It has been observed that former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) had it right about Russia. The biggest threat to the world today is unequivocally, he said in an election debate with President Obama, Russia. And this not from the Gen. Curtis LeMay corner of conservative extremists, war-hungry nostalgicos passing today as a Tea Party, but from the knowledge that things last longer than the fall season.
{mosads}Romney “got it right” because he understands himself in the world and he understands that for us war babies, the same paradigms that applied when we were 18 still apply today and will for the rest of our time here; our condition is unresolved. They apply to Bill and Hillary Clinton and George W. Bush and Mitt Romney. And all 45 million of us born in the same post-war years. Because we of the post-war Pax Americana are still working through the same issues.
Romney’s adult understanding of the world began as a Stanford University student in the turbulent academic year of 1965-1966 and advanced shortly after in France, where he was on a church mission. The ’60s were years of contrasts. In California it was a time of Janis Joplin, awakening the Bay Area with a howl as if from a hundred years of sleep; Timothy Leary and Ram Dass, advising the world to “turn on, tune in, drop out.” As governor from 1967 to 1975, Ronald Reagan (R) was the equal and opposite counterforce to the hallucinogenic Summer of Love.
Romney knew then that these forces will run oppositional in our times and the one forms the necessity of the other. And he understood his own place in this spectrum. But does he see correctly to 2016? Does he see that he, like Reagan, may this time be the singularly necessary one, the equal and opposite counterforce to the current disorders who sets the world to spinning again?
A draft movement for Romney 2016 has recently started in Utah, but Romney indicates little interest and insists again that he will not run in 2016. Possibly he is being coy, as they all are in this early day, but he is not like the others.
Will America’s final legacy to the world be the promotion of gay marriage and transgender relationships even in Italy and Africa and legalization and celebration of drug ingestion here at home? These are the themes legislators and major media aggressively promote in our times. They resonate and dominate everywhere today in the global village. And their agents, including President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, have beyond imagination initiated and promoted this strange and arcane version of Thomas Jefferson’s America worldwide.
It might be said of periods like this that it is not over until the bearded lady sings. But then it flips. When it does, nature seeks a strong force: Abraham Lincoln, who would pull the Transcendentalists out of their broody trance and drive them almost overnight to war. Reagan, who brought a national correction to the hallucinogenic ’60s.
Which is not to compare Romney to Lincoln or even Reagan. But he has the same predictable, steady and resolute qualities which we call on to return to a lost standard when we wander. It is where we look in panic when it is almost too late or when it all breaks. When the witch comes in the night and the zombie apocalypse is suddenly there at the front door.
The all of a sudden, a man like Mitt Romney makes such perfect sense.
Quigley is a prize-winning writer who has worked more than 35 years as a book and magazine editor, political commentator and reviewer. For 20 years he has been an amateur farmer, raising Tunis sheep and organic vegetables. He lives in New Hampshire with his wife and four children. Contact him at quigley1985@gmail.com.