May 21, 2009

Obama's Magic Hat

By Gary Horne

Many Obama voters now expect the President to pull utopia out of his magician's hat. What will they do when the hat turns out to be empty?

In the dream, the magician came on stage amid a robust round of applause. He took the magician's hat off the table and showed the audience it was empty inside. Then to everyone's amazement he pulled a rabbit from the hat. "That was nothing," he said. The audience waited as the magician put his hand deep into the hat. Then suddenly out came; Free health care for all! No waiting, no horror stories, everyone will be taken care of and no one will pay.

Next, he pulled out a blue box. When the box opened, money poured out endlessly. The cover of the box read, "The fair share of the rich." Next, he pulled out a yellow box with a peace symbol on the top. Out of this box came flowers and birds and magic words which when spoken brought about universal peace and changed enemies into friends. Next came a green box, which when opened became a pristine garden of Eden, untouched by man. Item after item came from the magic hat, no more hard work, no more pain, no more tough decisions, no more disagreements, no war, no blood, no more "evil" businessmen, no bothersome people with rational arguments.

The young dreamer awoke from his dream with excitement. He rushed to turn on the TV to see what his new President had pulled from the magic hat. To his disappointment, the hat was empty today, though the commentator said he still believed. He called his conservative friends to complain that they were preventing the President from using his magic hat.

Of course, the magic hat will never work. The utopian dreams of the far left are incompatible with reality. These dreams are nothing more than fantasy. Fantasies can only be brought about by magic, not wishful thinking. In Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, John Galt describes the mystics' belief in wishing:

...in their non-material, non-profit world, they travel from planet to planet at the cost of a wish. If an honest person asks them: ‘How?' - they answer with righteous scorn that a ‘how' is the concept of vulgar realists; the concept of superior spirits is ‘Somehow.' On this earth restricted by matter and profit, rewards are achieved by thought; in a world set free of such restrictions rewards are achieved by wishing.

Such wishing is described in Randall Hoven's excellent article:

The common theme of the wishful thinking method (aka "hope") is that there never need be a tradeoff. There is always some other method, one never before tried, of dealing with life's problems. And funny thing: only Democrats seem to have these methods.

Voters are encouraged to believe in the magic methods by subtle hints and murky slogans, such as the recent "change" theme. The "Change" signs held up by Obama supporters in the campaign could just as easily have read "Magic." The magician is never mentioned but is always assumed somewhere offstage.

Time will drag on and the stuff will never come out of the magic hat. What will the Obama supporters do then? Substitute "utopia" for "prophecy" in the following quote about when prophecy fails:

You might also think that followers would decide they'd been fooled and rebel. More often, however, the failed prophecy actually makes their belief stronger. In the case of cults, members have invested their money, time, lives, and sometimes even children in the cult leader. It's very difficult to suddenly reject all that, since their very identity is often linked to the beliefs.

Most likely, the true believers will find a reason utopia didn't appear, like we didn't let them have enough of our money. They will find someone else to hate. The statist ideologue believes it is some else's fault. As Mark Levin says in Liberty and Tyranny:

The Statist searches for significance and even glory in a utopian fiction of his mind's making, the earthly attainment of which, he believes, is frustrated by those who do not share it.

So, it will be those nasty people on American Thinker who thwarted the magician. Don't count on the true believers to suddenly be rational when voting in 2010 or 2012. But true believers are not the majority. There will be many disgusted, dispirited, and disappointed people (who can see the hat is empty) voting differently next time, and hopefully the magicians will be booted off the stage.