Dents in the Carpet (Revisited)

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In the days following Obama's election, I began a series of posts called "Dents in the Carpet."

Below, in brown text, are key thoughts from that initial post:

The Power of Status Quo
and Importance of Burden of Proof

On occasion it’s helpful to know a dead language, and most of us know a little Latin whether we think so or not. We all use the term status quo, which basically means “the way things are,” but it‘s often used negatively by advocates of change to mean “the way things have been for too long.”

I’ll begin with a simple example. How often do you rearrange the furniture in your most static room? [Static is a form of the word status and, in this usage, means the room that changes the least in your house, not the room with the most static electricity.] If you consider why you set that room up the way it is in the first place, you may find the reasons remain compelling through time. If you try to change things around, you may end up putting things right back where they were. (which is easy to do because of the dents in the carpet).

This is not always true, sometimes you can rearrange things in a room, step back, and really like it. [And you put ice chips in the carpet dents to help them bounce back overnight.]

The difference between men and women when it comes to rearranging furniture, is that (typically) men can live with the status quo of any room. They set up a TV room, for instance, and it can stay that way for all eternity....

Before getting off the couch to move it, men are far more likely to challenge the idea, because they understand that, while change is not wrong, the burden of proof rests firmly on those who which to change the status quo. Not only do women sometimes forget CHANGE bears the burden of proof, they seem to forget the fundamental rules of furniture inertia: the heavier the piece, the more indelible the dents, the less often it should be moved. Or as the Romans said in Latin, Quieta non movere, meaning "Do not move settled things."

In other words, it is safe to assume that there is a reason for the status quo and CHANGE has the burden of proof that it will indeed be better, if implemented, than the way things are. Some changes are good and long overdue, but this merely eases the burden of proof; it does not eliminate it.

This topic is far more important that this furniture example suggests. It becomes strategic in matters of law, morality, and politics....


Those were my thoughts a year and a half ago, and they still hold true today.

The only thing that has changed is that we now have more than 500 days of watching the Obama Moving Company attempting to rearrange the nations furniture--and in fact, they are trying to remove the carpet itself so we can't see the dents and forget how things once were for America. Not only is the carpet rolled up and sitting out on the curb, the curtains and upholstery are being replaced. In short, anything that represents the fabric of our lives seems to be fair game for being undone before Obama's era is brought to an end.

But a funny thing happened under the rolls of carpet and all the other things Obama hastily took to the curb. Under that pile of America as we know it, the grass began to feel the pressure, the grass began to feel like it was being robbed of sunshine, the green life in its cells began to fade to a pale yellow, and the grass roots said, "Wait a minute! This carpet and all the dents that remind us how things were before Obama took over don't belong out at the curb. It's still good carpet. We like the way things were before he tried to force his view of this world on the rest of us."

And to all the liberal Democrats surprise, the grass roots became so strong under those rolls of discarded Americana carpet that they pushed it up and let the winds unroll it for all to see, and passers by began to say, "Hey, I remember that carpet. I remember those dents. I remember how things used to be." And the people, beginning with the strength of those grass roots, began to rally together to put things back the way they were.

Here is an column from the Wall Street Journal, that articulates the beginning of the end of the Obama regime. I think it will help people understand why the Obama bell does not ring true. At first, millions of people liked the sound of his bell ringing and ringing throughout his meteoric rise to fame and the White House, but now folks from both sides of the aisle are seeing that the ring is hollow.

OPINION JUNE 9, 2010
The Alien in the White House
The distance between the president and the people is beginning to be revealed.
By DOROTHY RABINOWITZ

The deepening notes of disenchantment with Barack Obama now issuing from commentators across the political spectrum were predictable. So, too, were the charges from some of the president's earliest enthusiasts about his failure to reflect a powerful sense of urgency about the oil spill.

There should have been nothing puzzling about his response to anyone who has paid even modest critical attention to Mr. Obama's pronouncements. For it was clear from the first that this president—single-minded, ever-visible, confident in his program for a reformed America saved from darkness by his arrival—was wanting in certain qualities citizens have until now taken for granted in their presidents. Namely, a tone and presence that said: This is the Americans' leader, a man of them, for them, the nation's voice and champion.


Those qualities to be expected in a president were never about rhetoric....They were a matter of identification with the nation and to all that binds its people together in pride and allegiance. These are feelings held deep in American hearts, unvoiced mostly, but unmistakably there and not only on the Fourth of July.

A great part of America now understands that this president's sense of identification lies elsewhere, and is in profound ways unlike theirs. He is hard put to sound convincingly like the leader of the nation, because he is, at heart and by instinct, the voice mainly of his ideological class. He is the alien in the White House, a matter having nothing to do with delusions about his birthplace cherished by the demented fringe.

One of his first reforms was to rid the White House of the bust of Winston Churchill—a gift from Tony Blair—by packing it back off to 10 Downing Street. A cloudlet of mystery has surrounded the subject ever since, but the central fact stands clear. The new administration had apparently found no place in our national house of many rooms for the British leader who lives on so vividly in the American mind. Churchill, face of our shared wartime struggle, dauntless rallier of his nation who continues, so remarkably, to speak to ours. For a president to whom such associations are alien, ridding the White House of Churchill would, of course, have raised no second thoughts.

Read the full column here, and you'll see why I say that the grass roots are rising up to reinstall the best of America as we once knew it. The carpet will return to the rooms, the dents will be studied, and the many hasty changes will be reversed. Who knows, maybe we'll even ask our friends in England if the bust of Winston Churchill can be returned.
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