The Convulsions of the Potemkin Villagers

Americans are waking up to the Potemkin Village that their elitists have been building for them for decades. It isn’t pretty, but it is healthy. The villagers are going to knock down the walls very soon. No amount of clever political strategy up to and including the orchestration of war and/or terrorist attacks around the time of the November elections is going to forestall the revolution of the villagers. They are on to the truth, and the truth is going to set them free.

For those too young to have heard or been taught, a Potemkin Village was the name given to a fake settlement designed to fool an observer—if Wikipedia is to be trusted, it arose initially in Russia, as a minister sought to impress an empress with development under his leadership. More recently, the terminology was re-used in describing fake, propped up, movie-lot facades of communities designed to depict a life of joyous normalcy for the Jews in Germany at the very time Hitler was proceeding with the Holocaust. Films were made of children playing in the playground, families having picnics, all in a beautiful setting of safety and comfort and decency. Just behind the cameras were of course the Nazi guns, enforcing compliance with the charade.

The radical leftists put the finishing touches on the world’s greatest Potemkin Village in the run up to the American election of 2008. A good and decent and humble Christian man named George W. Bush had been transformed by the relentless spin of the godless media into an evil, lying, warmongering criminal ready to be replaced by fresh hope and change. A post-racial, pedigreed, eloquent, once-in-a-millennium leader would take his place, lower the sea levels, achieve rapprochement with all who hated America because of the evil Bush, and usher in an era of racial harmony. A few bows to the right people in the right places would put an end to all wars based on religion. Greed and dishonesty among the grubby private sector would be banished, replaced by the enlightened, selfless angels who in years past were mere bureaucrats but now were saintly czars and their well-trained minions. Healthcare would be free to all at a cost to none. Government would save jobs and provide endless unemployment compensation to those whose jobs weren’t saved; government would assure payment of your mortgage; government would go green and save the planet; government would assure you a supply of small, energy efficient cars that it knew you wanted; government would give you easy-money loans for your children’s education. Government would make sure that everything everywhere was equal for everyone, everywhere. And paying for all of this would be as simple as printing money.

All of this was and is a lie, an offense against the very concept of truth in human existence. Some of the Village builders were innocent or ignorant of the lie they were building; some were not. But the ace in the whole for the whole enterprise were those playing the Potemkin Village role of filmmakers—the media—who were firmly determined to portray to Americans that the Village was real, that a government with a ‘boot on the neck’ attitude toward the private sector was wise and benevolent, that reports of fiscal recklessness on an historic scale were simply hype, that racist behavior by the government’s “Department of Justice” was not really racist, that news reported by sources other than themselves—for example, the ACORN videotapes— wasn’t really news, that Islamist ideology wasn’t really behind a murderer shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ as he killed infidels, that a lesbian woman who bans US military recruiters from her domain while accepting millions from a Saudi nation governed by a theology that orders death by stoning for homosexuals is a perfect fit for the United States Supreme Court because of her mainstream American views.

In secular terms, the undoing of the Village was a little thing called the internet, supplemented by another little thing called talk radio. The truth couldn’t be suppressed. The Village builders kept expecting their ace in the hole to carry the day, but they didn’t realize that the media itself had become a caricature—an entire industry comprised of “Baghdad Bobs” who stare right into the camera and tell you lie after lie after lie, but don’t have even a clue that you long ago stopped believing them or even listening to them. Their self-preserving polls ceased to work. The last flailing of the media was found in its hidebound determination to play the race card against any and all who dared on any grounds to question the authenticity of the Village, culminating in a morally insane race-baiting attack on Arizona citizens terrified of very real and not Potemkin violence in their border state neighborhoods.

The American Potemkin Village is crumbling before our very eyes, and the American villagers are increasingly restless. The media is in convulsions trying to hold it all together; the Village builders have run out of new facades to draw attention away from the collapsing structures that are around them everywhere. The Village Leaders look desperately to one another for reassurance, but the nagging feeling that they are re-shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic just keeps getting stronger. The last resort of bringing in the guns to enforce play in the playgrounds and picnics in the parks just isn’t going to work.

The villagers are ready to demo the village; they are ready for a return to the real. They know the real America of the founding was not a Potemkin Village, but a right foundation for building the ‘shining city on a hill’. The foundation doesn’t assure that the rest of the building will be perfect or never in need of repair, but it does assure that whatever is built on it can stand.

Somewhere (most Americans know exactly where) it is written that ‘ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free’. The villagers have re-discovered it and are re-awakening to their native kinship with America’s founders. More convulsions to come, but truth is on the move.

Paul Gable

July 21, 2010