I was once part of a conversation where the topic was What would have happened to the United States had there been no slavery. Most argued that nothing much would have changed, but I maintained that the United States would have been a different country with a different history had there been no slavery, because had there been no slavery there would have been no Civil War. My reasoning was that almost 600,000 men died in that war, most of them young, most before they had produced children. Had there been no war those childless young men would have married and had children, but because they were dead the women they married wed someone else and had children who would not have been born had the man she would have married not been killed in the Civil War. But it goes much further than the number of children directly related to the dead soldiers. Every woman who married a man she would not have marred had her soldier not been killed caused another woman to marry a different man than she would have. Example: Had there been no Civil War young Tom marries Alice and has five children; but Tom is killed and Alice marries Ben and has five children, entirely different people from the ones she would have had with Tom. But what happens to Ben when Tom isn’t killed? Ben marries Ann and has five children, but because Tom is killed Ben marries Alice and Ann marries Zeke. This chain is a very long one, difficult to break, and is not confined to the first generation, for all those children who would have been born had there been no Civil War continue the chain. The chain is exponential, and in four or five or six generation the country is populated by an entirely different group of people. Some immigrant groups might not have been greatly affected, but remember O. O. Howard’s luckless Germans who got rolled up by Jackson’s men at Chancellorsville, and Meagher’s Irish Brigade at Burnside’s Bridge. In one of Ray Bradbury’s time travel stories a mouse is accidentally killed a million years ago by time travelers, and everything changed because the chain of life was broken for mice and for everything that depended on mice for food, and everything, including man, that depended on an unbroken food chain. Bradbury was right, as he was in so many things. Each of us is alive because the chain is unbroken, often extending back hundreds if not thousands of generations. Contrary to the oft repeated statement that you can’t beat arithmetic, each one of us has beaten the arithmetic.

The cave where often I met Ogg
Lay open to the rain and wind
The land he farmed was now a bog
And to a nearby log was pinned
A note from Ogg that told the tale
Of how he never had been born
Of how his parents, Tom and Dale
Had disappeared one sunny morn
His ancestors had been erased
Deleted, gone, each child, each spouse
His generations now replaced
And all because of some dumb mouse

A paradigm is a model, a mold, a template, and in political terms a paradigm can be considered to be the dominant ideology, the dominant form of government. At the moment the dominant form of government in the United States is state based socialism, which, if recent elections are any indication, is on its way out. The last paradigm shift in the US occurred with the advent of the Great Depression, the election of FDR, and the gradual devolution of the US from a previous form of governance and culture to the governance and culture we have now. Whatever the new paradigm may be, I hope it won’t result in a replay of the unemployed singing, Brother Can You Spare A Dime.

The paradigms come faster now
Technology on Speed
Producing things beyond our ken
As well beyond our need
A bouncing baby born today
Will shortly be in school
To find that he is one more cog
Just one more fragile tool
That better minds than his control
His every mood and thought
Computer minds that rule the world
With every human caught
In spider webs of silicon
Connecting all to all
Directing actions from afar
While not a leaf may fall
Without the notice taken by
Machines in machine time
While huddled hungry masses ask
Brother can youse paradigm

Back in the 1920s RAF pilots flying over the North African desert saw large circular outlines like wheels beneath the sand. Almost a hundred years later, despite great advances in technology and understanding of ancient peoples, Professor David Kennedy of the University of Western Australia can still say, “For now the meaning of the wheels remains a mystery.”

Would the wand’rers of the desert
View the circles of the moon
As messages from God to those below
Not knowing that the circles were
Great craters ages old
And not the word of God they could not know
And thus constructed wheels of stone
To answer the great God
They watched the golden moon both wax and wane
And when the circles rose again
They understood that God
Had spoken but they read the text in vain
But presently the shaman read
What seemed to be a verse
Encrypted in the message they’d received
Declaring that the builders of
The wheels would rule the world
To find that once again they’d been deceived
And so the wind and time and sand
Upon the stone wheels crept
The wanderers would never know that they
Misread the text for they had used
The wrong encryption key
And had they not they’d rule the world today

The universal soldier fights on either side of a conflict for the ashes of his fathers and the temples of his gods, even if they are the wrong gods. – Richard Fernandez, the Belmont Club.

But they are never the wrong gods. When a Persian soldier lowered his spear and walked steadily toward a distant line of glinting shields, did he consider that Ahura Mazda might be the wrong god? I think not. When a Hittite bowman went careening across the field in a wild chariot charge, was not Warunkatte with him? When a legionnaire raised his shield did he not commend his spirit to Mithra? It has been said there are no atheists in a foxhole, and there were no atheists in a Spartan phalanx either.

It matters not to fighting men
What god be bona fide
What matters is that if and when
He fights, god’s on his side
Egyptian god or German god
The soldier sees as friend
Obeys the scepter and the rod
And soldiers to the end
When angels or Valkyries ride
To take him to his rest
Where in god’s arms he will abide
For he has done his best

Mary Landrieu, Democrat senator from Louisiana, the woman who cast the 60^th and deciding vote for Obamacare, facing certain defeat in a runoff election against her Republican opponent on 6 December and the loss of a senate seat she believes is hers by divine right, tried to resuscitate her dead political life by calling for a yes vote on the Keystone pipeline. Her Democrat colleagues turned her down, voting no. Obama, ever solicitous, tried to put his arm around her, but she would not be comforted. She was, quite naturally, enraged at what Obama and Obamacare had done to her.

With savage screams she lit a star
And flung it in his face
Scarring him with incandescent flame
And shrieked with laughter from afar
As standing in his place
A pile of smold’ring ash, but just in case
The hellish fire of the sun
Had not quite done its work
She kicked the ash and screamed, “Your epitaph!
You led me on, said you’re the One
You smirking little jerk!”
Recoiling as she heard his brittle laugh
“You’re going down,” Obama said,
“Though that was not my wish
The Senate’s lost and I say that is that
I’m sorry your career is dead
But now you’ve burnt my hat
Goodbye my dear and thanks for all the fish”
A gesture and a shock wave flung
Her clear across the sky
Past galaxies that darkened as she passed
‘Twas over now, the songs all sung
At least she knew the why
She lost because that damn vote that she cast
Upon a rock she came to rest
In deepest, darkest space
And there she sat, but fearful of the worst
Obama said, “It’s for the best
Your vote cost you disgrace
But know, my dear, my legacy comes first”

Trust is a fragile commodity. Once it is lost, it is lost, not to be regained. Barack Hussein Obama, visiting a local kindergarten class, tells the kiddies who he is.

Come, children, sit upon my knee
And I shall tell thy destiny
A life of change, a life of hope
And you will even buy the rope
A genuflect, a knuckled brow
A jump, a leap, when I say “Now!”
I see the question in your mind
You wonder that I am so kind
To give to you the stars above
And you give me undying love
And yes, my children, love you must
For I am he in whom you trust

Every president ultimately has an official portrait. Obama will need three.

OBAMA AS HE SEES HIMSELF

A canvas larger than each precious moment
Reflected in the polished sun lit pool
A president who didn’t know what no meant
The face, the smile, the eyes, the teeth, so cool
A canvas splashed with pigment for the ages
To last at least a thousand thousand years
To glorify the last of nature’s sages
And generate a trillion trillion tears

OBAMA AS SEEN BY HIS LOYAL CULTIST SUPPORTERS

A canvas splashed with love and faith and kindness
A life of service, honor and of hope
Who never lost his temper as the mindless
Attacked from every side to blunt the scope
Of visions that bestrode the world around us
A vision of a world devoid of sin
A world where Barack’s loving would surround us
A world where sin and hate had never been

OBAMA AS SEEN BY THE REST OF THE WORLD

A figure scribbled on a grain of barley
A portrait by a dabbler in the arts
A tragic figure, wizened, rough and gnarly
As if the artist showed his finer parts
A man who brought destruction to a nation
That raised him to a post beyond his worth
A post that saw him far beyond his station
A man ordained for failure from his birth

With his poll numbers falling to below freezing, Barack Hussein Obama, the last black president of the United States, laments his fallen state in a late night tearfest with Vice-president Joe Biden.

How sad the polls now are, Joe
Compared to good times past
I didn’t think that this low
Could come about so fast
How well do I recall what
A man I used to be
I nearly had it all but
It simply fled from me
A million cheering Germans
A Nobel Prize for naught
I loved those racist sermons
And knew that I’d been taught
To do what was expected
My handlers were well pleased
For not a man suspected
That my way had been eased
By sycophants and traitors
Who saw I made the top
But now those right wing haters
Have brought it to a stop
No longer do the masses
Huzzah my very name
Devotion quickly passes
And Joe, that’s just a shame

Venezuela, swimming in oil, is bankrupt. If you say Caracas real fast it sounds like carcass. The grand socialist experiment, the sclerotic European Union, is on life support, and the French have just begged the Brits for a billion pounds. And so it goes with socialism, and so it will go with us as the Democrats place tens of millions of the unproductive on plantations and pour millions of illegal third worlders across the southern border, all of them supported by the rest of us.

And so we say goodbye to fair Caracas
Goodbye to what’s become a steenking carcass
Where socialism proved to be as dark as
The seventh circle of the depths of hell
In France Hollande says things could not be better
But nonetheless he’s sent the Brits a letter
Demanding that while France won’t be a debtor
A billion pounds or so would suit him well
And so it goes where socialism beckons
The unwashed to demand both firsts and seconds
Despite how known experience still reckons
That very soon the markets ring the bell

It has been said that getting old beats the alternative, and for some getting old is simply a time for resting and watching the sunsets after a busy life. Some time ago I stood on a dock, looking across the bay as a slowly setting sun turned the sky a brilliant rose and gold. A frail, elderly man appeared a short distance away, so silently I hadn’t heard him come up. After a short silence he said softly, “You know, some folks look at a sunset like it’s tearing pages from a calendar, counting off the days, but when you think about it it just means we’re getting close to the next day, and next day there’s always a surprise for you.” I said I never thought of it that way, and he said most folks don’t, especially those getting on in years. He looked across the bay at the last of the sun, tapped his cane on the wooden dock, and said, as he turned to go,

The sunsets seem to come now so darn fast
And morning sun just never seems to last
The memories are of the distant past
A movie with a once remembered cast
He smiled and said you find that you’re now slow
The aches you never had begin to show
The high is now less often than the low
And some of what you knew no longer know
He looked across the bay and seemed to tense
Then said for me time’s passage fair relents
And sunsets are for me mere incidents
I tell the man with scythe to take thee hence
He smiled and said I’m here a few more years
Though even now there’s much sand in the gears
For now though I choose laughter over tears
And face the coming sunset with no fears
I watched him walk away, so bent and slow
As all around the shadows seemed to grow
A youngster gently took his hand in tow
Lit by the fading sunset’s afterglow