on deaf ears. NAFTA was already killing us. Clinton was the traitor that paved the way to our downfall.
Not till the ascendency of Trump did I hear Rush acknowledge that NAFTA was a mistake. I remember him lamenting NAFTA in his dying days. Trump was our one chance to restore what was rightfully ours. Too little too late given that we are now led by even bigger traitors than Clinton. The democrats, led by Biden are killing us from within. This is the essence of our destruction.
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