The silence of the bumper stickers

Received mail about seeing no bumper stickers in North Carolina and Virginia.
Marilyn writes thoughtfully: “A possible explanation for no bumper stickers in
NC is my observation that more couples here are a split-ticket. Bare bumpers
are the compromise.”

But bumper stickers also express advanced political yearnings: “Charlton Heston
is my President” or the classic, “You can have my gun when you pry it from my
cold dead fingers” or “Had enough yet?” And devoted followers tend to keep the
stickers on long after the race. Apparently not with Obama. Driving home to New
Hampshire, only two drew attention. One said, “Danger: I drive like a Cullen.”
Another was a Mitt Romney sticker seen at rush hour in Hartford on a car driven
by a woman simultaneously driving and eating a plate of macaroni and cheese.
Spooky. It brought to mind that quiet moment when the dogs headed for the hills
just before the tsunami.

I’ve been experiencing a political turning since Bill Clinton, and since they
changed the money to the bloated deconstructivist thing. Many of those who
predict change professionally using a generational system saw the Great Change
in Barack Obama. I did not. I saw the Obama presidency as the successful
completion of a political cycle starting in 1831. There were three objectives
of the northern invasion of the South: Preventing Southern secession, freeing
the slaves and egalitarianism between black and white. C. Vann Woodward pointed
out that the third goal was unachievable in the 1800s but America was beginning
to get to it in the 1950s. The Obama presidency achieves that third goal. So
the Obama presidency brought an end rather than a beginning. And when historic
periods end, something entirely new begins. The Roosevelt longing is evidence
of a society looking back, not forward. The change is ahead.

Change is either external or internal. Generational predictions usually follow
an 80-year model. I use a 160-year-model as the historic periods, like the
generations, appear to alternate. So I have been predicting internal change.
And that is what we have been seeing in this past year as Missouri, Arizona,
Texas, Minnesota, Vermont and 30 other states call for sovereignty. The runaway
popularity of Ron Paul and Austrian economics is evidence that we are
experiencing internal change.

Today, several nations including China, Israel, Germany and Canada send subtle messages
that they do not necessarily require our benevolence. China and Israel,
increasingly less subtle. Globalization no longer works to our benefit although
the priests who accompany the conquistadors — Bono, Matt Damon, Lady Gaga — think
they are still very much needed to save the world. Internally we hear the
phrase “post American” more frequently. It will neutralize those cultural
missionaries who “think globally” but “act locally.” (Or is it the other way
around?) Yuppies may be retiring in droves to third world states where living
is cheap and reefer grows on trees, but otherwise we are seeing the end of
globalization as we have known it.

The Wall Street Journal’s intuitive Peggy
Noonan long ago sensed danger and called a warning. Better than those tsunami
dogs, she sensed it back in 1994: “Something inside was telling us we were
living through ‘not the placid dawn of a peaceful age but the illusory calm
before stern storms.’

“I can imagine, for instance,” she wrote, “in the year 2020 or so, a movement
in some states to break away from the union.”

Maybe not. As Col. Ely S. Parker, the Seneca Indian who served as Grant’s
adjutant, said to Robert E. Lee at Appomattox, we’re all Americans here. What I
can see is an end to the specific New York cultural, political and economic
sensibilities that took dominance here by force in 1865 and soon after conquered
the world with Wilson and the Roosevelts.

The storms will start in September and October 2010.

Visit Mr. Quigley’s website at http://quigleyblog.blogspot.com.