“Dictators ride to and fro upon tigers from which they dare not dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry.” – Winston Churchill
I was reminded this week also of the limerick about the lady smiling as she rides the tiger – and how they return from the ride with the tiger smiling and the lady inside. I wonder this week if certain politicians (American and European mostly) and good many of our own very dear national media figures are riding the tigers with a desperate smile plastered on their faces. They’ve had a good time and have scored richly remunerative leadership positions or climbed to the top of the national media heap in advocating for various progressive causes, or in defending such causes through various media organs.
They’ve been riding those metaphorical tigers for decades; championing everything from enabling the mass importation of illegal immigrants and spurious refugees country-shopping for the most generous set of benefits, gay porn for kindergarteners, skimping on fire prevention and brush clearance in the name of the ecology (looking at you, Governor ‘Brylcreem’ Newsome), enabling and indulging the deranged and drug-abusing homeless, knee-capping the domestic industrial base and reliable energy-producing technologies, enthusiastically denigrating the white ethnic working class (and majority) citizens to favor the exotic ‘other’ in every possible way, leading many observers to suspect that our leadership wishes to dissolve the people, and replace them with a much more biddable and subservient population. Oh, and don’t forget how our educational overlords have reduced the value of a college education into something with the approximate value of a used bus ticket, and graduated high schoolers who can barely read a third-grade textbook.
The big names in our national media rode the tiger by insisting for years that Joe Biden was sharp as a tack, an incorruptible and stone-patriot American, against everything that the rest of us could see with our own eyes. For which we were told that our lying eyes were deceiving us, right up until a few weeks ago, when those big national names began sobbing about how it wasn’t their fault! They were all deliberately fooled by certain of the Biden administration top staffers. So – this belated cri de Coeur establishes the national media as either partisan hacks or too dumb and incurious to even call themselves reporters of news at anything more elevated than a high school newspaper. If this is the national media’s tiger dismount, it’s way too late to redeem the lost credibility.
As for progressive politicians, academicians and bureaucrats generally, the policies on which they have built decades-worth of careers are turning out to be wildly unpopular, especially among citizens who feel themselves to have been grossly harmed by them, and voted last November to favor our own interests and concerns. Trump and other MAGA-sympathetic office-holders have the whip-hand in the US, at least for now – and not wasting any time in holding back with the whip. Now comes the time when the ride is getting … uncomfortable for those on the tiger. Ask not for whom the mob bays – it bays for thee. And when and if they decided to dismount, the smile will be on the face of the tiger.