Of course, this answer is really at the very heart of the current debate over global climate change (formerly global warming, formerly global cooling), because whatever the polar bears might think about their own species’ global population, it is obviously far more than most every human environmentalists seem to care about theirs.

“Their is an anti-human element to many environmentalists.”  That was what Phelim told me the day I first met him and his lovely wife Ann McElhinney early last year.  The two had just spoken, quite passionately I might add (everything the two of them do is quite passionate), at a private gathering of conservatives in Sherman Oaks, California. 

Like so many documentary film-makers, they needed a ride.  (Unlike so many documentary film-makers, the ride was to a fairly nice hotel in Santa Monica…)  In exchange, they offered to screen an early cut of their film, “Not Evil, Just Wrong,” for me and a few friends.  It was a bargain I was happy to take.  “Only an environmentalist could look at thirty million dead from malaria and think that the biggest threat to the world is the pesticide that would stop it,” Ann told me on the ride over the hill.  “You really should watch our movie.”

In a world where so much of the debate (if you could argue that there is any real debate…) over climate change is focused on the science, it is the human story that most interests and appalls Phelim and Ann.  More aptly, it is an anti-human story, and they have seen it first hand.

In 2005, the couple traveled to Romania with a mission.  It was being reported in the European press that a greedy western mining corporation was invading the quaint, idyllic Romanian village of Rosia Montana to extract the regions’ gold deposits and exploit its people.  For Phelim and Ann, both experienced documentarians, this seemed like a story worth telling.  The problem, as they soon learned, was that the story was a lie.  Far from quaint and idyllic, Rosia Montana was a badly impoverished village that modernity had largely passed by. “These people weren’t making a lifestyle choice.  They were in deep, deep poverty.  They couldn’t wait for the mine to open and inject fresh money and jobs into the local economy. But stopping that were activists from Switzerland and Belgium. These rich western environmentalists didn’t care.  They were content to watch people live in misery and view it as a “culture” that needed to be preserved, but if you talked to the local people they viewed poverty as a curse that was killing their children early and needed to be eradicated as soon as possible.”

What Phelim and Ann discovered was a far bigger story – one that would give their film, and their lives, a whole new shape.  It was the largely untold tale of western activists advancing Marxist ideology under the guise of environmental protection. “This romantic notion that starving people are ‘poor but happy’ has to stop.  Someone needs to tell these environmentalists that humans are actually part of the environment.”

In 2006, Phelim and Ann did just that, releasing their film, “Mine Your Own Business,” as a stern rebuke of what they see as a criminally disingenuous movement to destroy the west and the progress that modernity has brought.  The film is a brutally honest look at how much damage is done to actual humans by those claiming to save the world.  “Rosia Montana never got their mine, but the Romanian villagers facing another winter of extreme poverty can shiver to sleep secure in the knowledge that the greedy capitalists were defeated.”  Environmentalists called the movie “Nazi propaganda…”

“Not Evil, Just Wrong” picks up on the same theme, and carries it much farther.  If free-markets, trade, and employment are the only tools ever used to effectively end poverty, then what would it mean to take those tools off of the table, as the modern environmental movement seems bent on doing?  Who will suffer and who will gain?  According to Phelim and Ann, who will suffer is everyone, especially the poor.  Who will gain is Al Gore and the rest of the multi-billion dollar Big Environmental Businesses.  And of course, America loses the most.  Says Ann, “China produces more genuine pollution than any other nation on Earth, but none of the international regulations on the table do anything to curb them.China’s cities are badly polluted with dirty fumes. If Greenpeace wanted to stop global pollution they should move all their offices to China. And I’m talking about genuine pollution – not CO2 which is essential for life and one of the elements that keep our crops growing and our children healthy. But Greenpeace is not in China because there is a strong anti-business, anti-capitalist and above all anti-American element to the environmental movement.  If the world is really ending, why wouldn’t they want to stop everyone polluting and not just single out the American economy for destruction?.”  Or, as Phelim puts it, “They say America should lead by example, but what example is that?  Suicide?”

“Not Evil, Just Wrong” is the anti-”Inconvenient Truth,” not only because it exposes and rebukes the foundational premises of that film, but because it advocates humanity first, and nothing serves humanity better than morally checked, free-market capitalism.  As it turns out, that’s another topic Phelim and Ann know rather well.

“We’re trying to do something innovative,” Phelim told me on a recent call.  “We figure that lots of really interesting and intelligent ideas have come out of the American home and almost nothing interesting or intelligent comes out of the current American cinema.”  Phelim and Ann’s innovative answer?  They are going to launch their films in the former, not the latter.  The idea is as profound as it is simple.  In a world of flat-screen televisions, high-speed Internet, streaming media, and cell-phone movie rentals, “Not Evil, Just Wrong” is leading the way in direct-to-consumer marketing.

On Sunday, October 18th, the largest, simultaneous film-premiere in history will take place. “Not Evil, Just Wrong” will be screened in well over 4000 private locations in America, and more than a thousand more worldwide.  People from all walks of life are hosting screenings in their homes and churches, they are renting small theaters and community centers and school auditoriums.  It is a grassroots movie premiere.

You can visit their website for a map of screening locations. It is impressive.  Better yet, you can tune in to Big Hollywood and be a part of this historic premiere event yourself tomorrow night at  5PM PST, just like thousands of other venues around the nation and world.  It is a very human model for getting a very human movie out into the culture, and as Phelim and Ann are always quick to remind, humans are what this story is really about.  As Phelim told me recently in Texas, “The vast majority of human history has been spent in darkness and hunger and tyranny.  That’s what these environmentalists, by their actions, seem to want to bring back, only not for themselves, of course.  They just want everyone else living in huts and starving to death but with a “quaint” centrally approved lifestyle while the environmental elite run the show.  America’s existence and success is the only thing stopping them, and it’s the proof that they’re wrong, which is why they have to destroy it.”

Or, put more simply, “These people don’t give a damn about polar bears.”

Moviefone:

Crude posters of Lenin and Trotsky adorn the threadbare walls of an office in a desolate part of town, and a group of outcast revolutionaries hatch a scheme to overthrow the ruling powers and bring equality and a classless society to mankind. The beginning of an Eisenstein film? Bunuel? Renoir?

Try ‘Astro Boy,’ the upcoming animated film featuring the voices of Nicolas Cage and Kristen Bell about a boy robot (Freddie Highmore) that leaves his scientist father after finding out he isn’t human. Ostensibly a film for children — with a fringe following of fanboys, thanks to its comic book series — the movie features very adult ideas of ownership and class structure that will most likely be future fodder for college philosophy classes around the country.

While it’s no secret that Hollywood films tend to skew left in general, ‘Astro Boy’ may be the first animated blockbuster to discuss, if not necessarily endorse, explicit Marxist ideologies (albeit in cute robot form, of course.) In the movie, the aforementioned outcasts, led by Robotsky, form the Robot Revolutionary Front, stenciling their logo on city walls and chanting “Viva La Robotolution” at anyone within earshot. On the whole, it’s played for laughs, but makes us ponder the question:

Have animated films gotten more leftist in recent years?

You can read the full article here.

There was no debate, no discussion; in fact the bill wasn’t even finished when they started voting on it. Yet they all knew they would like everything in the bill, and rushed the vote. I’m somewhat envious of the common goal they all seem to share, but I’m also suspicious of why nobody bothered to read it. Granted it was fifteen hundred pages, Fourth of July recess, and the deposit on the Martha’s Vineyard cottage wasn’t refundable.

I think there is also something else at work here: Democrats tend to have more faith in the system than they have in the individual. When President Reagan tried to close the Department of Education, he was considered to be against education. It’s not just spin, Democrats really think that way. They feel it’s important to keep the Department of Education, because without it, there will be no education. Without the Department of Health, we would all be sick; without the Department of Commerce, the economy would fold. Ditto for the FDA, the FCC, FAA, and the rest of the alphabet soup.

I’ve been a fan of Rush Limbaugh for quite some time; he is an incredible source for information and salient points. Unfortunately, I can’t repeat anything I hear in front of Democrats, because once you do, your point is considered moot. It doesn’t matter if the statistic you quote comes from the Congressional Budget Office or the United Nations, if you say you’ve heard it on Rush Limbaugh, your point is dismissed, and the conversation is over. (Not only don’t Democrats want to listen to Rush, they don’t want to listen to anyone who admits to listening to Rush.) Yet, these same people claim to know everything about Rush. How is that possible?

Democrats don’t have to listen to Rush, (or Fox News either) because there are other people charged with that task. Organizations like Media Matters do all the dirty work then translate it for all the Lefties. So they never have to soil their mind by exposing it to a contrary opinions, or risk being converted to Conservatism. (For some reason, people on the Left believe they are incredibly susceptible to brainwashing, so they feel it is better not to listen to anything contrary.)

I assume the same thing happened with the energy bill. Like the trust they put on Media Matters to tell the truth about Rush, there are people in the Party they trust to read the bill. Since it had the Waxman-Markey brand on the label, Democrats knew there was nothing but good old-fashioned Marxism inside.

There is nothing more secure to Democrats than a big bureaucracy–it makes them feel safe. Perhaps that’s why so many of them linger on in colleges longer than the average American. Inefficient bureaucracies and musty old buildings with union swept halls are warm fuzzy places for them.  These people are the kind that like being looked after–it is the natural state of the Left.

They want to live under a huge bureaucracy that will direct their life, from the time they are born into a government hospital through their time in government schools, then punch the clock at a government job until a government appointed doctor gives them an assisted suicide. A Democrat Utopia would be like a human zoo where the lions are kept separate from the zebras, every one is fed, and the doctor comes round once a year. Just keep re-electing Democrats who will insure the air is clean, your food is safe, your retirement is secure, and the tithe is paid.

That’s a big one. When you decide to become a Democrat, the need for you to ever contribute to charity is completely eliminated. Every election cycle Democrat candidates are exposed for being skinflints when the 1040s are released. There is always a ridiculously small number on the lines of where charitable deductions are listed. The contribution is always so small you would think it was an accident, like they thought their $100 donation to the Breast Foundation was a subscription to a porn site.

In actuality, I think they believe that membership in the Democrat Party is their donation to charity. The Party is their Church and the leaders are their clerics. Why should Al Gore give more than a couple hundred bucks to charitable causes when he has made his life work saving the earth from prosperity? (That could explain why so many of Obama’s appointees didn’t feel the need to pay taxes–churches are tax-exempt.)

Never mind that Gore’s “charitable’” works have netted him billions. That’s just a bonus, and as most people like Gore will tell you, the nature of his job requires certain amenities. The Pope doesn’t fly coach either.

I’ve yet to meet a public “servant” that didn’t whine about being underpaid and brag about how much more they could make in the private sector. Personally, I think it is the duty of Americans to help out these dedicated “servants” by removing them of their obligation and set them free to find their fortune.

If you don’t want to read your assignments, it’s time to get a job. We need to make Democrats learn responsibility. Call it “tough love.” We need to lock the Democrats out of Government, the same way that a parent might eventually need to change the locks on the house while a 30-year-old child is at the Arcade. We need to tear down their posters, throw away the bongs, and put their X-boxes out on the back porch. Let’s turn the basement into an exercise room.

Our next opportunity is coming in 2010.

I think it has something to do with the McCarthy era, when everyone was using the “C” word, and pointing fingers at everyone and getting everyone in trouble.  But it’s different now.  Anything goes, and we’re all “tolerant” and “inclusive”, right?  I think we can use the word if it fits the situation.  Words are just letters and sounds we use to communicate our ideas.  Of course, words are powerful and should be used politely and accurately, so I assumed an attitude of kindness, and did my homework. 

At my first protest, the Tea Party at Santa Monica Pier, I read from Webster’s Dictionary the definition of Capitalism, Socialism and Communism, because I had begun to realize that Americans don’t know what the words mean.  Capitalism means freedom, the people control production.  Socialism is the link between Capitalism and Communism.  Communism is when the state controls everything; you know, like autos, banks, medicine, health insurance, taxes, television. (You know, like what Obama is doing.)  No freedom.  And soon…Poor, dirty, gray streets.  Poor, dirty, gray faces.

Well, some people know the definitions.  They learned it the hard way.  All the Cubans who took over my hometown, Miami;  they know what Communism is.  Their streets were poor, dirty and gray. They risked their lives floating to America on rafts to escape Communism.  My friend Sonja escaped Iran and then Russia to become an American.  She knows what Communism is.  She writes to her Senators and Representatives.  She does not take freedom for granted.

I took my freedom for granted my whole life.  It took the “C” word to wake me up.  It took the “C” word to get me involved in the fight, because freedom isn’t free.

I am a beginner political activist. I’m doing everything wrong too, but at least I’m doing.  I called Howard Berman, and told his assistant to vote “NO” on the Hate Crime thing.  She belched, “Are you aware that Howard Berman is the one who created the bill?”  I said, “No, I wasn’t aware of that, but tell him he’s wrong.  All crimes are hate crimes.  It’s just an attempt to push the gay agenda.”  Then, I hung up red faced, but committed.  I called Nancy Pelosi and when I got her voice mail, I said, “Please vote to keep Freedom of Speech, especially Conservative and Christian, on the radio and T.V.  If you don’t, you’ll be sorry!”  When I hung up my cell phone, my husband the cop screamed from across the car, “Who were you calling?!”  He almost crashed. I said, “Nancy Pelosi.”  He said, “You just threatened Nancy Pelosi?!!  The Speaker of the House?!! The third in line?!!”  I started shouting, “I didn’t threaten her life, I was just trying to be emphatic!  I just meant that if she eliminates conservative and Christian talk radio, all that will be left will be Howard Stern, and filth, and porn, and everything will be dark and bad, and icky!”  My husband the cop shouted back, “They take threats seriously, Vicki!!”  So, I called her voice mail back, and told her my name and apologized and said that I was a beginner political activist and hadn’t worded my message right.  I just wanted my freedom not to go away.”  My husband shouted, “You just told her your name!”

So, now my phone calls are probably being intercepted by the CIA, but I still say the “C” word because I think it applies.  It’s very sad and scary.  There must be a way we can wake up our friends and neighbors.  They are sleeping right through the takeover.  Sigh.  I read 1984 by George Orwell twice and it seems to be coming true.  I’m going to attend my local Tea Party this weekend.  I wear buttons that say, “Taxed Enough Already”, and “Well, at least the war on the middle class is going well.” I had a bumper sticker that said “I Resist Socialism” but someone smashed into my bumper.  I’m buying Glenn Beck’s “Common Sense,”  and Levin’s “Liberty & Tyranny.”   I’m reading “Speechless:  Silencing the Christians” by Wildmon.  But, I can’t seem to figure out how to convert the lost!

Initially, I used the “C” word to get people’s attention, to wake them up to the fact that they were voting into office a person who hated America and wanted to destroy it.  It didn’t work.  They didn’t listen. I guess we need to find a stronger word.

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.