Culture – Page 30 – Libertate Virtute (Virtue + Liberty)

February 6, 2021February 6, 2021

Provocation of the Worst Angels of Our Nature

Thousands of residents of Minden, Nv., ran BLM protesters out of town as soon as they showed up in the neighborhood and threatened to cause a scene, August 2020.

While reading this morning, I realized that I was listening to a musical piece entitled “Inequities in a Society” on XMRadio’s Symphony Hall. The online write-up for the piece goes as follows:
“The death of Trayvon Martin in Florida in 2012 drives Julius P. Williams’ InEquities in a Society, a ‘political’ piece that laments this country’s tendency to crucify young men of color. The oboe carries us forward, merging with a string melodic line whose angularity will result in a full ‘confrontation’ with the repressive agents of ‘authority’.”

Now, I thought, it’s everywhere with no nook or cranny of life not infected with the dreaded specter of “inequities”, and a clarion call for an “equity” holy war. It’s as if a Ministry of Truth has suddenly planted itself into our society with its controlling tentacles everywhere. Some have noticed its appearance; some have warned of its baleful influence. Indeed, it is here, and provoking the worst angels of our nature.

What is the source of the provocation? I believe that one part of the country is in the grip of a shiny new and chic thing: the belief that racism must, absolutely must, exist despite its universal condemnation and six decades of public and private efforts to weed it out, with near-unanimous acclaim.

At root, Marx’s class-obsession is replaced by a Foucauldian race-obsession. Foucault was famous for announcing the existence of concealed forms of power. So, the way is cleared for claiming the presence of something that can’t be proven but nonetheless will be proclaimed. It’s what all the beautiful people take for granted in their stultifying conversations in their exclusive and tony east and west coast soirees.

To give the thought a patina of academic respectability, statistical contrivances are conjured to add an aura of confirmation. One such gimmick is “statistical disparity”. When a socio-economic number strays from the norm – the “norm” defined as a group’s percentage of the population – it’s time to jump to the conclusion of the alleged actuality of white/male power with its host of useful monikers (white supremacy, white privilege, systemic racism, patriarchal hegemony, etc.).

Don’t expect the people who should know better to know better – and by people who should “know better”, I mean the degreed people who populate Sociology Departments, et al. They should know better but don’t because their mind is surrendered to Foucault’s mind. When the stuff percolates down into the broader society, the beautiful and truly semi-literate people in their social circles, and in the complete absence of a skeptical mind, parrot the baloney. Thus, we get “Inequity” symphonies, corporate sponsorships of Marxist groups (BLM), NBA endorsements of Leftist propaganda, the Big Brother light-and-heavy censorship coming from Big Tech oligarchs, streamed entertainment to reinforce the party line, as ad-men and women insert the dogma in their commercials. Maybe Biden was wrong in an earlier carnation. His hope that China will become more like us must give way to the realization that we are becoming more like China.

Is this what we’re in for?

As in a strike-slip fault, when one tectonic plate moves while the adjoining one remains stationary, the great divide in America is between those who remain faithful to the Founder’s vision of a moral equality in law and government in addition to a supportive civil society, and those who have jumped with both feet into Foucault’s mental snake pit.

Most people may not be able to articulate the divide but they intuitively, as in Justice Potter Stewart’s famous words, “know it when [they] see it”. The average person recoils in horror at the antics of spoiled, fulminating snowflakes on our college campuses, the scorched-earth rampages through our cities, the indoctrination masquerading as scholarship, the swarming intimidations and threats on social media, and the mobs defacing the tributes to others who sacrificed so much for our freedoms and prosperity. People know barbarity and ingratitude when they see it.

Protesters wrecked a statue of Philadelphia abolitionist and philanthropist Matthias Baldwin, June 10, 2020.

Like two magnets that repel each other if touched by ends of identical polarity, so we increasingly find each other odious. Those who rejoice and those who find the revolution repellent are finding coexistence untenable. Terry Teachout predicted it in 2000, along with Gertrude Himmelfarb, as well as Bill Bishop and Robert Cushing in their 2004 book, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart. Traditionalists in blue-state red counties flock to red states. The blues stay pat in ignorance and denial. Blue becomes bluer and red redder. And some reds become purple as their cities emulate their blue-state cousins. Teachout predicts a soft civil war, or will it be occasionally hot? I hope not . . . to both, and most of all to the latter.

The real catalyst for the confrontation may lie in something more profound than Foucault’s intellectual hallucinations. Princeton’s Robert P. George thinks so. George, one of the few contrarians left in our over-priced and hubristic academies, sees the cultural emasculation of Judeo-Christianity as the accelerant. He’s onto something. Today, the restraint of the cross is replaced by the brute power of multiculturalism’s secular messiahs. The therapeutic restraint of Christianity on our worst instincts has been neutered leaving nothing behind but the exercise of naked power.

George refers back to Germany’s 18th-century Jewish-Christian poet, Heinrich Heine. Heine prophesied the dark clouds of brutalities in Germany’s future. To quote Heine,
“Christianity, and this is its greatest merit, has somewhat mitigated the brutal German love of war, but it could not destroy it. Should that subduing talisman, the cross, be shattered, the frenzied madness of the ancient warriors, that insane Berserk rage of which the Nordic bards have spoken and sung so often, will once more burst into flame.”

The resuscitated “ancient warriors” need not be limited to jackbooted Nazis. Our would-be tyrants have no affection for jackboots, but wear penny loafers and suits and possess prestige indoctrination from prestigious Ivy League schools. Call them GQ tyrants. They operate with the same bumptiousness as SS-Brigadeführer Reinhard Heydrich in carrying out the 1934 bloody Nazi purge of the SA known as the Night of the Long Knives. You think that I exaggerate?

I do, but only slightly, to make a point. The federal government’s vast cadres of prosecutors and people with guns – the military and numerous law enforcement agencies – are about to be harnessed to a crusade against “domestic terrorism”. January 6’s capitol riot is yesteryear’s Reichstag Fire. The ground will be prepared by incessant talk of “extremism”. Do you actually think that they are looking both left and right for kooks? No, for them, “extremism” only comes from the right. Not to say that there aren’t kooks over there, but such talk greases the skids to ride out of the public square the last vestiges of opposition to the official wokeness. It will be the excuse to shame those who think differently. And Hollywood, Big Tech, and Big Media will enthusiastically join in the pogrom.

American newspaper stories of the Night of the Long Knives, 1934.

In the meantime, the breakdown of law and order, the incessant “equity” inquisitions, the catastrophe of socialism’s incursions into the economy, the attempt to reformulate our Constitutional order to embed them in power for a generation, a facile and inhuman culture-run-amok, the threat to livelihoods from the commissars of the Green New Deal, will take its toll on vast populations lacking in enthusiasm for the revolution. The passion for a woke future will still have an audience in urban America and faculty lounges. Everyone else will either be refugees or man the political ramparts to keep the revolution’s bacillus from penetrating their state’s borders.

Biden and powerful Democrat politicos are preparing a jam-down. Their mistake is to think that they’ll be able to get away with it. They’ll discover that they’ve provoked the worst angels of our nature . . . on both sides.

RogerG

January 29, 2021January 29, 2021

Seabiscuit, The Salve of Our Times

*If you need something to steel your spine in the face of progressive authoritarianism, watch “Seabiscuit”.

Last night, as I routinely do, I watched the nightly news by flipping between CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News. The first two infuriate me and the third revs up the infuriation about the other two. I normally break away from it by seeking something else as food for the soul. Lo and behold, from our downstairs rec room came the sounds of my wife and son watching “Seabiscuit”. I thought what a great idea since I haven’t seen it for a long time. So, I streamed the film from the beginning. It’s a great movie.

It is a perfect accompaniment for an escape from the discontents of our time, and a perfect lesson for us in our troubled times. The arc of the story has the additional advantage of being true . . . for the most part. The New Deal hero-worship by historian David McCullough’s voice-over was a bit much. The fact is, the New Deal made many people feel better as it kept them in misery. But the story, the story. The script artfully blended the lives of three broken people – Tom Smith, Charles Howard, and Red Pollard – brought together by a broken horse.

Seabiscuit wasn’t so much broken as rejected. He didn’t fit the expected profile for a racehorse – like many of us who don’t fit the expected mental profile of our rich, fashionable, insulated, and lacking in self-awareness “social betters” by rejecting their chic and foolish ideas. He lacked, as they say among horseracing connoisseurs, “conformation”. He didn’t look like a racehorse. He was short, had awkward legs with knobby knees, and was gimpy in his walk. To boot, he was lazy, temperamental, unpredictable in performance, and hated training.

And he became a hero to the “forgotten man” in a decade of troubled times. The “forgotten man” isn’t the one exploited by FDR in the 1936 campaign for political purposes: the man, in Roosevelt’s words, “at the bottom of the economic pyramid.” The real “forgotten man”, according to economist Amity Schlaes, was the working men and women who ended up paying for the largesse that was distributed to the constituents of FDR’s New Deal coalition, and beginning the political practice of using taxpayer money to build political power. Actually, both versions flocked to a horse who bucked the preferred look of the privileged class, as most of his fans did.

The horse’s fan base is more like today’s “smelly Walmart shoppers” than the student bodies and alumni of prestige colleges with their fat trust funds. Princess Diana was garishly and undeservedly given the moniker of the “people’s princess”. In contrast, the “people’s horse” was a title rightfully earned by Seabiscuit. His following grew so much that by the time of his five-year-old season in 1938 he drew enormous crowds. In the seven years after his retirement to his death, he had 50,000 visitors.

Seabiscuit fans who came out to see him race.

The thing about Seabiscuit is that he had “fight”. It’s a word in disrepute among today’s self-appointed gatekeepers of thought after its use by their bogeyman Trump on January 6. The word simply means the well-spring to rise to a challenge. Some people call it grit; others associate it with courage and determination. Whatever it was, he had it, and it was admirable and inspirational. It’s something we’ll need to resist the hegemony of our malignant and politically-connected cultural elites.

Seabiscuit crossing the finish line ahead of War Admiral in the 1938 match race.

Trump is a special taste for a special political and social pallet. His ability to inspire didn’t reach beyond his tranche of the electorate. “Inspiration” isn’t a word that I can easily associate with him. “Dogged” and “fight”, yes. Seabiscuit had all three.

See the movie, even if it might be for the third time. It’s the perfect salve for those anxious about the gauntlet that the cultural left from their exclusive estates and seats of power are setting before us. Seabiscuit’s “fight” is a lesson for us 70 years later.

RogerG

January 28, 2021January 28, 2021

The Principal Cause of Our Discontents

Pro-life Democrats are beyond “endangered” on that official list of fading species. They are “critically endangered”. Soon, you’ll only be able to see a stuffed one in a musty museum exhibit.

At the start of 2020, there were four in the House. Now, there is one: Henry Cuellar of Texas. Two were taken down by Republicans in the general, and one, Dan Lipinski of Illinois, was primaried earlier by another one of those signature social justice warriors in vogue in the Party. The downfall of Democrats who show even the slightest squeamishness about abortion is the harbinger of the Party’s leap to the far left, which is the principal cause of the chasm in our national politics and culture.

Our split cannot be charitably described as both sides simultaneously moving in opposite directions – or even a by-product of a particularly boorish Republican president – but is a result of a leftward momentum in the Democratic Party that began long before the orange man came down the escalator. The Party absorbed the 60’s radical left and thereafter continued its transformation into the organizational agent of muscular eco-utopianism and the erection of a central-planning police state.

It’s happening before our eyes. And the Party’s minions aren’t alone in their mission in “transforming” America. Censorship is about to enjoy the full force of the central government, but the greater reach to blanket all of America is made possible with the cooperation of well-moneyed elites who speak in the mono-voice of the cultural left. The tenets of cancel-culture are found everywhere from the corporate boardroom, faculty lounge, Big Tech oligarchs, the entire world of entertainment to its branch in Big Sports. Super Bowl LV will be replete with subtle and not-so-subtle messages about a racist America. Watch that space.

Buffalo Bills players kneeling during the national anthem.

Big Money is fully on board. This isn’t a revolution of pitchfork-wielding peasants. It’s being imposed from the top down. Following the money, as they say, will show that Biden’s basement campaign and Stacey Abram’s antics in Georgia were amply funded from the deep pockets of Big Money. The poor Republicans weren’t the party of the rich zip codes, by a factor of three or four.

Don’t believe me? Comb the campaign finance reports.

Big Money made it possible to engineer an election ripe for exploitation by funding the political pressure for immense mail-in voting, registration drives for the uninterested and ill-informed, the army to hector the uninterested and ill-informed and harvest the things. The pandemic was the excuse; but with the fear-mongering no longer sustainable, they are working to chisel the scandalous regime in granite for all time in Pelosi’s much-loved HR1. If she has her way, America’s elections will have all the credibility of those in Maduro’s Venezuela.

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has claimed victory for ‘the revolution’ in a controversial election a day after ten were killed in a wave of protests, July 2017.

The half-witted, semi-literate elites, and their underlings, at the commanding heights of our culture gave us a left-wing government and are seeking to complete the cycle by dictating a left-wing culture as well. Amazingly, though, enough word gets out to animate a counter revolution. Hats off to the folks at Fox News, et al, and people like Mike Lindell for swimming against the currents at the oxygen-starved financial elevations of Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey and Tim Cook and Jeff Bezos.

It’s a troubling trend: achieve a 9-zero portfolio and your brains are drained. They’re good at the narrow specialty that earned the bank, but it doesn’t qualify them for the post of philosopher-in-chief. But that hasn’t stopped them from claiming the mantle.

This crowd with their money beyond count, allied to a radical left party that sings their cultural tune, has enforced a new kind of Jim Crow, an imposed feudalism. They, with their values and political views in tow, have divorced themselves from the hordes of paycheck and mortgage-paying Americans. If they can engineer an election system like they do cell phones, they will be able to make America unrecognizable to your grandparents.

Sen Charles Schumer’s famous quip after the November 2020 elections.

Herein lies the crux of our dilemma: our moneyed elites have shamefully abandoned America and its traditions, culture, and institutions. Personally, I think that it’s a consequence of years of K-through-grad school indoctrination in UN-love and global citizenship.

Their alliance with a radical left Democratic Party has pushed the Party and its co-conspirators away from the rest of us. They are the principal cause of our discontents. Until the Party opens its doors to ideological and cultural diversity, and or moneyed elites show more practical sense, America will remain in the throes of a cold civil, and maybe not-so-civil, war.

At least 3 officers were injured after being attacked at a Black Lives Matter protest in July 2020. (Source: Screenshots from Twitter)

Meanwhile, I’m not certain about watching Super Bowl LV. I don’t have a taste for political sermons emanating from a Manhattan-based league monolith and the mouths of its multi-millionaire players. If I’m to have leftism splattered into my life, I prefer that it come from the usual miscreants: California’s Democratic Party, the Antifa and BLM street thugs, our increasingly decrepit colleges, and the urban and coastal mandarins in lifetime sinecures.

Politics on the playing field is like spitting in church.

RogerG

January 24, 2021January 24, 2021

A Few Prudent Suggestions for Biden; Most Are Pernicious

Politico reached out to the punditry class for suggestions on how to unite the country (see here). First, let me say, “unity” can be a very dangerous word. Totalitarian rulers seek unity, albeit through a police state and elimination of opposition in the form of a well-armed cancel culture, the antithesis of real rule-of-law democracies.

Visage of Big Brother on the Ministry of Truth from Orwell’s “1984″.

The overwhelming majority of the pieces in Politico fall into this trap like “Root out extremism in the military ranks” (Beirich/Singh), “A White House task force on white supremacy” (Miller-Idris), “Punish politicians who lie” (Uscinski), “Update national standards for U.S. history” (Cooter), “Rebuild a shared reality” (Enders), “A new voting rights act” (Albright), “A truth and reconciliation commission” (Shim), “Increase access to affordable housing” (Sugrue), “Investigate Trump’s treatment of immigrants” (Garcia-Rios), “Reparations for Black Americans” (Galea), etc. These authors’ partisanship leaves no doubt.

This advice is proof that the Overton window (a group’s range of acceptable thought) of the Democratic Party has leaped to the extreme Left toward state-sponsored indoctrination, coercion, and federal Soviet-style central planning. It is the attempt to manufacture unity through the barrel of the state’s metaphorical gun. If followed, don’t expect unity but await irreconcilable and deepening division.

There were a few in the batch deserving of honorable mention: “Reaffirm the First Amendment” (Bauerlein), “Call out new threats to freedom in America” (Eberstadt), and “A nonpartisan, no-nonsense virus strategy” (James).

The actual cause of our division – beyond the fact that it’s natural in a democracy – is the false and malignant campus cancel culture that has entered the public square’s mainstream through one of our two institutional political parties, the Democratic Party. To paraphrase Reagan, we didn’t leave the Party; the Party left us. By left us, I mean that they went off the left-wing cliff.

If we really want to remove the road blocks to calm, reasoned deliberation, we must expunge the toxicity at the root of our inability to dialogue. Yes, noxiousness can be found on the right, but it’s a coopting of the Left’s identity-mongering. The left-wing variety has all of the backing of our cultural commanding heights. The Left has all the wind in their sails. Tune into Netflix, the networks (except Fox News), and social media with their decidedly left-wing workforces and you’ll get the monotone voice of a leftist monoculture.

Our rancor won’t disappear with a rearming of the federal government with crusades for racial reparations or an “Investigate Trump . . .”. The enmity will fade once the donkey party opens its ranks to pro-life Democrats and people who could carry the mantle of Truman, Scoop Jackson, and Hubert Humphrey. No need to worry about the crazies on the right. They’ve already been ostracized. The donkey party needs to look in the mirror and excise the radical left inquisition in control of it.

Half the country not only disagrees with them. They are justifiably afraid of them.

RogerG

January 24, 2021January 24, 2021

‘Tis the Season for Lunacy

Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, was quoted recently as saying in a comparison of the skilled-labor pools in China and the U.S., “In the U.S., you could have a meeting of tooling engineers and I’m not sure we could fill the room. In China, you could fill multiple football fields.” Other than the usual crony-capitalist plea for more H1B visas and cheap labor, what is he actually saying about our education system and the broader American culture? I construe nothing positive. We should sit up and take notice, though.

Apple CEO Tim Cook speaks during an Apple event on Monday, March 9, 2015, in San Francisco. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg)

Is he right? Is it fair to draw these implications? Mostly . . . yes and yes. For decades, from the commanding heights of our culture has come a corrupting message that has severely damaged our long-term prospects. We have incessantly advertised the idea that personal well-being is found in the possession of a piece of paper from an institution with a similarly questionable piece of accreditation paper, called a college. And this has simultaneously occurred as powerful political currents have demolished academic rigor and classroom decorum, and morphed our schools into indoctrination camps. The result is a growing class of opinionated dunces, a divorce from reality for many, and a country that has to import the brains that are capable of delivering the stuff on our Amazon wish lists.

The culture drives our problems, a culture from the individual to the family right up through the entire federal system. Human beings don’t just pop out of the ground as in Gimli’s joke about the birthing of dwarves in “The Lord of the Rings”. People are born and raised in a social setting, a setting of distracted or, at the other extreme, smothering parents who themselves were a product of the same social eco-system, as were their parents. It’s been around that long. The whole notion of practical realities is fading from the social memory. Nature abhors a vacuum and similarly our social and mental vacuum is being filled with drivel.

One of the worst ideas to come down the pike is the ethos of collectivism, or as Hillary was fond of saying: “the things we do together”. The personal accountability of the Genesis story, the prophets, and the Gospels is erased by an imperial group identity. Personal souls become group souls. Group guilt and rewards are the necessary by-product. Racial vengeance in the form of racial reparations and a check-the-box of “oppressed” identities for new hires and promotions are the expected norm. Social cohesion is the first casualty as some groups realize that they are screwed.

The past is contorted to fit the new reigning obsession, and when things go awry, as they inevitably will, more fallacies in thought and action will be implemented to cover the tracks. For instance, order in the classroom will come under attack as soon as it is discovered that suspensions by group don’t conform to neat proportionalities. The old justice for the individual turns into group justice – a noxious idea no matter where it has reared its ugly head in history, a history we are quickly forgetting. The classroom spirals downhill only to lead to more permissiveness, ad infinitum. The only operative principle to draw is never having to admit you’re wrong (from what movie?).

“Statistical disparity” enters the lexicon as the bogeyman to all things good and right. Now, we are no longer expected to look at the particular circumstances of each incident of mayhem. From the classroom to the street, some people who’ve shown the propensity to harm people and their things get essentially a free pass because any rightful application of justice trips the group’s proportionality.

Group oppression in the form of race and the ever-expanding number of phobias is the go-to explanation for the misalignment, the “statistical disparity”; thus, the rise of “systemic” racism, sexism, and the phobias to drive the left’s social engineering crusades. Using the airy adjective “systemic” makes it possible to say it without proving it. It’s impossible to prove an ill-defined abstraction. Just say it and that’s tantamount to proving it. Never entering the mind of these dunces is the possibility that social pathologies don’t conform to proportionality. But that’s roundly rejected as further proof of, you guessed it, “systemic” fill-in-the-blank. Is there something grossly absurd in this fever swamp of thinking?

Nonetheless, off we go to the land of fantasy where we find leprechauns and unicorns. And it shows in the people trashing Portland and manning (and womanning, or whatever) the Biden administration. Toppling the statues of people who established their right to believe in nonsense has been one of the miscreants’ highest priorities. Has the irony occurred to them?

Not stopping there, many coddle a fascination with socialism of almost every shade, from, once again, the people trashing Portland and manning (and womanning, or whatever) the Biden administration. Some deny it while still talking like it, like our new commander-in-chief. Has it occurred to these people that a society corseted by the overweening principle of government massively taking from one group to give to another is disruptive to national cohesion and prosperity? The coerced giver has little incentive to produce the means to give and the recipient of the largesse has little incentive to earn it. It doesn’t matter if you reclassify the waste as “investment”, a mere play on words. You’ll still end up with less of what you want – the stuff on our Amazon wish lists – and more of what you don’t – more people on the dole.

The self-styled progressives aren’t espousing Christian social teaching. Don’t fool yourself. This is social suicide. I don’t think that Thomas Aquinas had a suicide pact in mind.

What we are getting is less demanding of our people and more of a demanding people. The work ethic declines as we increasingly distance ourselves from the practical realities of life. An infatuation with leisure, individual license, a wallowing in falsehoods, and schools reflecting the morass is not likely to fill a stadium with mechanical engineers. China may not eat our lunch, but we are certainly making it possible for everybody else to do it.

Our only recourse to date would be to export the madness. Win by making others equally as corrupt. Beijing, how about taking in more of the faculty of our grad schools of education? Many of them are already with the Party program anyway.

RogerG

January 12, 2021January 12, 2021

The Monoculture’s “Triumph of the Will”

Leni Riefenstahl at work in the filming of “Triumph of the Will”.

Apple commercial that appeared on Jan. 11, 2021 during the NCAA College Football championship telecast,

*monoculture: noun; in agriculture, monoculture is the practice where a single crop, livestock species, or plant of one species that are genetically uniform at a time.

The term “monoculture” need not be limited to agriculture. It accurately applies to us and our time. It also has regurgitated throughout history. 1935 was the year of release for Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will”, a propaganda film commissioned by the Nazi Party about the 1934 Nuremburg rally (see it here with some commentary). Modern tyrannies seek to impose a uniform mind, a monoculture of thought if you will, and they have a plethora of media technologies to assist them like film and today’s Big Tech media tentacles. In 1935, the Party sought to implant the purity of the “kulture” of the German “volk”, and the Party and its Leader as the embodiment of it, as a pretext for mammoth social engineering that would lead, among other things, to the squashing of all dissent and eventually the Holocaust. Riefenstahl’s film was part of the program to further the goal of creating a Teutonic version of Rousseau’s General Will, a “will” that will not tolerate opposing views. It is happening to us, as I write, across a broad front of armies of sycophants under the command of powerful corporate boardrooms, ad agencies, Big Tech, Big Media, Big Entertainment, Big Sports (NCAA, NFL, NBA, MLB), etc.

We see the singular message everywhere from athletes’ helmets to streaming services, the networks, and commercials (like the one below). It’s a simple message: America is an oppressive society. It’s a very pernicious idea that has nothing behind it but rank repetition in our media-saturated world. The idea lies around like a loaded gun on a table in the memorable words of Justice Robert Jackson in his famous dissent in Korematsu, the 1944 Court decision that sanctioned the internment of Japanese-Americans during the WWII. He wrote that the Court in its majority opinion had “for all time…validated the principle of racial discrimination … The principle then lies about like a loaded weapon, ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need.” Today, the monoculture that dominates our cultural commanding heights is the “hand” ready to inflict on the country the loaded gun of a racial jihad and reverse Jim Crow.

Japanese-American internment camp, WWII.

Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, one of 3 dissenters in Korematsu v. United States, 1944.

The real targets of the monoculture’s purveyors are anyone who doesn’t accept the idea. Those enemies of the monoculture’s “will” were neatly summed up in Hillary Clinton’s words from 2016: “… you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it.” The tactic involves permanently branding your opponents through control of the media and endlessly repeating the slander. It’s happening right now.

It occurs when Big Tech “depltaforms” people and goes after Parler. Everyone else gets the message after a few scalps.

Look at the not-so-subtle messaging in the Apple commercial from last night’s college football telecast (see below). With a driving beat in the background, the voice-over childishly opines that “There’s a certain kind of person who won’t take no for an answer. They don’t walk in quietly. They parade in . . . status-quo breaking.” And what status quo are they breaking? Look to the placards on the wall or on a t-shirt. “Racism” and “Me Too” define that status quo: America, the racist and sexist pig. The whole ad was an incitement to bellow against “systemic” . . . anything, like the contrived-but-useful -isms or -phobias.

This is rank mental conditioning from a shallow crust at the top of our societal pyramid. The crust is not just socially shallow – a small percentage of the population living in exclusive isolation from the rest of us – but cognitively. All that they complain about are singular incidents that may or may not reflect an evil -ism, or is reliant on the numerical hocus-pocus of “statistical disparity”. The numbers may shed light on a problem, but they say next to nothing about causation. Why do African-Americans disproportionately show up in violent crime statistics? Is it because an entire system of police officers – black, white, Asian, Latino, men, women, et al – have it in for blacks? Or could it be the disproportionate presence of certain social conditions in our black communities that explain the disparity? Well, if your mental reflex is to hate America, then the “system” is your target of choice. Now, that’s a tall order – to tinker with an entire way of life – but it’s the one robust enough to justify great power for our power-seeking utopian busybodies.

Will half the country acquiesce to Big Brother’s message? Will they accept the grand social engineering crusade that will be in store for them? My guess is “No”. Deep cultural fissures already exist and the monoculture’s efforts to smash dissent will only exacerbate them. No amount of woke proselytizing by Big Tech and Big Media in their own versions of the “Triumph of the Will” will make dissenters conform.

Two brothers from Ohio at a 2018 Trump rally wearing t-shirts that said, “I’d Rather Be A Russian Than A Democrat.”

A cold civil war seems likely. I just hope and pray it won’t turn hot. It all depends on how provocative the cultural Left pushes their project of smothering those who demur. Beware Big Business, Big Tech, and Big Media, you may find yourself deplatformed by half the country.

RogerG

January 10, 2021January 11, 2021

“The Spirit of Resistance to Government”, Thomas Jefferson

If you of the revolutionary-Left persuasion are not too busy trashing Thomas Jefferson, or toppling his statue, you might take time to ponder his words. In the end, he’ll drive you crazy and into uncontrollable bouts of more rage. Check out these words.

In the wake of Shays’ Rebellion of 1786-7, Jefferson saw something benign in it. In a letter to Abigail Adams, later to James Madison, he wrote, “I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere”.

Armed farmers began appearing at courthouses shutting down proceedings to prevent foreclosures on their farms.

In a letter to John Adams’s son-in-law, “God forbid that we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion”. If the people remained quiet for too long, he claimed, “… it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty”. Jefferson wrote that if it should cost some lives it was still worth it: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time by the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure”.

Could these words be appropriated by Antifa or BLM? Well, they could if you possessed the mental sophistication of a child, which Antifa, BLM, race hustlers, and the barkers in the Democratic Party exhibit daily. Shays wasn’t fighting to create the collectivist tyranny of a Green New Deal, racial reparations, racial political exhibitionism, and a Constitutional order to keep themselves in power for a generation or more. He wanted relief from government.

There’s good reason, if you think about it, for the halfwits in The Squad, BLM, and Antifa to target Jefferson. He was a slaveholder, an identity that caused anguish for the rest of his life. He was also a proud exponent of liberty: the freedom of the individual to live a life of virtue and choose their own path of reward. The radical Left in whatever guise – socialism, communism, Antifa, BLM, the Democratic Party platform, etc. – is a movement to shackle one population through a powerful government of commissars to allegedly deliver benefits to another. The reality is a shackle for everybody. They’d be better off quoting Marx, not Jefferson.

UNSPECIFIED – CIRCA 1865: Karl Marx (1818-1883), philosopher and German politician. (Photo by Roger Viollet Collection/Getty Images)

I’m reminded of Jefferson’s words as I watched Wednesday’s mob storm the capitol. Honestly, I have as much trouble with his words pre-riot as I do post. But the event presents a clear warning for today’s power-hungry collectivists: the ghost of Daniel Shays is buried deep in the American psyche. Pushed too far, people will march on DC as they did on Springfield, Mass., in 1787.

Once again, I’m not advocating it. I’m predicting it. Pray to God that cooler heads prevail.

RogerG

January 9, 2021January 10, 2021

The Beginning of the End?

Events are moving fast. In the space of less than a year, the radical Left has moved from a few dark, dank alleys of American politics to the cusp of ramming their socialist wokeness down the throats of every American in every state and territory. Most frightening of all, this is coming as Red China is rising. How will this agenda sit with most sober Americans if it takes on the force of law? Accept, submit, or resist? Now, that’s hard to say, Wednesday’s events notwithstanding. The speed of it all is frightening to behold.

The dire straits that we find ourselves is unique, with the possible exception of the 1850’s. The federal legislature narrowly leans left; the Supreme Court tilts center-right; and the new executive will be the locus of much of the Left’s aggression. We’ve had these kinds of divisions before, but never before have we experienced an entire major political party leap so dramatically in the direction of the neo-revolutionary Left. This donkey party is no longer the place for a Truman, Adlai Stevenson, Eleanor Roosevelt’s originally-conceived Union for Democratic Action, Scoop Jackson, the anti-communist leaders of Big Labor (Walter Reuther, A. Philip Randolph, Philip Murray, et al), etc., if they were alive today.

Harry Truman, John Sparkman, and Adlai Stevenson August 12, 1952.

As it would turn out, organized socialism waned as a force in American political life not due to rejection of its beliefs, but because many of its beliefs would be resuscitated and eventually sucked into today’s Democratic Party under many guises: critical race theory, systemic racism, environmental extremism, “diversity”, and woke ideology. There’s no need for an official socialist revolutionary party. We’ve already got one in the form of the modern Democratic Party. This situation makes our divisions entirely new, much more serious, and not analogous to any previous period.

What’s coming down the pike? Already, HR 4, racial reparations, is ready to be dumped into the congressional hopper. In addition, if yesterday’s Biden/Harris press conference is any indication, a war on political opposition is in the offing. Political resistance will be branded “domestic terrorism”, a tactic remarkably similar to the Bolshevik hunts for “wreckers”, “terrorists”, and “kulaks”. The irony of all ironies is that these same people were silent as Antifa and BLM lit up cities across the country. This will be an ideological assault meant to enforce conformity.

A trial of “kulaks” during Stalin’s forced collectivization campaign, 1929.

That isn’t the end of it. The law enforcement and legal apparatus of the executive branch will be run by “diversity” zealots. That means that a campaign against nebulous “crimes” such as “hate crimes” will turn American life into a society of informers, with everyone everywhere looking over their shoulder to see if an oversensitive ear heard an innocuous but untoward remark and off they will be whisked to be questioned and fired, maybe prosecuted. Personnel is policy, so watch the names being put forward as our new commissars.

The newly empowered firebrands in Congress, and zealots under Biden and his sidekick, Harris, will be energetic in the erection of race-consciousness with force of law. It’s bad news if you’re white, male, Asian, or a “person of color” who can’t accept the Party program. If you’re young, on the margin of academic performance, and one of the disfavored, set your sights on a trade school, community college, or State U . . . if you’re lucky. The slots in the highly-prized institutions will be filled by the favored. The same will be true throughout Big Law, Big Business, Big Foundations, Big anything. Call it reverse Jim Crow.

That’s not the end of it. Central planning will migrate from the hapless and defunct Soviet Union to DC. To enforce the “diversity” decrees, a politically useful brand of “civil rights”, and to get you out of your car, job, suburban home, and live according to the dictates of the Squad, an all-encompassing state apparatus will be staffed with soulless die-hards – the hard face of utopia. The Green New Deal is Soviet central planning. Period.

And, just think, I haven’t got to the Electoral College, threats to the Supreme Court, or the neutering of the Second Amendment. With the demise of the Electoral College, red-state influence in the choice of chief executive will be shunted to the side as the presidency will come to reflect LA, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Chicago, Atlanta, Baltimore, Detroit, New York City, and the faculty lounges. An intimidated Court will not be a stopgap. FDR showed that threats can bend the Court to the president’s will. The crushing of the Second Amendment will prove that a disarmed citizenry is a very pliable one. No obstacle there. The path is laid bare for the full implementation of the revolution.

If any opposition remains to slip out into the public square, Big Media and Big Tech will be there to crush it. We’re already seeing it. “Deplatforming” is the new censorship. Young techie lefties who overwhelmingly man the monitors of Big Tech’s social media organs will be there to label disagreeable speech “violent” and thus be silenced. Google and Apple will squash any remaining outlets of free speech, as they are currently doing to Parler if it doesn’t play along. Try and get the Parler app on the Google and Apple app stores. Free speech is in the process of being flattened.

This is what happens when a monoculture dominates the cultural commanding heights of a nation. An excursion from today’s Big-anything all the way to the halls of academia is exhibiting a frightening sameness, a revolutionary-Left sameness.

It’s developing before our eyes. America is an idea nation. Other nations are for the most part ethno-national in nature. Their existence doesn’t hang from the fine thread of an idea. Once that idea is undermined – something the powerful and influential are in the process of doing – the glue of the nation is compromised. Our nation is a very delicate thing.

People will notice the threat and some will be motivated to take action. How far will they go? I hope not very, but my hopes may not be the reality. Right now, opposition to the monoculture is being boxed into a corner. Some will seek to stanch the danger by working within the system; others will seek remedies outside. Some states not so enthralled with the Party and its program may get organized to resist the monoculture’s DC behemoth. Sadly, violent eruptions and disunion may be in our future. Forces in the Democratic Party are trying to take the whole country to a place that parts of it will not and cannot accept. If the monoculture forces the issue, all bets are off.

Radical Left revolutions are ugly things. The rank and file in federal law enforcement and the armed forces may have a decision to make about whether they want to participate in the ugly thing. Do they want to be part of a radical Left revolution? Do they wish to be the secret police for a monoculture’s doctrines? Just as rapidly as a radical Left revolution is upon us, people may be forced to choose sides equally as rapid.

Democratic Party, please come to your senses. The country’s existence is at stake whether you realize it or not.

For me, my hope doesn’t lie with a change in heart of the revolutionaries. Our constitutional structure may save us. May. The revolutionary party’s hold is tenuous. Seven seats separate Kevin McCarthy from the speakership. The Senate Democrats need VP Harris and revolutionary unanimity to run roughshod. On such a narrow thread is the Court free from court-packing. The very thing that pissed off 19th and early 20th century progressives may save us: separation of powers . . . if the militants can be held at bay for two years.

The real threat comes from the zealots under Biden and his sidekick, Harris. The executive branch can do a lot of damage all by themselves. Let’s see if their actions will be enough to tear the country asunder and pave the way for Red Chinese hegemony.

I sincerely hope that my pessimism will be proven wrong.

RogerG

January 3, 2021January 4, 2021

The Party on New Year’s Day

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/.

December 29, 2020December 31, 2020

Our Schools May Be Hazardous to Our Health. For Proof, Look Around.

2017 graduation at The Ohio State University.

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.

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”.

RogerG