CPAC 2013: Lions and tigers and communists, oh my

The official theme of CPAC this year is America's Future: The Next Generation of Conservatives. A quick scan through the program, however, suggests a strong ancillary theme might be Our Yearly Homage to Pants-Crapping Terror. A seemingly endless list of available movie screenings and book signings mostly borrow from the latter; the books, especially, carry loud, insistent titles about imminent terror coming from an unending parade of conspirators. A sampling, with bolding to properly highlight the terror:

• Obama's Four Horsemen: The Disasters Unleashed by Obama's Reelection!
• Beating Obamacare: Your Handbook for Surviving the New Health Care Law!
• The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis, The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mentor!
• Fast and Furious: Barack Obama's Bloodiest Scandal and Its Shameless Cover-Up!
• At The Brink: Will Obama Push Us Over the Edge?!!!

Those obviously all deal with the same terror, namely the currently sitting president. Other terrors are more inclusive, with lavishly thrilling subtitles like How Government Fat Cats Are Getting Rich Off of You or Will Americans Rule Themselves or be Ruled by Others?

The panels are considerably tamer sounding in comparison, but certainly with exceptions, as with a Charles Murray-led effort titled Is America Coming Apart?, and God help us all on that one. Panels are devoted to Fatherless America and Hollywood, and Iran because that goes without saying. A business-oriented outing asks Has Atlas Shrugged? (The answer on that last one would be no, and please stop asking; a perceived crisis involving whether or not America's most wealth-obsessed titans of unspecified industry will someday just find it all too sad and burdensome to go out and make even more money is quite possibly the most maudlin thing I have ever heard.) A crackpot-heavy panel on The United Nations vs. The United States sounds like a spectacular effort in the making; if you are the betting type, that would seem a fine one for quickly going off the rails and into a muddy ditch somewhere.

I keep saying it, over and over: I have no idea how conservatives do it. The sheer number of things that require absolute panic'the fast-moving, rock-strewn river of things that are about to cause the imminent destruction of America or of the Good Conservatives within it, is uncountable, and the effort it must take is enormous. Conservative dogma requires multiple exclamation points of alarm over the United Nations, all of government, Democrats, liberals, communists, atheists, Muslims, insufficiently Christian Christians, Christians of dubious sects, the media, Hollywood, Obamacare, brown people, immigrants, sex, homosexuals, uppity women, all of Europe (both as entity and as abstract concept), everywhere that is not Europe, climate scientists, biologists, environmentalists, economists, college professors, bilingual people, urban dwellers, campaign finance advocates, community organizers, several American cities and certain unpleasant history books.

No wonder people like Wayne LaPierre imagine that an American collapse and dystopia is just around the corner; all of modern civilization is apparently etherial, or ephemeral, or a cruel plot. We are always one health insurance law away from government-sponsored camps, or one overly-tanned immigrant away from genetic or cultural Armageddon.