Sensimilla

George Will supports the full legalization of banned narcotics! No, wait, what?

Alors. As a Randroid Trustafarian Anarchist whiling the long summer hours by twindling political invective onto a World Wide Web Blog from the family yacht, dreaming of a day when every man, woman, and child lives as his own shrugging Atlas in a seasteaded individual fruitopia . . . uh, what was I saying? Oh, oh, yeah. Obviously, I'm sympathetic to any view that we have too much government, that government is too intrusive, and that the illusion of progress through government, human uplift through legislation and regulation, is a dangerous one indeed. Equally obviously, most of the people who espouse such ostensible views don't really believe them. When you discover a man who supposes that a semi-socialized medical industry represents a greater immediate threat to liberty than a vast standing army, a set of decade-long colonial wars, and the most ubiquitous penal system the world has ever known, then you can be reasonably certain that he has no real objection to the power of the state per se, but merely to certain applications of that power insofar as he percieves such applications to nibble away at important class distinctions. (George Will Our hypothetical person would never say "class distinctions" of course.)

As for George Will, he managed to compose an entire column in which the nebulous proposition that Obama is somehow and unprecedentedly tinkering with the traditional social order is propped up with cocktail umbrellas and playing cards as an elaborate, contemporary, metaphorical proxy for Prohibition, the point being more or less that Prohibition begat general lawlessness, ergo semper fidelis ubiquito logo pox tantalus presto Americans are going to, what, burn their health insurance cards? The comparison shatters like an osteopeniac hip hitting the pavement. Meanwhile, there is a perfectly workable contemporary analogue to Prohibition that demonstrates to irrefutable effect the impossibilities of social engineering, the cruelty of arbitrary power, the inequity and iniquity of the law, the way that the language of morality is perverted into policies of oppression, etc., and that analogue is . . . prohibition.

In closing, Will hopes that Americans today prove as ungovernable as they were in the past. This is an awfully tendentious reading of history, especially from a man who wears a bow tie. America likes its tall tales of rugged individualism and wild frontiers, but we have always been one of the most governable of people, deeply conformist, and appallingly respectful of the law. Even the fucking Canadians throw better demonstrations than we do. When we boast of being a nation of laws and not men, we might pause to consider what is implied by the preponderence of the first and the paucity of the latter.