The Myth of the Eternal Return is the title of a 1954 tome by the Romanian historian Mircea Eliade, although many other deep thinkers, from Pythagoras to Nietszche, have voyaged into the same poetic and philosophic recesses.
My task is much shallower: To show how old, bad, ideas keep recurring in American politics. Yes, I bear witness to The Truth of Infernal Return. As with bad pennies and bad breath, it’s no myth that our politics are infested with nefarious ideas that never die and eternal lie. As with some Lovecraftian daemon, they await their infernal comeback.
Case in point: Kamala Harris’s August 16 announcement of her plan for price controls—that being a fair way to describe federal monitoring of “price gouging.” Harris has revived one of the worst ideas from the stagflationary (stagnation + inflation) 1970s. More on that later, but let’s recall other bad ideas that have lamentably rebounded:
First, unnecessary foreign war. Into this Baby Boomer, memories of the bloody futility of the Vietnam War are seared. So when the North Vietnamese finally conquered South Vietnam in 1975, my teenage self said, “Well, at least the U.S. will never make that mistake again.” Which only proves I had a lot to learn. As we all know, less than three decades later, the U.S. invaded Iraq, a military operation that made the Vietnam War look prudential.
Today, 21 years after George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished”—the most grimly hilarious pronunciamento since Vietnam’s “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it”—we still have troops in Iraq, which is now dominated, of course, by Iran. So what, now, are those Americans doing there? They aren’t looking for WMDs, and they aren’t building democracy. Instead, they are fighting Al Qaeda, ISIS, Daesh—or whatever new bogeyman emerges from the Middle East’s tireless terror-meme generator.
According to reports, the U.S. has 3,400 troops in Iraq and adjacent Syria, but only a fool would vouch for the accuracy of that number, given officialdom’s history of fibbing, the slippery X-factor of contractors—and perhaps some other number-hiding shell-game that we’ll learn about only in the next investigative scoop.
Hellbound and Down 