Toles Friday rant: Stick a fork in the road, it’s done edition

By Tom Toles
Yesterday I organized a bus tour of the flying railroad of current political metaphors, but I want to return to one of them. The Fork in the Road.

This is actually the important one, and it describes the nature of the political hysteria and rivers of froth foaming forth from the frowning faces of fanatics. See the alliteration out the window to your right! Because in their telling, the fanatics see the USA at a Fork in the Road. One fork leads back to The Way Things Were Before, starring Jerry Mathers, as the Beaver. The other, in their telling, leads to Nigerian Anticolonialism, starring Barack Obama as Joseph Stalin. If we take THAT fork, we a re warned, the one that has a GOVERNMENT in it, all is lost.

Except we DID take that fork, 70-some YEARS AGO, under FDR, who demonstrated that capitalism thrives best under a mixed government/business partnership. Exhibit A: the greatest period in American economic and social history. Oh, that. On the other side of the fork, we have the Great Depression. Trying to get us BACK on that fork gave us the Great Depression Part Two, which I hope you are enjoying as we speak.

Yes, we are at a fork in the road. One fork tries to undo and replace the post World-War II era with uncompromising, absolutist ideology. The other fork leads us forward.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/tom-toles/post/friday-rant-stick-a-fork-in-the-road-its-done-edition/2011/06/16/AGhgVXXH_blog.html