Friday, New Year’s Day, I broke down and watched a couple of College Football Playoff games, the Rose and Sugar Bowls. I soon realized that I was taken into the world of Winston Smith of Orwell’s 1984. The parallels between 1984 and the telecasts are glaring. Oceania was governed by The Party – Ingsoc (English Socialism) – with Big Brother’s visage and voice everywhere from every bathroom’s two-way monitor to the daily and public Two Minutes of Hate. The message is the same and omnipresent for the denizens of Oceania. Ditto in the broadcast and on the field of the bowl games. Oceania and today’s media big brothers are obsessed with making a common mind no matter how ludicrous.
The message from Friday’s broadcast was that African-Americans are always oppressed by an enemy every bit as nebulous as the “enemy” engineered by Ingsoc and reified with names such as Emmanuel Goldstein (Orwell), or today’s “systemic racism”. Murky, ill-defined threats are perfect for mind control. They can’t be easily refuted because you can’t get your head or hands around a cloud.
I put up with it for about two-thirds of the second game and at that point I reached saturation. I changed the channel. What were they doing? Why, pay attention. All of Ohio State’s helmets had “Equality” stenciled on the back. This isn’t “equality of opportunity”, for The Party’s acolytes believe it to be code for – you guessed it – “systemic racism”. “Equality” has a more aggressive meaning to the zealots: equality of outcome. The players were ignorantly endorsing a pernicious revolutionary and totalitarian slogan.
If you didn’t get the message from the helmets, the leagues’ infomercials (example below) were resplendent with calls for an assault on the unstated and unproven “systemic racism”, like the imaginary threat of Emmanuel Goldstein in Oceania. It’s amazing how even respectable people get caught up in our own time’s Two Minutes of Hate.
For The Party’s activists, “systemic racism” must exist because of the statistical mirage of “disparate impact”. That’s the sole basis for its “truth”. In other words, if bad stats are larger than a group’s proportionality, everything must be turned upside down to make it “right”. It never crossed these geniuses’ minds that the numbers don’t jive because the causes are far removed from their racism hang-up. Lower incomes are more likely due to lower graduation rates, for instance.
Not content with pushing The Party’s line on “systemic racism”, Big Business – in this case Ford – chimed in with advocacy of The Party’s strangulations of the economy and social life.
Many of the measures pushed by the visuals and words, such as universal mask-wearing, social isolation, and a rubber-stamping of lockdowns, were excuse-mongering for Newsom, Cuomo, and the rest of the blue-state potentates. The commercials made no mention of the fact that last March’s draconian edicts did nothing to prevent the second surge. Flattening the curve meant flattening our lives. What side of deranged do we have to look to find a rationale for this lunacy? Not a word from Ford on the palpable incongruency.
The NCAA and corporate America are carrying water for lefty theatrics. They are trying to make unassailable what they cannot prove. Sounds like good old-fashioned propaganda to me, the kind that oozed out of Oceania’s Ministry of Truth.
RogerG
**Also on my Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/rgraf0829/.
A caveat to begin with: I refuse to paint with a broad brush. I had the pleasure of working with some of the most wonderful and dedicated people on the planet in my 30 years as a public high school and community college teacher. Yet, over those many years, I also became aware of the cancerous rot that has penetrated almost every square inch of the system. It’s amazing that some teachers succeed in spite of the decay. Lately, their task has been made worse by the intensification of the putrefaction. I worry for the kids and many of my colleagues still in the system.
One of the most dreadful notions to fly under the radar is the idea that human relations can be tuned like an old-style carburetor with a turn of a screw. A carburetor is childishly simple when compared to the ultrafine mesh of a civilization. The attempt to adjust one set of connections unravels and distorts others. To the over-confident and over-credentialed “expert”, unknowingly wearing blinders, and many a government officeholder who began their rise to prominence in the same manner as the degreed master – with a college degree – the temptation for busybody interference is too great to resist. The schools are the principal purveyors of this facetiousness.
To be honest, the idea of a small and centralized group of henchmen running national affairs has been around for centuries. As a case in point, the notion was crystalized in economic terms in the 17th century by the equivalent of France’s Commerce/Treasury Secretary under King Louis XIV, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, and called mercantilism. Mercantilism is so simplistically alluring: sell more than you buy as a nation and your nation will get rich. The fact is, any benefits are concentrated on a few while the costs are many and more broadly distributed. For any politician and most others in our ill-educated media, the glorious ribbon-cutting ceremony is more glamorous than the many other people up and down the economic food chain who gradually find their lives made more difficult. It’s a fool’s errand but one perpetuated by the belief in the omniscience of the degreed or credentialed “expert” to manage things. We’d be far better off if our culture and schools did more to esteem humility than mass-produce framed paper affixed to office or home walls.
Trump swallowed the idea of societal manipulator hook, line, and sinker in his affection for tariffs, but don’t think for a moment that the Democrats are off the hook. The foolishness is the heart of their progressivism. They believe in “industrial policy”, an idea that is akin to a people’s life being best managed by a class of social and economic technicians. Of course, the technocrats will be churned out by our degree mills, the colleges, and not surprisingly it has led to wisdom dilution, inflated tuitions, and soaring college debt. Amazingly, our grasping for societal betterment became a disaster to be “solved” by more national debt.
The Democrats want to manipulate the system for the benefit of anyone not white and male, no matter how you define the sexual divide. Genitalia and melanin matter much to them. If truth be told, though, a history of lefty activism would have to be added to their list of preferred traits. So, clearly, it’s lefty women and men in dark pigments who are the objects of their sympathies and cares.
The intersectionality of the superficial, and having little to do with character.
In contrast, Trump’s darlings are blue collar workers. If I had to choose, my sympathies lie with the working stiffs who keep things humming along. Regardless, though, such targeted sympathies do not ensure good policy for a nation.
No better example can be found than Trump’s tariff escapades on aluminum (see here). The on-again, off-again exactions wreaked havoc for aluminum users such as beer and soft drink producers. Given the peculiarities of the beer and soft drink markets – the industry’s consumers are highly sensitive to price changes – the tariffs made precarious the livelihoods of thousands beyond the few hundred who have an increased lock on job security among the few remaining domestic producers of aluminum sheet metal. Trump had more zeal for ribbon-cutting while others were left seething at Budweiser, Coca-Cola, etc. Many in the bigger economy might be able to connect the dots. The possibility may have been missed, or simply ignored, by Trump and his advisers.
Where were the schools in teaching basic economics to the millions who pass through their doors? Where were the “experts” in educating your sons and daughters? Either the lessons didn’t stick or were never taught. Maybe people were never held accountable for either learning the lessons or teaching them. Either way, there’s a vacant spot in many minds to be filled with socialist nonsense or the belief that a puppet master or grand vizier will manipulate our lives to paradise. Actually, both possibilities are mirror images of each other.
We’ve seen this picture before. The vacuous thinking was resplendent in the streets of ancient Athens to those of Weimar Germany to the avenues of today’s Seattle, Portland, LA, Chicago, New York City, and any place in America beyond a threshold of population density. The “science” and “experts” haven’t freed us from the turmoil and ignorance. In fact, they may be contributing to it.
Take for instance, our “experts” in epidemiology – especially those that fill government posts – a field of understandable media attention during a pandemic. They have set us on the road to lockdowns, mandatory and universal mask wearing, abolition of Christian fellowship, the end of Thanksgiving and Christmas, the destruction of much of our economy, and putting the kibosh to real education for our kids. Has our educational system given us the same breed of “expert” who foisted on us the 1960’s-and-beyond War on Poverty?
They came right out of college knowing a lot about microscopic organisms and very little about the Laffer Curve, creative destruction, supply and demand curves, or crowd-induced hysteria. It’s easy for them to say, “If it saves one life, it’s worth it.” In their isolated world of labs and microscopes, it might make sense. As a governing philosophy, it’s a disaster. Just think of all the salutary advances from the rule of law to artificial power (steam, natural gas, nuclear, et al) that came from someone somewhere gambling. We’d still be in tribes in constant war with each other or huddled in caves next to open fires if we decided all matters by “If it saves one life …”.
And we are slowly reverting back to that prehistory with the lockdowns, stay-at-home orders, mandates for donning semi-burkas at all times in all places, and everyone treating everyone else as an alien species with the unceasing entreaties for social distancing. The crazy orders are depriving people of producing sustenance – i.e., boundless business closings and zooming (no pun intended) unemployment.
You know, sustenance, the kind of thing that’s been around since hunting and gathering. Many in our ruling class have made a conscious decision to replicate primordial existence, or at least the Great Depression. Once you take a meat axe to capital – thank you, Gavin Newsom and the other would-be Napoleons – it’s hard to bring it back. According to the National Restaurant Association, 40 to 50 percent of eateries won’t, if ever.
An empty downtown street amid the Covid-19 lockdown in Chicago, March 21. (photo: KAMIL KRZACZYNSKI/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE)
Guess who’ll suffer the most? To find the susceptible, you’ll have to move down the social status and income pyramid: small businesses and the social rungs below those in exclusive zip codes. Without a doubt, the not-so-privileged, in the lingo of the day, will be the most vulnerable, not just to get the virus but also to lose their livelihoods (see here). Guess what happens to the woke crowd’s much-esteemed goal of “equity” as Newsom and company smother their economies? Guess who’ll cry the loudest for a “bailout” for their draconian measures? Mensa membership isn’t necessary for an answer.
The service industry is decimated, and much of the 15 million middle-income jobs with it. What do you think happens to your average barista? Hello, AOC. The president of a leftist activist group, Diane Yentel of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, proclaimed, “The majority of the up to 17 million households at risk of losing their homes this winter are people of color.” The lockdowns are an assault on the much-ballyhooed “equity”.
Taking a page from the Weimar Germany book of 1923, the response is to shower the country with paper money, with the same result, and non-expulsion edicts. Paper money being shoveled into the economy while euthanizing much production isn’t an expression of sanity in public policy.
It’s all due to “If it saves one life …”. Thank you, our schools, for giving us a powerful cadre of small-minded but powerful people.
Arising out of our colleges is much more than blinkered, busybody “experts”. Insanity dressed up in arcane academic rhetoric emanates out of these gilded hot houses. For example, take equality and turn it into equality of outcome, mash it into ruminations about our electoral system, and out comes “vote reparations”, and out goes “one man, one vote”. You’ve got that right: a black vote should count twice, or some similar formulation. Really? Brandon Hasbrouck, law professor at Washington and Lee University, hatched the idea to address the fact that there aren’t enough blacks in Wyoming and Nebraska, and too many in Chicago, Detroit, and the urban dots on the mid-Atlantic coast (see here). Yeah, African-Americans aren’t evenly distributed enough, he says, or in large enough numbers to protect their interests in a constitutional republic. So, he demands to jerry rig the system to the advantage of 13% of the population and end the constitutional republic that we’ve come to know.
Brandon Hasbrouck
The possibilities would be endless for advocates. For instance, divide LA’s Watts, Compton, and Southcentral neighborhoods into 20 congressional districts. Let’s put Eldridge Gerry’s salamander, the Gerrymander, on fertility drugs.
Printed in March 1812, this political cartoon was made in reaction to the newly drawn state senate election district of South Essex created by the Massachusetts legislature to favor the Democratic-Republican Party. The caricature satirizes the bizarre shape of the district as a dragon-like “monster”, and Federalist newspaper editors and others at the time likened it to a salamander.
Crazy? You bet, but something that gets a serious hearing among those in padded cells and faculty lounges.
Our schools, now at all levels, are quickly becoming breeding grounds for the sort of deadly mental pathogens that spell doom to any healthy society. At the entrance to every school – grade school to college – the following caution should be required under the school’s name in an official font size: “Warning: The activity in this place is hazardous to your cognitive development and the health of your country”.
Post-election polling results in a prior AEI piece (see the proceeding post) might be symptomatic of a deeper trend: the electorate was awash in the poorly informed and addle-brained. People that wouldn’t break away from their basement game console in normal times came out of their bunker to mail their ballot. Why? For once, our politics became as interesting as World of Warcraft. Provocateurs and rhetorical bomb-throwing (and sometimes literal) made our politics able to compete with whatever you can get while streaming. It’s a thought worth exploring.
Battle lines were stark this time around. Take a look at the orange man. Something that you can’t say about Trump is that he speaks in soothing subtleties. The guy’s entertaining ad hominems turned his rallies into a kind of Woodstock. They added, with his Twitter fulminations, to his following but also detracted from it. Others harboring distaste for his antics are going to explode in hostility to him. The guy is both repellant and magnetic at the same time.
Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee gestures to a his camouflaged “Make America Great” hat as he discuses his support by the National Rifle Association at a campaign rally at the Redding Municipal Airport Friday, June 3, 2016, in Redding, Calif. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)
Over on the neo- and paleo-socialist side, we have the black-clad anarchists of BLM and Antifa, the immature mental hiccups of recent urchins from our college campuses who matriculated to Congress (the Squad), and Democratic Party power brokers who can take the hiccups and turn them into policy and party platforms: defund the police, identity favoritism, gun confiscation, government invasions of the pulpit, erasures of history, etc. The bomb-throwing went to the streets and into the party’s base and mouths of its camera-hugging politicos, all of this occurring in the Super Bowl of our politics, a presidential election year. This side of the ledger is also simultaneously repellant and magnetic.
Demonstrators raise their fists as a fire burns in the street after clashes with law enforcement near the Seattle Police Department on June 8, 2020. (photo: David Ryder / Stringer / Getty Images)The Squad (L-R): U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) speaks as Reps. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) listen during a news conference at the U.S. Capitol on July 15, 2019 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Alex Wroblewski/Getty Images)
Add the accelerant of chaotic election procedures in mail-in voting with mostly lefty “dark” money to inflate the ballot count and we have hyper-inflationary votes with the value of dirt. The election has little credibility at the moment our politics became incendiary.
The results were courtesy of the politically-motivated ignoramuses who were drawn out by the flammable political melodrama. Otherwise, they’d slink back into their lounge chair.
Interestingly, a high voter turnout may not be a sign of a healthy democracy. In a piece for the American Enterprise Institute, Dalibor Rohac makes plain that goons come to the fore more times than not. So, this time around, we got the mentally incontinent Joe and the slap-happy but rattled Kamala — and a Congress that could possibly check the worst instincts of these clowns.
If this is a recurring feature of our politics, our fortunes may resemble the termites leaving little mounds of shavings as they go to work on your home’s skeleton. Soon, a threshold is reached when the thing comes crashing down. Hopefully, you won’t be in it when it does.
The plutocrats of today: Gates, Bezos, Soros, Zuckerberg (l to r)
Abraham Lincoln on his dire warnings about the possible demise of the United States in his address before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, January 27, 1838 (read at http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/…/speeches/lyceum.htm):
A younger Abraham Lincoln at the time of the Lyceum address.
“At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? — Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never! — All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.
At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”
* * * * * * *
Is Lincoln right? Are we about to confirm his prediction of us being the author of our destruction? If so, the rot has begun among our elites and the institutions that they dominate and like gravity it will flow downhill. The rest of us get mindlessly pulled along or find ourselves powerless to resist. Pick any one of today’s fashionable issues – climate change, systemic racism, its cousin “social justice”, “equity”, the preeminence of self-professed identities, transnationalism – and we will drown in it.
Last Sunday, in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Bill Gates, tech billionaire par excellence, made statements about the pandemic that had me shouting at the tube (see below). My wife sought peace in another room. Now, I am no epidemiologist, and neither is he. Look at his bio. The much-abused word “privileged” applies to his upbringing. His father was a prominent lawyer and his mother was on the board of First Interstate BancSystem, Inc., her father being a national bank president. They were well-heeled enough for young Bill to attend Seattle’s exclusive Lakeside Prep School. “Silver spoon” doesn’t go far enough to explain his privilege.
And off to Harvard he went, dropping out after two years, taking mostly math and computer science courses. He made his well-deserved “bank” and retired, with his bank freeing him from the mundane matters of life so he could pursue his philanthropy hobby. In his mind, apparently, his lavish donations qualifies him to pass judgment on matters epidemiological. Tapper treated him as an “expert” . . . which he isn’t! A silver spoon and half a Harvard degree doesn’t qualify him to pontificate on the many ways to destroy our existence, but obviously not his. Yet, here he was at CNN having his ego stroked for his “wisdom”.
Gates’s advocacy of globalism/transnationalism, more lockdowns, and reluctance to give Trump’s Operation Warp Speed any credit for the record time in the development of a vaccine is both informative and disturbing. He twists himself into knots to give credit to others outside of Trump while completely ignoring Trump’s all-important gift of clearing the regulatory way for Big Pharma. Trump gave the keys to the researchers, and gets no recognition for the fact from the muddle-headed Gates.
Pres. Trump announced Operation Warp Speed on May 15, 2020.
What does the personage of Bill Gates say about the condition of our moneyed elites? Lots! This guy, and many others among the techie super-rich, has no real acquaintance with a coal miner, steel worker, grape picker, or anyone in the skilled trades, where and how they live, their values, and not much of anything about them, except as an order to an underling to call one of them to service the mansion’s plumbing. The lives of the average people are an abstraction to be treated abstractly. Lockdowns, compulsory mask wearing, school closings are pressed without the slightest appreciation of the impacts on the common people outside the walls of the gated estate. Their proclamations are easy for them, their wealth and influence being a shield for them and their children.
Not so for the masses of human beings underneath them in the status pyramid. This is an elite unlike any other before, a point made by Victor Davis Hanson in his piece “Where Did the New Mad Left Come From?”. They made their money in ways that insulated them from the earthy existence of manufacturing, mining, lumbering, construction, and the kind of retailing that requires you to meet and interact with customers. Theirs is an apartheid world of wealth where they go from their homogeneous wealthy suburb to the exclusive prep school to the Ivy League to high tech and high finance. In their chosen sector, a life with the hoi polloi isn’t necessary and not evident. They live a life mostly freed from the unwashed masses, except in acts of social penance that appear as gifts that draw the admiration of the Davos crowd.
Warren Buffett, chairman and chief executive officer of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., speaks during an event with Hillary Clinton, former Secretary of State and 2016 Democratic presidential candidate, not pictured, at Sokol Auditorium in Omaha, Nebraska, U.S., on Wednesday, Dec. 16, 2015. Buffet said at the rally that he was supporting Clinton’s bid for president because they share a commitment to help the less affluent. (Photographer: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Take a look at another among the fabulously rich in the tech world, Mark Zuckerberg, or the Google patriarchs, or the money-changing George Soros and you’ll see the same monotone leftist ramblings. Manipulating currencies or a life that keeps you ensconced among others like you isn’t the experience that’ll keep you from flights of utopianism and a predilection for the left side of the political spectrum — which is the same thing. They are the big money behind the billion-dollar prestige-school endowments, collectivist crusades, and neo-socialist/neo-Marxist agitators of the moment. Their money flows from the indoctrination in the colleges to the mobs in the streets to the political adventures that empower the home of lefty America, the Democratic Party.
To be clear, lefty bromides are toxic. Assaults on personal responsibility and the guarantors of morality in a thriving Christianity, and extended adolescence in state dependency aren’t the makings of mental health or personal accomplishment. No society can long endure under this constant abuse. Lincoln could be right in that we nurture our own downfall, and it begins as a rotting head on our social body.
Jack Dorsey of Twitter
I think that I’d have more respect for Gates if he’d give up his castle keep, take up residence in public housing, forego the hired security, and force his kids and grandkids to zoom from a dilapidated computer without expensive tutors and the elite prep school. Furthermore, Bill, freeze access to your bountiful assets so you’ll have greater appreciation for those wondering where their next paycheck will come from after your lockdowns continue into 2021 and maybe onto 2022. My guess is that he won’t last the night.
Are we irreparably divided? When deeply divergent cultural assumptions lie at the root, we could very well be heading for disunion. The only question is, will it be “soft” (peaceful) or “hard” (violent)? Terry Teachout, drama critic of the Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary, comes down on the side of disunion, but it’ll be a “soft” one to him. I’m not so certain, but I hope he’s right if we are to have one.
Terry Teachout
At work are two radically different notions of human nature. On one side lies the near perfectibility of us and our socio-economic-political arrangements. Indeed, a fixed nature is far from their imaginations. This leads to an endlessly meddlesome state. Space is left open in their intellectual firmament for all kinds of socialism: aggressive and velvet glove. In this social scheme, at the top of the governing pyramid is situated people like them, people whose status stems from paper credentials like college degrees and certifications. Today, this crowd increasingly comes with these ontological beliefs in tow.
Obama’s “pajama boy” from the 2010 publicity campaign to pass Obamacare.Steelworkers on a shift change in Braddock, Pa., 2008. (photo: Damon Winter/The New York Times)
On the other side of the cultural divide, we find those more traditionally inclined and the belief that human flourishing requires self-reliance and virtue. Yet, human nature is punctuated with a dark side. Therefore, all-powerful directorates will be populated with agents of a flawed nature like the rest of us. Spending 17-19 years in classrooms won’t change our basic makeup. Lord Acton’s famous quip about the possession of great power accessing our darker side is very relevant here.
Well, some of you might minimize the disagreement as only a difference of opinion. You’d be wrong to trivialize the estrangement. It’s fundamental to the difference between gun confiscation and a Second Amendment, abortion as infanticide and limiting it to the first trimester, free college and personal responsibility for your career path, environmental totalitarianism and environmental prudence, economic growth and the “new normal” of stagnation, religious liberty and state invasions of the pulpit, education freedom and the government classroom monopoly as a lefty finishing school, identity favoritism and equal opportunity, etc. Hardly trivial, this is existential.
In October 2015, Houston’s progressive mayor, Annise Parker, ordered the city’s district attorney to subpoena the sermons of selected pastors whom she suspected of using the pulpit for political purposes.
How did we get to this impasse? I think that the growth of government and its dependencies has seriously eroded the basis for our civilization. But also state-love has seeped into the subconscious of our media-saturated metropolitan areas. It began as a pervasive ethos in our faculty lounges. From there, it was evangelized to succeeding generations. I know of its prevalence as a 30-year teaching veteran in our public schools.
Unexamined lefty assumptions in our citified blue dots have provoked the chasm. Don’t be a bit surprised when you learn that people outside the blue dots have noticed. They have, and are justifiably horrified.
Rush Limbaugh yesterday let out the “S” word: secession (see below).
Over the past few years, I have been ruminating on the topic of secession, and worried that we are essentially two different peoples heading toward it. The differences are so profound that for one to rule the public square, the other is suppressed. Our politics have become a matter of conquest as we have become so deeply divided. It’s natural for the conquered to seek separation.
How different are we? Metropolitan areas are enthralled by a relatively recent nanny-state zealotry. Everywhere else, tradition and self-reliance has a stronger grip on imaginations. It’s the difference between pleasure-seeking materialists and your local church, if you want avatars to encapsulate the two sides.
Mayor Muriel Bowser looks out over a Black Lives Matter sign that was painted on a street, during nationwide protests in Washington, D.C., U.S. June 5, 2020. (Khalid Naji-Allah Executive Office of the Mayor/Handout via REUTERS)
We see it more and more, and all around us. During the Trump presidency, Democrat/Lefty strongholds engaged in John C. Calhoun-style nullification of federal immigration law, which Calhoun was an 1830’s harbinger over a federal tariff.
Now, it’s the traditionalists’ turn. Licentious electoral systems in blue states, and metropolitan cores in red-leaning states, have imposed an executive branch with lefty evangelical zeal on the vast stretches outside the blue dots and the coasts. In 1860, George Templeton Strong put it succinctly when he said, “Get prepared for a hurricane!”
The simple fact is that the urban cores and urban-core dominated states has adopted an aggressive leftism in recent years. They have moved extreme left while the rest of the country has remained more true to our founding beliefs and traditions. This could be a secession sparked by a militant collectivism in like manner as the adoption of a grand theory in defense of race-based chattel slavery in the South in the middle of the 19th century would incite the first go-around. In opposition, the abolitionists were the inheritors of an emancipation that is traced back through Christianity to classical times.
Modern urban bohemiansBlue collar Americans
I am worried. The fundamentals are present for a repeat. Indeed, if wiser heads don’t stop the leftward lurch, “Get prepared for a hurricane!”
While listening to Amazon Music this morning, the playlist presented “I Need You Christmas” by the Jonas Brothers. The song is beautifully performed, and reminded me of all that we are missing as our life has been meaninglessly deformed by the mini-totalitarians in positions of power.
The lockdowns and mitigations have nearly expunged church, most of of our interactions with other people, and removed celebration and spontaneous enjoyment of friendship from our lives. Children are banned from the park and school. They are left to spend most of their lives behind walls and in front of a computer screen. Ours is a deformed existence and not a natural and reasonable response to the spread of illness. This song reminded me of what we are missing, and ought not to.
Christmas should be a time of joy, faith, family, and friends. To be honest, the song makes me melancholy. Still, it’s a wonderful song and beautifully performed. Pease enjoy. And merry Christmas . . . if you can.
Rev. Al Sharpton speaks, center, flanked by La Raza President Janet Murguia, right, and Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed, speaks to reporters about the Voting Rights Act, outside the West Wing of the White House in Washington, Monday, July 29, 2013, after a meeting with President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
If you have any doubts about the fact that Big Tech is seeded throughout their organizational pyramids with leftists, look at what happened to Eli and Shelby Steele’s film, “What Killed Michael Brown?”, on Amazon’s website (see the trailer below).
Shelby Steele. director and writer of “What Killed Michael Brown?”, being interviewed by Fox radio.
The film was initially cancelled. Why? The censors at Amazon rolled out drivel like the film wasn’t “eligible for publishing”, “doesn’t meet Prime Video’s content quality expectations”, and Amazon “will not be accepting resubmission of this title and this decision may not be appealed”. That’s a gobbledygook word salad, with the last phrase an attempt at commercial assassination.
For the incorrigibly naïve ready to believe Bezos’s underlings, go to Amazon Prime and take a look at the boat loads of stuff that shouldn’t be “eligible for publishing”. Who are these people trying to kid? The Steeles, pure and simple, challenge the Black Lives Matter dogma. That’s it! The Steeles’ take on race is too jarring to the straitjacketed minds in our chattering classes of legacy media, the academy, corporate boardrooms, Big Tech and its minions, and the Democratic Party. These socio-economic satraps are different legs of a monocultural centipede that can’t handle an opposing posture. If you have $19.99 to spare, buy it and watch it. You’ll quickly discover that “quality” was a PR word to hide an organizational attack on a different, well-founded point of view. Big Tech is working really hard to get a step on Orwell’s Ministry of Truth.
From left: Amazon Devices chief David Limp, SVP of corporate affairs Jay Carney, and CEO Jeff Bezos. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop)
Later, after an outcry, Amazon relented. If for no other reason, stick your thumb in their eye by purchasing the film on Prime. You’ll also be rewarded by the “quality” and a well-reasoned outlook on the issue of race in America. You’ll quickly come to see that Amazon’s ploy was a lie.
Now, to the film. The Steele perspective on race is analogous to a kind of digestive tract that goes from real historical oppression, to later white guilt/penance, to government coddling to assuage the guilt, to crippling dependency, and to the evolution of a mutually beneficial relationship between the providers and recipients of the largesse. At this last stage of digestion, we have a full-blown race hustling industry ready to treat incidents as if they were a resource – like yesteryear’s Carnegie Steel exploiting Minnesota’s Iron Range – but leaving the cultural landscape in black neighborhoods horribly scarred.
This race-hustling industry has made a new career path in race-hustling. As in most things, the new career is founded on a few presumptions. It begins with the busybody reflex in the progressive mindset: life and people would be better only if they – the self-anointed “expert” – had power to direct their lives. Where did that lead? It led to the War on Poverty and the wholesale demolition of black property ownership and, most terrifyingly, the loss of the full humanness that naturally accrues to all of us. Blacks were put into a special category reserved for people incapable of personal responsibility. A near complete annihilation of their civil society with its faith and family spilled out of this good-intentioned crusade.
And a new market in the penance for “white guilt” arose as white liberals sought exoneration and forgiveness and race-hustlers offer it for a price: wealth and power. In economics, no market can survive without mutual benefit, and indeed Al Sharpton and Democratic Party hegemons get wealth and power and whites earn remission after bending a knee before Black Lives Matter. It matures into a forever thing, a perpetual motion machine built around grievance and shallow identities.
Shelby Steele blows the cover on this hideous marionette show. See “What Killed Michael Brown?”. It might compensate for the deep disappointment after watching Mitt Romney join a horde of Black Lives Matter enthusiasts in the wake of another one of those resourceful incidents, George Floyd.
Photo: MICHELLE BOORSTEIN / THE WASHINGTON POST / GETTY
Mugshots of some of the arrested in the September 2020 BLM riots in Manhattan, NYC. (photo courtesy of the New York Post)
Now that we’ve gotten the Trump v. Biden dustup over with, we can focus on the stories that really resonated from that season of falderol. These overlooked stories should grab attention because they are profound signifiers of deeper and troubling trends in the country. Take a look at this story in the New York Post of September 9, 2020: “Inside the privileged lives of protesters busted for rioting in Manhattan”. Something has entered the brain function of the upper third of America’s wealth pyramid, and it isn’t healthy. I’m wondering if we are breeding our own downfall through the nurturing of a new kind of privileged degenerate.
One of the main points that was raised by Luke Thompson in his recent piece in National Review Online, “Why Democrats Are Winning the Suburbs“, was the demographic shifts in the composition of the ‘burbs. In his estimation, more “minorities” mean a more politically competitive environment for Democrats. He’s probably correct to some degree but I think that he’s missing something much weightier. The suburbs and other upscale districts are breeding Maos, Trotskys, Lenins, Marats, Robespierres, Pol Pots, and Che Guevaras. Our new crop of revolutionaries doesn’t comport to the movie myth of a radical radicalized by some past personal abuse. The newest editions lead a comfortable life, comfortable enough to be free to dabble in extremist matchstick politics without worry of consequence. Not surprisingly, they probably have much in common with many in the latter list.
Just look at the mugshots. All of them suffer from melanin deficiency, a surprising feature given their fanaticism for the oppressed people of color. One, Clara Kraebber from the wealthy Upper East Side of NYC, and daughter of an architect and child psychiatrist with a second home in Connecticut, fits the same mold as the others. Let’s do a deep dive into Clara.
Clara Kraebber at home from Rice University. Clara Kraebber planned to build a ‘BLM focused’ network for ‘wealth redistribution’ in notes seized by law enforcement last week.
She (if I’m allowed to use the “binary”) is quintessentially “privileged” by any of the approved measures of Ibram X. Kendi. Her mom is an accomplished New York City architect with many prestigious projects under her belt. Her dad is a child psychiatrist and professor at Columbia University. These Masters of the Universe were accomplished enough to buy a $1.8 million 16th-floor apartment on Manhattan’s East End Avenue in 2016.
Condo apartment buildings on Manhattan’s East End Avenue.
In addition, the well-heeled elders apparently went on a real estate shopping spree to buy a completely renovated historic home in tony Litchfield County, Conn. These folks aren’t the kind to share the dining room at Burger King with an unemployed steel worker in Ohio. Literally, the working stiffs of the Midwest must be an alien species seeing that the place isn’t visible from 30,000 feet or is nonexistent in a short east coast drive down the freeway to their chic rendezvous in Connecticut.
The Kraebber second home in Litchfield County, Connecticut.
This couple gave birth and raised Clara. Where’d she go to school? She was schooled with others like her, maybe not in skin tone or eye shape but more importantly in socio-economic background. In 2014 she was a freshman at Hunter College High School when she joined up with a crowd protesting the Michael Brown shooting. The school isn’t an American Graffiti high school. It’s an elite prep school at public expense with enrollment proudly proclaimed by the school to be the “top one-quarter of 1% of students in New York City, based on test scores”.
Hunter College High School in Manhattan.
Her lefty politics matriculated with her to Rice University in 2018 where she is an undergrad. She must have been home due to the crazy lockdowns in order to participate in September’s riotous fun in New York City’s Flatiron District where she earned her Bonnie-and-Clyde reputation.
It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that the brawling munchkins are the Democrats’ youth brigades in action. Clara was an active member of Rice University’s Young Democrats. Maybe not in action but at least in thought or sympathy, Party leaders share a Vulcan mind melt (Star Trek lingo) with the chanters of “Every city, every town, burn the precinct to the ground!” I can only guess at the intimate conversation in the Kraebber home that helped give rise to this bile.
Clara Kraebber arrested.
The rest of the arrested clan have similar bios. You’ll read about their heartwarming (?) professions of idealism for the “oppressed people of color”, animals, or zealousness for environmentalism. Wokeness and the religion of environmentalism lays them open to socialism and other revolutionary tropes. These are not minds open to reverence for the permanent things, such as the faith of their fathers and mothers. These children are primed to tear it all down.
Shame on the schools and shame on the two-parent families of the comfortably prosperous. The single parent in the ghetto is overworked and frequently incapable of screening out the chaos. Those in the upper third of the wealth pyramid have no such excuse. Their permissiveness, indulgence, and subtle philosophical innuendos make it possible for there to be more people like Clara fulminating in the face of a $50,000-per-year police officer.
We’re going to have to reformulate our political lingo. Country club Republicans is an endangered species, to be overtaken by country club Democrats. We breed them faster today.
I have much to be thankful. God has blessed me with a wonderful wife, two fabulous sons, dear friends and relations, a superb career in teaching, and a beautiful Montana retirement. Mine is a blessed life. Personally, it’s sunny. Extending the purview nationally, though, dark clouds are looming. Much of the dread emanates from Hollywood.
Speaking of the weather, in the language of climate change – the fad-issue of the day – the word of choice is “anthropogenic”, or “man-caused”. Our current political and cultural storm is anthropogenic by definition. Reality is being distorted through the funhouse mirror of Hollywood and the near uniform bias that permeates the great bulk of our media. It’s sad that informed contemplation has been replaced by this stuff.
I’m reminded of our constant flirtation with Hollywood’s diseased mind in the productions that roll off the entertainment industry’s assembly line. Take for example Netflix’s “The Crown”. The third season is upon us and my wife and I have seen them all in binge-watching forays. It’s a soap opera, and it isn’t history; however, there’s not much standing in the way for it, and most of Hollywood’s other affluence, from becoming the History. After all the schooling from K through PhD to the tune of trillions of dollars every year, a 19th century pioneer in an isolated homestead on the Great Plains is better equipped to handle the cultural noise than today’s typical upper classman in a university’s ASB. For them, and probably the bulk of streaming subscribers, the noise is mistaken for the music because there’s not much in the head to contradict it.
After viewing the last episode of season 3, I have a chance to ruminate on what I’ve seen. My conclusion? It’s entertainment, not history – and extremely opinionated entertainment at that. The butchering of important personages in the life of Queen Elizabeth Il, especially those on the right, is all too obvious. Churchill is reduced to a whimpering and emotional wreck. The reality of his forthrightness is hard to perceive in his frequent, blubbering downpour of tears. In an attempt to build up Elizabeth in relation to the old white guy, the script writers concocted the fantasy of a young Queen Elizabeth lecturing the elderly Churchill on some point of the British constitution in season 1. It’s absolutely unbelievable, but maybe believable to a poorly informed audience.
The blubbering Churchill as portrayed by John Lithgow.
Prince Philip comes in for analogous treatment. In the course of 3 seasons, I can’t recall an instance of his influence and advice being treated in a positive and sagacious light. How could somebody spend an entire life and be wrong throughout? I have my doubts. Counterpoint is a useful plot device, but this one presents a towering female Socrates to a bumbling prince consort. Could this be another opportunity for Hollywood to present the “other” upstaging the patriarchy? Maybe not, but it’s a familiar theme in everything from ads to movies. The zeal to correct for a generalized “wrong” leads to a fiction that will be mistaken for non-fiction in a population unable to draw the distinction.
Tobias Menzies as Prince Philip in The Crown.
Take the character of Margaret Thatcher in this last season. Her character is molded into an emotionally scarred, rigid scold with strangely misogynistic tendencies. Imagine it, the worst of Britain’s aristocratic and sexist good ol’ boys in their men-only clubs have nothing on Britain’s first woman prime minister according to the people who put this thing together. The incongruency is profound.
Interestingly as a matter of fact, it’s well-known that she loved her mother.
The hard face of Gillian Anderson’s caricature of Margaret Thatcher in a seated position with her cabinet.
To make this portrayal a functioning theme, the setting of the 1970’s is stripped from the story. Other than a brief reference to strikes that lead to energy shortages during the tenure of Labour prime minister Harold Wilson – who’s portrayed positively by the way – we’re not given much to understand the reasons for the rise of Thatcher.
Let’s plow the fields of real history. In the 1970’s, the UN’s OECD had projected that the UK was on a glide path to the economic status of Albania. The unions had crippled the country with rampant strikes. Garbage wasn’t picked up due to strikes as shortages and inflation plagued consumers. Government-owned industries were mismanaged black holes at huge public expense. Anthony Scargill, President of the National Union of Mineworkers, an avowed Marxist, held the country hostage with his demands and strikes that periodically cut-off of the coal supply. The UK was a mess and ready for Thatcher. Don’t tell me that there wasn’t room for that context in a multi-season serial instead of the excursions into Princess Diana’s anorexia-bulimia.
Piles of rubbish lay uncollected on the streets in the winter of 1978/1979 amid strikes Litter mounted on the streets during the Winter of Discontent as collectors went on strike Gravediggers joined the strike action too, meaning that vans were filled with bodies to be embalmed and stored in disused factories.The miner’s strike crippled the country’s main source of heat and electricity.People queuing outside of bakery during flour shortage (‘the bread strike’) 1977, A sign reading ‘Sorry No Petrol’ outside a UK service station during a petrol shortage on February 1978. (Photograph: Pete Primarello/Getty Images)The unemployment rate began to spike before Thatcher became prime minister and remained high till the country is weaned off of the central planning of Labour’s socialism.
The Falklands War gets all of . . . 10 minutes . . . at most. And then it’s only mentioned as a backdrop to Thatcher’s narcissistic grandstanding. The reawakening of pride of country, and the magnitude of the success, was reduced to the scene of a self-absorbed Thatcher in a victory parade’s grandstand. The fact is lost on the producers that the success in the Falklands War gave Thatcher the breathing space to make headway in de-socializing the country. A much freer economy, a legacy of Thatcher’s reforms, would make possible the more prosperous UK of today.
And then there’s all the intimate dialogue. Where’d that stuff come from? Sure, the script writers have to put together a story by stringing the characters in verbal interaction. But most of it was most certainly contrived. There was no-one in the rooms of private quarters taking dictation on the conversations. It’s a tool in the scriptwriter’s kit to craft the character for certain plot purposes. It’s also how ideological zealotry can infect a story, and replace reality with a politically useful unreality.
Be prepared for next season. It’s likely to be Diana, more Diana, and Diana all the time.
Am I going to hang out in front of the tv when season 4 arrives? I don’t know. I’m inclined not to. I have no appetite for the elevation of ex-Princess Diana to sainthood.
