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.
If you have a hankerin’, go watch “The Plot Against the President” (trailer below) on Amazon Prime by Amanda Milius, daughter of legendary script writer, producer, and director John Milius. It lays out the scheme by Obama’s courtiers, and Obama himself, to undermine Trump from the moment he won the nomination to the failed impeachment on February 5, 2020. Trump had no traditional “honeymoon”, and neither is Biden deserving of one. There should be a peaceful transfer of power, but it doesn’t have to be a cooperative one.
The post-2016 Democrats were despicable in their embrace of reverse racism, a racial spoils system, turning a blind eye to rioters, and socialism here, there, and everywhere. Their behavior was disgraceful in almost all matters political. Biden’s people should be prohibited from executive branch offices till noon, January 20. A couple of briefings for Biden alone may be alright. Then, he can take the info back to his minions that are holed up in the Office of the President-elect.
Congressional Republicans, keep the heat on from day one. Senators, if you have the majority, take a few scalps, particularly those that belong to Democrats from the California snake pit. Protect Durham and anyone who might be appointed to investigate the Biden family’s influence peddling.
Is this merely a matter of “vengeance”? No. Consider it, to borrow from the romantic texts between the Strzok and Page love birds, an “insurance policy”. It’s insurance to keep the Democrats from turning America into Venezuela.
Will Biden be hampered from doing the people’s business? And what business is that? Going after your livelihood and your $45,000 SUV in your garage? Greasing the skids for the prosecution of police departments and individual officers? More lockdowns to make your kids dumber and dumber? Going after your suburban neighborhood because it is too middle class and too nice? Waking up to learn that tax-the-rich became tax-the-paycheck? More insults to Israel and fist bumps with the mullahs? Your children finding that their college application didn’t check the right genitalia and skin color boxes? Lefty ideology being taught to your kids as “equity”? DMV-style healthcare replacing your doctor? Making it more difficult for you to get a gun as they open the jails, budgetarily strangle your police, and refuse to prosecute the guy breaking into your home and car?
Considering all that the Biden regime plans to offer, gridlock sounds good to me. At least, we’ll be spared the woke and neo-socialist claptrap.
Solar panel array in Irwindale, California. (photo: Ringo Chiu/Zuma)
Here I am with another piece on the ongoing and grotesque burlesque show in my native state of California. This one is about the inevitability of oppressive central planning that grips the progressive mind in the state. There seems to be this fetish for the power to control everything and everyone to get to the ruling claque’s rapturous end state. They need a cataclysm to stampede the state’s hoi polloi into their arms. For them, nothing better fits the bill than their fixation on “climate change” and the companion thought that the Golden State and, if they capture DC, the US will lead the way to the nirvana of Sierra Club policy papers.
I was reading Kevin Williamson’s fairly balanced essay in National Review’s October issue, “The Heart of California’s Darkness”, and it dawned on me that the political power-hunger in the heart of every California progressive (or liberal, or leftist, or whatever) is, in some ways, more complete than anything that came out of the old Soviet Union. The USSR was a contraption that couldn’t run because it combined two incompatible things: complete equality in all things material and a prosperous life filled with conveniences. The former undercut the latter, and down it came after about 80 years. The crazies that run Sacramento are after something more sweeping.
Frankly, they don’t care so much about conveniences as they do about their religious-like adherence to an arbitrary sense of environmentalist purity best articulated by the immature utterances of people like 17-year-old Greta Thunberg and her ideological soulmate, Ocasio-Cortez. They won’t even make allowance for the desire for comfort in life. One of the greatest additions to comfort, alongside the automobile and balloon housing construction (makes the ‘burbs possible), was air conditioning. All of them are on the hit list for eventual elimination.
Ocasio-Cortez and Thunberg
The only problem is that the peasants would be seeking their pitch forks if the zealots shocked them with a huge and immediate dose of their vision. So, the fanatics seek to slowly strangulate our conveniences under think layers of regulations and edicts emanating from a politburo of the ruling party’s elders and the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC).
The Party has supportive cadres in affiliated institutions such as publicly-funded universities to help them invent new schemes to herd the masses in the desired direction. One such contributor in the achievement of the Party’s goal is comrade Severin Borenstein of UC Berkeley’s Energy Institute at the Haas Business School. He’s an enthusiast for tying electricity rates to the time of day when their most needed. If you don’t find ways to cut back on air conditioning, you’re deserving of bankruptcy in the fevered imaginations of people like Severin.
Severin Borenstein
And this comes at a time when the air is fouled by earlier escapades into environmentalist utopia that turned the forests into a blanket of matchsticks. So, if his wish comes to pass, you, my fair resident of the state, will have the privilege of coming home to a hot and stuffy house to sweat and bake in. That’s what you get for not desiring to live in a cramped and over-priced hovel in the narrow band of real estate hugging the coast. The abject inhumanity at the heart of the worldview is what’s so appalling.
The fact is, California’s version of Lenin’s vanguard elite is trying to shoehorn reality into an unreality. It won’t work any more than the Five-Year Plans of Lenin and his descendants. See, the sun and wind don’t cooperate so you must be made to cooperate. According to the California Energy Commission (another Party affiliate), energy capacity has indeed increased in the past 20 years as the activists in power shifted to renewables. But not so fast. “Capacity” – which could be another one of those statistical fairy tales – must not be confused with “generation”. Generation of electricity has been flat, even declining slightly in the face of population growth. Accepting energy from hydrocarbons from inside or outside the state to make up the difference between demand and supply gives the ruling class the willies, and nuclear power conjures visions of old monster movies. What you end up with is blackouts and/or personal bankruptcy – not exactly an open-arms invitation to move to the state.
This is no way to live. Not surprisingly, 800 businesses have jumped ship in one year from 2018 to 2019 to join thousands of others in the diaspora. California is not the future, so long as its goofy vision is quarantined within its borders. That’s an open question given the fact that California acolytes of central planning are auditioning for national promotions in the new Biden administration.
If left alone, California will suffer the same fate as the Soviet Union. One can only hope . . . and pray. The death of the hot mess is the only thing that’ll keep the rest of us safe and secure. Now that’s real herd immunity.
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
AEI scholar and contributor Frederick Hess in his piece “The oddest sort of progressivism” lays bare the wacky idea of wiping clean $1.6 trillion in student loan debt.
Chiefly, the idea is pushed most heartily by the people most likely to benefit: the people who staff the 200 progressive organizations – not the purported constituents – who last week petitioned Biden to do it “on day one” with a stroke of his pen. The whole thing is a ploy to transfer wealth from those who didn’t go to college and those who worked their way through cheaper schools to grad school graduates at pricey private schools and those who pursued grievance instruction in identity politics departments. Simply put, the equation goes something like this: money will flow from skilled tradesman and those working their way through school to those who’ll earn about $1 million more in lifetime income and rioters demolishing monuments and blowing up our cities. The former could be excused for thinking themselves to be chumps and suckers as the latter laugh all the way to the bank. This kind of thing turns the shiftless and conniving aristocrats in 18th-century Versailles into paragons of virtue.
People in the skilled trades. Many of these people worked their way through community college or trade school and have little accrued student loan debt, if any. Plus, they are more employable and better able to repay their much smaller loans than those who spent 4 years, in addition to a couple of years of grad school, for their Social Science or law school degree.
The biggest chunk, some 40% of the debt, was accrued for grad study “by doctors, lawyers, and other professionals in pursuit of lucrative credentials” according to Hess. Add to that, the gambit does nothing to address the colleges’ complicity in the skyrocketing tuitions that drive much of the debt. Easy student loans mean more breathing room for college administrations to hike rates and offer instructional silliness. What do you get for the higher price? Certainly not a better education. The grievance industrial complex is too well entrenched in many Humanities, Social Science, and identity politics departments. Many students will matriculate their way through and come out only equipped for political activism, while facing a student loan bill that neither their activism nor barista job can afford.
Here’s an idea: put the colleges on the hook for their graduates’ inability to repay. I can’t think of a better way to use Harvard’s $42 billion endowment. The taxpayers shouldn’t be saddled with a debt that was stimulated by administrative flights of fancy in the absence of accountability. Make them as answerable as we are in meeting our mortgage. As such, all of us will be further advantaged by no longer having to submit to the half-witted sermons of grievance politics graduates. That industry could very well dry up as schools quickly realize that “… Studies” degree programs are drawing down the school’s bank account.
Let’s ignore the crony capitalist pleas of the self-interested and, instead, make the schools responsible for the quality of their instruction and the occupational fate of their students. Now that’s an idea I can support. How about you?
Mail-in ballots in Chicago, Ill., waiting for postal delivery for the November 3 election.
One way to perpetuate the politically useful cause of combatting racism is to proclaim its existence in such a manner as to make the charge unable to be disproven by announcing it to be abstract or systematic. Leaving aside the patent illogic of it all, our political practitioners of irrationality have hit upon something. The form of something, take our election system for instance, is just as important as the content of it. It’s just that the woke crowd’s preferred use of “system” is pure nonsense.
Break the election system into two parts: the distribution and the processing of the ballots. First, the distribution. Thanks to COVID-hysteria, across the country we went on a binge of early voting, voting by mail, ballot harvesting, and essentially eliminating the measures to ensure ballot integrity and validity. In other words, we legalized what in another era used to be called fraud or cheating. Slipping ballots in early used to be one tactic to game an election. Another was to grab a handful of ballots and hand them to God knows who to do God knows what, like in our own time mailing the things to addresses across the universe. In another time, it was considered the fraudulent abuse of the absentee ballot procedure. This set the stage for the party of one-party fiefdoms and urban political machines – Remember Missouri’s Pendergast ring or Gotham’s Tammany Hall? – to legally do overtly what they used to do covertly.
I’m reminded of Robert Caro’s The Means of Ascent, the second volume of his series on the life of the 36th President of the United States, Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ). Of particular note is LBJ’s successful and dubious elevation to Texas senator in 1948. Much that he did to steal the election from Gov. Coke Stevenson was legalized for today by the “crisis too good to waste”. Late registrations, new ballots mysteriously showing up, the whole mail-in shebang of today making it possible for one person to manufacture unknown multiples of votes, ballot harvesters hunting down warm bodies who can be cajoled to vote – and vote the “right” way – and legally diluted verification measures turned past crimes into permissible election procedures.
No wonder there’s little evidence of widespread fraud. Much of what fell under criminal fraud became, all of a sudden, statutorily permissible, or at least, with a wink and a nod, excusable. There was little fraud because fraud was legitimized by the pandemic.
You don’t need to resort to nefarious activities in processing, or counting, the ballots to manufacture the desired result. The whole system of distribution was fenagled to make a predetermined end more likely.
So, you will hunt in vain for old-style fraud like stuffing the ballot boxes because we’ve made it easy to do the same thing under cover of law in the distribution of the pieces of paper. Try and do the same thing with larceny, murder, and rape and see how far you get. This election was systematically a sham, period.
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.
Men sit passed out in a park where heroin users gather to shoot up in the Bronx on May 4, 2018 in New York City. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
America is being trashed from our institutions to our public squares. Look around, roving gangs of cultural and historical illiterates – the uneducated educated – are defacing monuments; downtowns are torched by the very same hordes; public spaces are turned into graffitied homeless encampments with feces and hypodermic needles in a sickening sphere of influence overlapping the places that used to be for rollicking kids and families; and the whole thing spills into our politics. Elections are a pandemonium filled with the hyperbole to remake or tear down America while the chief malefactors designed an election system that made it easy to game. In essence, the rules of the election game function as a game without rules since they are so elastic, confusing, and contradictory with early and earlier voting, voting after election day after the intervention of unconstitutional actors, shot gunning ballots through the mail like the confetti falling from the ceiling after a NCAA national championship game, many jurisdictions lacking the will or ability to verify the ballots, and local Democrat-dominated election boards acting like feudal lords over their fiefdoms and flaunting any rules that do exist. Sounds like the wholesale trashing of America to me.
Mail-in ballots on the floor at the Park East Terrace Apartments, Paterson, NJ, May, 5, 2020.Three mail-in ballots on the ground in the Park East Terrace complex, Paterson, NJ, May 5, 2020.
After the bill is totaled for this parade of the grotesque that we call an election season, we’ll have come to realize that big money was fully on board with the party of big government, the Democrats. Bloomberg was committed to spending $150 million to bring down Trump and his supporters. He ended up ladling $106,000,000. Is there any doubt about the stance of Silicon Valley and its tributaries? Zuckerberg himself answered that question in testimony to Congress – “extremely left-leaning”. Reid Hoffman (Microsoft, LinkedIn) spewed $7.6 million with $1 million each for Schumer’s slush fund and the Biden affiliate Unite the Country. His wife, Michelle Yee, pumped half a million into Biden’s coffers. Allen Blue (LinkedIn), Kevin Scott (Microsoft), Brad Smith (Microsoft), Sheryl Sandberg (Facebook), David Zapolsky (Amazon), Steven Kessel (Amazon), Douglas Vetter (Apple), Eric Schmidt (Alphabet), Reid Hastings and wife (Netflix), and a host of others opened the cash floodgates to the tune of six to seven figures to the left of the decimal point. Do you have any doubts about where K St. and big finance ended up?
Paul McCartney was right in singing “money can’t buy me love”, but it can buy a Mafia-like organization with its many “soldiers” to stretch the waist-line elastic of an election system that was refashioned for any size belly.
George Soros
The drumroll of tycoons backing (or banking) the Democrats includes the usual suspects such as Warren Buffett, George Soros, Tom Steyer, etc., etc., etc. What’s happening with the rich for them to be lining up behind a party whose political carnival barkers profess to hate them . . . or in reality bilk them? The quandary can’t be easily answered except as a commonality of values and worldview. The coed blathering about evils of George Washington as she affixes a rope around his statue’s neck, the corporate heads of Alphabet, and the rest of the Fortune 500 CEO’s have more beliefs in common than they do with the owner of a local hardware store.
The CEO and the miscreant came to the same ideological place because they arose from the same subcultural ether: the upper third of American life. Through their wealthy metropolitan suburbs, prep schools, and the Ivy League, they are of the mind to either bankroll the Democratic Party to the left or subsidize the pillaging of the country, as the Party’s media darlings – from the same subcultural soup, by the way – wobble around trying to justify the madness. For today’s left, some got rich and others hit the streets from their safe perch on campus.
Reid Hoffman, Eric Schmidt, Dustin Moskovitz, and Laurene Powell Jobs, Silicon Valley’s new power set, are instrumental to fulfilling Democrats’ four-year-long quest to oust Donald Trump. People take turns stomping the Christopher Columbus statue after it was toppled in front of the Minnesota State Capitol in St. Paul, Minn., on Wednesday, June 10, 2020. (photo: Leila Navidi/Star Tribune via Associated Press)
Today’s nouveau riche are accretions to yesterday’s. American has no official aristocracy, but we do have an unofficial one. It’s anyone with the critical mass of wealth. Millionaires alone don’t count any more. A family pedigree with trust-fund millions and multi-billionaires do. Possession of the equivalent of the GDP of a Central American country is the entry point into America’s nobility of today. No invitation from the queen (Michelle Obama?) is required. The newly arrived add to a polymorphous Patricii.
For the old gentry, someone somewhere down the family tree joined the ranks of the filthy rich and passed it to their scions. Do the Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, Kennedys, and Waltons remind you of anyone? Add to them the newly minted gazillionaires. John Adams writing in the 18th century extensively wrote on the troubling happenstance of a “natural aristocracy” in America. The Rockefellers, Kennedys, et al, would be the Boston Brahmins of the Bradlees, Brinleys, and Lowells to Adams. He saw their narrow-minded ambition and avariciousness as a threat to the republic. They were “always the most dangerous” class and if unrestrained they would be the “destruction of the commonwealth”. That’s the reason for his support for corralling them in their own house of the legislature, a senate. Once penned, they could be flanked by a chief executive and lower house.
Harvard University students in the 1870s. The “Boston Brahmins” and their progeny kept close ties to the most prestigious institutions. (Bettmann Archive via Getty Images)
Today, our Senate is in no position to perform that function after the passage of the 17th Amendment (1913). The hyper-rich with their newly acquired gazillions have nowhere to go but be like Caesar: buy the affections of the plebes with bread and circuses, or lavish campaign contributions. There’s nothing quite like having a mob on-call. Caesar could well understand. George Soros has much in common with Julius.
What has this agglomeration of our “betters” given us? Their influence, after all, is everywhere. Our public squares under this cultural miasma seemed to have been inspired by the spare, stern, and hard face of the “beast of Belsen”, Irma Greese (see below). Look at these spaces, and then at her.
Irma Ida Ilse Grese (7 October 1923 – 13 December 1945) was an SS guard at the Nazi concentration camps of Ravensbrück and Auschwitz, and served as warden of the women’s section of Bergen-Belsen.Boston’s City Hall Plaza
Whether they be an open space in a planned development or a courtyard in front of a high-rise, they resemble military parade grounds studded with an odd, out-of-place thing, a “sculpture”, that has more in common with the glacial eratics dotting the landscape of the Scablands of eastern Washington state. New York City’s Hudson Yards has the freak “Vessel”.
The VesselAn erratic in the Scablands of eastern Washington state. It was deposited here by late ice age glacial floods. Its geology is unrelated to the geology of its current location. It is an “erratic” for this reason.
New York City seems to be dotted with these sculptural eratics. Another one is the now-deceased “Tilted Arc” (by Richard Serra) in Manhattan’s Foley Federal Plaza. It proved to be a visible and physical contradiction, like all walls, to the very purpose for a plaza: social intercourse, interaction, and “inter- “anything involving human beings. Luckily, wiser heads prevailed and the thing was torn down and hauled off to the scrapyard in 1989.
The Tilted ArcA lesson in urban beauty and a counterpoint to our military parade grounds: the gardens of the Fontaine de Nîmes in France. The park had the advantage of incorporating preexisting Roman ruins, and they were with stunning effect. The French architects, Jacques-Philippe Mareschal and Pierre Dardailhon, at the behest of King Louis XV in the 1740’s, created an inviting outdoor experience for pedestrians of all ages. The Walt Disney Concern Hall, Los Angeles, Ca.
The buildings surrounding the parade grounds – aka “plazas” – could be jumbled eyesores like LA’s Disney Concert Hall or the structural boxes that were animated by Germany’s Bauhaus movement or Rommel’s Atlantic Wall. Long gone are the graceful lines of neo-classicism with its adornments. Long gone are the interplay of nature, terraces, columns, and balustrades in our green spaces. It seems that our urban landscapes were inspired by the Soviet Union . . . or worse. The setting for the Vessel would be just as fitting for a guillotine.
A fortification in Rommel’s Atlantic Wall.The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, Marcel Breuer architect.The new House Gropius, designed by Bruno Fioretti Marquez Architects, is built on the basement of the original, the only part to survive the bombings in WW2. (Photo: Christoph Rokitta / Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau)
The only applicable interplay in modern architecture is the one between ideology and design. Speaking of long gone, long gone are defined boundaries and the architectural axis. The limits to a public space are the imposing and ominous structures that resemble Mussolini’s Fascist Party headquarters in Rome, or busy traffic lanes. The spaces are boundless except for the grim and graceless stare of these giants.
Mussolini’s Fascist Party headquarters in Rome.The MetLIfe Building, New York City.The Seagram Building, New York City.
The formlessness comports well with the unquestioned obedience to the belief in the tabula rasa of the mind among our so-called cultural superiors. To many of them, there are no preordained limits, only those that we choose to plug and unplug into our self-identity. If we can’t see their function because our minds are too superficial, they are to be discarded like so much rubble in front of a bulldozer’s blade. Functionalism replaces order and standards.
Michael Lewis, architecture critic, The Wall Street Journal.
Michael Lewis writing in National Review Magazine makes the case: “… after World War I, modernists abolished the axis, as well as a good many thrones and altars, and replaced it with the idea of flowing space. Paths of movement were to be efficient and functional, without any ceremonial hierarchy, suggesting freedom of motion in any direction. Where the public square was once a kind of bounded outdoor room, it was now a mere incident along boundless space.” It’s now considered a social good for people to intellectually and morally emasculate themselves, just like their public spaces.
And, boy, are we emasculating ourselves. The moral and intellectual castration began in earnest when it started its march through our governmental institutions. Official sanction was given for our urban outdoors to be turned into an open sewer. San Francisco began its slide into the gutter when in 1961 it announced that it would no longer enforce its vagrancy laws. The idea went national when the Supreme Court in 1972 issued one of its decrees in Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville that abolished such laws. Contemporaneously, the doors of our mental asylums were flung wide open and the number of inmates plunged from 559,000 in 1955 to 72,000 in 1994. Adding insult to injury, in 1975, the Supreme Court once again piled on with its ruling in O’Connor v. Donaldson. After the Court jumped into the fray with O’Connor, we could no longer reinstitutionalize because another one of the Court’s infamous “tests” made confinement a Sisyphean task.
A woman walks toward friends at a homeless encampment where she lives next to the Interstates 101 and 280 in San Jose, California, on Saturday, February 3, 2018. (LiPo Ching/Bay Area News Group Archives)
Where would the released end up? You guessed it. They congregated in those open spaces meant for kids and families. And thus, our open spaces became informal convention centers for junkies, the mentally troubled, and the bachelor herds that we often call youth gangs. Who wants to go to the park, with or without COVID hysteria? It’s far safer to ride out the horrors beyond your home’s walls with your internet, smartphone, and video games. Hopefully, you’ll have a gun in case what’s outside makes its way inside . . . if your local sovereigns haven’t regulated the 2nd Amendment into oblivion, or, God forbid, defunded the local PD.
COVID became the go-to excuse to further malform our existence. We’re trashing our faces with masks for God’s sake. The masks, social distancing, and lockdowns have killed romance, our children’s schooling, and given us a scorched earth through our economy. Church, Thanksgiving, and Christmas are redubbed super-spreader events.
All of this has come to us not from scientists and medical practitioners, but from lawyers. For some reason, the strong scent of power is irresistible to those who passed the bar. Our governmental pyramid is filled with them. Only a handful have a PhD after their name.
Oh, they, the JD’s, claim that’s what the “science” says. But they don’t understand what the science says any more than my grocery store’s stocking clerk. If I had to bet on the one with the most knowledgeable of science, my money would be on the clerk. To borrow from James Carville, just like one could trawl through a mobile home park with $5 on a fishing line and hook many Paula Joneses, so I could wade my way through the halls of almost any professional building with that very same $5 and hook any number of lawyers.
Anthony Fauci all masked up.
And, also, you might snag a few politicized “experts” along the way. “Experts” are notorious for having the blinders of a racehorse. They frequently have little empathy for competing “experts” and look at the world through their narrow professional prism. If you want a sure path to hell, find yourself a narrow claque of “experts”, follow their advice to the last punctuation mark, and then scramble for excuses as things fall apart, for them and the rest of us.
These trashed times come to us courtesy of a certain political class with cramped cultural antecedents. With a few politicized “experts” in tow, they have left an inhospitable living space in their wake. We can’t go to work, school, church, see grandma, and experience Christmas cheer due to their singular approach to a science that the lawyers don’t understand, but their patronizing “experts” do, but to the exclusion of any other consideration. If we are ever again allowed to go outside, we’d be reacquainted with the marred urban surroundings that they knowingly and unknowingly left behind.
Trashed elections. Smothered public life. Venturing outside is a walk on the wild side. Our cityscapes are an affront to decency and good sense. The waterboarding of life through a return to lockdowns, school closures, mandatory masks, social distancing, and all along knowing it didn’t work the first time. Other than that, what’s there to complain about?
