Monday, November 2, 2009

Learning from Fairy Tales

Bureaucrat from T. Gilliam's Baron Munchausen

While Peggy Noonan says we're being governed by 'callous children', it might be more accurate and truthful to say those in the executive branch see themselves living in the castle on the hill, beloved by all the peasants who need their leadership. The peasants who do NOT love them just have not come to get to know them well enough, or their sincerity, or the ends toward which all of these means (Public Option, Women's Reproductive Health Services, bailing out the Fat Cats of Wall Street, etc.) they are striving.

Alas. They must resort to sordid and picayunish squabbling with the knuckle-dragging right-wingers to hoist the nation to their lighter than air humanist utopian soap bubble. (And, ultimately, peasants must be dragged along, too, don't you know.)

The trouble is, the present Administration does not realize that no fairy tale ever began, "Once upon a time there lived a President and First Lady..." while endless fairy tales begin, "Once upon a time there lived a King and Queen."

While those countless voters who discarded the Christian faith - or, rather, the orthodox Christian faith as taught and vouchsafed by the magisterium of the Catholic Church - to elect this ersatz King, they too have forgotten that fairy tales are very important for learning truths about us humans, as the grim Brothers Grimm know.

In fact, one of the main lessons we learn from fairy tales is that we get in deep trouble when we set ourselves up as kings and queens when all we really are a bureaucrats, conventional scholars of a certain romantic Gnostic ilk, and partisan politicians who live and breath the worship of Mammon.

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