Kevin McCarthy Meets Henry Ford

If there’s anything we’ve learned these last seven or so years, if it can be called learning, is that there is such a large constituency of uneducated or miseducated people in this country that Henry Ford’s chestnut, “History is more or less bunk,” has acquired new relevance, if not the shimmer of absolute truth.

Those who specialize in the formation of Banana Republics have now gained a semblance of unruly control in our parliament. Most of them live in Banana Republics themselves, nearer the south of the Equator than the Middle, in states like Florida, Georgia, Texas, Arizona, and central California. Fiercely independent, these ‘folks’, as the neoliberal infiltrator Barack Obama once liked to refer to them, prefer the playground of chaos to the actualization of a sensible political order that reflects the will of The People, bloviation to thoughtful speech, and the theatrics of governing to the actual and difficult job of governance.   

Their gavel has now come down on The Republic, and consequently on all of us. History is indeed bunk if nothing is learned from it. As Henry Ford said when rolling out the prototype Model-T: “The customer can have any color he’d like, as long as it’s black.”