Good-bye, Paul Krugman

Truth be told, I am not going to miss Paul Krugman’s New York Times columns. I never read them anyway.

You might know that Krugman is retiring from column-writing, for reasons that have not been elucidated. 

Of course, Krugman is a propagandist, not a rational thinker. He believes that Republicans are at fault for everything that goes wrong in the country and that Democrats are the voice of reason and good policy. 

In his last column he also takes out after billionaires, the elites who, to his mind, are bitter and resentful. Is this an example of projection? I leave that to you.

Most people know what Krugman is going to say without reading it, which is the reason why so many of us have happily ignored his ramblings.

Apparently, Krugman longs for the reign of Bill Clinton, a morally upright man, a prince of virtue, who presided over a wondrous nation. The Clinton administration left the nation wallowing in optimism about the future.

Without naming names he dates the arrival of American resentment to the election of George W. Bush. He has nothing to say about the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center but stands by his conviction that we should not have invaded Iraq.

Of course, the groundwork for 9/11 dates to the Clinton administration. We might have felt optimistic in 2000, but we were incapable of handling the terrorist attack. The nation went to war against al Qaeda, with Congressional approval, but the war did not unite the nation. It divided the nation. Of course, Krugman does not bother to mention that Congress voted for war.

For former members of the Vietnam counterculture the Iraq war was a gift. They were happy to have another war to lose, another instance to show off America’s failings.

It is difficult to sustain national pride-- another concept that is alien to Krugman-- when half the country is rooting for the other side and where we continue to lose wars. 

Of course, Krugman misses the point. A nation that idealizes or even excuses its leader’s decadence will not have the moral fortitude or strength of character to win a war. It will withdraw as soon as it begins to feel bad. Because decadence, and not merely the misogynistic behavior of Bill Clinton, involves allowing actions to be determined by how it feels.

As for the elites, we do not know, because Krugman does not tell us who these elites are. Aside from resentful billionaires-- names, please-- we have a right to ask how well the people in charge are running things.

By all indications, not very well. 

At that point we should ask whether the people in charge earned their position or were merely appointed. If you want to know why people have lost trust in the elites, then perhaps the reason is that the elites are underperforming.

Consider the simple fact that one of our leading political parties ran, in an election for president, a subliterate reformed courtesan. And that they could not find any good reason why the American people might have rejected her.

In his words:

Basically it comes down to the pettiness of plutocrats who used to bask in public approval and are now discovering that all the money in the world can’t buy you love.

You might ask when plutocrats basked in public approval. You might ask when Krugman basked in public approval. You might remark that the echo of a Beatles song at the end of that sentence exposes a mediocre writer who cannot even fashion his own ideas.

As for the notion that these plutocrats merely want love, that is adolescent thinking, someone whose mental development ended at the time of the Beatles.

Surely, it would have been worth noting that the American people are showing less trust in the mainstream media, as in, the New York Times, and that they are tuning into podcasts and blogs.

We do not know why Krugman will no longer be writing for the Times. We would like to think that he got fired, for being predictable and for writing propaganda. It would be a step in the right direction. It would show us that the Times is beginning to return to its glory days, when it was a newspaper.

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