The hollow men vs. The carny men
By Michael Moriarty
web posted January 18, 2010
I've been reading Mark Steyn for years, even before he left Canada for the States. His most recent offering, however, is, how shall I say … uh … The Highest of Steyn … that ingenious balance of wit and cliff-hanging urgency that deserves a corner within the Library of Congress to be named after Mark Steyn.
His writing is a cross between Samuel Johnson, Mark Twain, recordings of Jonathon Winters and Robin Williams plus … uh … the inimitable Mark Steyn.
It's as if Mr. Steyn were here to prove conclusively that not only does the truth hurt but Big Truth about Human Stupidity grows larger as you move up the pecking order.
What used to be his stream-of-consciousness-generosity is now so lean and mean that not a single sentence is expendable. The article doesn't pace itself. It hurtles toward, in this case, the perfect rounding of the Mark Steyn circle.
From Salman Rushdie to a wiser Salman Rushdie, leaving Barack Obama … uh … well, please read it yourself.
2 plus 2 equals 4 and those who, due to their higher education, wish to sum it all up as 5 or 4.5 and then teach it as New Math, they now, in the last half of the last century, have been leaving a career in academics to run for political office and, unfortunately, put their laboratory findings into action.
Ergo, President Barack H. Obama.
Adlai Stevenson was the first of this ilk that I can recall from my own lifetime.
We were wise enough then not to elect him.
However, the similar likes of Dr. Henry Kissinger snuck into the Nixon administration.
It obviously was the likes of Stevenson and Kissinger who inspired that treasonous graduate of Yale, William F. Buckley, to opine: "I would rather be governed by the first two thousand people in the Boston telephone directory than by the two thousand people on the faculty of Harvard University."
And Buckley always sounded and looked like the Ivy League mold that never broke.
Meanwhile, why are Mark Steyn's autopsies of the dead realities of these enlightened despots, as Voltaire called them, why are they simultaneously so dismissive of their subjects yet indelibly memorable in their … uh … panache, yes, in the abandon with which such essays take our loftiest leaders, expose them as not only without clothes but without an ounce of common sense, remind us adroitly of how absurdly repetitive their … uh … absurdities are repeated … and … well … leave us with no other recourse but to laugh out loud until the tears come?
Turning our predicament into a blissful agony, with implications that can only foretell of ancient disasters still to come?!
The wittiest people now are unquestionably the political conservatives.
Yes, it is possible to live in not only the Real but the philosophic dissertations on the Really Real as well, and not have done so with an elitist's college degree.
I once knew a man who began his adulthood hawking side shows as a Carnival or Carny Man.
Mark Steyn and the Real Carny Men of the world see through everything so swiftly that they, in a way, become our best friends.
They are desperately needed, particularly at a time when the Harvard and Yale graduates are hawking their own wares out of the White House and trying not to sound like Carny Men, when, indeed, that is what they are.
However, their "wares" and the amazing acts behind closed doors are the exact opposite of what Carny Men like Steyn and Beck deliver.
The Progressive wares Progressives sell carry the exact opposite of life and laughter.
The only audience laughing on their side of Pennsylvania Avenue is the very Death Panel they've tried to sell as Health Care.
Also they don't really laugh.
They smirk.
Oh, and guffaw!
There's always ridicule behind what they consider funny; whereas there's hard-biting truth beneath the observations of Steyn and Beck.
T. S. Eliot branded a post World War I era and the architects of the Versailles Treaty as an elite selection of The Hollow Men.
I doubt if that poet could have anticipated quite as hollow a man as that gaggle of Ivy League know-it-alls of this era, erupting from Harvard and entering the White House with a grandiosity that rivals Nero's.
There are many ways to burn down a house and a nation; and the most invisibly effective is with economic policies that collapse an entire, national economy.
May Steyn and Beck forever play the clown – or as the Russian composer, Dimitri Shostakovich, did under Stalin, play the Yurodivy, the "Fool" – while the Bushes, Clintons and Obama increasingly reveal themselves as The Hollow Men who will build a New World Order in the same way Woodrow Wilson and Company built the Versailles Treaty.
President Wilson, Prime Ministers David Lloyd George of England and Georges Clemenceau of France and their Versailles Treaty, for some, yea, for many, became the very provocateurs of not only Germany's excruciating collapse but its inevitable surrender to Nazi tyranny.
The Progressive leadership of the Bush/Clinton/Obama years, coupled with those of both Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown of England and the late Pierre Trudeau of Canada presage for me another continental nightmare brought upon us by The Hollow Men. 
Michael Moriarty is a Golden Globe and Emmy Award-winning actor who starred in the landmark television series Law and Order from 1990 to 1994. His recent film and TV credits include The Yellow Wallpaper, 12 Hours to Live, Santa Baby and Deadly Skies. Contact Michael at rainbowfamily2008@yahoo.com.