The Annals of Soft-Despotism

Dereliction of Duty

The idol of the soft-despotic state must needs be mocked and ridiculed.  It is one of the more effective weapons God has given to His people to excise this particular demon from our lives.  As we engage in this divine sarcasm we are conscious of standing in a long line of prophets who did not hold back from mocking the idols of their day.  We have in mind Elijah on Mount Carmel, for example, ridiculing the priests of Baal, as they called upon their god but to no avail:

And at noon Elijah mocked them, saying, "Cry aloud, for he is a god.  Either he is musing, or he is relieving himself, or he is on a journey, or perhaps he is asleep and must be awakened." (I Kings 18: 27.)

A recent tragedy has been the cold-blooded murder of innocents at the Navy Yard in Washington DC.  One wonders how it could be that a non-serving civilian could be granted admittance to a military installation, armed with a semi-automatic shotgun, to kill twelve people.  What happened to the nation's god?  In the words of Elijah, perhaps the soft-despotic deity in Washington was musing somewhere amidst a brown study.  Or he was in the loo.  Or he had undertaken a long journey.  Or he had fallen asleep.  The answer--all of the above.

Governments that attempt to rule everything in an embrace of soft-despotic tyranny end up powerless and incompetent.
  Here is the most powerful nation on earth--a nation whose hubris has gone so far as to  lecture and regulate its citizens over what can be put on their plates and in their diets--utterly incompetent. It has failed dismally, not just to provide basic security on a military establishment, but to screen out the disturbed and mentally unstable from working there.  The nation which believes its government is competent to regulate everything ends up with a government utterly incompetent everywhere. This, from Breitbart News:

The government's sprawling system of background checks and security clearances is so unreliable it's virtually impossible to adequately investigate the nearly 5 million Americans who have them and make sure they can be trusted with access to military and sensitive civilian buildings, an Associated Press review found.  Case after case has exposed problems for years, including recent instances when workers the government approved have been implicated in mass shootings, espionage and damaging disclosures of national secrets. In the latest violence, the Navy Yard gunman passed at least two background checks and kept his military security clearance despite serious red flags about violent incidents and psychological problems.

One of the most profound observations on the tragedy came from the Secretary of Defense:

The Pentagon knows there are problems. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has ordered a sweeping review of all military security and employee screening programs. "Something went wrong," he said.

You don't say.  

Columnist Michelle Malkin had this to say:

 . . . the truth is seeping out about shooter Aaron Alexis. The 34-year-old Navy veteran had been treated since August by the Veterans Administration for a host of mental problems that plagued him for up to a decade.

Officials say Alexis was paranoid, had a sleep disorder, suffered from schizophrenia and was “hearing voices.” He told Newport, R.I., police after an altercation just last month that he believed a “microwave machine” was sending vibrations through a wall into his body. Friends say he was a heavy drinker and violent video game addict. A ticking time bomb, he had racked up a string of misconduct incidents during his military stint ranging from absenteeism to insubordination to disorderly conduct. He was arrested in Seattle in 2004 and in Fort Worth, Texas, in 2010 for separate anger-fueled shootings that terrorized neighbors and innocent bystanders.

Yet somehow Alexis passed several military background checks, gained high-level security clearance and had access to multiple military installations. The civilian contractor who employed Alexis blasted the feds on Tuesday for failing to fully disclose his history. “Anything that suggests criminal problems or mental health issues, that would be a flag,” Thomas Hoshko of The Experts told The Washington Post. “We would not have hired him.” And 12 innocent people might still be alive today.

There are two basic responses to this kind of manifest incompetence.  The first is to cling to the idolatry of omni-competent statism and double down--demanding more money, more bureaucracy, more rules, more regulations, etc.  The second is to repent of soft-despotic statism and limit the responsibilities of the state to what God has laid down for it.  Ironically, one of those is to provide for the common defence against military attack.  But because the government is so focused upon everything but, in its vaunting ambition to be as a god to the people, it cannot carry out even its lawful and fundamental responsibilities properly.

There has been a manifestation of dignified nobility amidst this tragedy.  We found ourselves humbled and moved by the mother of the murderer, Aaron Alexis, who expressed relief that her son had passed from the sight of mortal men and would no longer be able to kill anyone else and who, at the same time, lamented the damage and suffering to the families of his victims.   May God comfort her--and those who have suffered such terrible, unexpected loss.