You reap what you sow

It's a pretty simple fact of life. And it is a fact of life in politics as much as in the rest of life.

Rod Dreher offers some really poignant observations on this fact of life, today, in his column, And It Was Written, Our Blame.

"Complex financial instruments come and go, but the hearts of men remain the same. Greed, vanity and hubris we always have with us, as well as a weakness for the soft sophisticated lie over the hard plain truth. About human nature, tradition – the accumulated wisdom of mankind – is never wrong. True conservatives – as opposed to those who confuse mammon-worship with moral and intellectual principle – know that a tolerable order can only exist when most people live by the moral laws articulated in time-worn banalities.

So, send the tumbrels into the streets to carry off the heads of sophisticates who believed that we had repealed the laws of economics and human nature by our cleverness. The Gods of the Copybook Headings demand propitiation. We shall offer them scapegoats and try to forget our own complicity in the coming catastrophe.

After all, these scoundrels did not elect themselves, nor was there an outcry heard in the land against Wall Street rapacity and recklessness when our 401(k)s were rising, and all but the lowliest plebeian was moving into his very own McMansion.

Along those lines, there's one proverb that we will all become painfully acquainted with in the years to come: You reap what you sow."

I try to take a lighter view on things that Ron does here. But I have to say that I'm a little disgusted, today, watching Wall Street folks who fucked up getting a handout while the average folks who lost in this most recent round of the the hot-then-cold housing market get to eat their mistakes themselves.

It's kind of bullshit, really. Whole fuckin' political world is kind of bullshit, really. And then they all go pat themselves on the back on avoiding the Depression that was sure to come one quarter following 3.3% growth. And while liberals are scaring us all with Depression talk, conservatives are out scaring us with talk about how Hitler is around every corner.

It's all so bullshit and dishonest I can hardly stand it. I'm sure these morons honestly believe their bullshit. But they do so avoiding debates with one another and with those who could distinguish Depressions and Hitlers from stuff that they don't even closely resemble.

And then they tell themselves, "See. Those smarty-pants professors didn't know what they were talking about. You don't have to be a genius to make a fortune or build a power base. You just need to believe in your own bullshit enough that you never have to even question it, you're so goddamn sure of how right you are."

The only solace I have watching this load of shit unfold is exactly what Rod Dreher concludes with:

We reap what we sow.

There is no law that human beings always follow. But there are some facts of life that always show up.

And this is one of them.

It will not be the last. No matter how much we try to bullshit ourselves otherwise.