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About Constancio Asumen, Jr.
Mr. Asumen has most recently assumed the responsibilities of
Chairman-of-the-Board for ACE LILACS, a budding startup venture
in the marketplace of ideas. The list of previous vocations he
had engaged in before this, includes being a farmer, fisherman,
stevedore, national scholar, college professor, journeyman
laborer, freelance scribe, typesetter, proofreader, systems
analyst, software developer, cab driver, etc. He holds a masters
degree in Mineral Science & Technology (1973, Kyoto University)
with a major in Exploration Geophysics. Somewhat of the
quintessential Ivy League under-achiever, he is an embodiment of
the can-do attitude so prevalent amongst most first generation
Americans. He is an ardent adherent to the tenet that anything
worth doing is worth doing well. Mr. Asumen maintains a
website here. |
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Past Articles
Being
There: The Tragic Legacy of Voting Present
Incidental Lessons from Fluid Mechanics
In
Search for Governing Virtues
Slouching Out of National Dyslexia
Dissonant & Delusional: The Activist Ideologue
Obama’s Contempt: Vestige of His Incompetence
Green
Technology: A Poverty of Philosophy
Global
Warming: The Religion that Failed
Consensus
Does Not a Science Make
Historical
Parallels & Intersections
The
Repugnant Obama Paradigm
The Myth of
Moderate Islam
ObamaCare:
How Lucky Can You Get?
Assimilation Overkill Begets Bigotry |
Constancio Asumen,
Jr.
Being There: The Tragic Legacy of Voting Present
July 21, 2010
"President Obama was slow
reacting to the oil spill. He seems loath to send the National Guard to the
border... Same thing with the economy. Americans like strong leadership that
appears to have things under control. Anybody seen that recently?” – Bill
O’Reilly,
The Chaos Factor
For a President who was committed
earlier than day one of his presidency to "...begin
again the work of
remaking America,” the seeming preponderance of nonchalance in handling any
crisis of national proportion seems out of character. But a
cursory examination of the
history of ideology, especially of the Marxist-Leninist variety, would
illustrate that the nonchalance that Bill O’Reily was rhetorically mulling about
is indeed consistent with the modus operandi of the
classic ideologue activist.
The incessant
obsession with equality of outcomes as most recently propounded in connection
with
the G20 talks in Canada, was at best delusional. If you eliminate the
motivation to compete, you are undermining the very essence of free market
economics, which is the pursuit of excellence that you can leverage to your
advantage.
The very
notion of utopian
Shangri-La is antithetical to the notion of excellence. For why bother to be
better than your neighbor if there is no advantage to be gained by it? Even
vegetation, if unwittingly, still ‘endeavors’ to get a better angle of exposure
to the sun to optimize its utilization of chlorophyll and attain a more
effective photosynthesis to propel and sustain a healthy growth and outflourish
its neighbors, or even other segments of the same plant.
The point
that needs to be emphasized over and over again, until it finally sinks in and
gets factored into the national consciousness and political calculus of the
policy making classes is plainly and simply this. The mandate to compete is
inherent to the political DNA of the very concept of being an American. It is
that very concept, as embodied in the U.S. Constitution, that the President
is statutorily sworn to "preserve, protect, and defend.”
By contrast,
while
Lincoln’s admonition of, "With malice toward none; with charity for all;
with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right,..” has become
part of the American cultural tradition, nowhere in the wealth of documentation
on how the nation was founded and ought to be governed is prescribed an equality
of outcome for any endeavors that individual citizens may choose
to undertake. Take away the freedom to choose and you deprive any American of
the very essence of Americanism.
Recall how in
the Peter Sellers movie "Being
There,” the most profound meaning was imputed by the policy wonk
types to every trivial and idiotic platitude uttered by Chance the Gardener. The
same attributive inertia has exactly been operational with the Obama phenomenon.
When people swoon over the profundity of such meaningless pronouncements as "we
are the ones we have been waiting for,” you can be dead certain that a
segment of the populace is seized with the malady that can only be characterized
as
political dyslexia, if not outright dementia.
It is not so
much that some people are mesmerized by the rhetoric of President Obama that is
disastrous for the country. Rather it is the eventual creation of a political
underclass which will perpetually be wards of the government that bodes
disaster. This is the end that every policy initiative espoused by the Obama
regime appears designed to accomplish. The "can-do” attitude that so pervasively
permeates the American tradition is being systematically undermined and
supplanted by a "could-obtain” (from somebody) attitude that could prove to be
most tragically toxic for the country. As
Angelo M. Codevilla so eloquently formulated,
dependence economics entails that,
"...our
ruling class is making itself the arbiter of wealth and poverty...modern
government makes valuable some things that are not, and devalues others that
are. Thus if you are not among the favored guests at the table where officials
make detailed lists of who is to receive what at whose expense, you are on the
menu. Eventually, pretending forcibly that valueless things have value dilutes
the currency's value for all.”
It is only
in this context that
the passive, betimes bordering on being
obstructive response by the Federal government to the BP oil spill in the
Gulf of Mexico can begin to make sense. Voting present on the oil spill simply
allowed the repercussions of the accident to become exacerbated to its most
harmful extremes. Being there and doing nothing allowed the situation to
deteriorate in a manner that whatever and however little the government would
subsequently do, could inevitably assume the illusory character of Providential
benevolence and deliverance.
The
repeated attempts at imposing a six-month
moratorium on offshore drilling across the board is better understood in
this context. This is consistent with the Regime’s
pushing to enact the cap-and-trade legislation while the BP broken well was
spewing tens of thousands of barrels of oil and gas per day into the Gulf of
Mexico. It is sold as an urgently needed
alternative energy policy notwithstanding that the
scientific premises of
global warming which underpins the entire carbon footprint narrative proves
credible only amongst demonstrable charlatans, as I sufficiently
demonstrated earlier:
"Consensus
does not a science make. ‘Carbon footprint’ and ‘carbon offset’ are not
scientific concepts. They are political constructs, concocted for propaganda,
designed to politically and financially benefit their proponents. It has as much
basis in reality as did mortgage-backed securities which obliterated the real
estate market and the entire
financial
system needed a multi-billion dollar bailout.”
As I
emphasized
earlier elsewhere,
" ...when the POTUS
brazenly claimed in this year’s
State of the Union Address of an ‘overwhelming scientific evidence on climate
change,’ he was counting on what he perceived as the ignorance of the American
people which elevated him to the Oval Office. Or, to be more charitable, he was
reciting meaningless talking points platitudes, with the assurance that a rubber
stamp Congress can push through every whimsical scheme he embraces...
"The point
is, there is money to be made by jumping onto the Global Warming bandwagon,
provided you are on the taking side of the financial equation. Politicians and
pundits of all shades and flavors conveniently embrace the Global Warming dogma
not only as a matter of intellectual indolence, but more so as a matter of
economic advantage.”
Voting present on anything is a most appropriate euphemism for the
subterfuge of opting to do nothing of consequence that can possibly influence
the unfolding of events. Or more precisely, it is Obama speak for obfuscating
the landscape to make it appear to a
credulous public that the regime is doing something worthwhile and
consequential. The approach works brilliantly under two conditions, namely, 1)
when you don’t know what to do or what you are doing to change the situation, or
2) when the unfolding of events is trending towards your desired outcome, thus
it serves well to let it ride.
The Obama
regime’s response to the BP oil spill just illustrated a perfect combination of
these two conditions. Containing the gushing broken oil well proved
above the pay grade of anybody who matters in the administration. Moreover,
an oil spill ravaged Gulf of Mexico is a godsend to the radical
environmentalists who wanted to scuttle the oil industry to begin with.
Furthermore, it fits ever so snugly into the Obama template of downsizing the
fossil energy industry as it bolsters subsidizing the "renewable” energy sector,
while he proceeds to engineer for posterity another glorious age of the
Greening of America.
Make no
mistake about it. This goes far beyond the
Charles A. Reich, Woodstock Festival of the counterculture variety. As I
warned in the
earlier cited opus,
"Obama and
his cohorts want to take us back to the windmills and dragons of
Cervantes’ Don Quixote and the blissful world of Sancho Panza and Dulcinea
del Toboso...the intellectual bankruptcy implied in this attempt to take us back
to the hunting and gathering mode of provisioning ought to outrage every
American worthy of the sacrifice and noble visions of
our Founding Fathers.”
Against such a gloomy prospect, it
is imperative that a veto-proof majority in the house is secured come November
2. Even more crucially, the majority should go beyond numerical superiority.
There should be a preponderance of principled representatives whose most urgent
agenda go beyond getting re-elected two years thence. The task of undoing the
damage unleashed by the Obama regime, demands reconstructing, brick by brick,
the glorious edifice of freedom and liberty that the Founding Fathers had
bequeathed to the nation with
this solemn covenant:
"And for
the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of
Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and
our sacred Honor.” |
