What Have you Done?

David Solway

An open letter to Americans:

As a Canadian, I’ve been observing for some time now, with great concern and even greater disbelief, the political farce enacted day after day in your country. And I keep asking, what have you done? For it seems to me, and to many others as well, that you have embarked upon a truly destructive course that may eventually bring the United States to the brink of ruination. What have you done? You have elected a president on the strength of an ellipsis, neglecting to fill in the three dots trailing after his every echoing jingle—“Yes we can”…what? You have credited a nimble spinner of tales, a pretty fellow with no significant experience of the real world of risk, hard work and the hazards of survival, a thug with a beguiling smile. You have elevated to the highest office in the land a man without discernible qualifications who is plunging the nation into unredeemable debt for generations to come. You have installed possibly the most consummate liar in POTUS history, who breaks campaign promises as if he were cracking eggs for the skillet and changes his mind almost daily like a weathervane on steroids. You have put your trust in an intellectual lightweight and geopolitical bungler who makes Jimmy Carter look like a paragon of acute intelligence, moral substance and rare diplomatic foresight.

What have you done? You have bought into a fraudulent narrative. You have made a Faustian bargain with a suave Mephistophelian who offers hope and change but delivers instead inevitable suffering and a violated people. As in all such compacts, the price for a brief state of euphoria is subsequent prolonged distress. You have given carte blanche to a man with a personal dossier blacked out in many places like a letter from the front, so as not, apparently, to divulge sensitive information. You have raised among you a man whose friends and influences would surely have precluded him from meriting your confidence had you paid attention to plain facts rather than to quasi-mystical incantations. You have anointed a man with a sinister agenda. You have voted for your historical nemesis who with his every move and decision renders you increasingly insecure in a violent and unforgiving world.

If you need a slogan to trigger a reaction, it should not be “Yes we can”—whatever that might conceivably have meant—but “What have we done?”—whose implications should now be obvious. I pray it is not too late to reverse the trajectory you have unthinkingly plotted for yourselves. It may be a shame to let a serious crisis go to waste, as your president’s intimate adviser cynically put it, but it would be a much greater shame to let a crisis reach the point of no return. And there is little doubt that you are now facing an impending crisis of the first magnitude, both domestically and globally.

Let us count the ways.

The response to a looming international menace is paralysis, appeasement and misconstrual—to the dire effects of which we are all, not only Americans, susceptible. American troops are targeted on the battlefield by the interventions of rogue regimes, such as Syria and Iran, which the present administration refuses to condemn and, indeed, with which it is seeking closer engagement. Defense capability is progressively truncated. Officials sworn to defend the nation to the best of their ability are saddled with the fear of prosecution, discouraging their peers and successors from properly doing their job. Detained terrorists are repatriated to their fields of operation, many taking up once again the jihadist activities for which they were originally interned. Acts of military aggression are adjudicated as civil offenses, awarding terrorists the same constitutional rights as ordinary Americans. Solemn alliances are flouted with whimsical impunity and typical hissy fits while manifest tyrants are treated with kid gloves and gestures of obeisance. UN kleptocrats and avowed enemies are laureled with meretricious authority. This is what your president’s current foreign policy amounts to, abetted by a carefully selected and pliable cadre of career puppets without character or backbone.

Meanwhile, legitimate dissent is denounced as a form of subversion. The Constitution is euphemistically interpreted as a “living document,” that is, as subject to tampering, which is nothing less than an assault upon the foundational heritage of the Republic. Individual liberties are being relentlessly eroded and private behavior regulated by an expanding government bureaucracy. The prospect of enfranchising up to eleven million illegal immigrants presages an American ochlocracy, that is, government by the masses rather than the laws—the very antithesis of Republican rule. Unelected officials, appointed by the president and known as “czars,” wield disproportionate power as they carry out their master’s directives. Unsustainable entitlement programs impinge dramatically upon the future. Income redistribution schemes disincentivize industrial and commercial productivity, creating a shrinking GDP and budgetary shortfall. Discredited hypotheses such as anthropogenic “climate change” are allowed to drive economic policy, leading to even further instability. Major tax hikes are on the horizon, complemented by the shell game of disappearing numbers, especially in regard to the so-called healthcare “reform,” with revenue calculated over a longer period than expenditures. New debt is piled on old debt like Pelion on Ossa. Fiscal blood drains from the nation’s arteries. These and more are the daylight consequences of your electoral delirium.

Who am I to address the citizens of another country? A loyal friend, and a citizen of a nation whose fate is inextricably bound up with yours. My interests are also at stake. That is why I am glad to note that many people are now awakening to the nature and extent of their folly, but far too many still malinger in the grip of a profound narcosis. To these latter, I would say that, in your desire for novelty, your pampered sense of frivolous grievance and your hypnotic suggestibility, you have chosen to cohabit with an incubus. You have shown a readiness to be seduced not by a lover of freedom but by a votary of his own malign gods. Despite the recent surfeit of Hollywood films, TV programs and neo-gothic novels fondly rehabilitating the undead, deep down you must know there is no such thing as a good vampire.

And so, in conclusion, I ask once again. What have you done?
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