Obviously, it means everything we’ve ever believed is absolutely wrong.

The free market just doesn’t work. Every conservative really is a secret dog-whistle racist. America is no more exceptional than North Korea. The earth really is barreling towards cataclysmic destruction because of you air conditioner. True equality and justice comes from redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor. Wait–

*brakes screech*

*spit take*

*jaw drops*

*pants fall*¹

Redistribution of wealth? Lucky for Aglialoro and his partner at Atlas Films, Harmon Kaslow, they’re located smack dab in the middle of millionaire country; and Los Angeles’s rich filmmakers all agree that redistribution of wealth is the right path for America! So, here is my plea to some of Tinseltown’s most beloved left-wing filmmakers. We’ve seen the light, and now we need your help.

Aaron Sorkin:  Your screenplay for The Social Network, a deconstruction of a modern-day captain of industry, was a runaway hit. It more than recouped its $40 million production budget with a global take of over $200 million.  Surely you can spare 50% of your Social Network royalties for a struggling production company for whom the free market has failed. Oh, I see; you’d resist because Atlas Shrugged doesn’t deserve this money, right? The writing was stilted and didactic? It skimped on marketing? That, Mr. Sorkin, is what we call blaming the victim. These hard-working people, who put their heart and soul into this film, are like an innocent Alaskan caribou shot and butchered by apathetic moviegoers– witless bullies destroying the potential to finish a historically important film adaptation. Mr. Sorkin, surely you have the moral courage to take a stand against this injustice, to give your hard-earned money to those less fortunate artists, cruelly maimed by the dog-eat-dog world of capitalism.

James Cameron:  What more is there to say about the success of Avatar? Yeah, you may have only surpassed the gross of Titanic by jacking up ticket prices, packaging them with little plastic sunglasses, but by gum, you surpassed Titanic, almost earning $3 billion. Now, at the very least, you can help offset the carbon footprint of your film, its DVD sales (remember, DVDs are wasteful), and Atlas Shrugged’s production.

Now, I know this is a touchy subject, but I think it’s a great opportunity for you. We’re quickly coming up on the five-year anniversary of Al Gore stating we only have 10 years to prevent a “tipping point” in our climate’s destruction. Since then, the only thing Al’s cut back on is his number of wives, and things aren’t looking so great for your own efforts against nothing less than the destruction of worldwide ecosystems. This is a crucial moment, Jim; this is your chance to turn the tide. Do you really need the money from DVD sales of your films? Please, Mr. Cameron, stand in solidarity with endangered species and donate 100% of this year’s royalties to Atlas Productions on the condition that 25% of them will be used for carbon credits. You’ve had a taste of the thanks you can receive from the world’s indigenous populations; why would you hold onto transient wealth and prevent yourself from receiving this thanks from the very fauna and flora of the Earth? Remember, you can’t take it with you, Jim. Not even the submarines.

Adam McKay:  Surely, sir, you see how the example of Atlas Films versus your own Gary Sanchez Productions is a textbook example of income disparity– the same disparity you handily reminded us of in the infographic credit sequence of your blockbuster hit The Other Guys, which cost $100 million to make and grossed $170 million worldwide.  That and your three previous films have all been profitable because you found ways to repackage Will Ferrell’s schtick in wildly different settings and situations, attracting a large, enthusiastic audience and making you a very, very, very, very, very, very, very rich man. You’ve stated in the past that executives in other industries make too much money and should keep less of it for the good of everyone.

So, let’s review some economic facts here (I can’t afford to hire animators for an infographic):  your theatrical films alone have earned a collective $453,190,451 in box office receipts, though their production budgets only add up to an estimated $263,500,000. That’s $189, 690,451 in profit, a profit margin of almost 42% (obviously those figures don’t include marketing costs, but they also don’t factor in DVD sales or money from product placement through multinational corporations). Atlas Shrugs still hasn’t recouped $15,659,145 of its production budget after a month in theaters. That loss could be covered by 8.2% of the profits of your films (and this isn’t counting the profits of Funny or Die or your income as head writer of Saturday Night Live).

Now, obviously, the lion’s share of that money goes to the production companies who fund your theatrical films, so I have no idea how much of this money is actually yours. But I still have no doubt that you could fill the deficit of Atlas; at the very least, you could convince your good friend and collaborator Will Ferrell to donate that much from the $20 million he demands per film, leaving him with $4,340,855 to live on until his next project– a sum that many Americans would kill to earn for a few months of work. If that’s too unreasonable, surely you have enough millionaire friends that 16 of you could donate just under a million dollars for those whom the free market has forsaken?  Or are we gonna have to introduce more strenuous regulations to counteract your greed?

The Rest of Hollywood: Should these men fail to abandon capitalistic avarice and refuse to help out peers in need, this is an open call to make President Barack Obama proud of you and spread the wealth around. Remember, you pledged.

¹ They were actually already down.

Tony Stark, left; Jack Abramoff, right

In the second “Iron Man,” Tony Stark is the same cocky hero that we know from the first film. Towards the beginning of the film, Stark is asked by an elected official to give up his Iron Man suit. Not only does Stark refuse to give it up, he openly cracks jokes with the official and makes him look like a fool. Even when his life is threatened, Stark does not lose his self-assuredness. However, despite his overt cockiness, Stark remains a strong hero that people can relate to. He may be arrogant but he is still a hero who fights against the villains in this movie and he uses his suit for the good of man.

Ann Hornaday, from the Washington Post, does not see it that way, it seems. In a recent review of Iron Man 2, she refers to Stark as a “scoundrel,” focusing on his failings rather than his strong and noble qualities. In that review, she writes that “watching ‘Iron Man 2’ earlier this week, it became soberingly clear that the film protagonist whom Tony Stark most resembles isn’t fictional, but the star of a documentary that also opens Friday.” That documentary is not about a flawed but brilliant genius who strove for world peace. That documentary, entitled “Casino Jack and the United States of Money,” is about Jack Abramoff, the currently-imprisoned corrupt former lobbyist.

Later in the article, Hornaday adds to the comparison one of the villains of “Iron Man 2,” Justin Hammer, who works with a maniacal Russian to create an army of Iron Mans. Hornaday writes, “when you put ‘Iron Man 2’ and ‘Casino Jack’ side by side, you see that Stark, Hammer and Abramoff share the same brand of moral arrogance that creates mayhem out of single-minded, by-any-means-necessary expediency.”

Unlike Stark, though, Abramoff is not well-known for his nobility or his serving the world at large. Abramoff is well-known for his criminal record.  A January 4th 2006 article in the Washington Post about Abramoff noted that he “pleaded guilty… to fraud, tax evasion and conspiracy to bribe public officials in a deal that requires him to provide evidence about members of Congress.” Abramoff is now in prison serving time. Even though he has been in jail for several years, he is still considered a symbol of corruption and greed. Few of those people who look disparagingly on Abramoff would compare him to a superhero trying to do good for this world.

Admittedly, I had issues with “Iron Man 2,” as Hornaday did. I thought the movie was weaker than the first film and that it included too many extraneous subplots. However, I continue to enjoy watching the main character fight against the bad guys and works to promote peace.

He may be cocky and he may be selfish but he is no Jack Abramoff, and Ann Hornaday should have realized that.

Now before you go and crucify me, keep in mind that there is a huge difference between someone who is “down on their luck” and someone who is able-bodied and “chronically poor.” There’s a big difference, and I’m only addressing the latter.

We see the stereotype everyday in Hollywood films: The wealthy, corporate, penny-pinching sell-out who inevitably becomes a slave to their own greed. Note: That stereotype excludes the rich, bloated constituents of Tinseltown themselves. The sad part is that oftentimes Americans believe it. As a largely blue-collar nation, I could think of nothing more satisfying than vilifying the “boss” (not a Springsteen reference, for those wondering). The only problem is that it’s dishonest.

Successful people aren’t inherently evil. I believe that more often than not people’s lives are a result of their actions. It’s silly, I know, but when you look at things within that context, you have to ask yourself: what kind of actions lead to poverty?

Now, I hate to throw a Proverb at you (particularly as it’s not of the trendy Chinese variety, but one of those scary Old Testament scribbles) but no matter what your faith, I would imagine that Proverbs 28: 22 would still have to be incredibly insightful.

A stingy man is eager to get rich and is unaware that poverty awaits him.

See, God isn’t condemning rich people. He’s condemning actions followed by a solemn warning of where they would lead. God seems to think that actions are a reflection of your heart. He’s a freaky dude when it comes to that kind of thing. Yes, I said “dude.” Feminists, start sending your letters.

Now statistically, it’s true. Poor people (particularly liberals) donate a lower percentage of their income than middle and upper-class Americans. To be fair, they have less to give… But then I guess it becomes the whole “chicken or the egg” deal. Do they have less to give because they’re stingy/greedy, or are they greedy because they have less to give?

Either way someone’s getting punched in the face for milk money.

I would say that the action of a perfectly healthy individual living a life on welfare provided by the hard work of others taken by force through taxation… That’s greedy.

The action of not stepping out of your comfort zone and creating a business, or helping OTHERS to prosper because of your personal contentment… That’s greedy.

The action of hoarding all the good-looking prom dates, leaving me no other date options than my cousin Kevin… That’s greedy.

Not giving to those who are seriously less fortunate than you… That’s greedy.

The problem with greed is that it has no understanding of logic and will constantly find a scapegoat… Sometimes it’s an actual goat (he deserved it), sometimes it’s a lemur (he didn’t deserve it) and sometimes it just ends up being a decent rich guy whom everyone loves to hate.

And no, I’m not talking about Sean Penn.

History serving “a social aim,” rather than chronicling the past in a detached manner, is what readers get in A People’s History of the United States. With any luck, “The People Speak,” the History Channel documentary based on the book that premieres this Sunday, will be, like so many Hollywood productions, unfaithful to the original. Given A People’s History of the United States’ infidelity to facts, this might be the only chance viewers have of seeing anything resembling an accurate retelling of history.

Through Zinn’s looking-glass, Maoist China, site of history’s bloodiest state-sponsored killings, transforms into “the closest thing, in the long history of that ancient country, to a people’s government, independent of outside control.” The authoritarian Nicaraguan Sandinistas were “welcomed” by their own people, while the opposition Contras, who backed the candidate that triumphed when free elections were finally held, were a “terrorist group” that “seemed to have no popular support inside Nicaragua.” Admitting some human rights abuses, Zinn writes that Castro’s Cuba “had no bloody record of suppression.”

Readers of A People’s History of the United States learn very little about history. They learn quite a bit about Howard Zinn. In fact, the book is perhaps best thought of as a massive Rorschach Test, with the author’s familiar reaction to every major event in American history proving that his is a captive mind long closed by ideology.

If you’ve read Karl Marx, there’s no reason to read Howard Zinn. In fact, reading the most important line of The Communist Manifesto makes a study of A People’s History of the United States a colossal waste of time. The single-bullet theory of history offered by Marx–“The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggle”–is relied upon by Zinn to explain all of American history. Economics determines everything. Why study history when theory has all the answers?

Thumb through A People’s History of the United States and one finds greed motivating every major event. According to Zinn, the separation from Great Britain, the Civil War, and both world wars—to name but a few examples—all stem from base motives involving rich men seeking to get richer at the expense of other men.

Zinn’s projection of Marxist theory upon historical reality begins with Columbus. According to Zinn, those following the seafaring Italian to the New World did so for one reason: profit. “Behind the English invasion of North America, behind their massacre of Indians, their deception, their brutality, was that special powerful drive born in civilizations based on private property,” maintains the octogenarian scribe.

A materialist interpretation continues with the Founding. “Around 1776,” A People’s History informs, “certain important people in the English colonies made a discovery that would prove enormously useful for the next two hundred years. They found that by creating a nation, a symbol, a legal unity called the United States, they could take over land, profits, and political power from the favorites of the British Empire. In the process, they could hold back a number of potential rebellions and create a consensus of popular support for the rule of a new, privileged leadership.”

Zinn sarcastically adds, “When we look at the American Revolution this way, it was a work of genius, and the Founding Fathers deserve the awed tribute they have received over the centuries. They created the most effective system of national control devised in modern times, and showed future generations of leaders the advantages of combining paternalism with command.” Rather than the spark that lit the fire of freedom and self-government throughout much of the world, he portrays the American Founding as a diabolically creative way to ensure oppression. If the Founders wanted a society they could direct, why didn’t they put forth a dictatorship or a monarchy resembling most other governments at the time? Why go through the trouble of devising a constitution guaranteeing rights, political participation, jury trials, and checks on power? Zinn doesn’t explain, contending that these freedoms and rights are merely a facade designed to prevent class revolution.

Zinn paints antebellum America as a uniquely cruel slaveholding society subjugating man for profit. Curiously, the war that ultimately results in slavery’s demise is portrayed as a conflict of oppression too. Zinn writes, “it is money and profit, not the movement against slavery, that was uppermost in the priorities of the men who ran the country.” Rather than welcoming emancipation, as one might expect, Zinn casts a cynical eye towards it. “Class consciousness was overwhelmed during the Civil War,” the author laments, placing a decidedly negative spin on the central event in American history. America is in a lose/lose situation. The same thing, according to Zinn, caused both slavery and emancipation: greed. Whether the U.S. tolerates or eradicates slavery, its nefarious motives remain the same. Zinn’s jaundiced eye fails to see the real issues surrounding the Civil War. Instead, he envisions the chief significance of the grisly conflict as how it allegedly served as a distraction from the impending socialist revolution.

By the time the reader reaches World War I, Zinn begins to sound like a broken record. “American capitalism needed international rivalry—and periodic war—to create an artificial community of interest between rich and poor,” the Boston University emeritus professor of history writes of the Great War, “supplanting the genuine community of interest among the poor that showed itself in sporadic movements.” Yet another diversion to delay the revolution!

“A People’s War?” is Zinn’s chapter on the war in which he served his country. Zinn suggests that America, not Japan, was to blame for Pearl Harbor by provoking the Empire of the Sun. The fight against fascism was all an illusion. While Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan may have been America’s enemies, Uncle Sam’s real goal was empire. Regarding America’s neutrality in the Spanish Civil War, Zinn asks:  “[W]as it the logical policy of a government whose main interest was not stopping Fascism but advancing the imperial interests of the United States? For those interests, in the thirties, an anti-Soviet policy seemed best. Later, when Japan and Germany threatened U.S. world interests, a pro-Soviet, anti-Nazi policy became preferable.” Reality is inverted. It’s not the Soviet Union that went from being anti-Nazi to pro-Nazi to anti-Nazi. Zinn projects the Soviet Union’s schizophrenic policies upon the United States. While Zinn awkwardly excuses the Hitler-Stalin Pact, he all but proclaims a Hitler-Roosevelt Pact.

The reader learns that the Second World War was really about—surprise!—money. “Quietly, behind the headlines in battles and bombings,” Zinn writes, “American diplomats and businessmen worked hard to make sure that when the war ended, American economic power would be second to none in the world. United States business would penetrate areas that up to this time had been dominated by England. The Open Door Policy of equal access would be extended from Asia to Europe, meaning that the United States intended to push England aside and move in.” Yet, this didn’t happen. The English Empire expired, but no American Empire took its place. Despite defeating Japan and helping to vanquish Germany, America rebuilt these countries. They are now America’s chief economic rivals, not its colonies.

The profit motive certainly is central to numerous major events in American history. The discovery of gold at Sutter’s Fort in 1848, for example, undeniably stands as the primary reason—alongside the favorable outcome of the Mexican War—for the subsequent population explosion in California. The Gold Rush is one of several historical occurrences that conform to Zinn’s overall thesis. Even a broken clock is right twice a day. For every major figure or event whose catalyst was economic interests, scores were sparked by some unrelated concern.

To question Zinn’s method of analyses is not to say that economics does not influence events. It is to say that one-size-fits-all explanations of history are bound to be wrong more than they are right. History is too complicated to find a perfect fit within any theory. For the true believer, this inconvenience can be overcome. When fact and theory clash, ideologues choose theory. To the true believer, ideology is truth. Time and again, A People’s History of the United States opts to mold the facts to fit theory, leaving the reader to wonder what “people” he is referring to in the book’s title. Dishonest people? Left-wing people? Delusional people?

“Unemployment grew in the Reagan years,” Zinn claims. Statistics show otherwise. Reagan inherited an unemployment rate of 7.5 percent. By his last month in office, the rate had declined to 5.4 percent. Had the Reagan presidency ended in 1982 when unemployment rates exceeded 10 percent, Zinn would have a point. But for the remainder of Reagan’s presidency, unemployment declined precipitously. While Zinn teaches history and not mathematics, one needn’t be a math whiz to figure out that 5.4 percent is less than 7.5 percent. Despite unleashing an economy that created nearly 20 million new jobs during his tenure, Reagan continues to be smeared by historians—and it’s not hard to figure out why. Reagan’s free market polices were anathema to Marxists like Zinn. Upset at the pleasant way things turned out—Reagan’s policies unleashed an economy that continuously grew from late 1982 until mid 1990—historians prefer to rewrite history.

These are but a few of Zinn’s errors, which curiously seem to always bolster the left-of-center position. No error goes against the grain of the author’s general thesis. Every author makes mistakes. Zinn, it seems, would make less of them if he used his mind rather than his ideology to do his thinking.

By now one might be thinking: On what evidence does Zinn base his varied proclamations? One can only guess. Despite its scholarly pretensions, the book contains not a single source citation. While a student in Professor Zinn’s classes at Boston University or Spelman College might have received an “F” for turning in a paper without documentation, Zinn’s footnote-free book is standard reading in scores of college courses.

More striking than Zinn’s inaccuracies—intentional and otherwise—is what he leaves out.

Washington’s Farewell Address, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and Reagan’s “tear down the wall” speech at the Brandenburg Gate all fail to merit a mention. Nowhere do we learn that Americans were first in flight, first to fly solo across the Atlantic, and first to walk on the moon. Alexander Graham Bell, Jonas Salk, and the Wright Brothers are entirely absent. Instead, the reader is treated to the exploits of Speckled Snake, Joan Baez, and the Berrigan brothers. While Zinn highlights immigrants that went into professions such as ditch-digging and prostitution, he excludes success stories like Alexander Hamilton, John Jacob Astor, and Louis B. Mayer. Valley Forge rates a single fleeting reference, while D-Day’s Normandy invasion, Gettysburg, and other important military battles are left out. In their place, we get several pages on the My Lai massacre and colorful descriptions of U.S. bombs falling on hotels, air-raid shelters, and markets during 1991’s Gulf War.

How do readers learn about U.S. history with all these omissions? They don’t.

Daniel J. Flynn is the author of A Conservative History of the American Left (Crown Forum, 2008) and Intellectual Morons: How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas (Crown Forum, 2004), from which this essay is adapted. Copyright © 2004 by Daniel J. Flynn.

A.O. Scott raved about the movie, and I agree on one hand that Michael Moore has finally chosen the most logical topic for his kind of film. At least Michael Moore has the nerve to finally say it: he doesn’t like capitalism. It’s absurd, it’s ridiculous, it’s akin to Lieutenant Kaffee rising and sleeping under the very blanket of freedom that Colonel Jessep provides, then questioning the manner in which he, Colonel Jessup, provides it.  I’m sure Goldman Sachs would rather Mikey just thank them and go on his way… but I digress…

Scott said something at the end of his review that made me mutter “typical liberal.” To paraphrase, he said that we should all see this movie even if we disagree with Moore. Again, I don’t know if he’s a liberal. He did say he wasn’t sure if he agreed with Moore or not.

My problem with this sentiment, even from someone who’s unsure of whether they agree with Moore or not, is that it fails to acknowledge that Moore’s work is propaganda. Furthermore, why do I need to see it? It’s just a movie. No one ever gets real serious and says to a liberal, “Even if you disagree with Ann Coulter, you should read her latest column.” And that’s what Moore’s movies are, commentary, the cinematic equivalent of a column.

Roger Ebert prefaced his latest Michael Moore interview with a similar disclaimer: “Whether or not you agree with Michael Moore, he has one piece of invaluable advice in his new film…” Moore goes on to explain derivatives and the stock market crash, and included in the interview is this non-sequitur:

One guy comes to the table and takes nine slices of the pie and everybody else at the table has to split the last slice. That’s not democracy; that’s not what Jesus said. All the great religions actually say the same thing, they all have the same basic beliefs about how to treat the poor and how the rich are not to suck everything up and make life miserable for everybody else.

There’s no real preface to this illustration, but a couple of things stand out to me. One, the illustration has nothing to do with Democracy. He’s confusing his targets here, and we’re not a Democracy, anyway. Two, he brings up Jesus. How come he gets away with that, and conservatives don’t?

My real problem with liberal attacks on capitalism, and I don’t need to see Moore’s MOVIE to know this, is that they’re not really attacking capitalism. They’re attacking greed. They say they want to regulate Wall Street, but they really think we can get rid of greed. This is, at best, naïve. Let’s regulate and eliminate lust, sloth, envy, pride, wrath, and gluttony while we’re at it. I know, Mike. That last one hurts, huh?

This bill essentially allows the Treasury to define “fair pay” for all employees, at any level.  Worse, the Treasury would like to be able to take over any company it deemed as important enough to take over regardless of whether or not it had accepted bailout funds. Worse still, the Serve Act proposes to make volunteering for the government mandatory (with pay, of course). Last time I looked, working for pay was called A JOB. 

The scariest part of the bill is that while you’re serving as a “volunteer,” you’re prohibited from participating in worship and church activities, political rallies and being involved in a union. In short, your essential freedoms are gone. I keep hearing about Obama being a socialist but, I have to disagree.  Based on these measures he appears to more like a person pursuing Communism or Fascism. 

Let’s face it; if you wanted to tear down the Republic and install a Communist Oligarchy you would first have to take over all major industries where corporate power resides, then you must get the wealth away from the rich — but how would you do that?  Well, you create an even larger economic crisis so the country thinks your massive debt spending is a way to help the country when your real plan is to incur so much debt that the only way to prevent the country from bankruptcy is to impose a tax system that depletes the wealth of the top 1% until we’re all equally “wealthy.” …Well, except for those wealthy people who helped you get there. You know the ones I’m talking about. I don’t mean to HARPO on the subject, but we seemed to have forgotten what we’re protecting. What about the Republic?  Is it already gone? 

When the government ignores legal contractual obligations because they judge someone’s bonus as unfair the law has been ignored, which means it was violated and this violation occurred at the highest level of government. I’m not saying the AIG bonuses weren’t excessive.  My point is, we don’t know what these people did to deserve or NOT to deserve them because this was never mentioned or examined.  Maybe some of those people brought in a billion dollars of business and their bonuses were based? Maybe the CEO is the main reason the company is failing? Does that mean that some guy who worked hard to bring in that billion dollars in business shouldn’t be rewarded? But Obama needs a way to regulate pay and the bill proposed doesn’t even stop at executives, it doesn’t even stop at dollar amounts. In fact, it has no specification whatsoever.

So we can all look forward to government cars, government jobs, paid civilian volunteers who watch our every move and the the loss of our ability to reach for our dreams. The sad part is that Obama told us exactly what he was going to do and 52% of you refused to hear what he said. In fact many of you cheered at these things. Let’s remember just of few of the things he said.

1. The Constitution is fundamentally flawed.  It only protects the rights of the people but does not allow the government to do anything on your behalf.
2. He wants a civilian Army as large as our military, and as well funded ($650 billion annually).
3. He wants to “spread the wealth.” Oh, don’t pretend you don’t remember Joe the Plumber.

And let’s not forget good ole Reverend Wright whose teachings about America being evil and unequal ring in Obama’s ears. Funny … It’s equality that got Obama elected. Change? Oh yes, there’s change and if we don’t act soon the meaning of hope will have a very different meaning.

Some conservative commentators are demonstratively wishing President Obama well. My heart admires their good intentions, but as I watched Obama’s inauguration on TV, my mind couldn’t help but ponder the possible consequences thereof. As someone coming from another country (ex-USSR) I don’t participate in racial debates nor do I want to. Being post-racial is fine by me. So let’s accept Obama’s post-racial premise, leave the issue of melanin content aside, and judge the man solely by the content of his agenda. And the more I look at Obama’s agenda the more I realize that wishing him well is like wishing luck to Don Quixote in wrecking the windmill that feeds me and my family.

It’s not a matter of taste. The spectacle of a bombastic crackpot in medieval armor poking his lance at random objects is disquieting if you own and operate an industrial facility. It sends thrills up your legs if you share the noble hidalgo’s conviction that the perfectly functional, cereal-grinding, income-generating windmills are the embodiment of evil, spreading death and destruction. As far as popular entertainment goes, I’ve seen worse. But when Don Quixote organizes a community to fight windmills and receives massive support, anyone with a job should be worried. When he becomes president with a popular mandate to wreck windmills at taxpayers’ expense, using the government apparatus, hope becomes all but absent.

Being light on details, Obama’s inaugural speech briefly remunerated his views – which we already knew from his previous comments, associations, voting record, and cabinet appointments. Here is a partial list of the windmills he pledges to fight:

Windmill #1: Greed is bad for the economy.
Greed is a known “progressive” code word for the freedom to keep what you earn – the sort of freedom that made the United States the economic wonder of the world. To be fair, during the presidential debates McCain also attacked greed in rather quixotic terms, although next to Obama he sounded more like the simple-minded Sancho Panza.

Windmill #2: Lack of government control is bad for the economy.
The ones out of control here were the Democrat politicians who created corrupt government-sponsored companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, later defending them to the death against Republican calls for stricter oversight. At the same time they overburdened the banking industry with Utopian requirements to give mortgages to people who couldn’t pay them back – a quixotic move that sparked the current economic meltdown.

Windmill #3: Partisan discord must give way to “unity of purpose.”
A debate between political parties is healthy for a democracy. The trouble is, the debate itself became toxic when Obama’s own party was hijacked by leftist radicals whose idea of unity is the suppression of dissent. If we unite with them for that purpose, it will be the end of American democracy. Observe examples of political unity in Cuba, North Korea, and Hollywood. One-party rule was stipulated in the Article 6 of the Soviet Constitution that singled out the Communist Party as the leading and inspiring force of the Soviet people. We know how that ended.

Windmill #4: Wealth creation must give way to wealth redistribution.
“Without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control – and … a nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous.”
In real life, free market favors everybody who participates in it. Excessive regulations give unfair advantages to large corporations that can swallow the extra cost while their smaller competitors will choke on it. This stifles competition, reduces economic opportunity, lowers the quality of life, and spreads misery. In the end the elites remain prosperous while everybody else is worse off. Quixotic policies always result in the exact opposite of the original intentions. The only winner here is the growing government bureaucracy.

Windmill #5: Discipline the government bureaucracy.
“And those of us who manage the public’s dollars will be held to account – to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day.”
It’s what Leonid Brezhnev also said when he figured Khrushchev’s liberal reforms had unleashed government corruption that had been previously held in check by Stalin’s rule of terror. Let’s face it – terror is the only way to run a state-owned economy effectively; that’s why Stalin kept his apparatchiks trembling with fear and waking up at night in cold sweat. Without the show trials and executions, to manage an army of sticky-fingered bureaucrats became a gigantic windmill that the country had been fighting for a few decades before it collapsed from exhaustion. The moral here is that, short of the gulag, nothing can control the corrupting powers of an exponentially-growing government bureaucracy. Attempts to fight it will only result in a quagmire. The obvious answer is to stop feeding this monster, by removing the unessential regulating functions; the government will deflate to a manageable size and will become people-friendly again.

Windmill #6: Finance government construction projects by taxing private industries.
Talk about “meeting the demands of a new age.” Throw away your computer and grab a shovel – the future is here! Putting government in competition with the private sector helps neither, but corrupts both. FDR tried this on a massive scale; his well-meaning programs turned a recession into a depression, prolonged the suffering, and delayed the recovery by a decade. The subsequent lionization of FDR for this man-made disaster could only occur in a mindset where good intentions mean everything, and the results mean nothing – a classic example of quixotism.

Windmill #7: Ward off the specter of Global Warming.
“We will work tirelessly to lessen the nuclear threat, and roll back the specter of a warming planet.”
Nice try bundling terrorism with Global Warming, but no cigar. While the industrial impact on climate cycles remain a questionable hypothesis, its ideological underpinnings are getting more and more visible. Not two weeks ago Obama created the position of global warming czar and gave it to known socialist radical Carol M. Browner, whose solution to any world problem is the curbing of capitalism and shrinking the economy. Swapping Karl Marx’s “specter of communism” with a more convenient “specter of a warming planet” may have changed the lyrics, but the song remains the same.

In this light, Obama’s promise to “restore science to its rightful place” is merely a code phrase for the politicization of science. In the USSR, where scientific consensus was created by government mandate, politicization of science resulted in a colossal waste of national resources on absurd agricultural hoaxes, while state-appointed “scientists” denounced the emerging cybernetics as a “bourgeois hoax.” Every single one of these people acted out of good intentions.

Windmill #8: Global poverty exists because the US taxpayers aren’t throwing enough money at it.
“We can no longer afford indifference to suffering outside our borders; nor can we consume the world’s resources without regard to effect.”
If global poverty still exists after trillions of dollars in foreign aid over the decades, shouldn’t we already start looking for the root of the problem elsewhere? Say, not in the lack of donations, but perhaps in the despotic quasi-Marxist regimes that cause poor nations to stay poor? A bizarre quixotic-despotic symbiosis has emerged, for example, in Africa, where well-meaning Western activists and politicians are promoting socialist reforms and nationalization of resources – while local despots, who otherwise couldn’t care less about Marxism, find this system very useful in maintaining power and keeping populations in economic serfdom.

As long as everything is owned and governed by the state, the head of such a state automatically becomes an absolute monarch, owning and governing the entire land and its people. Such governing typically consists of stealing foreign aid, pilfering the country, looting the neighbors, and fighting off coup after coup, led by an endless swarm of similarly inclined wannabe despots, who want their share of foreign aid, gold, diamonds, or whatever else the educated Western geologists happen to find in that God-forsaken, state-owned land. No such despot will ever step down voluntarily, because that would make him like everybody else in his country – dirt-poor and vulnerable to abuse from the new despot.

Perhaps, in order to eliminate bloody civil wars in Africa and elsewhere, Obama could throw a few billion of our dollars at a posh retirement facility for tinpot dictators that would help them soften the blow and deal with psychological stresses, thus facilitating a peaceful transition of power from one crook to another. A better solution, of course, would be to introduce those countries to capitalism with its freedoms, incentives, property rights, and the rule of law – but apparently this is too ignoble a prospect for a soaring quixotic mind to consider.

* * *

These are the facts that Americans, of all people, should be able to recognize as obvious. How did it happen that the usually realistically-minded Americans not only elected a man who is withdrawn from reality, but overwhelmingly wish him to succeed in carrying out his fallacies?

The answer is probably in the changing nature of our age and its heroes. How it is changing and why is being increasingly determined by those who set the tone in the American popular culture.

Obama’s popularity indicates that a new archetypal American hero has emerged – a sentimental, selfless idealist, preoccupied with perceived crises and injustices – real or imaginary – and is determined to fight the cynics for the people’s right to have good intentions – consequences be damned.

In his speeches, Obama often derides cynics, positioning himself as the ultimate anti-cynic, which is also how Don Quixote is viewed in today’s popular culture – the same popular culture that for several decades has been a plaything in the hands of liberal trendsetters in Hollywood, TV, and mass media.

Apparently even celebrities, who spend their days pushing the limits of egotism and degeneracy, have moments of clarity and feel an occasional need to redeem their meaningless existence. But to pause and rethink their lives, grasp the reality, and get out of the rut may be too much to ask from people whose idea of happiness is to snort cocaine off oneanother’s buttocks. Instead, they engage in what they perceive as the opposite of cynical depravity. So they start pushing the limits of selfless idealism. That’s when they donate to radical groups and politicians, make movies about Che Guevara, and act as spokespeople for ultra-liberal causes.

Never mind that what they see as the opposite of degeneracy is just a mirror reflection of the same old rut. Reality has never been their strong suit. Nevertheless, their quixotic efforts have already shaped a culture of scatterbrained idealism that trumps reality. Last November, millions of consumers of this culture gasped and decided that it would be very cool to elect, not the real man, but a cultivated archetypal image of a well-meaning, starry-eyed dreamer, who they hope will somehow help them avoid taking responsibility for their own lives.

Compare a modern liberal to Don Quixote, and he will take it as a compliment. In my years of living in America, I have met a number of people who proudly claimed they were fighting windmills – a generic code phrase meaning “actively working to undermine American cultural, social, military, and economic institutions.” Destroying property and sabotaging business operations made them feel good, as each imagined himself a noble hidalgo, fighting the powerful and defending the oppressed masses.

One might conclude that in their feverish Marxist brains, the story of Don Quixote was about a glorious rebellion against imperialist powers by a romantic freedom fighter with no life (his female comrade thought he was a Trotskyite), and so he took on the revolutionary road to utopia, struggling for social and economic justice, liberating the oppressed, and destroying means of production privately owned by capitalist exploiters.

They didn’t believe me when I said that Cervantes named his protagonist after the horse’s ass, using Catalán slang for it, that “mancha” in his full name also meant “stain” (as on one’s honor), his horse’s name Rocinante meant a “reversal,” and the novel itself was actually a satirical farce about a mentally disturbed retrograde, whose fight was against societal progress and the human nature itself.

It’s only fitting that people who are withdrawn from the reality end up misjudging the history of thought and societies. Another seminal book that the quixotic left has completely misconstrued is 1984, but that is a whole different story.

Let me put it in terms that a Marxist can understand: the original Don Quixote makes fun of a fossilized remnant of the feudal era, who is confused by rapid social changes and the emancipation of the working man. He is sickened by the idea that a lowly commoner who works for a living has suddenly grown more important than he – a blueblood who has neglected his estate, squandered his fortune, and spends his days in bed reading chivalric novels. So he escapes into a fantasy world of romanticized chivalry, courting a woman who thinks he is a crackpot, and destroying property of a hard-working miller because it makes him feel good to imagine that he is defending humanity from evil.

In this sense, Don Quixote is an ultimate liberal elitist who despises the bourgeois class that feeds him, feels nostalgic about the idealized past when benevolent kings bestowed favors upon the destitute subjects, and treats other people as mere objects of his exaggerated emotions, in complete disregard of their true nature.

To continue in Marxist terms, the story is an allegory of the painful reaction the discarded nobility had to the breakup of feudalism, and the rising overall prosperity brought in by the new class of capitalist entrepreneurs who were happy, well-fed, and held their head high, despite their obvious lack of grooming and heredity. These insolent former peasants ridiculed the idea of having a benevolent lord protector to care about their needs – which was what our anachronistic “knight-errant” was offering.

As if disrespecting the bluebloods was not enough, the new bourgeois class defaced the landscape with clusters of ugly, prosaic windmills that squeaked and creaked, increasing the number of well-fed, freewheeling plebeians, and decreasing their collective dependency on the charity of the powerful – or, for that matter, on anything else larger than themselves.

In today’s industrialized, world old windmills may be seen as sentimental relics of a bygone, bucolic era. But in the early 1600s they were as much part of an industrial landscape as power plants and oil rigs are today. Think of Big Oil as today’s equivalent of Big Windmills.

Thus, Don Quixote’s attack on a windmill was an emblematic act of resentment by a feudal diehard against the symbol of the newly-emerged capitalist system – a much more progressive, efficient, and successful socio-economic order that ushered in prosperity, equality, and individual liberty.

In a parallel development, observe Sen. Edward Kennedy’s fight against power-generating windmills that threatened to ruin a bucolic view from his patrician Camelot mansion. You get the idea.

* * *

All things considered, wasn’t the entire socialist movement, from the very start, a fearful, allergic reaction to capitalism and industrialization? Wasn’t the longing for a powerful welfare state born from nostalgia for the idealized safety net of feudalism, with its certainty of social roles and obligations? Didn’t the notion of a benevolent government official, caring about the helpless masses, originate from the romanticized myth of a noble lord caring about his loyal peasants – without the anxieties associated with freedom to make individual life choices? And wasn’t it darkly ironic that apologists of such a backward, regressive idea chose to call themselves “progressives”?

What motivated and united the quixotic “progressive” elites was their impulsive, irrational loathing of the perceived materialism of the markets and the coarse, ill-mannered bourgeoisie, which had become the designated windmills of the new era. Free markets broke up the rigid social structure and fostered upward mobility, discarding the certainty that aristocrats would keep their wealth without having to work for it – and that they would not be out-shined by the dreaded “nouveau riche,” which was the aristocratic slur for the “previously poor.” Anyone’s chances to succeed in life now depended on their abilities, rather than pedigree.

As life was becoming increasingly “unromantic,” more commoners were enjoying higher living standards, hygiene, education, and improved life expectancy. Industrial innovation steadily reduced the share of stupefying hard manual labor and increased the share of clean, professional, high-paying jobs, further shrinking the dependency of the commoners on the elites. Mass production brought down the prices, allowing every yokel to own things and travel places that used to be an exclusive privilege of nobility. And what did these oafs do to deserve it – except making, delivering, and marketing food, clothes, houses, tools, medicine, and the ugly prosaic machinery?

It was probably somewhere in the midst of such mental entanglements that a longing for a romantic anti-industrial hero first produced the “revised and improved” interpretation of Don Quixote – no longer a horse’s ass, but a selfless idealist fighting the windmills of greed and materialism, impervious to the mocking and jeering of the unrefined cynics.

The key word here is “cynics.” To understand the whole quixotic phenomenon, one must realize that the cynics in this case are the people who build, own, and operate windmills – and who don’t want to see them leveled by some well-meaning loon. It is these people – not the elites – who make life possible. And if you talk to them outside of the contrived quixotic dichotomy, they don’t sound like cynics at all.

“Cynics” is also the key word in Obama’s code language, which stems from the same quixotic paradigm. Once you decipher the key word, other code elements begin to fall into place. Let’s see…

“Change” signifies a backward movement to the idealized Utopian times that never really existed. More specifically, it can mean anything Obama’s team does – from staffing the government with old Clinton drones to exhuming and reviving the corpse of the “Fairness Doctrine” – a mothball-smelling liberal zombie programmed to kill radio stations that broadcast dissenting voices

“Hope” means a conscious effort to fire up a quixotic vision of a government-appointed knight in shining armor, galloping to your rescue – and to spread this illusion to the scale of a massive hallucination.

“Crisis” denotes a fortunate turn of events when the frightened masses are more likely to elect a quixotic leader. Nothing bolsters collectivism like a stampede.

“Unity” means that everybody must play this game without exception. Which reminds me of the old Soviet make-believe game of building the communist society long after people had stopped believing in it, but continued to pretend out of habit, convenience, fear, or career prospects.

And so on.

If we pretend to play Obama’s game for a moment, we may start seeing America as a downright mean country – without hope, in bad need of change, and overtaken by crisis that we can overcome if we only have unity.

In contrast, if we listen to the “cynics,” we may learn that America is a land of optimistic can-do people, who disposed of the abusive nobility, created a government of, by, and for the people, and achieved unparalleled historic successes by taking a rational, freedom-loving, and self-reliant worldview to the farthest frontiers – in the process benefiting not only themselves, but also the rest of the world.

But such low-brow American “cynicism” couldn’t completely vanquish the noble spirit of “social awareness” and “economic justice” – also known as collectivist feudal co-dependency, disapproval of individual judgment, fear of risk-taking, reliance on the charity of the powerful, and the romanticized utopian view of the collectivist past. This spirit had lived latent for many decades, fueled by socialist movements overseas, and fortified by the influx of immigrants infected by collectivist ideologies that, in the Old World, later metastasized into Fascism and Bolshevism.

But no matter what we call things, and what code words we use to disguise them, no matter how we try to change, alter, condition, accommodate, convert, modify, modulate, redo, restyle, reshape, transfigure, transmute, warp, invert, reverse, swap, transpose, or bend the public perception of reality, in the end we will still be living in the same old reality, governed by the same, unchanging, objective laws. And according to these unchanging laws, any quixotic intentions to curb the industries and rein in the materialistic capitalist class will, with absolute certainty, result in degradation and reversal of the real progress that the human race has achieved in the last few hundred years.

When the romantic concepts of “renewed spirituality” and “communal living” come in direct contact with the unchanging laws of human nature, they inevitably result in punishing the achievers, removing incentives, reducing productivity, shrinking industries, shortening life expectancy, decreasing skilled high-paying jobs, and increasing the share of stupefying hard manual labor. You wanted Obama to succeed? Here’s your shovel-ready project.

The code word for this in Obama’s Pig Latin is “progress.” In case you were looking for the definition of cynicism, this is it.

When Obama talks about taking America into the 21st century, he insults everyone in this country who has worked hard to take it there, before they first heard his name. However, now that we’ve partially cracked the code, we can make an educated guess that the time where Obama intends to take us, is actually not ahead but behind us – the early 20th century, the era of first socialist revolutions and the Great Depression. But it might as well be 1605 when Don Quixote was first published.

Occasionally, Obama lifts his visor and speaks to the masses in plain language. The New York Times slavishly reports: “In his commencement speech last month at Wesleyan University, Barack Obama … sounded an impassioned call to public service, and warned that the pursuit of narrow self-interest – ‘the big house and the nice suits and the other things that our money culture says you should buy … betrays a poverty of ambition.’” He continued, “Because it’s only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.”

This is purely quixotic claptrap. Come to think of it, in today’s world, Don Quixote might as well take up “progressive” activism and become a “community organizer.” Or he could be an unfunny comedian with his own talk show on Air America Radio, campaigning for one of Minnesota’s seats in the US Senate.

While the ascension of Don Quixote as a new American idol is a grotesque comedy of errors by itself, the political effort to take advantage of this cultural trend was hardly a coincidence.

Every utopian revolution ends up in corruption. The more altruistic the heroes are, the faster the plutocrats move in. If Obama really is the dreamy idealist from his own campaign poster – allergic to dirty politics, with his head fixed permanently above the clouds – then, naturally, the real power will be quickly divided among his crafty puppeteers. But let’s give the newly sworn-in President credit – it takes an extremely shrewd politician to sense the cultural current, catch the wave, and ride it all the way to the White House the way he did.

Whether Obama is a starry-eyed dreamer, or a manipulative pragmatist preying on public fears, will be revealed soon enough. Whatever the case may be, his inauguration marks the beginning of a new age in America and the world. Some may call it the belated dawning of the Age of Aquarius. I call it the Age of Don Quixote.