A broad at home.(the bent pin)(Essay)

'SHINE, perishing republic," as Robinson Jeffers said when I voted him the poet I would most like to have a beer with.

As I write this in the waning days before the election, Campaign '08 has been buffed up to reveal a high gloss of protesting too much that meets Shakespearean standards for compulsive self-exposure. Listening to endless choked-up tributes to the "real people," the "real patriots," and the "real Americans," you start to ask yourself, Why are they coming down so hard on the real? Are all those real people out there in the real America really as real as the pols say?

I got myself into this knotty speculation the same week that the subject of socialism hit the fan and became the bee in every bonnet, so I let it buzz around in mine until I came up with a theory.

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Conservatives are incensed by the idea of American socialism but I think we have skipped it in favor of bigger and better despair. America will never be a socialist country per se because we are already globalists-in-training and will be full-fledged ones in the not-too-distant future. At the moment, we are undergoing some kind of 21st-century sociopolitical sea change, comparable to the transference stage in psychoanalysis that leaves people the same, but different.

Globalism is socialism without borders whereby the world's moneymen practice unfettered capitalism among themselves while majority populations, lulled into brain death by the good life under the socialistic governments set up to keep them quiet, convince themselves that they live in capitalist countries. Not only do they get the "capitalist" part wrong, they get the "country" part wrong, too. Globalist Man doesn't live in a country, he lives in what Teddy Roosevelt called a "polyglot boardinghouse." This is how socialism and globalism differ. Socialism leaves conspicuous nationality alone, often because it's good for the tourist trade. Globalism, on the other hand, cannot succeed unless people become foreigners in their own land. This is what is happening to "real" Americans in "real" America: Expatriation in situ is the enemy within, and it's us.

As the globalistas well know, displaced nations can survive intact without their art, without their music, even without their language, but they can't survive without their hangups. Where you find hangups, there you will find strength of character: Well-adjusted people are pushovers. Take away the hang-up and you take away the Americanness. The winning formula can be expressed with: "Give me a hang-up until I am seven and it is mine forever." Unfortunately, in America it is virtually impossible to hold on to any trait smacking of individualism until the age of seven. Thanks to the combined forces of "education," political correctness, diversity, and free-floating induced guilt, we are losing so many of our hang-ups that we could be the poster child for Idiosyncrasy Makes the Man, Inc.