Current Lipozene Customer
Have you seen the infomercials for Lipozene? If you haven’t (and thank god you haven’t) Lipozene is a pill that is supposed to cut weight. The hook is that taking this pill will let you cut body fat “without changing your lifestyle.” How remarkable! No personal sacrifices required. No dieting, no exercise. This pill is perfectly targeted at those Wal-Mart shoppers who are so fat that they immediately sink into a motorized scooter upon entering the store. With Lipozene you don’t even have to suffer the indignity of ordering a diet coke with your Big Mac.
So you ask, “AJ, why are you talking about some BS infomercial pill?” Because Lipozene is a metaphor, and a symptom of, what ails our country. With Lipozene you can expect results without doing any of the corresponding work. We as a country harbor these same expectations.
The idea of sacrificing anything as a country is so mid-20th century and more than a little distasteful. Remember Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson writing about sacrificing at the altar of freedom and refreshing the tree of liberty with the blood of patriots? Seems a bit disgusting now. I mean blood? Icky. And altars…let’s not even get started on religion, it’s not PC to worship anything anymore, even freedom.
But don’t worry, you don’t have to take my word for it. Let’s examine some examples:
Spending – The stimulus bill embodies this “easy route” attitude. Let’s review, the country is in dire economic straits, we are hemorrhaging money, and if ever a situation called out for fiscal responsibility, this is it. Instead of cutting unneeded spending and focusing time and money on useful projects, we have taken an indiscriminate approach; millions on small airports, millions for playgrounds, and thousands for some fancy new bicycles and Segways. After all, it’s much easier to put up a bill, let it get jam packed with pork, and not take the time to make sure the projects are effectively targeted. As long as the right people get the political credit, the easy route works just fine, regardless of the consequences.
Carbon Offsets – Let’s assume for the sake of argument that man made global warming is real. You’re looking at some pretty serious consequences: massive species extinctions, floods, and crop failures. So if you’re a self-righteous California liberal committed to saving the world, what do you do? This is America silly, you pay someone else to care. Introducing carbon offsets: a way to offset your carbon output and your liberal guilt. After calculating your contribution of carbon to the atmosphere, you log onto Pay Pal and pay a third party in the Third World to plant some trees. The logic is brilliant and infallible, “The world is ending, I’ll pay someone else to deal with it.” There is not more elegant proof global warmers don’t actually believe the doom and gloom they predict.
Military Action – The U.S. Congress decided in 2003 that Saddam Hussein was a threat and voted to go to war with Iraq, a decision bolstered by high public support. But a funny thing happened, as soon as soldiers started dying, public support for the war dropped and Democrats seized the opportunity, riding Iraq War opposition to Congressional majorities in 2006. The country was confronted with a daunting, but not impossible task, and seemed to say, “No thanks.”
Never mind that the soldiers doing the sacrificing are more supportive of their mission than the general public and that compared to wars of similar intensity the casualty rates are low. The country can’t stomach conflict even though the troops, who bear the highest cost, believe in what they’re doing: Reinvigorating Iraq as a free country and people.
After the invasion to remove Hussein, it became vital that we left Iraq with a future, regardless of regrets over the original decision. But public opinion, Democrats and the “Out of Iraq” crowd demanded this noble pursuit of freedom be painless, which is to say there mustn’t be any pursuit at all.
And this is hardly a party specific phenomenon, Reagan pulled out of Beirut in 1984 because it was easy, Clinton pulled out of Somalia in 1993 with Republican support because it was easy, and Clinton’s remote bombings of Afghan terror camps were not met with Republican cries to put boots on the ground, because anything more wouldn’t have been easy. The easiest course does not always equate with the right one, and the country has been guilty at times of taking an unserious approach to military action.
There is a related column at the Telegraph about a return to deep space which details how averse Westerners have become toward any physical risk, not just military action.
As a country we have grown accustomed to getting what we want easily, and if the solution isn’t easy, we take shortcuts, like the stimulus or carbon offsets. But these are only Band-Aids used to hide more serious problems. These Band-Aids, like Lipozene, don’t actually work, no matter how hard we wish they would. “You can all have free health care, just vote for this bill,” is the political equivalent of, “You can lose eighty pounds by taking this pill.”
Serious problems require serious solutions. From the economy, to healthcare, to Iraq and Afghanistan, significant challenges confront our country. It would behoove us not to take the easy route.
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July 22nd, 2009 at 1:03 pm
This is a clever presentation.
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