Culture – Page 18 – Libertate Virtute (Virtue + Liberty)

March 29, 2022March 29, 2022

Stop the Politics in Everything, Literally Everything

Please watch the clip of political sloganeering in March Madness:

I love March Madness . . . until this year. Today, the c-suites managing the tournament from their metropolitan lairs gave us a steady diet of messaging, or what is often called “virtue-signaling”. It’s simply revolting to find almost everything polluted with not-so-thinly-disguised political messaging. With the tournament as a backdrop, you can see it on everything from the team warm-ups to the litany of ads punctuating every broadcast. This isn’t basketball. It’s the same monotonous, droning sermon in the church of the woke revolution.

We are pummeled by “Black Lives Matter” (and its companion, “Stop Racism”) which, by the way, was worn by the players of the tournament’s “Cinderella” team, St. Peters. Nothing new here. The banality has been with us since neo-Marxist hooligans started chanting “Pigs in a blanket, fry ‘em like bacon” in 2014. What does the slogan mean? Simple, and it’s not the obvious. If we were limited to the direct meaning of the words, it would be the equivalent of “Breathe” on the St. Peters’ t-shirts. The slogan is the crowd favorite of revolutionaries for a reason. It pushes the same tired, worn-out oppressor/oppressed gag. The real meaning: a state takeover of life by us (Antifa, BLM, Inc., snotty upper-middle-class whites, college ASB’s) is essential to make “Black Lives Matter”, and the lives of all the other identity clients in our sloganeering repertoire. It’s revolutionary theater.

Not content with that, we get walloped by ads from the NCAA, Buick, and Adidas. The point in the NCAA commercial is a pure inanity. They are committed to “opportunity” for “all of us”. Well, if they weren’t, they’d be sued. What’s new here? Virtue-signaling. The NCAA’s corporate bigs are saying that they aren’t like those yahoos at Trump rallies. They don’t discriminate . . . in sports that have to discriminate, as in distinguish between winners and losers. To get around the reality that not everyone gets a trophy, they inundate us with images of the Supreme Court’s “protected classes”, as if there is a shortage of black players on basketball teams. Do we really have to be constantly reminded, going back decades, that Title IX commands equality in sports, that there exist women basketball players?

They do the “opportunity” schtick to such an extent that they’ve created real opportunities for men to compete on women’s teams. Can’t make a go of it on the men’s team, jump over to the woman’s pool after pumping up on estrogen and announcing that you feel like a woman today, thanks to the NCAA. So much for opportunities for women . . . while expanding opportunities for men.

Car companies juice-up their commitment to the revolution by playing the statistical-disparity game. Going to a break during a timeout, Buick prints across your tv screen, “Over 40% of athletes are women, but they get 10% of the media coverage”. The ad continues, “Buick is committed to raising that percentage.” In actuality, they mean, shame on you, the viewers, for finding men’s basketball more interesting than women’s hoops. Bluntly put, that’s the rub. They, of all people, should know that ad exposure and expenditures closely track Nielsen ratings. Dah!

As for “raising that percentage”, Buick apparently believes that the natural human preference for watching excellence in greater physicality in speed, strength, and agility can be reshaped by c-suite decisions to spend more of the shareholders money on social engineering. Is Buick selling cars or militant affirmative action? Could the money on that ad campaign be better spent on improving Buick’s competitiveness with Toyota? Shareholders are indicted for letting them get away this.

And then we got Adidas’ ditzy ad offering (see below). They’re all-in for the trans agenda, the freedom of trans women to compete. And shame on you for not relishing the thought of your daughter sharing swimming lanes and a locker room with a woman with male genitalia. Are these folks selling shoes or gaslighting us into ignoring our lyin’ eyes?

For once, can’t we just sit down and enjoy the performance of exquisitely trained athletes and great coaches without the constant clamor of how committed the c-suite is to lefty politics? We need a separation of politics from athletics in much the same manner as some have constructed an impenetrable wall separating church and state. If we can ban the post-game prayers of football players and coaches, we ought to be able to keep the inane political opinions of billionaire athletes and c-suite execs from spoiling the fans’ experience.

For me, once again, I’m done with the whole sordid mess. They just made my time better spent in my garage working on the MGB and reloading cartridges for sport shooting. Please, stop the politics in everything, literally everything.

RogerG

March 16, 2022March 16, 2022

What Are They Doing to Our Soldiers? What Are They Doing to Our Children?

Eau Claire Area School District Administration Building, Eau Claire, Wisconsin.

See the source image — Naval War College, Newport, R.I., and near Barrington, R.I.

What are they doing to our soldiers? Indeed, what are they doing to our children? The “they”? They go by various titles: “cultural curators (Salena Zito), “cultural commanding heights” (mine), “elites”, “limousine liberals”, “establishment”, “progressives”, “blue-check Twitter”, alongside a host of disparaging terms for anyone outside these tightly-packed super zip codes in the cartography of America. A tell-tale sign is glaringly evident in almost any place with a college of extortionate social and economic (and by extension political) influence. Three recent incidents are case studies of their baleful clout.

Who’s educating our children? It might be the same people like the staff of University of Wisconsin Eau Claire’s Gender & Sexuality Research Center (GSRC) who conducted a teacher training session for the Eau Claire Area School District in late February on the whole gamut of woke ideology. Safe spaces, the evils of heteronormativity and meritocracy and systemic racism and white privilege, and the need to freeze parents out of their children’s gender identity issues were taught as unassailable truths to the government employees who have the residents’ children under their control for 6-8 hours per weekday. The whole thing might have flown under the residents’ radar, pre-pandemic, but parent groups, post-pandemic, were tipped off.

Thankfully, word got out. Parents learned that teachers were told in power-point slides,

“. . . parents are not entitled to know their kids’ identities. That knowledge must be earned. Teachers are often straddling this complex situation. In ECASD, our priority is supporting the student.”

In essence, the area’s children were treated as property of the school district. The arrogance is startling. Chris Jorgenson, the director of the GSRC, was impertinent enough to declare to the throng of teachers, “But much like we wouldn’t act as stand-ins for abuse in other circumstances, we cannot let parents’ rejection of their children guide teachers’ reactions and actions and advocacy for our students.” If you can make sense of the word salad, the presentation of gender-identity ideology – sometimes referred to as transgenderism – makes an enemy of parents who understandably reject the ideology by calling the repudiation parental “child abuse”. The whole falderol was sanctioned by the district’s superintendent, Michael Johnson, in classic bureaucratese when he said the district “prides itself on being a school district that makes all students feel welcome and safe in our schools.” The effrontery of our cultural curators was on full display.

May be an image of 1 person, beard, standing and indoor — Culprit #1: Chris Jorgenson, director of UW Eau Claire’s Gender & Sexuality Research Center

It doesn’t end there. Barrington, R.I., is home for many veterans and staff of the Naval War College (NWC), and what we see in the faculty lounge of UW Eau Claire is clearly evident among its professoriate, and it spills over into the town of Barrington. Don’t forget, the NWC educates the officer corps of one of the institutions that is assigned the sole task of protecting us from foreign aggressors who wish to inflict abject harm on us. The first decades of this century have made the threat abundantly clear.

Instead, like the teachers and children of Eau Claire, Marine and Naval officers are being indoctrinated with the same ideology of self-flagellation. Think about it: what effect will it have on morale in the ranks? General George C. Marshal warned us in the tumultuous days of World War II, “It is not enough to fight. It is the spirit we bring to the fight that decides the issue. It is morale that wins the victory.” Who would want to defend a nation that has been characterized barely this side of Nazi Germany?

At issue in Barrington is the sponsorship of this year’s Memorial Day activities. For the past number of years, it was the Barrington United Veterans Coalition (BUVC). Well, not this year. The town’s Master of Ceremonies will not be the head of BUVC but the role will be turned over to a NWC professor, Frank Douglas, who previously spoke in favor of flying the Black Lives Matter flag at city hall. The Veterans Coalition had opposed the proposal to grant BLM the same honor as the POW-MIA banner. Douglas, according to town council minutes, played the trite “diversity” card when he said, “… there is diversity in the veteran community because they [BUVC] do not speak for all veterans.”

The Black Lives Matter flag flies on the pole outside Barrington Town Hall.

May be an image of 1 person — Culprit #2: Frank Douglas, Naval War College professor

Our intrepid NWC prof, Frank Douglas, is probably confusing the neologism BLM as a concept with the group. But flying a flag is quite different from simply endorsing the obvious truth that black lives matter. A flag denotes a group, and the BLM group is a scandal in belief and practice. A person who isn’t aware of the group’s neo-Marxist program has been living in a closet. Ditto for the bookkeeping shenanigans. Flying the BLM flag isn’t much different from flying the Viet Cong flag.

I’m not surprised. Douglas’s resume’ reads like a travelogue through academic bubbles – Georgetown U. (BSFS, Int. Affairs, 1993), Johns Hopkins U. (MA, Int. Relations, 1997), Harriman Institute (M.Phil., PoliSci, 2001), and Columbia U. (PhD, PoliSci, 2005). Clearly, this guy has the impression that some form of wisdom and competence is granted to someone with a litany of letters after their name . . . or it simply could be the desire for a cushy job.

As for his uniformed experience – he’s a commissioned officer in the Naval Reserve – his bio on the NWC’s website lists staff jobs in and out of theater from 2004 to 2018. Actual combat experience isn’t evident. I could be wrong but he appears to be a desk jockey. He might be the military’s version of a teacher quickly transitioning to administration. The old saying in education has a ring of truth: If you can’t teach, administrate. In the social ecosystem of the Pentagon, if you find the life of the grunt personally repellant, cram your resume’ with academic honors and be above the grime of actual combat, and, while you’re at it, engorge yourself on the thought-fads of academia.

If I’ve got it wrong, Douglas, please tell me.

The staff overhead of the Pentagon and its academic appurtenances frequently show the very same neo-Marxist influence as in Eau Claire Area School District’s headquarters. Who can forget General Mark Milley’s (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) statement before the House Armed Services Committee in June of 2021: “I want to understand white rage, and I’m white”? The pinning of “white rage” on the January 6 rioters and protesters sounds like The Squad’s camera-hogging howls. The lunch room at the Pentagon may not be much different from the UW Eau Claire’s faculty lounge.

May be an illustration of one or more people and text

Back to the NWC, another prof, Pauline Shanks Kaurin, delivered a lecture to sailors in June of 2021 that treated Meghan Markle’s fully unsubstantiated accusations of racism in the royal family as analogous to the alleged systemic racism in American society. She went further in slamming classical liberalism in its focus on the individual. If you want more of the mental gobbledygook, she continued to ineptly wax as follows:

“… [racism] is not a case of a few bad apples. This is, as the Duchess of Sussex said, she said, racism, racist is not rude….

This is not a matter of people who are being mean or rude or ignorant individuals. We tend to think of racism or sexism as, ‘this is a problem with individuals’. It’s not a problem with individuals. It’s not a problem with individuals only, it’s a problem of individuals within a structure, within a society, within a system.”

This is the stuff promulgated to the people trained to kill. Those in charge should be held accountable for wrongly presenting this bombast. And if they won’t be responsible, keep it out entirely. The nonsense should be treated as the bone of contention that it is. That means that you don’t deliver it from a lectern, as from a pulpit, even if discussion is permitted. The setting grants to the presenter the power to frame the discussion. Rather, it only deserves the full debate treatment: two sides cognitively armed to argue the merits, or lack thereof.

If not, keep it away from our troops, and keep it away from our children. It’s noxious neo-Marxism whether flying under the BLM banner or anti-racism ideology in teacher training, and needs to be confronted, and not in any way presented as truth. Our men and women in uniform and school-age children merit better. Schooling should not be a national suicide pill.

RogerG

March 12, 2022March 13, 2022

The Death of the Personal

Ask yourself a couple of simple questions. How could a governor coldly announce the end of the internal combustion in 15 years without any recognition of the upheaval – i.e., human cost – that it’ll create? In September of 2020, Governor Newson of California did:

“In the next 15 years we will eliminate in the state of California the sales of internal combustion engines. We will move forward to green and decarbonize our vehicle fleet … substantially reducing greenhouse gas emissions as well as oxide nitrogen, in so doing, we’ll improve air quality and improve the economic climate here in the state of California.”

How could Black Lives Matter declare economic war on white-owned businesses? Oh, but they did on Twitter in December 2021:

“Time to: #BuildBlack – Support Black-led-Black-serving organizations. #BuyBlack – Skip the Black Friday sales and buy exclusively from Black-owned businesses. #BankBlack – Move your money out of white-corporate banks that finance our oppression and open accounts with Black-owned banks. . . . White-supremacist-capitalism uses policing to protect profits and steal Black life. . . . Let’s use every tool in our toolbox…including our dollars…to end white-supremacist-capitalism.”

When not announcing an end to the traditional family, calling for the death of cops (“fry ‘em like bacon”), or excusing riots and murder in our cities, they applied the same old tired rhetoric in declaring their own version of apartheid nirvana.

Businesses torched in downtown Minneapolis during the George Floyd riots of 2020.

What’s happening? Well, it’s what happens when a person becomes incapable of examining their own assumptions. They blindly accept a set of propositions and then act upon them.

Something is missing from their mental comportment. The thing that is absent is the life of the personal. The life of the personal – also referred to as interiority – involves reflection, comprehension, and the private space to do it. For these avatars of a new world order, no time for that. That private space is to be treated as suspicious pods of conspiracy to stop them. The personal life is branded “counterrevolutionary”. For them, it’s time to light up the Molotov cocktails and torch the entire civilization and end the life of the personal.

However, it’s out of the life of the personal that arises all those things that we call private. You know, the private sector, private property, civil society, church. The life of the personal is more than emotions and the arts, even though it certainly encompasses them. It incorporates our tendency to gravitate to form family, a deeper form of intimacy than mere eroticism can satisfy. It includes our personal choices to make a living, whether to follow in the footsteps of mom and dad or not. It encompasses the natural inclination to acquire things unto ourselves – private property, private enterprise. It embraces the grappling to understand the nature of things, which includes the spiritual. Thus, churches arise.

All these things lie outside the revolution, because revolution is what these people are all about. They’re not into deep private reflection. They are consumed by ends (a complete revolution) sanctioning means (unbridled callousness). They desire to let loose an eruption to overturn nearly everything to make life conform to their unexamined vision.

No better illustration can be found than in a clip from director David Lean’s film from 1965, “Dr. Zhivago”, based on Boris Pasternak’s novel. In the scene, Dr. Yuri Zhivago is brought before the revolutionary commander Strelnikov in the heady days of the Bolshevik Revolution and Civil War (Whites vs. Reds). They met earlier before the Revolution but only briefly. The exchange is enlightening. Please watch the clip.

RogerG

March 10, 2022March 14, 2022

Ukraine and Hidden Agendas

While ruminating on the latest thought-fad emanating from the Left, Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), I was reminded of the tendency of people to hide their real intentions behind a flurry of academic jargon. Thus, the convoluted and incoherent MMT. Economists – left, right and center – have dubbed it “Calvinball” (Paul Krugman), “not ready for primetime” (Scott Summer), “sounded like lunacy” (Michael Strain), and “a political [not economic] manifesto” (report for France’s central bank). Frankly, MMT boils down to this: if the government wants to do something, go ahead and print the money and do it. No problem, the MMT priesthood would sing in chorus. Everything will be hunky-dory.

But what are they really after? Pure and simple, they want a humongous government with the power to tax, regulate, and spend at will; no restraints; socialism. MMT is just another tangled oratorical path to get there. Please, fans of socialism, cut the crap.

See the source image

The same mental gymnastics are at work on the right. Events in Ukraine have exposed a segment of the right’s own rhetorical curtain. Tucker Carlson babbles on about “just asking questions”, “neocons”, “Ukrainian corruption”, “World War III”, “Americans dying”, and “America first”. Laura Ingraham joins the chorus. What are they really after?

See the source image

The normally sensible Mollie Hemingway also seems to practice this form of mental subterfuge when talking about Ukraine. In a recent interview on the Hugh Hewitt show, she incessantly rambled about “knowing the risks” of US support for Ukraine, as if the thought was original to her; nobody but her is aware of it. But everybody intuitively does it when doing simple things like deciding to go to an ATM in crime-ridden LA under DA Gascon or proposing to prick the nose of the CCP with tariffs (they’ve got nukes too).

See the source image

What’s up? Two motivations lie buried in the verbiage: they are paralyzed in fear of Russia and have a hankering for a “fortress America” national defense strategy. Goatherders with boxcutters (9/11) proved the latter to be foolish. On the former, I fail to understand the gripping dread of Putin’s nukes over, say, those of Chairman Xi. Tucker, Laura, and Mollie are gung-ho in respect to China and have said so ad nauseam, but can’t bring themselves to support actions to forestall a mauling by a power wishing to resuscitate the Soviet empire on a continent historically beset by world-shattering aggressors. Speaking of spent blood and treasure to put thugs back in the box, recall WWI and WWII?

Hardly does an episode go by without two straw-man choices to bolster the cognitive inanity. Tucker presents the choices as either staying out, completely out, or body bags/nuked American cities. What happened to simply arming our friends? Putin and Xi do it regularly, and American soldiers have paid the price in such disparate places as Syria, Fellujah, and the Hindu-Kush. The Tucker-to-Laura axis’s response would be “no more forever-wars” or run and hide after, as Mollie would have it, tortuously “assessing the risks”.

See the source image

The thinking boggles the mind. They are quick to “assess the risks” of a bungled Afghan bugout but have no desire to “assess the risks” of a bludgeoned Ukraine, and possible defeat, as we sit idly by, safe in our “fortress America”.

Which brings to mind another hidden motive: pure cult-of-personality politics. Trump-love could be clouding their eyesight and mind. Biden, who defeated their master, did the Afghan bugout and is at the helm when Putin unleashed his doddering Wehrmacht on the Ukraine. They’re quick to blame Biden’s Afghanistan-appeasement for Putin’s invasion – and they’d be right – while at the same time they hawk appeasement in regards to Ukraine. Putin saw Kabul airport and Xi is watching Ukraine. A failure to stop Putin at the borders of the Ukraine could lead to a failure to stop Xi at the shores of Taiwan. If so, we’ll be really forced into “fortress America”. A self-fulfilled prophecy anyone, one not likely to be satisfying to most Americans?

I wish that they’d get their appeasement angles straight before they blather to us.

The modern punditry class is a disgrace. Previously, most of the sensible among us had no recourse in legacy media. The networks, CNN, MSNBC, NYT, WaPo, AP are mostly lefty propaganda organs. Now, it turns out, the primetime lineup on Fox News can’t be trusted. All of them prove that human fallibility is evident everywhere and academic degrees, party registration, ideology, race, gender, age, and telegenic qualities accord no fix. Fact.

Really, Tucker, Laura, and Mollie, tell us what actually lurks behind your wordiness. If it’s abject fear of Putin, say it. If it’s a sincere belief in the veracity of Russian propaganda, say it. If it’s a derivative of knee-jerk Trump-love, say it. If it’s an undying faith in oceans as our best defense, say it. If it’s a secret admiration of Putin as a fellow nationalist-populist, say it. If it’s the fright of “forever wars” trumping all other thoughts, say it. And, by all means, cut the crap.

RogerG

March 8, 2022March 8, 2022

More from “My Fair Lady”

See the source image

My previous post (see below) contained my explanation for the devolution of the cinematic musical. The same commentary could apply to Hollywood in general. Another DC/Marvel regurgitation, rich in CGI visuals and not much else, is today’s theatrical high point. Sad.

To get a sense of the sublime that Hollywood was capable of producing, watch this scene from “My Fair Lady” of Audrey Hepburn and cast performing “I Could Have Danced All Night” (Hepburn’s voice is dubbed, but nonetheless….).

Once again, if you can, run it through a set of speakers.

RogerG

March 8, 2022

What a Great Musical Looks and Sounds Like: My Fair Lady

Is our culture exhausted? I’m of two minds, but there are signs of fatigue, if not decline. Last night, I finished watching “My Fair Lady” on Netflix in HD and through my stereo system, as close as I can get to a theater experience for a film from 1964. It was magnificent and got me to wondering why we seem incapable of producing such cinematic grandeur today.

Not that there haven’t been attempts, but for me, they don’t measure up. Sorry, “La La Land” and “Chicago”, the two most recent endeavors to capture the magic, are poor knock-offs. The material elements are present in the physical choreography and vocalizations, and, yet, the whole package appears as a cheap imitation.

One factor for the debasement might have something to do with Hollywood’s zeal to be edgy. By edgy, I mean norm-busting: the unrelenting pressure to be a challenge to what used to be considered wholesome. It’s oft-putting and takes away from the synergistic combination of artistry, craftsmanship, and cinematography.

The zenith of the musical probably was the 1950s-60s. After that, it’s all downhill to the CGI/rapid-imagery, stale scripts, and unremarkable and uninspiring music of today. It’s so bad that the downfall of the musical coincides with the downfall of the Oscars. Who cares, except for the old stuff?

Please watch this performance of the wonderful song “On the Street Where You Live” from “My Fair Lady”. If you can, run it through a set of good speakers. Nothing from Hollywood’s current repertoire compares.

RogerG

March 7, 2022March 7, 2022

Zora Neale Hurston and Stewardship Properly Understood

Lest we find ourselves distracted by all things Ukraine at the moment, we should not suffer temporary blindness to the ongoing threats closer to home. If you’ll recall, we are engaged in a wholesale demolition of our cultural inheritance under the guise of a landslide of hackneyed buzzwords: diversity, equity, inclusion (curiously in that order to avoid the acronym DIE), social justice, systemic racism, white supremacy, et al. An older but truer meaning of the word stewardship comes to mind.

See 1 Peter 4:10:
“As every man hath received the gift, even so minister the same one to another, as good stewards of the manifold grace of God.”

See Genisis 2:15:
“The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.”

The ransacking of the legacy flies in the face of the obvious meaning of stewardship. Throughout the Bible it is used to remind us that God is the ultimate source of all gifts (broadly defined) and His expectation that we are to wisely use these favors. It is not a cover for political enthusiasms such as recycling regimes, anti-plastic crusades, climate-change manias, the assault on fossil fuels, government handouts for windmills and solar panels, the punishment of workers in certain commodity industries, the promotion of guilt-trips for owning an SUV, the policies of herding families en masse into cramped apartments, the demonization of single-family-residential, and the relegation of the public lands to mere hikers’ paradises and no one else need enter. God’s gifts are conferred on a businessman exercising property rights to extract mineral wealth from the earth as they are for white collar public employees wealthy and organized enough to politically force everyone else to live according to their preferences. At present, there the mutilated corpse of stewardship lies.

If I hear another clergyman spout from the pulpit stewardship as the guise for greenie agendas, I’ll scream.

The insipid mangling of stewardship has manifested beyond Green New Deals and into a frenzy for an inflated race-consciousness. Hyper-sensitive race-awareness tars everything to the point of a wholesale dismantlement of our grand cultural inheritance. Statue-toppling, the insidious doctrines of race-obsessiveness in instruction to the young, the rantings and bullying in social media, the loud advocacy of the extinction of personal freedoms in free markets, and the espousal of life under massively intrusive government commands will mean the death knell for God’s gifts. “Stewardship” undermining stewardship. Go figure.

A rereading of the writings of Zora Neale Hurston are the antidote to what she referred to as the “race man”, the carnival barkers for perpetual race-victimhood, people like the barely coherent Ibram X. Kendi or the insufferable Maxine Waters.

Check out this gem from Hurston’s essay “Art and Such”, wherein she decries the tendency of the “race man” to reduce the entire black experience to oppression and sorrow:

“Can the black poet sing a song to the morning? Upsprings the song to his lips but it is fought back. He says to himself, . . . ‘Ought I not to be singing of our sorrows? That is what is expected of me and . . . if I do not some will even call me a coward. The one subject for a Negro is the Race and its sufferings and so the song of the morning must be choked back. I will write of a lynching instead.’ So the same old theme, the same old phrases get done again. . . . The writer thinks that he has been brave in following in the groove of the Race champions, when the truth is, it is the line of least resistance and least originality.”

Zora sets the record straight. This latest campaign to ravage our inheritance is absolutely mind-numbing. The soul-destroying dogmas reduce thought to mindless chants. These people aren’t capable of originality and can add nothing to our inheritance. They only pillage. A painter’s palette is replaced by a sledge hammer.

So much for the stewardship in 1 Peter 4:10.

RogerG

March 5, 2022March 5, 2022

A Middle-Class Betrayal

In 2001, upon meeting Russia’s Vladimir Putin for the first time in Slovenia, Pres. George W. Bush famously said that he looked into Putin’s eyes and “was able to get a sense of his soul.” Apparently, Bush was bromanced by a heartrending Putin tale from his youth of his mother giving him a cross that survived a fire at the family dacha. Later, Vice-President Cheney chortled that when he saw Putin, “I think KGB, KGB, KGB”. Bush’s outpourings of sympathy were corrected by Cheney’s blunt realism.

We need more of Cheney’s therapeutic realism regarding all sorts of misguided beliefs that are eviscerating our country. One such assemblage of mind-junk running amok is environmentalism. This thing is an “ism” and not to be confused with its root, the environment. It’s a vast social engineering project that rivals anything bursting forth from the mind of Karl Marx, for whom it is related. After decades of persistent persuasion throughout the culture, it has settled into our myopic but comfortable middle class. We are willing our own demise, and the historical corrective in the form of a sober middle class has checked out of prudence and into folly, or so it seems.

Though, be mindful of the universal caveat: to be certain, not all of the middle class, but a sizeable chunk in varying degrees. One must avoid the sophistry of the woke in assuming a homogeneity of thought in a group arbitrarily defined by some external, physical factor (income, race, ethnicity, gender, etc., etc.).

The ”ism” is an example of a belief system every bit as straitjacketing as anything found in The Communist Manifesto, a kind of theology without an afterlife. Instead, the surrogate afterlife is a materialist utopia, a pie in the sky. The grand scheme begins with the acolytes’ favorite diagnosis of what ails us in the form of human eco-disruptions that have allegedly damaged our entire existence, us personally, and all our surroundings. The prescription requires the true believers to take control of the state to engineer a better human being for a better world. Devastation, though, is history’s likeliest verdict.

Climate change doctrines are the latest infatuation which has been used, for instance, to wreck our domestic energy industry and begin the coercive reengineering of our existence. Fact: no reliable energy, welcome to the stone age. And solar panels and windmills won’t cut it, so don’t go there. The eco-fanatics’ dream, however, will translate into the reality of dependence on Saudi monarchs, Iran’s mullahs, Putin, and Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro. Welcome to national subservience to imperial thugs and welcome to chronic retreat and defeat. President Biden is the latest figurehead trying to lead us into this new catastrophe.

Events in Eastern Europe – Ukraine in particular – have exposed the problem. We are in the midst of a massive federal, state, and local effort, led by the feds, to turn topsy-turvy our way of life in pursuit of almost anything labeled “sustainable” in 2,000-page Green New Deals (GND) while at the same time we are beset with the aggressions of Russia and Red China who are threatening to tear apart our alliances and trade relationships. We are pulled toward the amateurish visions of AOC as we are stretched in the opposite direction to stand up to tyrannical aggressions. It’s a two-fer for a beating. Lincoln’s “house divided against itself cannot stand” should ring in our ears.

The fact that the middle class, mostly white collar, has largely bought into this secular faith is evident everywhere. It can be heard from the pulpit to the classroom.

Groups who are the zealous spearhead of the movement notice their narrow demographic appeal in the white collar, urban/suburban/exurban, middle to super-rich cluster. The Sierra Club, Wisconsin chapter, admits it: “The lack of diversity and inclusion amongst staff and members of environmental organizations is a key component to their difficulty in effectively combating environmental justice issues.” In 2015, the group’s national governing body felt compelled to kneel before the cliché of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” to paper over the obvious truth of the group’s cramped attractiveness (sierra club 2015 diversity equity and inclusion pdf).

Pew Research points to the same constricted demography. Using Dem/Rep breakdowns as the metric – since GNDs aren’t in the Republican playbook – we get a sense of who’s rallying to the flag of the firebrands. The Democratic Party is, after all, their institutional home. Democrat strength has been rising in the same demographic wherein eco-activists draw their legions: white, college educated, and urban/suburban. These aren’t any kind of Caucasoids; they are whites of the other two characteristics.

For blue collars to join, they must either be confused or suicidal.

This isn’t your grandpa’s middle class. For a sizeable portion of them, they see the world as an urban park due to their unfamiliarity with anything else. Ensconced in their suburban bungalow, or coastal dwelling, or exclusive condo, or gentrified brownstone, they are far removed from the kind of people who make the stuff of their life possible. Distance culturally, morally, socially, geographically, and economically, sometimes over multiple generations, colors both their perspectives and profound ignorance. It’s easy for them to complain of the high price of housing but then support environmental policies that jack up the price of construction materials and strangle the supply of homes. To them, the national forests are a park, not a possible source of 2X4 studs, and the more land under the control of the Nature Conservancy the better in their mind. The monumental incongruency is startling.

Environmental activists protest outside of the Harvard Club where Trump’s EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt was scheduled to speak, June 20, 2017 in New York City.

Do you think the nations who wish us harm – yes, we do have them – are oblivious to the presence of a demographic fifth column in our midst? As Biden would say, “Come on, man!” In the 1970s and 80s, we called Soviet morale-busting campaigns disinformation. They called it dezinformatsiya which The Great Soviet Dictionary of the era defined as “false information with the intention to deceive public opinion.” The 1980’s Operation Infektion attempted to convince the world and us that our government invented HIV/AIDS in order to sap our will to resist them. President Reagan got a full blast of it when he countered a Soviet military buildup in Europe and resisted Soviet adventurism around the world.

Today’s Kremlin wouldn’t be continuing the practice if there wasn’t an audience for it, as there was for the Nuclear Freeze and peace movements 40 years ago. Former Soviet KGB apparatchik Vladimir Putin would be very familiar with this staple of Soviet war-by-other-means and is evidently using it. One of the biggest foreign boosters of John Kerry’s climate change hucksterism is Nikolai Patrushev, the head of Russia’s Security Council. Patrushev goes further in hawking American woke capitalism. Is he doing it out of pure altruism? Quoting Biden again, “Come on, man!” He knows, and we should know, that climate-change apocalyptics and social justice flimflammery only cripples us. What better way to advance Putin’s national interests than to cheer John Kerry’s galivanting escapades and The Squad’s congressional agenda? Weaken your adversary and warm up the tanks is a well-worn tactic.

The Kremlin gets traction with the hooey because many white collars are habitually open to the jive. When will these urbanistas realize that they can’t have a safe and prosperous country alongside blackouts and escalating utility bills? Electric cars, or electric anything, isn’t going to deliver 45,000 pounds of produce to their favorite Whole Foods outlet. Their Beemers and Subarus can’t be made without the liquid residue of primordial jungles. The stuff of fossil fuels surrounds them at a time when they are trying to kill it off. It’s one of the purest examples of economic self-negation imaginable.

We have more than a Left problem. We have a middle-class problem. The two intersect at environmentalism and ensure the atrophy of our economy, our national resolve, and compromise the defense of our national interests. No better word is available than “betrayal” . . . or maybe stupidity.

See the source image

RogerG

February 20, 2022February 20, 2022

Breakup D.C.

The French poet Alain de Lille wrote in 1175 AD, “. . . a thousand roads lead a man forever toward Rome.” In modern usage, “All roads lead to Rome” is meant to convey the center of something. Rome was the center of gravity for the classical Mediterranean world. Washington, D.C., has arisen as our Rome, for good or ill.

Durham’s indictment of Michael Sussman, Perkins Coie law partner and DNC lawyer, brought to mind the trope. If one cares to look closely at it, Sussman’s world is DC, a socio-politically incestuous pit of vipers that resists accountability. Don’t be surprised if Sussman and the DC network of Democratic Party swamp denizens never face justice for fabricating the Trump-Russia humbug. The swamp can get a Nixon (Watergate) but try and make them answer for their behavior? I’m skeptical. The Gordian Knot of intertwining relationships protects them.

John Durham, Special Counsel, and Michael Sussman

We’d be better served if all roads didn’t lead to DC. How? Breakup DC, scatter its federal departments, agencies, and the bulk of its employees to the far corners of the country. If any political chicanery were to take place, investigation and judgment would take place outside the shield of this cripplingly I-got-your-back web.

The Sussman case illustrates the outlines of this tightly knit socio-political hive. All the principal parties in the story, with the exception of Durham, are cozy with each other. According to Durham, Sussman is the man who peddled Trump-Russia collusion to his pals in the Obama administration. Enlisting the preexisting army of federal government operatives to cripple your political opponent is the queen on the political chessboard. It’s exactly what Sussman did in meeting with his old pal James Baker, FBI general counsel, to enroll the DOJ in placing a politically useful moral cloud on the Trump campaign. Trump was hounded throughout 2016 and into most of his presidency.

Don’t forget, later, Mueller and his cadre of Democrat henchmen spent two years (2017-2019) and $32 million to probe Trump-Russia and found . . . nothing!

The connections extend beyond Sussman and Baker. The trial court judge overseeing the case is Judge Christopher R. “Casey” Cooper, Obama appointee and long protégé of Democrat power-broking legal eagles in the Clinton and Obama administrations. Cooper, Baker, and Sussman were veterans of the Clinton DOJ – and many would later move into the Obama regime – and frequently interacted socially and professionally.

See the source image

Judge Christopher R. “Casey” Cooper

It doesn’t end there. Remember Lisa Page of “smelly Walmart shopper” fame? Her lawyer is Judge Cooper’s wife, Amy Jeffress, who was previously employed as national security adviser to Eric Holder, Obama’s AG. No accusation of conspiracy here, but instead there exists the network of friendships and mutually beneficial relationships that can last a lifetime.

Quite logically, conflicts of interest abound. If this was an honest world, recusals would be the most common feature surrounding the Sussman case, or any case with a partisan in the dock in the snake pit of DC, up to the city’s totality. This rabidly anti-Republican population (Republicans are 6% of registered voters) screams change of venue for any defendant who’ll be helped or harmed by a partisan reputation.

DC’s deeply embedded partisan hostility is just one reason for moving things out of the city. More threateningly, our government no longer represents us, the “us” being anyone whose experience with the country doesn’t emanate from an Ivy League campus, or from 35,000 feet, or passing through on the Acela. If we are to have rule by expertocracy, let’s move them closer to the plebes. For instance, pick any small-to-medium sized city in Kansas to headquarter the Agricultural Department. Say, move the Department of Justice to Lubbock – or any town with a strong commitment to the Second Amendment – if the town will have them. Commerce could head to Tampa or Mobile, since California is out of the running because it is determined to destroy its ports. Move the Pentagon to Camp Lejeune. Dynamite the five-sided edifice in Arlington for more breakwaters on the Chesapeake. HHS could benefit from small town values so place it in any small census tract away from a college campus and between the Rockies and Appalachians. DHS, the homeland security Borg, would benefit from a location like El Paso, Tx., to be closer to a porous border. The same is true for the rest of the cabinet.

Don’t worry, they don’t need to be within spitting distance of each other to fulfill their job descriptions. After all, if it was such a great idea to Zoom our kids’ education, they ought to phone it in too – or more accurately broadband it in – from a long way away.

As for the entangled web of regulatory agencies, find the most aesthetically unpleasant locations in this transcontinental nation. No coastal views or beautiful mountain vistas. We’ve got close to 4 million square miles to work with. The idea is to make these people want to cut short their stays in jobs telling us what to do. Brown and barren hills, blistering cold winters, and 110-degree summers would work wonders. They might want to get real jobs.

But herein lies a danger: scattering the hive to the winds might infect more locations with their socio-political-cultural decrepitude. An answer might be found in treating federal government employment as a form of minimum-security imprisonment. Workplaces and housing ought to be separated from the surrounding area behind secure fencing with ingress and egress carefully monitored. It might contribute to the impetus to end their incarceration and join the real world.

The above has zero chance of enactment but establishes a preferable end state to work toward. The idea is to avoid the nomenklatura-problem. No doubt, we have made great strides over the past 90 years in Sovietizing our existence. A large and overweening class of apparatchiks, insulated and living a world apart, must be brought to heel before they sabotage our civilization.

All roads should lead to Akron, Peoria, Lubbock, Wichita, Duluth, . . . .

RogerG

*Read Andrew C. McCarthy’s article, “Welcome to the Swamp, Mr. Durham”, National Review Online, February 19, 2022.

February 17, 2022February 19, 2022

Add Progressivism to History’s Failures (Eugenics, Fascism, Socialism, Communism): Look No Further Than the Response to the Pandemic

*It’s the unstated point in Jeffrey Anderson’s “The Masking of America: Faceless people make compliant subjects, not good citizens” in the Claremont Review of Books, Summer 2021.

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Homeless encampment along the beachfront of the LA area.

Hillary Clinton in a 2015 Anderson Cooper interview on CNN: “I’m a progressive, but I’m a progressive that likes to get things done.” Well, what is it that she claims to be in order to “get things done”? However defined, she isn’t alone. Today’s Democratic Party is almost the exclusive home base of it.

See the source image

Progressivism should not be confused with “progress”. Progress is a trend of improvement. Progressivism is an ideology, a belief system similar to a religion but without the supernatural. Call it a secular religion – and thusly an oxymoron – but that hasn’t stopped it from having its moment in the sun, which it still enjoys. The glow won’t last forever. At a certain point, it’s botches are too glaring to ignore. Is the trucker protest a sign of the dethronement?

Call it prog-thought. Many hear of it but few can describe it. Don’t expect to be enlightened by the schools. The schools give it curt treatment because emphasis is given to actions and historical personages, all of which they approve because they are caught up in prog-thought.

What you won’t get from the instructor is the fact that the ideological edifice is built upon Hegel’s idea of history as a chronology of improvements, one piling on top of the others over time. Improvement is defined as the heightened status of rationality in decision making, and rationality is best embodied in people like him, Hegel (professor at Heidelberg and Berlin Universities) – credentialed, degreed, many years of formal schooling. The purported efficiencies of the post-Napoleonic bureaucracies of his native Prussia were his ideal, which would blossom after his death under Bismarck and the Kaisers. Notice the absence of popular sovereignty in the scheme. The perspective’s early acolytes included 19th century Americans trained in German universities. It’s the beginning of the movement to train the apostles of the administrative state in the home of specialized PhD’s (college) who would infiltrate the subsequent and growing alphabet soup of unaccountable agencies.

Today, we are governed by the alphabet soup more than our elected representatives. Agency letter groups proliferated in the 20th century’s new and expanding field of public health in the FDA, CDC, NIH, NIMH, NIAID, etc., and the proliferation of state and local entities. The field of public health came to be the province of advanced-degreed specialists – the specialist possessing governmental power in the service of their specialty. The narrowness of perspective of the specialist is sharpened by a work life in the unique social eco-system in this expanding bureaucracy.

A climb up the greasy pole (in Churchill’s words) of career advancement places a premium on risk-aversion. The routine for career advancement remains the same throughout: don’t stand out, except as a compliant, ingratiating subordinate while avoiding black marks on evaluations. Steering clear of risks to one’s institutional reputation and the blinkered view of life spent in a specialty shapes a constrained, risk-averse personality for decision making. It showed during the Covid scare.

At the onset of the pandemic, instead of admitting ignorance of the virus, Fauci and others flip-flop on masks until resting on masking-forever, sometimes triple-layered. He must be seen as doing something and the default position is obsessive risk avoidance. It reaches absurd lengths, and a complete lack of common sense. Take a look at this gem of guidance for children from the WHO: “Before putting on the mask, children should clean their hands…at least 40 seconds if using soap and water…. Children should not touch the front of the mask [or] pull it under the chin…. After taking off their mask, they should store it in a bag or container and clean their hands.” Riiiiight! Picture that!

Fact is, the mitigations of mandatory-everything – lockdowns, church and school closings, masking, social distancing, vaccinations, deserted central business districts, the Zooming of life, etc. – is unprecedented. According to the historian Niall Ferguson, it wasn’t done in 1918 (Spanish flu), 1957 (Asian flu), or 1968 (Hong Kong flu). Back then, more people were cognizant of life’s risk calculus. Risk accompanies everything we do. As for diseases, they came and went with the suffering that is the flip side of life. The only difference is that today we have raised a population on the belief in a faux phalanx of “experts” to shield us from life’s vagaries.

How American life carried on as normal during the lethal 1968 pandemic — The 1968 Hong Kong flu didn’t interrupt the Woodstock festival, lilled 100,000 Americans, and infected President Johnson and the Apollo crew.

To no surprise, we have bred a mass of neurotics: people wearing masks while worshipping at the feet of tunnel-visioned experts and believing their pronouncements to be “the science”. You’ll see them everywhere in the Covid era from the masked while driving alone to the lonely outside jogger with labored breathing enveloped in the thing. A time traveler from the 1950’s, while viewing the scene, could be excused for thinking that the doomsday movies of his time were akin to biblical prophesies.

See the source image

The heralded “science” becomes less the search for truth and more the reflection of the more immediate needs of bureaucrats and their progressive patrons. Absent, or in spite of, the gold standard of randomized clinical trials, they reach for observational studies. The difference between the two is profound. The latter can have difficulty in determining causation. That won’t stop interested parties – bureaucrats and politicians – from manipulating and interpreting the observed findings.

We saw the corrupted practice during the pandemic. For example, New York under lockdown had fewer cases than wide open Florida at a certain moment. But New York’s results are due to unrelated factors peculiar to the state, and, given enough time, theirs jumps ahead of Florida. Averaged over the two-year lifespan of the pandemic, the experiences of the two are roughly the same — only Floridians are happier. During the interim, in the risk-averse blue bubbles, the populace became guinea pigs to placate the biases of politicized and narrowly-informed specialists.

In spite of it all, you can’t say that the actions of the hyper-active state worked. The virus continued to afflict more than the unvaccinated. It mutated and still spread. The guidance went from 15 days to stop the spread, to lockdowns to bend the curve, to school closures for up to two years, to mandatory mask-wearing and vaccination, to an end to fellowship in worship, to a retarded work ethic, to a crippling of small business, to the debilitating alternative reality of Zoom (or Skype).

What did we get for it? Looking across the immediate history, we got a summer of riots (2020), an emerging police state to squash resistance to the administrative state and party in power, inflation, empty store shelves, an unwillingness to return to work, loosey-goosey elections, and a loss of at least one academic year of educational achievement for kids in homes below the median income. It is a catastrophe for which we may have difficulty recovering.

We should not be surprised that the expertocracy led us to this impasse. These administrative functionaries are people with a very pinched background living a secluded life, and, as it turns out, residing in selective and exclusive locations as well. Fauci, Walensky, and the others hobnob in the blue bubble. Their social circumstances, and educational backgrounds, are as limited as their range of understanding. It’s an exclusive club populated by progressives. The club’s perimeters are policed by the high costs and exclusive zoning that require an ample income to afford the 5 or 6 Benjamins to take the family to a Senators game. For your information, Fauci’s annual take from the federal treasury is only $16,000 less ($384,000) than Biden’s ($400,000), and that doesn’t include his abundant investment portfolios from years of unstated influence peddling.

I don’t think that there’s a chance that we’ll see Fauci enjoying beer and chips with an Akron plumber, or any plumber for that matter, for the Superbowl. He and the rest of them live a world apart, and the world beyond the blue bubble is beginning to be weary of the expertocracy. Its reputation has taken a hit in polls and surveys. The CDC’s esteem in one survey fell from 60% in March 2020 to 41% in December 2021. The public’s opinion of the federal government flipped from a high of 70% in 1972 to 39% in 2021 in one Gallup poll. Pew put it at 73% in 1957 and 24% in 2021. The results are richly deserved.

Is a peasant revolt brewing? Truckers have had it. Moms and dads have had it. The only remaining question is this: Does the average person understand the connection between our current predicament and the reigning orthodoxy of progressivism as promulgated by an expertocratic priesthood? The root of all evil in the modern era is not mammon, but is more likely to be found in a blind faith in apparatchiks. It’s the one thing that eugenics, communism, socialism, fascism, and progressivism have in common.

RogerG