The Brave New World of Soft Tyranny

Rush Limbaugh is right--it is becoming impossible to satirize the left. Increasingly, news stories sound more like their comedy show imitations--Saturday Night Live, or Monty Python's Flying Circus. England is leading the way in idiocy. I've been saying for some time that they've gone around the bend and will not be back. It is a nation committing suicide as the world watches. The self-willed immolation that produces policies and programs alternating between the horrific and the comedic, ranging from the merely ridiculous to the mortally dangerous, has the feel of some ironizing dark future movie, the director for which cannot decide what kind of a movie he wants to make--and ends up with something that seems like a tale told by an idiot.

The latest nanny-state intrusion from the nation that used to be the high water mark for human civilizational achievement? Someone in that benighted country's government decided an urgent matter for the state's attention is food waste. So now the erstwhile adult citizens are now to be reduced to accepting government inspectors and hectors into their kitchens to make sure they know what they are doing. That's right. The ever solicitous government is establishing the food police to assist their helpless, child-like citizens in figuring out how to live.

Home cooks will be told what size portions to prepare, taught to understand "best before" dates and urged to make more use of their freezers.The door-to-door campaign, which starts tomorrow, will be funded by the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP), a Government agency charged with reducing household waste. The officials will be called "food champions". However, they were dismissed last night as "food police" by critics who called the scheme an example of "excessive government nannying".

But wait! Our own leftist heroes are not far behind. Watch for innovative programs like this in a town near you, as our own feminized castrati ache to follow the lead of the Brits in preventing all possible harms to the planet first, then the infantalized citizenry they take to be their charges. The ObamaCorps, or what ever they end up naming it, will need lots of do-gooder missions to perform, (600,000 new federal workers in the stimulus plan) and how many issues are more serious than "flagrant acts of nutritional disobedience"? "Cuisine commissars" in Berkeley CA, are already at work "altering pernicious cultural artifacts that equate festivities with good food":

“I don’t think all celebrations need to be around food,” said Ann Cooper, the director of nutrition services for the Berkeley school district. “We need to get past the mentality of food used for punishment or praise.”Ah, insight and wisdom from the city of Berkeley California. As the entire country adopts the values of Stalingrad by the Pacific the social and behavioral engineers will follow up their success in the public schools by an intense drive to export control into the students' homes. [see above] Down the road if the rightness of the directors of nutrition meet resistance in the home expect to see rules and regulations crafted to remove the wall that separates private from public. That's already underway in regards to smoking. As the war on smoking proceeds unopposed so too shall the war on food reign triumphant unless parents and all citizens relegate public servants to once again serving the public.

Public servants serving the public? How quaint--sounds almost Victorian. Huxley and Orwell--even Tocqueville--tried to warn us; but even they could not have foreseen what we are actually going to end up with. Food police...nutritional disobedience...are you laughing or crying?

***Update***

For more laughter, or crying as the case may be, see Roger Kimball's entry on the hard times satire faces in this particular period in history...