A Nation of Narcissists

We have become the most self-absorbed people the world has ever known. Galileo was persecuted because he had the gall to declare that the sun, not the earth, was the center of our solar system. But, today, he would have most of the country, not merely the Catholic Church, condemning him as a heretic for suggesting that each of us is not the center of the universe.

You merely have to look around. You will see people sending out second-by-second bulletins about themselves: “I’m fourth in line at the checkout line…now I’m third.” You will see them taking selfies, taking far more pictures of themselves than of their friends or relatives. Some thought it outrageous when Obama was seen taking a selfie, but why would the biggest narcissist of all not engage in the fad? After all, this was the same egotist who campaigned for the presidency while standing in front of Greek columns.

This is a Facebook world in which every single thing a person does or says is instantly posted for all the world to see and marvel at, a world in which the same people who rail at cameras posted in public as a means to control crime are never without their own camera phones, immortalizing every last second of their lives.

When George Orwell wrote “Animal Farm,” it was an allegory about the Russian Revolution and the resulting tyranny under Joseph Stalin. The book told of a revolt by the farm animals against the farmer, and how under the ironhanded rule of the farm’s new leader, a pig named Napoleon, the motto of the revolution, “Every animal is equal,” quickly morphs into the more realistic “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

Today, in America, we see the results of a similar revolution that began in the 1960s. But instead of a single boar at the top, we have millions of them running around. It is more like the situation envisioned by Orwell in his other classic, “1984,” in which a leader, Big Brother, controls society through his legions of Thought Police. But what we have brought on ourselves isn’t a single brutal tyrant, but millions of Big Brothers and Big Sisters making certain you mouth only false pieties. It is mob rule, but one in which competing mobs jockey for authority.

Dare to suggest that illegal aliens are a drain on society in every way imaginable, and they will call you names and try to deprive you of your livelihood. Dare to suggest that Islam is not a religion in the way that others are, but is, in fact, a political movement that seeks to dominate the world, and they’ll stone you.

Dare even to suggest that Sharia Law should be an abomination in the eyes of civilized people who claim to be in favor of free speech, equal rights for women and religious tolerance, and thugs waving foreign flags and throwing fists and eggs will descend on you, demanding that you toe the politically correct line. Or else!

Suggest that transgenders don’t need their own bathrooms; that what they need are a platoon of psychiatrists, and the Big Brothers and Big Sisters will treat you the way Cotton Mather treated “witches.”

Suggest that most of those who inhabit urban communities and will demonstrate on behalf of the criminals who prey on them, but never on behalf of the cops who risk their lives trying to protect them, should stop being treated like sacred cows, whose every gripe calls for federal action, and you will be condemned for racial heresy.

When you consider the crime rate in urban centers and the contempt the inhabitants seem to have for education, civility and the rule of law, perhaps the answer is to turn the enclaves into zoos. After all, inasmuch as those in the hood don’t object to living off the labor of others, why not approach the problem logically? Trillions upon trillions of dollars have been squandered by one administration after another, and all that society has to show for it are soaring murder and illegitimacy rates.

Besides, we don’t keep animals in zoos as punishment or because we hate them, but to ensure their safety as well as our own.

---

Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter announced at the Naval Academy, while delivering the commencement address, that Keenan Reynolds, the quarterback on Navy’s football team, will be spared the five years of active service he agreed to serve, after being named a sixth round draft choice by the Baltimore Ravens.

Apparently this isn’t the first time that the service academies have allowed football players to be drafted straight from graduation into the NFL, thus allowing them to avoid their military commitment, even though that was the deal the cadets signed up for when they agreed to have the American taxpayer pick up the tab for their college education.

In their pathetic defense, the academies claim that having these recent grads playing professional football acts as a recruiting tool for enlistments, although they are unable to provide any corroborating evidence.

If that has a familiar ring to it, perhaps it’s because it’s the one that Obama keeps dragging out as his rationale for letting terrorists out of Gitmo in his attempt to finally shut down the facility.

But not all the tyrant’s horses and not all the tyrant’s men have been able to come up with even a smidgen of evidence that the jihadists have ever recruited a single person to their cause because of the prison. In fact, it’s been Obama, himself, who has recruited killers to the cause of ISIS and the Taliban. He did so by releasing scores of them from Gitmo so they could return to the killing fields of the Middle East.

---

A longtime reader recently sent me an email that mentioned that college students were asked to rate others on a friendship scale. It turns out that in only 53% of the cases were the relationships reciprocal, which suggests that nearly half of those people who considered some other person a friend were fooling themselves.

It struck home because I occasionally tell my wife that most of my friends are people I’ve never met and probably never will meet. But of course even I know that’s something of an exaggeration. It only means that my readers and I pretty much share a vision of the world and the way we wished things were. So while that would certainly serve as a basis for real friendship, without knowing the particulars of the person, I’m only guessing.

I suppose, without knowing you folks as individuals, it would be safe to call us comrades-in-arms, doing what we can to defend America against the onslaught of socialists, jihadists and our own ignorant-and-proud-of-it youth.

Clearly, we all have different ways of defining a friend. In some cases, it’s just a word we use in identifying those who work alongside us or play golf with us on Saturday morning or sit across a poker table from us once a week. It just sounds friendlier than calling someone an acquaintance.

I think one way of identifying a friend is someone you would lend money to without asking for a notarized I.O.U. because you knew it would be paid back if at all possible and as soon as possible.

Another really great way to tell, of course, would be if he’d cough up a kidney if you really needed it.

Finally, and most telling of all, especially if he or she is a Democrat, is if you can tell him or her how you really feel about Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Barack Obama, open borders, Muslims and transgender bathrooms, and not be called a racist, a sexist, a homophobe, a xenophobe, a fascist, a cretin or a troglodyte, you have a real friend.

Of course, as the poll showed, that’s no guarantee it’s reciprocal.