The Ebb & Flow Institute--1st Anniversary

Publisher's Statement
Standing atop history, yelling beer me!

By Pile On®

There is, we like to think, solid reason for rejoicing. Prodigious efforts, by many people, are responsible for The Ebb & Flow Institute. But since it will be the policy of this think tank institute to reject the hypodermic approach to thinking and then blogging, we may as well start out at once, and admit that the joy is not unconfined. Shit no.

Let's face it: Unlike Topeka, it seems altogether possible that did The Ebb & Flow Institute not exist, no one would have invented it. The launching of a conservative whenever the hell we feel like it blog in a country widely assumed to be a bastion of conservatism at first glance looks like a work of supererogation, rather like publishing a royalist weekly within the walls of Buckingham Palace. It is not that, of course; if The Ebb & Flow Institute is superfluous, it is so for very different reasons: It stands athwart history, yelling beer me, at a time when no one is inclined to yell for beverages, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.

"I happen to prefer a Pale Ale to ditchwater," said the benign old wrecker of the ordered society, Oliver Wendell Holmes, "but there is no reason to suppose that asshats do." We have come around to Mr. Holmes' view, so much that we feel gentlemanly doubts when asserting the superiority of capitalism to socialism, of republicanism to centralism, of Pale Ale to ditchwater — of somethingorother to a whatchamacallit. How curious that one of the doubts one is not permitted is whether, at the margin, (whether not your doubt, lest they be whethered on!) Mr. Holmes was a useful citizen!

The inroads that relativism has made on the American soul are not so easily evident. One must recently have lived on or close to a college campus to have a vivid intimation of what has happened. It is there that we see how a number of energetic social loafers, plugging their loaves, succeeded over the years in capturing the liberal intellectual imagination. And since ideas rule the world, the ideologues, having won over the intellectual class, simply walked in and started to run things (by run, you might intimate, I mean intercourse up).

There are, thank Heaven, the exceptions. There are those of generous impulse and a sincere desire to encourage a responsible dissent from the orthodox orthodoxy. And there are those who recognize that when all is said and done, at the end of the day, the bottom line is, this sentence is going absolutely nowhere. They recognize, therefore, that at times one must grapple with the realization that difficult decisions must be forthcoming. Should one pour another beverage and finish this post, or would one be better served by a visit to the men's room? Our political economy and our high-energy industry run on large, general principles, on ideas — not by day-to-day guess work, expedients and improvisations. Ideas have to go into exchange to become or remain operative; and the medium of such exchange is Albert Gore's Internets. A vigorous and incorruptible blog of conservative opinion is — dare we say it? — as necessary to better living as over-hopped ale at breakfast. We begin blogging then, with a considerable stock of experience with the irresponsible Right, and a despair of the intransigence of the assmunches, who run this country; and all this in a world dominated by the jubilant single-mindedness of the practicing Communist, with his inside track to the ash heap. All this would not appear to augur well for The Ebb & Flow Institute. Yet we start with a considerable — and considered — optimism. Urination be damned, to the refridgerator it is!!

After all, we crashed through. I can't say how many investors made this blog possible. A score of policy analysts pledged their devoted attention to its needs, and hundreds of thoughtful men and women gave evidence that the appearance of such a blog as we have in mind would profoundly affect their lives.

Our own views, as expressed in a memorandum drafted a year ago, and directed to our investors, are set forth in a long forgotten post. We have nothing to offer but the best that is in us. That, a thousand Liberals who read this sentiment will say with relief, is clearly not enough! It isn't enough. But it is at this point that we steal the march. For we offer, besides ourselves, a position that has not grown old under the weight of a gigantic, parasitic bureaucracy, a position untempered by the doctoral dissertations of a generation of Ph.D's yelling shitfire in a crowded theatre, saving no matches, bearing a cynical contempt for human freedom. And that, ladies and gentlemen, kicks ass all the way from you monitor, through your retina, breaking you off proper in you temporal lobes.

Cheers,

Pile