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Panic in the Age of Trump

Walmart, Sandpoint, Id., paper goods isle on Sunday, 5/15/2020.

The photo (above) is of the paper goods isle of Walmart, Sandpoint, Id., on Sunday, 3/15/2020. A  young mother with a couple of kids in tow had 2 30-roll bricks of toilet paper in her cart, the only tp that I saw in the entire store.  Is this what modern-America panic looks like?

Shoppers at BJ’s Wholesale Club market at the Palisades Center mall in West Nyack, N.Y., March 14, 2020. (Mike Segar/Reuters)

On that same day, we rolled into a gas-‘n-stop for fuel and corn nuts.  A fellow customer waiting in line mentioned a wild rumor on social media that Trump is considering the closing of the interstates.  Panic, once again, in the age of Trump?

Our eyes and ears are saturated with “pandemic” and doctors on tv with warnings galore. Social interaction has become a dirty word.  It’s “coronavirus this” and “coronavirus that” everywhere we look.  Is America starting to resemble in thought and deed the America of the 1938 radio broadcast “War of the Worlds” by Orson Welles?

Are we, modern sophisticates, really so “above that”?  I doubt it in the age of Trump.  Trumpophobes see all external stimuli with real or imagined evil intent as emanating from Trump.  “Trump’s Katrina” is bandied about in the same manner as “abortion” and “control of her body” comes off the lips of Madonna.

Maybe what’s at work is something I call “vortex thinking”.  Most everything of consequence today goes down two vortices: Trump and climate change.  The Polar Vortex of a few years back, with its bone-chilling temps, was blamed on … global warming.  A tornado that passes through your backyard is pinned on … global warming.  Etc., etc.  Regarding Trump, anything that’s bad in your life is due to … Trump.  Everything that’s bad to anyone at any given time is placed at the feet of Trump.

George Will – no fan of Trump by any means – calls the phenomena “Caesaropapism”.  Our presidents are now accorded demigod status.  They are expected to control the tides in the manner of Persian king Xerxes flogging the Hellespont for destroying his pontoon bridge in the advance of his invasion of Greece in 480 BC.

Xerxes’s soldiers flogging the Hellespont.

Depending on the group of boosters, a president is saintly or evil incarnate. He or she is expected to be a master marionette controlling the actions of 330 million individuals.  Does “sophistication” now mean thinking like a 5-year-old?  Apparently so.

Right now, we are experiencing the first natural disaster to be pinned on the next-Republican-president-in-line.  Bush 41 was pasted with the rather mild recession of 1991-1992. Bush 43 had his hurricane.  Trump’s is COVID-19.

What separates a hurricane and a virus from an economic downturn is the fact that recessions are, indeed, man-caused.  They may occur due to a constellation of actions that were taken earlier in a president’s term, or, more likely, they erupt from the gestation of factors unleashed long before he took the oath.  Ditto for the good economic times.  For instance, back in 2008-9, the bills came due after many years of easy money and political pressures to extend mortgages to financially insecure people.  Obama rode it to the presidency.  Ironically, his wing of the Dem Party had a big role in setting up the dominoes.

Now we have the coronavirus.  Yeah, it’s unique … like all the previous strains were unique.  Sure, take all the practical mitigations available but remember, this thing, like the earlier ones, will have to run its course.  We have one thing going for us: we aren’t the Athens of 480 BC, or Constantinople of 541-542, or Europe of the mid-14th century.

The Triumph of Death by Pieter Bruegel, 1562, is a famous painting that relates to the Black Death of the 1340’s.

Please, get some perspective … and stop hoarding the toilet paper!

RogerG

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Go See “Richard Jewell”

Not to see Clint Eastwood’s latest film “Richard Jewell” is to engage in citizenship malpractice.

The real Richard A. Jewell, 1997. (photo: Greg Gibson/Associated Press, 1997)

Every citizen should see Eastwood’s portrayal of how well-meaning people in powerful government positions, allied to rambunctious reporters, can be so awfully wrong and mature into a malevolent force without even knowing it.  It’s how prosecutors can pursue an individual, wrongfully convict the person, pursue harsh sentencing, and resist any effort to set the record straight.  It’s how investigations are pursued on the flimsiest of “probable cause” and can morph into other investigations because it is heartily believed that the guy must have committed some crime somewhere, somehow.  Does this remind you of the events leading to the current impeachment melee?

A notion gets stuck in the craw of government officials – call it a “profile”, an expectation about the kind of person who commit these sinful acts – and persists until action is taken to the detriment of all.  Richard Jewell was slapped by the powers-that-be as symptomatic of the “hero syndrome” (creating a situation or crime to become a hero).  The media’s and the FBI’s “rush to judgment” led to Jewell’s public humiliation as the Olympic Park bomber in 1996 – only 7 years later to find the real culprit, Eric Rudolph.

Eric Robert Rudolph being escorted from the Cherokee County Jail for a hearing in federal court in 2003 after being on the run for five years.

False ideas creep into the heads of mighty people in a burgeoning and energetic federal government.  And if these people have guns, watch out!  It’s how we can have a Ruby Ridge (1992).  It’s how we can experience a Waco (assault on David Koresh’s compound, 1993).  It’s how we can have serial investigations of a presidential candidate as a “Russian mole”, and later to try to pin something else on him when the first effort failed in the belief that he’s still corrupt to the core.

The Branch Davidian compound, Waco, Tx., Feb.28, 1993.

There’s something in the government ether from the 1990’s to the present that is so insidious.  No, it’s not a “deep state”.  It’s something endemic – or generic – to government.  The Founders’ idea of government as a necessary evil is as true today as it ever was.  It’s a lesson we had better repeatedly teach ourselves and our young.

RogerG

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Speaking Truth to Power

“Speaking truth to power” became a cliché by people wearing fake vaginas on their heads the day after Trump’s inauguration in January 2017.  Well, take a look at “speaking truth to power”, the culturally powerful, or the culturally privileged – aka, Hollywood – by Golden Globe host, Ricky Gervais, last night.  The line about most of those folks, all prettied up in tuxes and gowns, being less educated than Greta Thunberg rings oh-so-true.  Take that Tom Hanks and Leonardo DiCaprio.

I was stunned and couldn’t believe my eyes and ears.  The whole monologue was great, but the spicy parts occurred in the last couple of minutes.  It was far better than the speeches by the cranial vacuum-tubed luminaries.  Enjoy.

RogerG

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Break Up the Nest

Kudos to Senators Josh Hawley (R, Mo.) and Marsha Blackburn (R, Tn.) for attempting to really drain the swamp.  Their bill, S. 2672, would move “90% of the positions in 10 Cabinet-level departments out of D.C.”  What a great idea: break up the place!  The thought occurred to me some time ago as the Trump-collusion imbroglio was gaining steam and I was reading Geof Shepard’s “The Real Watergate Scandal” on my Kindle.  Come to think of it, a real state depression in DC wouldn’t be such a bad thing for the country.

Blackburn and Hawley.

All those minions scurrying about DC have created a world all their own.  The progressives of the late 19th century assured us that the halcyon days of good government would be upon us if only more power was deposited in the hands of degreed professionals who were educated to treat all of reality as a matter for “science”.  In other words, people like themselves.

Ironically, they ignored the implications of the “science” of people both as individuals and in large groups.  People are simultaneously self-serving and altruistic, and not in equal measure – usually to the detriment of altruism.  As a collective, they create a distinct society with its own norms and expectations.  It’s a world unto itself.

The skyline of Washington, D.C., including the U.S. Capitol building, Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial, and National Mall, is seen from the air, January 29, 2010. (Saul Loeb/AFP)

A trip into the world of the Watergate scandal sheds light on the brave new world of this administrative state.  Let’s examine 3 prominent characters in the now bastardized but popular version of the story: Clark Mollenhoff, Mark Felt, and Bob Woodward.

Mollenhoff was a DC reporter and well-connected lawyer and friend of presiding judge John Sirica (Sirica is another of these networked DC folks).  Not only was he well-connected, he got a position in the first year of the Nixon White House.  His ambition to have direct access to Nixon and be Nixon’s premier sage was thwarted by learning that he would have to work under Haldeman and Ehrlichman.  The job didn’t last much longer than a year.  He becomes another of the disgruntled operatives – one among many thousands populating the District – roaming about looking for outlets for their scorn.  In clearly improper, if not illegal, ex-parte meetings with Sirica, he would fill that coveted role of “sage”.

Clark Mollenhoff

Mark Felt, ex-Associate Director of the FBI, is another example of a person with stymied high aspirations.  Passed over for the FBI directorate – it was handed to L. Patrick Gray – he simmered as second fiddle.  He willingly became an espionage agent for Bernstein and Woodward as “Deep Throat”.

Former FBI official W. Mark Felt arrive at federal court in Washington 9/18 for the continuation of his trial on charges of approving illegal break-ins during the Nixon Administration.

Finally, what about Bob Woodward?  He made his name in DC circles as an aide to Admiral Thomas Hinman Moorer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.  His connections would be useful in his second career as WaPo muckraker.

Carl Bernstein, left, and Robert Woodward, who pressed the Watergate investigation, in Washington, D.C., May 7, 1973. (photo: AP)

What to make of all this?  The country is governed in a bog-like slough of cliques, the excessively ambitious, and self-serving inter-relationships.  If you’re an outsider from Ashtabula, beware!

Trump, does this sound familiar?

Forget all that stuff about rule by the people.  Progressives bequeathed to us a government of an unaccountable nomenklatura.

That’s right, Blackburn and Hawley, we have no realistic recourse but to break it up!  Break it up, and do so quickly.

 

RogerG

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Not Making Sense

The Getty Fire burns near the Getty Center along the 405 freeway north of Los Angeles, California, U.S. October 28, 2019. (REUTERS/ Gene Blevins)

We aren’t well-served by the mass of our journalists or schools.  Frequently as a simple reader or teacher I’ve come away from an article or textbook treatment of a topic with a lingering sense of bafflement.  The stories don’t make much sense.

As a History teacher, for example, the common treatment of the Great Depression is awash in incoherence.  Blame is placed on greed and “over-production”.  What?!  “Over-production” is everywhere present in an economy and is corrected by sell-offs with no hint of a depression, let alone a “great” one.  As for “greed”, it’s been with us since Eve met the serpent, maybe before.  It wasn’t invented by the 1920’s.

The New Deal’s answer for “overproduction” and the decline in agricultural prices.

Plus, the authors don’t attempt to explain why the thing lasted so long.  The greed and over-production mantras are presented as a set-up for a love affair with FDR and all things New Deal. Interestingly the horror persisted and even worsened in ’36-’37.  Textbooks and teacher training are composed of the long march of banalities, and we’re spreading the bunk to the youngins.

Ditto for news stories.  Descriptions of today’s happenings are often muddled.  Take for instance The Atlantic’s Annie Lowrey in her piece, “California Is Becoming Unlivable”.  The “unlivable” part of California is ascribed to the underlying factors of climate change and high housing costs.  Both, according to Lowrey, led to California’s fires.  The high cost of housing forced development into the wildland urban interface (WUI). Her answer is the totalitarian urge to herd people into apartment complexes, something the commissars in Sacramento have been trying to accomplish for at least a couple of decades.  Could this have something to do with the high cost of housing?  Something about the dementia of “doing the same thing and expecting a different result” comes to mind.

Could this be their vision for the future of California housing?

Mulberry Street, NYC, circa 1900.

Of course they won’t leave the topic without throwing the fire epidemic into the climate change vortex.  But the climate change god doesn’t just pick on California.  It’s a global phenomenon.  What has turned California into matchsticks is a combination of its dry-summer climate, with its El Diablo winds, and the clowns in Sacramento.  Wildland fire suppression tactics are so passé among the ruling class of lefties in Sacramento.  Though, in the dry-summer chaparral biomes, it’s like playing with firecrackers in a refinery.

The clowns try to hide their incompetence behind a barrage of charges against the utility companies.  They can only get away with it under conditions of collective amnesia.  PG&E and the rest of the gang are under the PUC’s thumb and its lefty hobby horses.  Hardening the grid in a dry-summer climate takes second fiddle to dreams of a greenie energy utopia.  After piling up the firewood under the weakly-maintained power lines, the goofs are shocked that physics takes over.  Astounding!

A power line goes up in flames along a hillside as the Cocos Fire continues to burn in San Marcos, California May 15, 2014. (REUTERS/Mike Blake)

Parents beware of the indoctrination of your kids.  Additionally, you have to be leery of the network news and print and digital publications.  I’m beginning to wonder about the benefits of ignorance when compared to propaganda.  Mmmm, something to think about?

RogerG

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The Order of the Day: Lies, Lies, Lies

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren in a May interview in Iowa Falls. (Daniel Acker/For The Washington Post)

I remember a conversation with a friend and colleague who appeared to be apoplectic about Donald Trump’s lies during the campaign and up to the aftermath of the inauguration (when the exchange ended). Wow, looking back on it, over-stating crowd sizes seems awfully pale when compared to the whoppers coming out of the mouths of Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden, Lena Dunham, Jussie Smollett, and the adolescent Amari Allen at Immanuel Christian School. They have in common a desire to exploit ritual identity-victimhood, the central tenet of being “woke”.

Whew, let’s take ’em one at a time. Warren’s angle is to peddle a Native American heritage that doesn’t exist for professional advancement. She compounds the error by spreading a tale of losing a job for being pregnant, also fully debunked. At least the second tall tale takes advantage of something that she quite clearly is: a woman.

Former Vice President Joe Biden campaigns for president in Davenport, Iowa, on June 11, 2019. (Photo: Joshua Lott/Getty Images)

After Warren, we have Biden. This guy is famous for his whoppers. The one that should be most irritating is his rendition of the traffic accident that killed his wife and daughter. He bellows that they died at the hands of drunk driver. Sorry, Joe, not true. The authorities at the time said alcohol wasn’t involved and even more interestingly concluded that Mrs. Biden was the cause of the collision when she strayed into the truck’s path. What’s more galling is Biden’s sliming of the other driver as one who “drinks his lunch”. The man’s family demands a retraction. This is more than a mistake on Biden’s part; it’s evidence of a Biden character flaw.

If that’s not enough, along comes the mouth of the lefty celebrity community, Lena Dunham. She claims in her book that she was raped in college by, what else, a white College Republican. The only problem: it ain’t true. In fact, her publisher had to shell out a settlement to the innocent accused. Is there a congenital connection between being woke and lying? One wonders.

The fictions continue with the little Amari Allen at Immanuel Christian. It just so happens to be the place of part-time employment for Karen Pence, and, of course, being a place of traditional Christianity – the LGBTQ agenda is an awkward fit there.

Karen Pence at Immanuel Christian School. (Carolyn Kaster/Associated Press)

Well, anyway, the little girl came home with a story of abuse and physical assault by, what else, some white boys. The only problem – you guessed it – it ain’t true. At the time, for our woke press, it was a two-fer: racism, racism everywhere, and the VP’s wife is a functionary of the white racist machine.

Do you see a pattern here? I do. The woke folks are so enthusiastic about their lefty social engineering that they’ll defame anyone and anything to get there.

I can’t stop here. Does the slander of the Duke lacrosse team remind you of anything? How about the alleged rape culture at U. of Virginia, courtesy of Rolling Stone, and subsequently and fully discredited? The despicable and wild tales of Kavanaugh’s youth? Come on, let’s call them what they are: lies. Don’t be a bit surprised that more deceits lay in store after the completion of the investigation of the investigators of Russia-gate and whistleblower-gate.

I’ll ask once again: Is there something congenital between being woke and lying? One wonders.

RogerG

* You can read about many of these episodes in Kevin Williamson’s recent piece in National Review.

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Polling, Sh-polling

The mania for polling says more the about the interests of the media than it does about the views of the public.  They are used to inflate clicks on websites, sell air time, bloat premium subscriptions, peddle print copies, and cater to biases in newsrooms. They are also used in the manner of an arsonist to destroy clear thinking.  The particulars of an issue get sabotaged in a frenzy over polls.  All of sudden, facts are less and less relevant.

The media fixation is a manifestation of the old newsroom maxim: If it bleeds, it leads.  In the case of the impeachment talk, the hemorrhage is the bringing low of a prominent person by making news of a series of questions thrust to a random sample of people who may be poorly informed, uninterested, caught up in the hysteria of the moment, and/or willing to answer flippantly.  The thing may be scientifically sound but still be rubbish.

I say this not in regards to any current event, such as the current dust-up over impeachment. Polling has always bugged me.  Why?  Basics first.  The general public isn’t as obsessed with the news as those who are employed to exploit it for fame and reward.  As potential voters, most people don’t take something seriously till they have something serious to do, like cast a ballot.  Till then, they are at the mercy of media hype while, at the same time, they have more pressing concerns at home, like getting by in the world.

Secondly, since polls are of people with more important and immediate burdens, they are snapshots of loosely formed opinions.  It’s for this reason that election polls get more accurate on the state of play as election day arrives.  The person has a crashing deadline, an election, to motivate more thoughtful consideration.  It’s like a student who studies more intensely a day or two before a test.

So, what do the polls indicate about the impeachment of Trump?  Nothing much, other than a mass of rough-hewn opinions-of-the-moment.

The lesson for the public is clear: Watch the facts; ignore the polls.

RogerG

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Biased Assumptions

Why are we experiencing mass shootings and a spike in suicides, up 30% since 1999?  I can’t help but wonder that a deep dissatisfaction is running like an undertow in our times.  Are we quickly approaching a dystopia rather than a utopia?  If so, our modern life has undermined a key tenet of progressivism.  No longer can it be said that life is getting better, also known as “progress”.  In some ways, our times may be beginning to stink up the place.

Why the decline?  Well, something called solipsism has taken the place of knowledge of our past and a grounding in our civilization.  Solipsism is the philosophical core of radical individualism.  All reality is interpreted through the individual.  Subjectivism runs rampant, and any notion of moderation and objective standards takes a back seat.  We are encouraged to have no historical and social understanding and are free to create our own “truth”, not unusual among the fringe who are intertwined in cloistered social media hubs.  All-too-often, it is the alienated tutoring the alienated.

How did we get so atomized?  How did solipsism take root?  Part of the blame can be laid at the feet of our media and schools.  Both spread the secular gospel.  Radical individualism is hard to avoid in the movies and tv, but it’s reinforced by the schools.  C.S. Lewis saw it happening in British schools in the 1950’s.  He wrote about it in his book, The Abolition of Man.  In a chapter entitled “Men Without Chests”, he reviewed a British textbook teaching literary interpretation:

“I do not mean, of course, that he [the student] will make any conscious inference from what he reads to a general philosophical theory that all values are subjective and trivial.  The very power of Gaius and Titius [pseudonyms for the authors] depends on the fact that they are dealing with a boy: a boy who thinks he is ‘doing’ his ‘English prep’ and has no notion that ethics, theology, and politics are all at stake.  It is not a theory they put into his mind, but an assumption, which ten years hence, its origin forgotten and its presence unconscious, will condition him to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a controversy at all.  The authors themselves, I suspect, hardly know what they are doing to the boy, and he cannot know what is being done to him.”

The problem lies in the fact that the student will unknowingly possess assumptions that “will condition him to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a controversy at all.”

A continuous pounding of the bias will set the stage for a desperate loneliness as we become more unhinged from the roots of family, church, and our cultural inheritance.  The social setting is lost, and young people find themselves disconnected in a miasma of their thoughts.

And thus we have Al Qaeda, Nikolas Cruz, the El Paso and Dayton shooters. Are we sowing the seeds of our own destruction?

The El Paso shooter at the Walmart.
The Dayton shooter in a bar on the evening of the killings.

RogerG

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Killings and Diseased Discourse

“Beto” O’Rourke at the scene of the El Paso shooting.

The two murderous rampages over the weekend are more than evil deeds.  They have become, like most everything else, fuel to feed the unrelenting push to, in a modification of Eric Voegelin’s immortal phrase, immanentize progressivism’s eschaton – to bring to life the left’s dream of the better world.  It’s like all that happens in the world is forever on the event horizon, ready to fall into the left’s interstellar black hole.  Evil deeds can’t just exist to be fought against; they must be recruited for a partisan political agenda.  The events’ magnitude and sorrow, therefore, is cheapened by a horde of demagogues.

El Paso after the August 3 shooting.
Dayton after the August 4 shooting.

The airwaves are saturated with demagoguery.  Fingers are pointing at Trump for super-charged rhetoric.  Speaking of super-charged rhetoric, have you attended a Pelosi or Schumer presser, heard the bombast from AOC+3, seen “Beto” before a mike, or been verbally accosted by the rest of the herd running to seize the Democratic Party’s brass ring?  If Trump is to blame for El Paso, then Bernie is to blame for the 2017 shooting of Republican congressmen; or the Sierra Club and Paul Ehrlich are responsible for the Unibomber.  Anyone can play this game.  And it is a game: something far removed from mature thinking.

The Unibomber, Theodore J. Kaczynski, after his arrest, 1996.
The 2017 shooter, James T. Hodgkinson, a Bernie Sanders activist.

A favorite of the mob is, you guessed it, “gun control”.  Large numbers – 300 million guns in private ownership for instance – are contorted to serve the desired end, which is to make gun ownership as difficult as it is in Maduro’s Venezuela.  Their list of banalities includes “universal background checks”, bans on “military guns”, and various forms of gun confiscation.  What any of this has to do with straightening out the crooked timber of humanity escapes me.  What any of it has to do with addressing the causes of these incidents also escapes causal reasoning.  They do, however, serve a political end while advancing certain political careers.  In my book, it’s shameful.

The federal government’s powers could be expanded in the manner of Australia and New Zealand and initiate gun confiscation, but still completely miss the point.  And the point is the mental isolation of some of today’s young men, typically in the 20-25 age cohort.  Could our modern society be a breeding ground for alienated youth?  Parental absenteeism in the pursuit of careerism and material wants, or as a consequence of marital breakup and casual amours, have disturbing developmental effects on children.  In addition, the buffer of other civil institutions such as neighborhood associations and church aren’t what they used to be.  These factors are the ignored elephants in the room as the media chases the demagogues and their rantings.  The fact is, a very few of these young people – and some older adults – would be dangerous whether an AR-15, machete, or spoon is available.

Trump-hatred overwhelms all.  Could we just stop the hokum and take an adult look at how we are raising the next generation?  It could be that all we have to do is draw back the state in order to allow room for civil society to breathe.  Yes, and that’s no doubt a tall order in today’s atmosphere of smothering hyperbole.

RogerG

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Speaking of the Danger of Government Dependency

Former deputy Scot Peterson being led away in cuffs.

Scot Peterson is being charged with felony child neglect and 11 other counts.  He’s the sheriff’s deputy who was assigned to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.  He stayed out of the line of fire as staff and students were cut down by a murderous teen.

The lesson is clear.  If the leading lights of the Democratic Party have their way, certain legal gun owners of today will find themselves criminals.  In the end, after we are disarmed, we may find ourselves one government worker’s emotional disposition away from death.

The Peterson episode illustrates the danger of a disarmed public and the threat posed by dependency on government employees for your simple right to breathe.  That’s the promise of Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, the bulk of the Democratic Party’s presidential field, and the rest of the party’s shoguns (no pun intended).

Who knew that politics would come to have such threatening implications?

RogerG