M2RB: Blue Öyster Cult (cowbell link)
40,000 men and women everyday...Redefine happiness
Another 40,000 coming everyday...We can be like they are
Come on baby...don't fear the reaper
Baby take my hand...don't fear the reaper
We'll be able to fly...don't fear the reaper
Another 40,000 coming everyday...We can be like they are
Come on baby...don't fear the reaper
Baby take my hand...don't fear the reaper
We'll be able to fly...don't fear the reaper
By Mark Steyn
To
an immigrant such as myself (not the undocumented kind, but documented
up to the hilt, alas), one of the most striking features of
election-night analysis was the lightly worn racial obsession. On Fox
News, Democrat Kirsten Powers argued that Republicans needed to deal
with the reality that America is becoming what she called a “brown
country.” Her fellow Democrat Bob Beckel observed on several occasions
that if the share of the “white vote” was held down below 73 percent
Romney would lose. In the end, it was 72 percent and he did. Beckel’s
assertion — that if you knew the ethnic composition of the electorate
you also knew the result — turned out to be correct.
This is what less enlightened societies call tribalism: For
example, in the 1980 election leading to Zimbabwe’s independence, Joshua
Nkomo’s ZAPU-PF got the votes of the Ndebele people while Robert
Mugabe’s ZANU-PF secured those of the Shona — and, as there were more
Shona than Ndebele, Mugabe won. That same year America held an election,
and Ronald Reagan won a landslide victory. Nobody talked about
tribal-vote shares back then, but had the percentage of what Beckel
calls the “white vote” been the same in 2012 as it was in 1980 (88
percent), Mitt Romney would have won in an even bigger landslide than
Reagan. The “white vote” will be even lower in 2016, and so, on the
Beckel model, Republicans are set to lose all over again.
Hence the urge to get on the right side of America’s fastest-growing
demographic. Only 27 percent of Hispanics voted for Romney. But all that
could change if the GOP were to sign on to support some means of
legalizing the presence of the 12–20 million fine upstanding members of
the Undocumented-American community who are allegedly “social
conservatives” and thus natural Republican voters. Once we pass amnesty,
argues Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform, “future immigrants
will be more open to the Republican Party because, unlike many
immigrants who are already here, they won’t have been harmed or insulted
by Republican politicians.”
So, if I follow correctly, instead of getting 27 percent of the 10
percent Hispanic vote, Republicans will get, oh, 38 percent of the 25
percent Hispanic vote, and sweep to victory.
Everyone talks about this demographic transformation as if it’s a
natural phenomenon, like Hurricane Sandy. Indeed, I notice that many of
those exulting in the inevitable eclipse of “white America” are the same
people who assure me that demographic arguments about the Islamization
of Europe are completely preposterous. But in neither the United States
nor Europe is it a natural phenomenon. Rather, it’s the fruit of
conscious government policy.
According to the Census, in 1970 the “Non-Hispanic White” population
of California was 78 percent. By the 2010 census, it was 40 percent.
Over the same period, the 10 percent Hispanic population quadrupled and
caught up with whites.
That doesn’t sound terribly “natural” does it? If one were informed
that, say, the population of Nigeria had gone from 80 percent black in
1970 to 40 percent black today, one would suspect something rather odd
and unnatural had been going on. Twenty years ago, Rwanda was about 14
percent Tutsi. Now it’s just under 10 percent. So it takes a bunch of
Hutu butchers getting out their machetes and engaging in seven-figure
genocide to lower the Tutsi population by a third. But, when the white
population of California falls by half, that’s “natural,” just the way
it is, one of those things, could happen to anyone.
Every four years, the Republican party pines for another Reagan. But
Ronald Reagan, governor of California for eight years, couldn’t get
elected in today’s not-so-Golden State. Jerry Brown, Governor Moonbeam
back in the Seventies, now presides as Governor Twilight, lead vampire
of a malign alliance of unionized bureaucrats and a swollen dependency
class that maintains them in office at the expense of a remorselessly
shrinking productive class. As the nation’s demographic profile trends
ever more Californian, perhaps Norquist’s predictions of naturally
conservative Hispanics pining for a new Reagan will come to fruition. Or
perhaps Bob Beckel’s more crudely determinative analysis will prove
correct — that, in a multicultural society, jostling identity groups
will stick with the party of ethnocultural spoils.
Once upon a time, the Democrats thought differently. It was their
first progressive president, Woodrow Wilson, who imposed the concept of
“self-determination” on post–Great War Europe, insisting that the
multicultural empires of the Habsburgs and Romanovs be replaced by a
patchwork of ethnic statelets from the Balkans to the Baltics. He would
be surprised to find his own party presiding over a Habsburgian America
of bilingual Balkanization as a matter of electoral strategy.
The short history of the Western Hemisphere is as follows: North
America was colonized by Anglo-Celts, Central and South America by
“Hispanics.” Up north, two centuries of constitutional evolution and
economic growth; down south, coups, corruption, generalissimos, and
presidents-for-life. None of us can know the future. It may be that
Charles Krauthammer is correct that Hispanics are natural Republicans
merely pining for amnesty, a Hallmark Cinco de Mayo card, and a mariachi
band at the inaugural ball. Or it may be that, in defiance of Dr.
Krauthammer, Grover Norquist, and Little Mary Sunshine, demographics is
destiny and, absent assimilationist incentives this country no longer
imposes, a Latin American population will wind up living in a Latin
American society. Don’t take it from a right-wing bigot like me, take it
from the New York Times. In 2009, Jason DeParle filed a story
about suburban Maryland, in which he helpfully explained the
municipality of Langley Park to Times readers:
Now nearly two-thirds Latino and foreign-born, it has the aesthetics of suburban sprawl and the aura of Central America. Laundromats double as money-transfer stores. Jobless men drink and sleep in the sun. There is no city government, few community leaders, and little community.
Golly. You’d almost get the impression that Mr. DeParle thinks that
laundromats doubling as money-transfer stores, jobless men drinking and
sleeping in the sun, and dysfunctional government are somehow
characteristic of Central America. That sounds awfully judgmental for a Times man, no?
Republicans think they’re importing hardworking immigrants who want a
shot at the American Dream; the Democrats think they’re importing
clients for Big Government.
The Left is right: Just under 60 percent of
immigrants receive some form of welfare. I see the recent Republican
proposals for some form of amnesty contain all sorts of supposed
safeguards against gaming the system, including a $525 application fee
for each stage of the legalization process. On my own recent visit to a
U.S. Immigration office, I was interested to be told that, as a matter
of policy, the Obama administration is now rubberstamping all “fee
waiver” requests for “exceptional hardship” filed by members of approved
identity groups. And so it will go for all those GOP safeguards. While
Canada and Australia compete for high-skilled immigrants, America
fast-tracks an unskilled welfare class of such economic benefit to their
new homeland they can’t even afford a couple of hundred bucks for the
necessary paperwork.
It’s hardly their fault. If you were told you could walk into a First
World nation and access free education, free health care, free services
in your own language, and have someone else pay your entrance fee, why
wouldn’t you? So, yes, Republicans should “moderate” their tone toward
immigrants, and de-moderate their attitude to the Dems who suckered the
GOP all too predictably. Decades of faintheartedness toward some of the
most destabilizing features of any society, including bilingualism (take
it from a semi-Belgian Canadian), have brought the party to its date
with destiny. Or as Peggy Lee sang long ago in a lost land, “Mañana is soon enough for me.”
— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2012 Mark Steyn
Don't Fear The Reaper - Blue Öyster Cult
All our times have come
Here but now they're gone
Seasons don't fear the reaper
Nor do the wind, the sun or the rain..we can be like they are
Come on baby...don't fear the reaper
Baby take my hand...don't fear the reaper
We'll be able to fly...don't fear the reaper
Baby I'm your man...
Valentine is done
Here but now they're gone
Romeo and Juliet
Are together in eternity...Romeo and Juliet
40,000 men and women everyday...Like Romeo and Juliet
40,000 men and women everyday...Redefine happiness
Another 40,000 coming everyday...We can be like they are
Come on baby...don't fear the reaper
Baby take my hand...don't fear the reaper
We'll be able to fly...don't fear the reaper
Baby I'm your man...
Love of two is one
Here but now they're gone
Came the last night of sadness
And it was clear she couldn't go on
Then the door was open and the wind appeared
The candles blew then disappeared
The curtains flew then he appeared...saying don't be afraid
Come on baby...and she had no fear
And she ran to him...then they started to fly
They looked backward and said goodby...she had become like they are
She had taken his hand...she had become like they are
Come on baby...don't fear the reaper
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