Saturday, June 20, 2015

HERITAGE AND HATE.

Moderator: As more of accused Charleston shooter Dylann Roof’s racist beliefs come to light, some are suggesting that South Carolina take down the Confederate battle flag that flies on its capitol grounds. Others say the flag is part of Southern heritage and has nothing to do with Roof’s twisted ideas. To discuss this we have here in our studios Rev. Walter Hudson of the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church in Washington, which has just had a bomb threat, and Beauregard T. Dogwhistle, a member of the Fritters, Alabama city council. Before we begin, though, I have to ask Mr. Dogwhistle: Is that actually a Confederate uniform you’re wearing?

Dogwhistle: Indeed it is, suh. This heah is the unifo'm of a colonel in th’ Ahmy o’ No’thern Vuhginny, ve’y lahk one woah by mah great-gran’pappy at Seven Pines and Chancellorsville. It even has some o’ mah great-gran'pappy’s buttons and so fo’th — the original clawth coul’n’t last, o’ co’se, soaked as it wah with all thet Yankee blood my grand-grandpappy spilled at Chancellorsville! (laughs) Musta kiwwed fifty Federals thet week with his swo’d alone (mimes swordplay). Oh, thet wah a great vict'ry, suh!

Moderator: Mr. Dogwhistle, the Civil War cost the lives of more than 600,000 men and, more to the point, ended a hundred and fifty years ago. Why do you think it appropriate to wear on this program a Confederate uniform,  particularly after a horrible tragedy like the shooting at the Emanuel AME Church?

Dogwhistle: Why, suh, they is a princ’ple at stake heah! When this heah Roof fella killed them — well, Af’ican Amer’cans, guess ah’m s’posed to call ‘em — that-all had nothin’ to do with mah heh’tage! And thet flag is mah heh’tage, suh, just as this heah uniform is, and ah see nothin’ t' be ashamed of in eithah! If’n them folks don’ wish to see it, wew suh, they can lowah they eyes o’ sumpin’.

Moderator: Well, Mr. Dogwhistle, when some people, particularly African-Americans, see the battle flag and your uniform, they can’t help but think about the war fought by your grand-grandfather and others to defend the institution that made them slaves.

Dogwhistle: Slanders, suh! Why, the woah had nothin’ to do with slavery nohow. No, we was fightin’ ‘cause we was invaded, an’ ah don’t give a hang foah Foat Sumter — thet wah a what d’ye call it nah, a fawse flag, thet’s it, a fawse flag t’ covah Yankee aggressiousness --

Rev. Hudson: Well, Mr. Dogwhistle, you know that’s just not so. Not only the leaders but the Confederate Constitution show that —

Dogwhistle: (coldly) Excuse me, Mistah Moderatah, yo’ guess heah don’t seem t’ know he is interruptin’ a whaht man.

Moderator: Mr. Dogwhistle, I don’t even know what to say in response to that. Do you really expect us to abide by your openly racist standard of behavior?

Dogwhistle: Of c’ose I expect’ yo t’ honnuh it, suh; it is mah heh’tage. An’ ah dispute yo’ calling’ it racist. Whah, suh, there ain’t no moah racism in thet requiahment o’ mah dignity than they is in mah flag, o’ mah unifo’m, o mah collection o’ manacles an’ slave collahs an’ such lahk, no mattah what them statist rapscallions at eBay say about it. My heh’tage ain’t jes’ symbols; it’s mah whole way o’ lahf, passed dahn bah mah great-gran’pappy an’ f’um his great-gran’pappy. When you Yankees took owuh slaves, we still fahnd ways to keep our heh’tage, lahk with Jim Crow an’ the poll tax; an’ when y’all took thet fum us, we put it in legislation and gerrymand’rin’ and po-licin’ an’ whatnawt. It hain’t lahk it waws, but at leas' we all know how we feel ‘bout things and hah it’s s’posed t’ be, an’ if thet ain’t heh’tage, whut is? As fo' yo’ guess, ah was civ'lized -- ah didn’t use no “n-wo’d,” did ah? No, ah restrained mahse’f, an’ ah mus’ say it put a cramp in mah vocabulerry t’ do so. Now ah have obse'ved yo’ No’thun customs thus fah, an’ I expec’ y’all to obse've mahn. A man can only be pushed so fah!

Moderator: Mr. Dogwhistle, these security guards will escort you out of the building.

Dogwhistle: Humph! Ah guess Jonah Goldberg was raht -- you lib’ruls just woanna silence the opposition!

Friday, June 19, 2015

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.



Richard Hell, Tom Verlaine, and Billy Ficca. The right kind of shrill.

•   Two days after Charleston, National Review's The Corner is a river in Egypt. Don't you dare blame guns! What's so racist about the Confederacy? (Reihan Salam gently suggests that maybe now is not the time to fly the Battle Flag, and NRO commenters erupt with rebel yells -- "I think beta males and PC finks like our author here - will guarantee that flag flies proudly for some time to come," etc. -- and racism, some of it specifically aimed at Salam, e.g. "Reihan Salam's pals are currently destroying symbols in Mosul, Ramadi and Palmyra. He's not a good source for rational thought, as Kipling would say.") But the craziest -- so far -- is David French. The title of his post, "If One of the Churchgoers in Charleston Had Been Armed..." promises crackpottery, and the post itself delivers more than just a maudlin fantasy of heat-packing parishioners saving the day. Sample:
As I read the news and watched the coverage, I felt stricken for the victims, fury at the attacker, and more than a little personal conviction. Not because of any silly notions of collective white guilt or other nonsense peddled by the radical Left — and certainly not because I’ve long opposed the Left’s gun-control efforts and supported the individual, inherent right of self-defense, including the right to keep and bear arms. No, I felt conviction because of the numerous times that I’ve walked out of my house unarmed and thus largely incapable of defending myself — and, more important, others — from violent acts. Perhaps I chose not to wear the right kind of clothing — pants that allow me to conceal my carry pistol, for example. Perhaps it crossed my mind to carry, but I thought, “I’m not going anywhere dangerous.” The men and women at the Emanuel Bible study probably didn’t think they were in any danger, either... 
If the unthinkable happens, and I watch as my family, my friends, or even members of my community I’ve never met are hurt or killed when I could have prevented it by carrying the weapon I’ve trained myself to use, I could never forgive myself...
Don’t just carry. Don’t just go to the state-mandated training, buy a weapon, and then forget about it. Unless you train yourself to use it, that weapon would probably be less useful to you in an emergency than a similarly weighted rock. At least you’d instinctively know to throw the rock. Practice with a handgun until you can take it from a position of safe carry to active engagement within seconds. Then practice that again until you’ve beaten your best time. Then practice again. And realize that practice isn’t a burden but a joy...
So Charleston inspires French to be even more of a gun nut -- one who can't go anywhere without one -- and to try and get the rest of us to support his fantasy by playing with guns until we love them like he does. In the immortal words of Max Bialystock, this man should be in a strait-jacket.

•   Meanwhile at PJ Media, here's some culture war from David Swindle:


Why can't Tyrion be nice? Also, Leopold Bloom went to prostitutes, when they make a TV show out of it let's fix that. But here's my favorite part:
The concept that I propose discussing, which Game of Thrones illustrates better than any show on television today, is this: Postmodern Pornography. How is pomo-porno different than the traditional variety? In much the same way that Barack Obama’s Saul Alinsky-style, pragmatic community-organizing Marxism differs from the more honest Marxism of his mentors Frank Marshall Davis, Derrick Bell, Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, and Bernardine Dohrn.
Say what you want about the tenets of Swindlism, dude, at least it's an ethos.

•   Hey, remember that Bullets and Bourbon thing the Ole Perfesser and a bunch other nuts were planning for December? Here's fresh promo by Ed Driscoll. Stephen Green narrates from (it sounds like) inside a barrel over telephone hold music about how the Perfesser et alia will be talking to guests "about threats to the Second Amendment." (This is at a ranch in Texas, by the way, which is like talking about threats to the rich at Davos.)  Then the music changes to U2 Muzak and we see guys shooting at targets, which Green describes as "images to really whet your appetite." Targets! What about the most dangerous game? If I'm paying $1,699 I expect to get all likkered up and hunt humans. Maybe there's a platinum-level membership they aren't telling us about.



Thursday, June 18, 2015

CHARLESTON 2015: WE HAVE A WINNER.

Feeling bad about what happened in Charleston yesterday? Spare some sympathy for Mona Charen at National Review:
The heinousness of a person who can sit for an hour studying the Bible and then open fire is unfathomable. Even more depressing, if that’s possible, is my suspicion – and I truly hope I’m wrong – that this event will play a role in the 2016 presidential campaign.
This was treated with appropriate contempt on Twitter and elsewhere, and Charen roared back:
Some people, determined to see bad faith in those with whom they disagree, are seizing upon my post earlier today...
("Seizing upon" means "accurately quoting," in this case.)
Am I someone who’s more upset about politics than murder, hatred, and death? Um, no.
She said "um," that settles it. Wait, Charen has more:
I should have put it more precisely. The feelings of grief, rage, and horror at an atrocity such as we saw last night should be taken for granted among all civilized people. One doesn’t feel “depressed” about an event like a mass shooting. One does get depressed at the cynical uses to which such outrages have lately been put.
She didn't mean what she said, and we're monsters to think she did. Context doesn't redeem her, though. I've read quite a bit of Mona Charen's work. Here she's beating up on unwed mothers ("Of course some women want babies the way others crave shoes..."). Here she's tying thwarted attacks on the White House to Obama's "divisiveness"  ("his death at the hands of an assassin could still well be more pain and stress than our republic could stand. It’s a good bet that close to 100 percent of blacks and a good percentage of others would believe that a demonic conspiracy brought him down..."). Here's "Democrats do tend to be less patriotic than Republicans. There, I've said it out loud." I could go on, but if there's one thing covering these guys for years has taught me, it's that with someone like Charen there's no reason to interpret anything she says charitably.

Nine dead and she and the Republican Party are the victims. Sheesh.

UPDATE. Now Ian Tuttle is over there defending the Confederate flag:
But with respect to Ms. Kendall, this hateful man’s use of a slogan is no proof that the slogan itself is hateful. Elected leaders make this distinction constantly when it comes to Islamic terrorism, after all: The teachings of Muhammad, the Koran, the black flag with the Shahada (the flag of ISIS) — they have been “hijacked” and “perverted.” Why hasn’t Dylann Roof merely “hijacked” or “perverted” the main symbol of the Confederacy?
Interesting approach -- if you think Islam is different from Islamic terror, you must accept that those who fly the Battle Flag aren't necessarily endorsing the Peculiar Institution. But apparently it doesn't work the other way around: Here's Tuttle last year with a post called "No, Pointing Out Muslims Have Been Beheading People for Centuries Isn’t Islamophobic":
The larger question is whether Islam qua Islam sanctions beheading — or if jihadists pervert a religion that, in its orthodox form, is peaceful.

That debate can be left to religious scholars. What is evident is that, as Tantaros observes, the masked men in our age who delight in chopping off heads are typically Muslim, and they believe that they have the sanction of their religion. Furthermore, that religious fervor has made them less than amenable to reasoned, dispassionate negotiation.
If you tried this approach on the Charleston killer -- "the question is whether racism is a perversion of the neo-Confederate cause," for example, "but what is evident is that racists are typically neo-Confederates..." I expect Tuttle would be grievously offended on behalf of Nathan Bedford Forrest and the rest of his heroes.

Wednesday, June 17, 2015

THE SOUTH'S GONNA DO IT AGAIN, I.E. LOSE.

This week's Texas gold buggery story is amazing all by itself:
On Friday, Gov. Greg Abbott signed legislation that will create a state-run gold depository in the Lone Star State – one that will attempt to rival those operated by the U.S. government inside Fort Knox and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s vault in lower Manhattan. “The Texas Bullion Depository,” Abbott said in a statement, “will become the first state-level facility of its kind in the nation, increasing the security and stability of our gold reserves and keeping taxpayer funds from leaving Texas to pay for fees to store gold in facilities outside our state.” Soon, Abbott’s office said, the state “will repatriate $1 billion of gold bullion from the Federal Reserve in New York to Texas.” In other words, when it comes preparing for the currency collapse and financial armeggedon, Abbott's office really seems to think Texas is a whole 'nother country.
Brian Murphy's entire story is worth reading. Adding some savor for me: I've been reading E. Merton Coulter's "History of the Confederate States of America," published in 1950 as part of LSU's History of the South series. (Coulter was a white supremacist, but his research is sound.) I've just come through the part about the CSA's Treasury woes. Along with the understandable problems with sustaining a new economy in wartime, the Confederate Congress was apparently scared to raise taxes, and the response when they did try to raise them shows why: citizens availed every subterfuge to avoid paying, and the Confederacy, per Coulter, "raised throughout its existence about one percent of its income in taxes." The last Confederate Treasury Secretary, George Trenholm, "wondered throughout the period of his secretaryship why the people could never see and think of the Confederacy as part of themselves -- not something far away -- and why they as one great family did not come to the rescue," Coulter adds. States' rights is a hell of a drug. This new drive to lay up gold strikes me as a potent mix of that, Texas' secessionism revival and the government's pandering to same, and the influence of Goldline and related scams.

But at least the Rebels didn't have the dubious benefit of modern financial instruments. Murphy interviews Texas House member Giovanni S. Capriglione, the genius behind the gold-gathering, who says the state is defraying the cost of transporting and storing the bullion by having it handled by -- you guessed it! -- the private sector:
Moreover, by privatizing the depository’s operations, Capriglione said he was able to begin recruiting “stakeholders” who “are interested in being a part of the system we’re creating.” Rather than build a Fort Knox-type facility in Texas, Capriglione said “there are commercial vaults not being used or not at full capacity, and I’ve heard from groups willing to start their own depository and IT security companies with underground storage facilities for data centers who can make space available” for gold and other precious metals. 
Most importantly, Capriglione found that by offering gold brokers and dealers the chance to become “depository agents” who can accept deposits on the state’s behalf or set up accounts with their own precious metal holdings that can then be sold off and subdivided to would-be depositors, he found a broad network of supporters for the state depository...
By Charles Keating, that's good! If the Rest of America doesn't descend into Armageddon, expect some hilarious hearings when those bars go missing.

Tuesday, June 16, 2015

THERE'S SOMEONE FOR EVERYONE IN THIS WORLD.

Donald Trump threw his hairpiece in the ring today, and most people reacted with the solemnity the event demanded. Even Republicans seem to grasp that Trump's insertion is no blessing on their chances in 2016.  But Trump has a few friends among the conservative elite. Jeffrey Lord of the American Spectator is here to tell you smart-alecks that Trump has the love of the people:
The other day, Trump took a stroll outside of his iconic Trump Tower with Fox and Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade. Not surprisingly there were everyday folk instantly swarming to Trump. They wanted a picture, they wanted a handshake, they wanted to have a word. At one point, standing on Fifth Avenue, Trump is flagged by the driver of a lumber truck. “I know you!” the driver says with a laugh and a grin. 
Why? Why this Grand Canyon-size gap between media and political elites and average Americans when it comes to the subject of Donald Trump?
#1: This is probably the first time since 9/11 that anyone at the Spectator referred to New Yorkers as "average Americans." #2: I can easily see the same rubber-necking and gawking visited upon your average Kardashian, but I'm not sure what that means for their national electoral chances. (If Trump stayed out there a couple of days, he'd probably be getting the same reactions those guys who dress up as Elmo get at Rockefeller Center.)
Why is it that he is consistently underestimated whether the subject is his financial worth or his political viability? 
The answer in this corner is that Donald Trump is seen by many Americans as the very embodiment of the American Dream. Someone with vision and drive who settles down and focuses, working hard day in and day out to make his own dreams come true. And succeeding. When millions of average Americans look at Donald Trump — they see — shocker! — themselves.
If I were the American people, I'd sue for defamation. Also hot for Trump: Ben Shapiro. Yes, despite his defenestration from TruthRevolt, his prose lives on at Breitbart.com, where he has a "top seven moments from Trump’s speech." I dusted them for irony and came up empty. Example:
“I Don’t Need Anybody’s Money. It’s Nice…I’m Really Rich.” This, in a nutshell, is what makes Trump awesome. Trump may be the only candidate in the race who isn’t ashamed of being wealthy. He sees wealth as something Americans should strive for and be proud of, not something Americans should degrade. Trump also said that he had lobbyists who could get him any policy he wanted, and that as president, because of his wealth, he wouldn’t be beholden to anyone. If Trump actually sticks to this pitch, he’d do a true service to America, where Mitt Romney is supposed to act contrite for earning lots of money and creating lots of jobs...
I bet the guy in the lumber truck loved it. Shapiro is bullish on Trump's chances: "Trump must understand that he’s seen as a clown by the media – he’s too smart not to see that," he analyzes. (How'd David Horowitz let this guy go?)  "But being seen as a clown can be advantageous, because it comes with zero expectations of actual substance. Every gaffe by Jeb Bush throws mud on his skirt; every lucid moment from Trump elevates him..." Someone should check Lord's and Shapiro's bank accounts and see if they made any big deposits lately.

At Legal Insurrection, Amy Miller:
I think that most strategists would agree that a candidate who flaunts his wealth in the way that Trump has could prove problematic with the voting base. That being said -- at this point, why not try it?
She has a point. What if Mitt Romney had gone around lighting cigars with $100 bills, or paying children to dance for him?
...I may not understand what it feels like to own a yacht (anyone have a yacht I can borrow to test this?) but I do understand what it feels like to earn enough money to make a major purchase, or treat myself to a luxury item. Why shouldn’t he be proud of his towers in the same way I’m proud of the things I’ve earned?
I sweated and I saved and I was finally able to come up with $100,000 to pay off my $20,000 credit card debt from the 1990s. In another ten years I may be able to pay for this appendectomy, and then I'll be even more sympathetic to Donald Trump!
...as a wonk, I’m interested to see how his campaign plans on introducing Trump the Man to the American people.
My sources tell me Trump will do a listening tour where he hits the town halls, walks up to random voters, and offers them a million dollars to let him sleep with their wives.

Other conservative writers have less motivation to praise Trump and grimly make do with whatever dog-ends are available. At Hot Air, Allahpundit says Trump is a creature of the liberal media, who inflate him only as an excuse for "not having to cover more credible candidates like Rubio who pose a legit threat to Her Majesty. My guess is they’ll give him plenty of oxygen." If only someone could read this to Trump so he'd know what a patsy he's been played for!

Friday, June 12, 2015

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.




I've been listening to a mess of Uncle Dave Macon lately.
I know you guys are into politics, so here's one 
where Uncle Dave campaigns for Al Smith, because Prohibition.

•    I hear some people are pleased that Tracey Carver-Allbritton got suspended from her job at a Bank of America vendor company for her part in the McKinney debacle, and that Karen Fitzgibbons got fired from her job as a teacher for her racist Facebook rant on the same subject. I'm not pleased, though. Generally speaking, I don't like to see workers suspended or fired for activities outside their sphere of work (I understand the case for firing a schoolteacher a little better, but not much). Conservatives blubbered over the defenestrations of Brendan Eich, Paula Deen and Donald Sterling, but they were rich people who had been separated, not from their livelihoods, but from their voluntary associations with other rich people -- a CEO by his board of directors, an entertainer by her network, and an NBA owner by his league. Interestingly, their conservative defenders generally harrumphed that of course they believed the rich people had a right to fire one other, which shows at least that they understood the real point: they were just mad that someone got in trouble for bigotry, which turns their world upside down; they wouldn't have minded if some pauper got in trouble for, say, stealing a loaf of bread because he was hungry. Carver-Allbritton and Fitzgibbons resemble these conservative heroes in that they appear to be bigoted, but assuredly do not resemble them in their need to work for a living -- and it's significant that you are hearing them defended far less vociferously by wingnuts than the rich guys were. After all, in our neo-feudal age, nothing can be too bad that promotes employee disposability; why do you think the Bank of America factota were so quick to jump? Because they care about racism? Don't forget what it's really all about.

•    Ole Perfesser Instapundit:
AS MUCH RESPECT FOR THE CONSTITUTION AS OBAMA: In my latest oped with David Rivkin, we explain why Hillary Clinton’s voter reform proposals–automatic voter registration at age 18, a 20-day early voting period, allowing felons to vote, etc.–are all likely to be unconstitutional:
It is increasingly evidence that conservatives' constantly-declared love for the Constitution has mainly to do with 1.)  guns and 2.) keeping citizens from voting if they're unlikely to vote Republican.

•    We are finally on Part 5 of Dan McLaughlin's series at The Federalist, "Can Gays And Christians Coexist In America?" The first four parts, as much as I could stand of them, were basically all about how gays are oppressing Christians. The conclusion kind of thrashes around a bit. On the one hand, there's more modish martyrdom:
If proponents of liberty band together in these fights like the slaves at the end of Spartacus, they will do just fine (of course, the slaves got crucified together, and that is always a possible outcome -- but then, the Romans were no ordinary adversary).
(Wonder what that last part means? That the Romans were different from homosexuals? Brother, have I got news for him.) On the other hand, there's an attempt at "accommodation" of these fascist gays:
One element, of course, is for Christians, conservatives, and Republicans to demonstrate a greater personal ease with gay Americans, as people. As frustrated as we may get with the flagrantly one-sided nature of the public, media debate, we need to be happy warriors, keeping our calm and our cool and showing with deeds, not just words, that our disagreements on matters of deep principle do not prevent us from treating others with the love and respect that the Gospel demands of us. That’s not always easy in an emotional political fight; we have to work at it, and we must.
"(Okay, remember, stay positive, can't get mad even though they're monsters...) Howdy, faggot!"

McLaughlin would allow gays their hate crimes legislation and advises moving on from the marriage issue, but the rest of what he characterizes as accommodation may not seem like such to you: For example, when it comes to anti-discrimination laws, which he opposes, McLaughlin says, "Republicans in Congress and the states, in many cases elected with the support of Christians and other religious people, have a governing majority now and should act like one." Also: "An example of a smaller issue on which there also ought to be a sensible middle ground is 'gay conversion therapy.'" (Spoiler: Let's keep it! But have better medical oversight.) The weirdest one is this:
Working together on common ground is a good first step to the two sides humanizing each other and learning the habits of compromise. But the final piece of the puzzle of armistice and coexistence is the need to demobilize the institutions that have been engaged in LGBT causes: Hollywood, the universities, media and entertainment companies like Disney/ESPN, and other big corporations. So long as those various entities are run and staffed by people who see Christians only in caricature and see LGBT causes through the prism of Jim Crow, conflict will never end.
He never explains how he's planning to change this; maybe he envisions some sort of affirmative action for Jesus freaks. "You're out, Katzenberg. Make way for DreamWorks CEO Barebones Dogood!"



Thursday, June 11, 2015

WHAT SCHOLARSHIP LOOKS LIKE TO A PROPAGANDIST.

Daniel Henninger starts his Wall Street Journal column with a description of the Memory Hole from 1984, and regular readers know what that means: Liberals are once again forcing citizens to listen to lies such as "humans cause climate change," "the Iraq War was a mistake," "homosexuals have civil rights," etc.

This time Henninger's villains are the so-called "teachers" who are doing the latest revision of the Advanced Placement U.S. History curriculum for the College Board. (Apparently they revise the thing every couple of years. Parson Weems and the Pledge of Allegiance aren't good enough for these tenured radicals!)

 "The people responsible for the new AP curriculum really, really hate it when anyone says what they are doing to U.S. history is tendentious and destructive," says Henninger. (And why might that be? Sounds like some little pinkos have a guilty conscience.) These pencil-necks are deaf to the "pushback" to the revise that has "emerged in Texas, Colorado, Tennessee, Nebraska, North Carolina, Oklahoma and Georgia," the intellectual jewels of our nation, and to the 56 real "professors and historians" who have signed a petition against it. No, they bask instead in the approval of something called the American Historical Association, which sure sounds like a union to me. And New York magazine and "one liberal newspaper columnist" have had the audacity to make fun of these good Americans; why, that's double Orwell with a side of Alinsky!

There's more, including a quotation from a non-committal press release from the historians (to give Henninger's readers that got-'em-on-the-run feeling cultural warriors crave) and a tear for fallen comrade Lynn Cheney. But after all that, these are the examples from the actual revision plans Henninger picks to show us how Marxist is all is:
An example: “Native peoples and Africans in the Americas strove to maintain their political and cultural autonomy in the face of European challenges to their independence and core beliefs..."
This is in direct contradiction to the "dancing darkies" and "funny drunken injun" view favored by conservative historians.
Or: “Explain how arguments about market capitalism, the growth of corporate power, and government policies influenced economic policies from the late 18th century through the early 20th century..."
 Market capitalism doesn't "influence," libtards -- it heals, it soothes, it liberates!
And inevitably: “Students should be able to explain how various identities, cultures, and values have been preserved or changed in different contexts of U.S. history, with special attention given to the formation of gender, class, racial, and ethnic identities. Students should be able to explain how these subidentities have interacted with each other and with larger conceptions of American national identity.”
Apparently, even worse than acknowledging that slaves and conquered Native Americans had it tough is acknowledging that they had feelings and human interactions at all.

Maybe as soon he wrote these down Henninger realized he had nothin', because immediately he goes for the bullshit totem of the hour:
Comedian Jerry Seinfeld got attention this week for saying he understood why other comics such as Chris Rock have stopped performing on campuses beset by political correctness...
See, it all adds up! A pattern is emerging in all their P.C. hoo-hah: Their ideas fail, and they blame censorship rather than acknowledge that a growing number of people are figuring out they're full of shit.

UPDATE. In comments, whetstone points out that I missed Henninger's coup de horseshit:
At one point the curriculum’s authors say: “Debate and disagreement are central to the discipline of history, and thus to AP U.S. History as well.” This statement is phenomenally disingenuous.
Try and guess how Henninger will prove their disingenuity. Give up? Here:
From Key Concept 1.3: “Many Europeans developed a belief in white superiority to justify their subjugation of Africans and American Indians, using several different rationales.” Pity the high-school or college student who puts up a hand to contest that anymore. They don’t. They know the Orwellian option now is to stay down.
The history teachers are disingenuous, see, because they claim to believe in debate, yet who's going to debate their assertion that slaveowners and conquerors believed they were superior to their subjects? The only possible reason is Orwell! Perhaps Henninger and his buddies should publish a study guide to prepare students to contest this point of view; better still, a video;  even better a Vine, showing Brad Pitt being nice to Chiwetel Ejiofor, then a card that says YEARS PASS, and then a clip of Ben Carson at CPAC.

Wednesday, June 10, 2015

WHAT IS IT WITH THESE P.C. COLLEGE AUDIENCES? THEY'RE P.C., YET NONE OF THEM USE P.C.s! THEY USE MACS! AND THE FOOD THEY SERVE...

I love Jerry Seinfeld, but if the kids don't dig him anymore, maybe it's political correctness, maybe it's not, so what? The hippies didn't dig Bob Hope either -- that is, as they say, show business. Bitching about it makes you sound like Lenny Bruce's Comic at the Palladium when the Brits don't laugh -- "well, Freddy boy, I see it's a little squaresville tonight, real squaresville for the first show..."

I notice Aziz Ansari isn't having trouble drawing college crowds. Maybe different audiences just like different things. They're not obligated to like you, and if they don't it's not the same thing as oppression, as conservatives seem to think. The kids have not been "unwittingly drawn into a cult they cannot escape." They are young, they like what they like, and they think old people smell.

UPDATE. Hey, remember that crazy shrink or psycho-sociomologist or whatever she is Stella Morabito from The Federalist? She has another the-PC-end-is-near rant ("Ignorance was cultivated in the schools through political correctness and squashing free debate," etc. skree), and in it she acknowledges that the peecee people do in fact laugh, but at bad things that it's bad to laugh at:
I think the reason there is so little “comedy” that’s funny today is the genre itself has been hijacked by the humorless PC crowd. Why is their humor so unamusing and so dependent upon mean-spiritedness? 
Also, the music they listen to these days, you can't even make out the lyrics, and what's with those baggy pants. Increasingly it looks like this whole P.C. boo-hoo is just a weaponized version of Those Were The Days.

UPDATE 2. Enjoy some libertarian Mad Libs from the Fonzie of Freedom at Reason:
To be sure, San Diego State student Anthony Berteaux also insists in his letter that, hey, he likes edgy and funny folks such as Amy Schumer and Louis C.K. and George Carlin and that Seinfeld should "Offend the fuck out of college students. Provoke the fuck out of me. We'll thank you for it later." 
But this doesn't just ignore the chill that is already upon campuses when lefty feminist profs like Laura Kipnis gets dragged into Title IX hearings about sex on campus in The Chronicle of Higher Education...
If you don't laugh at this AARP member's jokes, Laura Kipnis goes to the gas!
...viewings of films as mainstream and honored as American Sniper are replaced by Paddington, and students call for trigger warnings before reading The Great Gatsby.
Regular readers know how sick I am of all the culture-war bullshit, but Fonzie has it exactly backwards. College students saying they don't like your act isn't oppression. If the kids want a different leisure time activity than American Sniper, which made gazillions of dollars without their help, who gives a fuck? You don't have a Constitutional right to student activity board funds. Incursions into the curriculum and the rights of professors, on the other hand, are about the new consumerist approach to education, whereby students are regarded as customers to be satisfied rather than seekers after knowledge; "social justice" is just the MacGuffin.  The bad ideas you should worry about are the ones that created this system, not some teenager's insufficiently deep understanding of racism.

Tuesday, June 09, 2015

WINNING HEARTS AND MINDS BY POINTING GUNS AT THEM.

The Christian Science Monitor explores the "etiquette" of America's open-carry-mania. Some gun enthusiasts believe, or at least pretend to believe, that if they act like the loaded weapon they're twirling at Arby's is no big deal, ordinary citizens will get accustomed to living in a dystopian novel instead of modern civilization and we'll soon be one be one happy, bloody shoot-'em-up society. CSM even hears from Ole Perfesser Glenn Reynolds, who says, "This is what lefties have done for decades, and it works" -- a cryptic statement, perhaps meaning that since liberals created feminism by letting their women go around without bras, it stands to reason that a bunch of crackers playing "Guess Whether I'm Going To Kill You And Everyone Else Here" at the Chuck E. Cheese will usher in the Groovy Second Amendment Revolution.

Some of the brethren are more hardcore:
“The idea that we must be more ‘polite,’ lest we frighten [the 46 percent of Americans who are seen as persuadable on gun rights,] ignores the nature of the right we are fighting for,” writes Kurt Hofmann on the website Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership. “We must be ‘frightening,’ because the people who would trample our rights will only lose interest in doing so if they perceive a very personal risk to themselves in continuing on that course.”
He's refreshingly honest in a psychotic way. So is Michael Walsh at PJ Media, who responds to the article's concern with an armed nut who stalked an Atlanta airport thus:
Here you have the basic leftist argument: they “felt threatened” even though, in fact and in law, no one was actually threatening them. But the Left has long dwelled in a fantasy world, in which all manners of terrors — except real terrors– lurk just beyond the precinct of their psychiatrist’s office.
Liberals try to make loaded weapons look dangerous! Before they ruined everything, guns were as ubiquitous as cigarettes in America -- ordinary citizens in Anytown, U.S.A. always went around strapped, packed, and brandishing, whether at the PTA or the steel mill. Ask your grandparents -- and if they tell you different it's because LBJ brainwashed them! (If you've got some time we'll discuss how liberals censors cut the weaponry from shows like Leave It To Beaver and Ben Casey.)

Fashions in Second Amendment interpretation may come and go but, this being America, gun nuts will always be with us. The big change recently is that we're supposed to take them seriously in the sense of "accept their point of view as valid" rather than in the sense of "call the police."

Sunday, June 07, 2015

BUT NOW HE'S PREACHIN' JUST TO BUY JELLY ROLL.

Kia and I saw the Dominique Serrand production of Tartuffe at the Harman at a preview on Saturday. The show doesn’t officially open till Monday. I am aware of and appreciate the controversy over reviewing preview performances, so I’ll forbear to judge what may be changed by the opening, and tread lightly regarding the performances, which I will say are all of high professional quality (especially in the handling of verse and comic business). I will discuss the concept, though, which was apparently settled by the time the show was mounted at Berkeley Rep.

We've all seen plenty of productions of established properties that might be deemed Dark Reimaginings. These have ranged from the brilliant, e.g. Throne of Blood, to the asinine — the worst example of which, for me, was an off-off-Broadway Midsummer Night’s Dream long ago which began with Theseus and Hippolyta simulating intercourse and had the actor playing Bottom portraying all the other Mechanicals with finger puppets. (I didn’t stick around to see what he did with Pyramus and Thisbe.)

Serrand is no tyro; he has apparently has had a long, distinguished career of squeezing extra juice of classics, and has clearly studied Tartuffe carefully, as you can tell by his sometimes laborious underlinings.

By now even people who haven’t read Tartuffe know it has something to do with religious hypocrisy and the ease with which it can upend real moral order. If you have read or seen it, you know that Moliere’s great achievement is to make the inversion as believable as it is absurd. From the outset we see that Orgon, the paterfamilias, has been not only been taken in by Tartuffe, but unhinged by him: he describes Tartuffe’s professed asceticism, and the lesson Tartuffe has apparently encouraged him to take from it: “…he weans/ My heart from every friendship, teaches me/ To have no love for anything on earth;/ And I could see my brother, children, mother,/ And wife, all die, and never care — a snap.” (This is from the old Curtis Hidden Page translation; David Ball’s adaptation, used in this show, is smoother.) Meanwhile Tartuffe is sponging off Orgon to beat the band, and has bigger game in mind.

Everyone else knows Orgon’s been had, but he never wavers in his faith until the famous scene in which Orgon’s wife Elmire conceals him so he may hear Tartuffe, who has already indirectly propositioned her, respond to her pretense of interest and fully reveal his hypocrisy (“The public scandal is what brings offense/ And secret sinning is not sin at all”). By then it’s too late, and Tartuffe has already swindled Orgon out of all his possessions. He is restored later, in a scene that Moliere added under what is generally thought to be royal compulsion, though audiences usually appreciate the relief.

This relief Serrand seems to begrudge, and in a big way. He keeps the ending, but makes it clear that Orgon’s family is dispirited and lives even after Tartuffe’s arrest in fear of him — so much so that they pile furniture against the front door of the house and slump dejectedly as the curtain falls.

In fact, though everyone besides Orgon knows Tartuffe is a fraud, throughout the play most of them seem frightened of him — even the typically sensible maid Dorine, even while she is insulting him, shivers like a menaced damsel. As for Orgon’s daughter Mariane, she’s so horrified by the prospect of the forced marriage to Tartuffe her father has arranged that she goes into a kind of Ophelia swoon — with bandaged wrists suggesting a suicide attempt, yet.

Steven Epp plays Tartuffe, rightly and very well, as someone who would give normal people the cold creeps; his blissfully bald-faced lying has an incandescence that suggests an inspired artist of deception — indeed, he really is a mystic of an evil kind, which is a great illumination of the character. But this alone can’t explain the quaking desperation he inculcates in the family.

The idea, insofar as I can guess, is to make Tartuffe represent the entire looming evil of false religion, something bigger than one man. To (I suspect) help put this over, Tartuffe is given servants who wordlessly louche about the stage like runway models on Seconal, sometimes physically accosting characters, sometimes just exuding sybaritic menace. One of them doubles as the process server Loyal, playing him like a Willem Dafoe villain. (Everyone cowers at him, too.) And though he’s doing fine just with the lines, Epp is occasionally directed to do movement-class erotic creeping along the floor, and a little door on his shirt sometimes opens to reveal his nipples. He’s not just a horny fake preacher — he’s the snake in the Garden of Eden.

Maybe I’m dense, but I think the great thing about Tartuffe is that he is a man, and that he can achieve as much mischief as he does, despite having been basically hauled in off the street, by fastening on the willful gullibility of a single bourgeois and playing it for all it's worth. We’ve all known leeches; sometimes they show unexpected resourcefulness in deception, and while it doesn't make us like them it changes our estimation of them. Tartuffe’s resourcefulness is of such a high order than when he manages to get away with his first seduction of Elmire, it’s like Richard III turning the tables at the end of Margaret’s big speech: The surprise is not completely negative. Like all the great comic villains (and some of the ones in tragedies) he’s got enough élan vital to make it interesting. We don’t necessarily have to identify completely with the dupes. In fact that may be why Moliere didn’t put Tartuffe’s comeuppance in the first version: why deprive him or Orgon of their just desserts?

Lest I make the show sound like a bore, be notified that it has great energy, some brilliant stage pictures, and lots of laughs. I wasn’t kidding when I said Serrand knows the play. The scene in which Mariane and her boyfriend Valere exchange insincere professions of unlove, and the one in which Dorine keeps coming up with ways to sass her master without getting socked, are especially successful, demonstrating that everyone involved knows what kind of human beings and human frailties they’re dealing with, at least when Tartuffe and his minions aren’t around.

Thursday, June 04, 2015

P.C. B.S.

I keep hearing from conservatives that political correctness is ruining everything. For example, at National Review, which runs stories about PC at about the rate The Federalist runs stories about Caitlin Jenner, Ian Tuttle extrapolates from an advice column at a site you never heard of that the peecee people "would do much to crack down on the number of Fitzgeralds or Faulkners or Cormac McCarthys" and supplant their brilliance with "the Afro-Cuban lesbian experience," har har; also,
No doubt over the next several years book clubs across America will pore over many a bestseller fitted to Gabbert’s advice, in the process sacrificing better authors — e.g., Homer, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton.
If Ian Tuttle knows where the next Shakespeare is, he should tell his editor, so they can use him to replace Kevin D. Williamson, Dennis Prager, or one of National Review's many other shitty writers. (For perspective: previously Tuttle told his readers "If you’re looking for a genuinely open-minded academic experience, Brooklyn College may not be the place for you" because the school refused to take money from the Koch brothers.)

Anyway, a lot of prominent liberals (including Amanda Marcotte, conservatives' favorite feminist voodoo doll) are saying Laura Kipnis got a bad rap from hypersensitive apparatchiks-in-training at Northwestern, and good for them (the liberals, not the apparatchiks). The other day Edward Schlosser had a long piece at Vox, of all places, complaining about student noodges. You'd think that if PC were as much of a menace as it's been portrayed, conservatives would be happy to at last have bipartisan support in fighting it. Well, here's James Taranto at The Wall Street Journal:
As we read the Schlosser piece, we felt more Schadenfreude than sympathy, and we wondered if that reflected poorly on us. (Spoiler: Nah.)
Instead Taranto complains that liberals like Schlosser are only upset because they're getting it in the neck, and are fundamentally incapable of understanding the pain of censored "outgroup" conservative academics like Glenn Reynolds, Ann Althouse, Harvey Mansfield, William A. Jacobson, et alia. Taranto explains:
Social systems have existed—think of the American South under slavery and Jim Crow—in which a dominant ingroup governed itself in accord with liberal principles while subjecting the outgroup to a combination of oppressive rules and often-cruel whims.
Time for a Poor Wingnuts' Campaign! Back at National Review Charles C.W. Cooke says
Of course Jonathan Chait is turning against political correctness and campus self-indulgence. Of course Vox’s editor, Ezra Klein, is now peddling lefty academics who are willing to stand up to the mob. Of course the good denizens of Jezebel are beginning to wonder aloud whether a feminism that eats the likes of Laura Kipnis is useful. If neo-McCarthyism “becomes a salient part of liberal politics,” Schlosser writes in his conclusion, then “liberals are going to suffer tremendous electoral defeat.” The American Left has started to rebel at the exact moment that its own interests are being hurt? Naturally. This isn’t about standards; it’s about power.
Cooke's essay is called "Is the Tide Turning against PC?" but it's not clear that he wants it turned if it means linking arms with those people. So I guess PC must not be such a big deal after all.

Sympathetic as I am toward Kipnis, I never thought so myself -- if some dumbasses want to play thought policeman in select programs at elite colleges, I figure, let them waste their parents' money and God help them when they graduate. And let those other dumbasses turn their tattered propaganda equity now this way, now that, trying to catch the wind. (Good luck explaining the menace of "social justice warriors" to downsized factory workers!) We who have free souls, it touches us not.

UPDATE. Comments are all glorious, but special thanks to commenter atheist for invoking La Rochefoucauld: "Our hatred of favorites is but a love of favor, and our scorn of those who enjoy it is only a balm to our vexation at being deprived thereof." Conservatives had their way exclusively for several centuries before the Enlightenment, and have been sore ever since they lost the franchise.

UPDATE 2. What causes political correctness on campus? Joseph Bottum at the Weekly Standard:
It’s possible to ascribe the situation to the presidential elections of 2008 and 2012.
Ain't even kidding.
The guidelines for Title IX issued by the Obama administration have shifted power to the outraged, and everyone seems to know it.
Everybody Joseph Bottum talks to at the Club, anyway. But wait, Bottum allows that the roots of PC do go deeper:
The reaction to Bill Clinton’s sex scandals, leading to his impeachment in 1998, may have been the first hint of a new choosing of sides, followed by an abiding anger over the outcome of Bush v. Gore in 2000. But the fate of the Democrats is not quite the same thing as the fate of radicalism, and to find the real springs of what is now washing over the nation’s schools, you have to go back, I think, to the fall of the Iron Curtain, 26 years ago.
Everything Democrat causes everything bad, and the same goes for the Soviet Union! In fact the title of Bottum's column is "I Still Blame the Communists." I expect if you swapped out "political correctness" for "riots in Baltimore," "Ebola," "potrzebie," etc., it wouldn't have to be changed much. Sometimes I think they work from Mad Libs.

Wednesday, June 03, 2015

WHY DO ALL THESE TRANSSEXUALS KEEP SUCKING MY ATTENTION?*

Let's see what's going on at one of our favorite rightwing opinion factories, The Federalist:
How The Hypersexual Trans Movement Hurts Feminism
Hmm. That's --
...These carpet-baggers to womanhood are trying to prove to all of us that what it really means to be a woman is to pose in a playboy bunny outfit and make kissy faces at men. They reinforce this idea to teenage girls: go put on the miniskirt, honey, celebrate Jenner’s beauty, and try to exemplify it in your own life.
(Pause.) Let's try another story.
Bruce Jenner’s Transformation Is A Lose-Lose For Liberal Ideology
Huh. How ya figure?
...For years, a major aim of the sexual revolution has been to deconstruct gender differences as being “social constructs"...
This is the ideology that governs liberal sexual philosophy, and it collides head-on with major aspects of the transgender movement. Transgenderism is unavoidably based on a kind of gender essentialism...
Hey, look at the time. Let's see what else:
Bruce Jenner: Selfie Culture Hero
Great! I could use some light reading.
....As he adapted, he still was treating his body not as his own, but like a shiny new midlife crisis vehicle that came with a great rack worth flashing to his son...
Yikes.
Personally, I don’t care either way, and I wish him well, but I’d prefer we identify actions of bravery with real bravery...
Oh, so we're making too much of Caitlin Jenner, huh? The obvious solution is to continue talking about her.
So is the best response to Mother Nature’s cruel visual inequity more surgery for everyone and glam teams ‘til their outsides match their insides? If that is case, Jenner just won another gold medal in the vanity Olympics...
Aw snap.
Who knows, and who cares. That’s some silly discussion...
Come into the light, Federalist author!
...one that will make “Jezebel rain hellfire down on” you. What matters is how it sounds, how it makes you feel, and if it’s attractive. Silence is easier and more attractive when roving bands of social-justice warriors vociferously silence dissent...
Do these guys get bonuses when they work conservative persecution into stories?
Now that we dispensed with critical thinking and an honest debate of ideas, welcome to a world where what matters most is how you look. It’s a brave new superficial world that had no better launching location than the pages of Vanity Fair. We are a society that has fallen in love with its own reflection.
Please, no one ever show her a magazine rack from the past fifty years; she'll run into the street screaming like Kevin McCarthy at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Let's move on:
Bruce Jenner is Not Brave
Oh for --
In a few days, we will celebrate the anniversary of D-Day, when men stormed enemy-filled beaches and died by the thousands...
Jesus Christ, aren't there any stories in this conservative magazine that aren't about transsexuals? Okay, one more:
Taylor Swift Flirts With The Feminist Dark Side
I'll take it -- oh wait, it's full of Lena Dunham. Have you got a copy of Field & Stream?

(*Titular reference here.)

Tuesday, June 02, 2015

ACADEMIC FREEDOM UP TO A POINT.

Scott Walker and Wisconsin Republicans are getting closer to eliminating tenure at the University of Wisconsin. Here's a column on the matter from David French, formerly an attorney for Christians who complained their colleges were violating their rights, now one of National Review's premier scolds:
As someone who has litigated many, many academic freedom cases, I have profoundly mixed feelings about this move. First, I know and understand that tenure is designed to guarantee freedom, to prevent political pressures from impacting scholarship. It’s designed to preserve academic independence. In fact, tenure has protected a number of outspoken conservative professors (including some of my clients), men and women who would have been fired long ago without tenure protections.
But...
At the same time, however, academic independence is a fiction. In the real world, leftist groupthink dominates academic departments, conservatives are easily weeded out before tenure – mostly through the hiring process itself – and even many (if not most) tenured dissenting professors live “in the closet” to avoid the social and professional consequences of public disagreement on key cultural or scientific issues. The result isn’t freedom but instead permanently entrenched ideological conformity.
Freedom not only isn't free, it isn't even real if it results in too many liberals. French then offers what may look to the casual observer like a defense of tenure...
Yet this same overwhelming conformity means that the immediate consequence of lifting tenure protections wouldn’t be greater diversity but even worse ideological persecution as the few conservative professors would face hostile departments stripped of the bulk of their legal protections. Ending tenure without simultaneously overhauling departments (including departments’ academic missions and hiring practices) simply won’t contribute to the cause of liberty. Yes, it might make it easier to make financially-motivated cuts, but it’s hard to see any short or medium-term increase in true academic freedom.
...but his GOP buddies are probably reading that and saying, "You know, he's right -- we ought to stuff the faculties with wingnuts, then make it easy to fire the ones we don't like!" Whether that was French's intention I leave to you, but read his closing before you decide:
Finally, there are downsides to tenure beyond its effect on liberty. Place any group of people outside of the normal boundaries of accountability, and they are likely to abuse that autonomy. Tenured professors are no exception, with their ranks including a host of colleagues who simply coast on their job security. They care little for teaching, behave horribly towards students and colleagues, and even slack off their research efforts. They occupy seats that could be taken by better, more conscientious teachers and scholars, and no one can move them until they retire or die. While preserving true academic freedom is worth tolerating a limited number of deadbeats, the deadbeats become much less tolerable if academic freedom is failing.
Jeez, why do we have this stupid old "tenure" in the first place? French is insufferable even when he's on the right side -- for example, you can believe Laura Kipnis got a raw deal from Northwestern and still want to sidle away when French says nuh-uh libtards, you're the real enemies of free speech; for many of us that may be a merely instinctual reaction, but French's post today shows why that instinct is absolutely correct.

Sunday, May 31, 2015

BUCKLEY AND MAILER.

Shortly before announcing his candidacy for Mayor of New York, an esteemed American author proposed a plan for the city: he would give tax breaks to “neighborhoods that developed self-financed patrols”; legalize drugs and gambling; and abolish all commercial vehicle loading between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. Once declared, he advocated charging fees on drivers from out of town, building a “Disneyland East” on Queens’ old World’s Fair grounds, and “cutting down traffic by building a huge aerial bike lane, twenty feet above the ground and twenty feet wide, above Second Avenue from First Street all the way to One Hundred Twenty-Fifth.”

Four years later, another esteemed American author — one who had, out of passion for urban design, built a model city out of Lego blocks so large he couldn’t get it out the front door of his Brooklyn apartment — threw his own hat in the same ring. He ran on a platform of local control — that is, he wanted New York City to secede from the State — and like his predecessor played with ideas from all over the map, from “compulsory free love in those neighborhoods which vote for it, [to] compulsory church attendance on Sunday for those neighborhoods who vote for that…” Also, his brain trust kicked out ideas like “Make Coney Island ‘Las Vegas East.’”

Thus described by Kevin M. Schultz in his new book Buckley and Mailer: The Difficult Friendship that Shaped the Sixties, neither the 1965 candidate William F. Buckley nor the 1969 candidate Norman Mailer sounds serious. Neither worked the hustings or brokered with interest groups: both won space in the news by being famous and saying outrageous things. In the present political scene they are most closely resembled by Donald Trump, a famous crackpot on whom only the most disaffected voters could project their disgust.

But in the Sixties there was plenty of disaffection and disgust to go around. Also, each of the two men was serious about something. For all Buckley’s playfulness in this particular endeavor (best evinced by his famous quip that, should the polls return in his favor, he would “demand a recount”), he was, Schultz suggests, building political capital. As editor of conservative flagship National Review, he had not only elevated but also lightened the tone of American conservatism, replacing Bircher brooding with a confident why-not attitude. This made conservatism attractive, even fun, and in this race he vaunted his whimsically reactionary politics in the media capital of the country as a contrast to the seriousness of local social planners whose efforts were visibly failing. During his 1965 campaign, as he shook hands with working-class New Yorkers who were abandoning the major parties to support him, “Buckley,” says Schultz, “saw the future of the Republican Party.” He got 13.4% of the vote on the fringe Conservative Party ticket and may have thrown the election from Abe Beame to John Lindsay. Strengthened by Buckley’s run, the state Conservative Party got his brother Jim elected Senator six years later. Ronald Reagan, or at least his handlers, took notice.

Mailer too was serious, but not about politics as such. True, he’d covered political events in Miami and the Siege of Chicago and The Armies of the Night, and given his qualified support to the anti-war movement. But he had no sensible prescription for change and in his own campaign approached governance as an existential experiment: “I want to see where my own ideas lead,” he told followers. Having successfully changed his literary stock in trade from straight fiction to social criticism, he now took a flyer on retail politics. But though he enlisted blue-collar writers Pete Hamill and Jimmy Breslin to add proletarian appeal to his egghead campaign, Mailer proved less talented than Buckley at outreach, or more likely just less interested. Asked what he’d have done as Mayor about a recent snowstorm, Mailer said he’d have “pissed all over it,” and his campaign effectively ended in a speech at the Village Gate where he figuratively pissed all over his followers (“he greeted their suggestions with an angry ‘fuck you,’” reports Schultz). His 5% showing in the Democratic primary may have cost Herman Badillo the nomination, but otherwise it had no discernible further impact on city politics, and seemed to begin Mailer’s drift from political subjects in general.

Schultz’ conceit, which is intriguing if not convincing, is that mismatched as they might seem, Buckley and Mailer had something in common besides talent and mayoral campaigns. It’s not so much the subtitular “Friendship,” which mainly consists of a few social meetings and letters full of writerly banter. Their bond, per Schultz, is that they “shared a common complaint about America,” born of a “joint disgust at the central assumptions that dominated postwar America” — that is, the technocratic, welfare-statist, progressive-up-to-a-point consensus that assumed the Goldwater debacle was the end of conservatism, waded America into Vietnam, and didn’t even see the SDS coming. Mailer himself seemed to endorse this reading in his first public debate with Buckley in 1962 — befitting the calculating chutzpah of both men, a heavily-publicized affair at Chicago’s Medinah Temple promoted like a prizefight, and on which oddsmakers and intelligentsia made book — where, Schultz reports, “Mailer insisted he hated the Liberal Establishment just as much as Buckley did.”

But even then, before the heterodoxies of New Right and New Left had calcified, the two men had staked out divergent territories. At that debate Buckley denounced what he perceived as liberalism’s capitulation to communism and pleaded for submission to the guidance of “Presidents Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.” That gave no wiggle room for the Left, and one gets the sense that was just how Buckley wanted it: heightening the contradictions was a big part of his act. Mailer, conversely, laid against liberalism a litany of complaints that, if they were technically as cosmic as Buckley’s, appeared to extend into a different cosmos entirely: Modern liberalism, he said, had led to “the deteriorated quality of labor, the insubstantiality of money, the ravishment of nature, the impoverishment of food, the manipulation of emotion, the emptiness of faith, the displacement of sex…” One can imagine Buckley’s supporters starting to follow this but drifting away as the vision exceeded traditional politics, not to mention propriety.

To the extent that the two men may be said to have had, even by proxy, a conversation, Mailer’s arguments were so much more capacious — if also necessarily more diffuse — than Buckley’s that nothing except their mutually glorious verbal skills really seems to unite them. On the Medinah Temple stage, for example, while Buckley was making coy references to Mailer’s personal excesses — which became his nasty habit in debates with and reference to his alleged buddy — Mailer said in apparent exasperation, “I’m trying to talk about the nature of man.” In a Firing Line session six years later, Mailer described to Buckley “greed, bigotry, insensitivity, and general stupidity” as “the disease of the Right,” and “excessive propriety in family life, excessive obedience to all the small laws of daily life, such as crossing at corners” as that of the Left. Schultz describes Buckley as dubious at this, which is understandable; Buckley and his movement saw (or at least were accustomed to profit by portraying) the Left as the home of rioting unwashed youth and blacks, whereas Mailer sincerely sought to diagnose the Left as if it were a character.

Parallels there may be, but there’s no getting around the fact that Mailer was first and last (with detours in the middle) an artist, whereas for all his authorial virtuosity Buckley was a propagandist. When Buckley dabbled in spy fiction, Schultz says, he was “rattling his saber in the most subtle of forms,” a polite way of saying that Buckley was more interested in investing his remarkable energy in a profitable line extension for his brand than in, as Mailer put it, the condition of man. For some reason Schultz seeks to portray late Buckley as a nearly spent force; after the Sixties he, like Mailer, “removed himself from the pitch of battle,” says Schultz. But that isn’t really so; though new jacks like George Will may have started to outsell him, Buckley hung in as the godfather of the scene -- even casual newspaper readers would know who he was and what he represented -- and churned out columns that served the cause. Take this bit from the start of the First Gulf War, 1991:
The anti-war people never really found a doctrine after the argument ran dry that we should continue with the sanctions. Some still hang in there with the cry, “We won’t die for oil!” but that moral-geopolitical analysis is also tending to run dry as the perception widens that “oil” is simply the convenient symbol of the kind of worldwide aggression that Saddam Hussein had in mind where he overran Kuwait and dealt with it in ways that remind old-timers of the Rape of Nanking (we hanged the Japanese general who supervised that operation).
Once a hippie-puncher, always a hippie-puncher. As for Mailer, his return to fiction and its hybrids was a return to form; his energy was as great as Buckley’s, but his skill visibly sharpened and his capacity for empathy remained and deepened and stood well his cause -- that is, his talent and literature. Along with some duds he had great artistic successes, most notably The Excecutioner’s Song. Schultz acknowledges that book’s power but, perhaps to brace up the parallel lives structure, insists that the book "was not, as Alfred Kazin had described Mailer's work a decade earlier, a mirror to the nation." Really? The story of a criminal famous for insisting on and getting the death penalty was no kind of national mirror? It might be argued that the best thing about The Excecutioner’s Song was Mailer’s evocation of the hard country that birthed and shaped Gary Gilmore and Nicole Baker.

There are other instances of Schultz trying to nudge his subjects onto convenient tracks. For example, we can see how Buckley's mischievousness fits with the rowdy Sixties, but Schultz goes so far as to insist, “he loved the constant rebukes to the status quo perpetrated by the counterculture.” Really? Like Pigasus, the Yippies’ candidate for President? “He could understand their anger and frustration,” continues Schultz, “and he, most at home as a provocateur, had never been one to toe the party line… he grew his already wavy hair even longer and could be seen darting around New York City on a Honda motorcycle, often with a passenger in tow.” This may have constituted letting one’s freak flag fly in Sharon, Connecticut, but there is nothing in Buckley’s corpus to suggest such an affinity for the Armies of the Night, or if there is Schultz does not include it.

But lily-gilding aside, Schultz does give us a fresh way to look at the two men, and if they interest you this book will, too. There are many anecdotes I hadn’t heard before — I had heard that Mailer challenged McGeorge Bundy to a fistfight, for example, but not that he was called off by Lillian Hellman, nor that Mailer was sore about it (“when the chips were down she’d always go for the guy who had the most clout”) and wouldn’t speak to her for two years. I will add that Buckley and Mailer makes very vivid a time in American letters when literary feuds were perhaps no less picayune than now but a good deal more interesting, perhaps owing to the relative quality of talents involved (I mean, who’d you rather hear bitch — Truman Capote or Jonathan Franzen?).

Friday, May 29, 2015

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.


I know I've posted this before but I'm in a fuck-everything sort of mood
and nothing but the Pride of Syracuse will do.

•   Bernie Sanders wrote this in 1972:
A man goes home and masturbates his typical fantasy. A woman on her knees, a woman tied up, a woman abused. 
A woman enjoys intercourse with her man — as she fantasizes being raped by 3 men simultaneously. 
The man and woman get dressed up on Sunday — and go to Church, or maybe to their "revolutionary" political meeting. 
Have you ever looked at Stag, Man, Hero, Tough magazines on the shelf at your local bookstore? Do you know why newspapers with the articles like "Girl 12 raped by 14 men" sell so well? To what in us are they appealing? 
Women, for their own preservation, are trying to pull themselves together. And it's necessary for all of humanity that they do so. Slavishness on one hand breeds pigness on the other hand. Pigness on one hand breeds slavishness on the other. Men and women — both are losers. Women adapt themselves to fill the needs of men, and men adapt themselves to fill the needs of women. In the beginning there were strong men who killed the animals and brought home the food — and the dependent women who cooked it. No More! Only the roles remain — waiting to be shaken off. There are no "human" oppressors. Oppressors have lost their humanity. On one hand "slavishness," on the other hand "pigness." Six of one, half dozen of the other. Who wins?
The rest here. The meaning of this admittedly jejune take on learned helplessness and gender roles will be clear enough to anyone with at least an eighth grade reading level. Wingnuts, though, are pretending it's a bombshell because, derr hurr, libtard said rape. Some of the dumber ones pretend Sanders said "All Men Dream Of Tying Up and Sexually Abusing Women, And All Women Fantasize of Being Raped By Three Men." "'Pretend Todd Akin said this': Where’s media outrage over Bernie Sanders’ pervy old essay?" headlines Twitchy. Akin, you may recall, not only professed to believe that women can use stress to stop a rapist's sperm from impregnating them, but reiterated this belief after his comments blew up his campaign, which I'd say is different from discussing the psychosexual effects of inequality.  Sanders' spokesman says the 1972 article "was intended to attack gender stereotypes of the '70s, but it looks as stupid today as it was then," and while that seems accurate as far as it goes, I'm sorry he felt the need. I yet hope for a candidate who, confronted with this sort of thing, will hand out vouchers for remedial reading classes, or at least demand that his persecutors conjugate a sentence.

•   Hey, Rod Dreher has discovered incivility in an internet comments section! And guess where:
I’m a regular reader of Douthat and Brooks, and am constantly shocked by how hateful so many NYT readers are.
Those vicious, foulmouthed Times readers! They're the nastiest slur-merchant that ever sailed the seven million IPs! Doesn't get around much, does he? (Actually he's seen it before: in his own comments section. ["I have always been puzzled by the people who read this blog, and who seem to hate everything I believe in or say, yet who keep coming back to tell me what an SOB I am."] I envy the state of wide-eyed innocence to which Dreher disingenuously pretends.)

•    At The Federalist, professional culture-victim Mollie Hemingway explains why the New Yorker cover about the GOP Presidential candidates is not funny you guys:
Anyway, how did The New Yorker pick these seven candidates? It certainly wasn’t which seven had the most popular support thus far, at least based on the Real Clear Politics average. That would have included Ben Carson and not Chris Christie. And the magazine already noted that it wasn’t who had actually announced their candidacy. That includes Carly Fiorina, the only female in the GOP race. They didn’t include people who have actually won primaries before, such as Rick Santorum, who finished in second place for the GOP nomination in 2012... 
Maybe they’re just terrified of letting liberal readers know how diversely hued the GOP field is. I don’t know... 
But even if the media wish the GOP field weren’t as diverse as it is, particularly relative to the Democratic field, the media shouldn’t do the artistic equivalent of airbrushing photos to get there.
I hope you stupid libtards realize that by not including the one black and one female candidate from the 342 prospective GOP Presidential candidates, you prove you're the real racist-war-on-womanist for misrepresenting our party's diversity. Now who's laughing -- wait, it's still you! Reverse prejudism!

Thursday, May 28, 2015

THE DREAM WILL NEVER DIE.

Rich Lowry thinks murders are up in Baltimore because people film the cops. No, really:
Why have the police in Baltimore pulled back? Baltimore’s police commissioner, according to the Sun, “has said police are struggling to stop violence in West Baltimore, where officers have been routinely surrounded by dozens of people, video cameras and hostility while performing basic police work.” 
If the message is supposed to be that they don’t want the police there, it has been received.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: Conservatives always want municipal union workers to be more responsive to the needs of the people unless the union is the cops and the people are black. (Actually I think we can drop the "the union is the cops" part.) Lowry also re-swoons over 2007 Presidential frontrunner Rudolph Giuliani and the District 9 style of community policing.

The libertarian moment is well and truly over, and Republicans will run in 2016 on a straight authoritarian ticket. As usual.

Wednesday, May 27, 2015

...UNTIL GOLDBERG WRITES SOMETHING ELSE.

Jonah Goldberg:
Huckabee’s Anachronistic Brand of Progressivism
We could shorter this "farrt" and call it a day, but let me  give you the gist: Because he wants the state to meddle in people's business, as has every Bible-beater since time immemorial, Huckabee is actually a "right-wing populist-progressive." Sure, why not -- Goldberg already told us liberals are fascists so why can't right-wingers be progressive? The explanation is, as usual, that William Jennings Bryan and Woodrow Wilson did racist or repressive things, therefore progressives are racist and repressive.

You can catch some of Goldberg's related argumentation in a remarkable Twitter debate with Jamelle Bouie; Goldberg leans heavily on the assertion that he didn't mean anything bad by "ideologue" because it just means somebody who has an ideology -- you know, like when your smartass friend in middle school told that Jewish kid he was anti-Semitic because he didn't like Arafat. Some Goldberg highlights: "Hey, I don't have a huge gripe with you. But the idea you're not a liberal ideologue because you say you're not is...unpersuasive" (this is known to rhetoricians as the argumentum ad ellipsis) and "the term 'ideologue' was largely invented by Napoleon and Marx to do exactly the kind of thing you're trying to do to me."

The column ends with Goldberg saying even though Huckabee is bad because he's a progressive, he's not as bad as those progressive-progressives because he believes in God. If nothing else, it proves the wisdom of this old saw.

Tuesday, May 26, 2015

SLOUGHS OF DESPOND.

'Round rightwing world, there has of late been much lamentation and weeping over the ruin Obama is alleged to have made of America. This is of course just their way of trying to distract the rabble so they might forget who George W. Bush was and let the Republicans get back into power, whereupon they will begin a war with Iran, force paupers to subsist on protein powder (but not the good kind the yuppies get!), institute the Yacht Needs Cleaning Income Tax Credit, and generally complete the neo-feudalization process. But right now they're really gnashing their little teeth out and it's fun to watch.

Take the ultimate wingnut Memorial Day essay by Town Hall's Slaverin' Kurt Schlichter:
Like everything about the Community Organizer-In-Chief and his cronies, everything about the carefully choreographed charade we’ll see this Memorial Day is a lie... 
It’s a pose, an act, a scam. You can see it in the faces of the liberal politicians as they are forced to stand there onstage each last Monday of May, pretending they wouldn’t rather be anywhere else in the world than in the sun listening to people talk about what, at best, liberals consider suckers, and more often consider outright babykillers.
(His readers nod sagely from their Barcaloungers and wash down another burger with another craft beer.)
Look at Obama’s face as he walks behind the floral tribute in front of the cameras at the Tomb of the Unknowns. Tell me he’s thinking about the men who stormed ashore at Normandy and not about getting out of there and teeing up.
He’ll talk a good game – they all will, but it’s all a lie. If he cared, he wouldn’t have squandered the victory in Iraq to satisfy his America-hating pals on the left. ISIS, the JV team? Obama lied, and tens of thousands died – and those were the lucky ones.
The whole froth is a delight -- some sections, e.g. "They spit in our warriors’ collective face every time Jenjis Kerrey’s equine mug flashes across the TV screen as he rushes back to the Middle East to tongue kiss the Iranian Islamonazis..." you can easily imagine being read by Patrick Magee in A Clockwork Orange. But "and those were the lucky ones" is sublime -- her heroes spent, America  cowers before the coming reign of Hitlery ISIS!

At National Review Victor Davis Maximus Super Hanson brings the back of his wrist to his forehead, flutters his eyelids, and mourns the wreck Obama has made of the Middle East to which C-Plus Augustus once brought order and stability. Also unlike Bush, Obama won't suck up to the Saudi pashas  -- and have a care, soothsays Hanson, for "their financial clout and the availability of Pakistani bombs for Sunni petrodollars" (also, they share our values!) -- plus Obama hates Israel, perhaps because "it resembles the United States too closely, and thus earns the reflected hypercriticism that so many leftists cultivate for their own civilization," but he loves his fellow black people, whom he and "the elites" subsidize with "huge, unquestioned redistributionist entitlements for the inner city." You see the problem: Obama gives more attention to America's despised underclass than to Arab sheiks and Israel. Vanitas! 

Hanson's colleague Quin Hillyer actually revives the #Benghazi-is-worse-than-Watergate thing ("a few goobers rifling through the office of the opposing political party" etc) and denounces the Clintons in general for "putting all the rest of us at substantially greater risk of annihilation" (hysteritalics his). But it's the American people who seem most to disappoint him. "A goodly number of Americans apparently are aware of the scandal yet still fall at [Hillary Clinton's] feet," he gasps. The punters also "believe quarterback Tom Brady cheated but say in the next breath that he’s a good role model for children." Of course, dummy, you want to say to him, how long have you lived in this country, Brady's rich and butch! But by then Hillyer is on about our "culture" and how it "celebrates depravities" and  "we're now told that we can't spank a misbehaving child; that we can't read Huckleberry Finn because it features the 'n' word; that we can’t name sports teams in honor of Indians" etc. and eventually Hillyer is holding his knees to his chest, rocking and reminiscing on Pat Moynihan and the Moody Blues.

The best, however, is Rod Dreher having the expected 100,000-word meltdown over gay marriage in Ireland. Here is, in every sense, the nut graf:
Understand that by “liberalism,” [Matthew B. Crawford] means not the social politics of the Democratic Party and its supporters, but the entire Enlightenment framework of social and political ideas. All of us Americans, whether we call ourselves liberals or conservatives, are liberals in this sense. I am no different. I believe in free speech, freedom of religion, civil rights and the other hallmarks of liberalism. Now that liberalism has evolved into hostility to what I believe to be true about religion, morality, and human nature, I — like all orthodox Christians — have to face the fact that liberalism, which all of us Americans took in with our mother’s milk, may ultimately be alien to our faith, because in the end, it enthrones the choosing Self over God or any conception of external, transcendent Truth.
Keep this in mind when they come whining at you about gay wedding cakes -- these guys think that the Enlightenment, whence came the American idea of freedom, is anti-Christian. And you know what the next step would be. I'm beginning to think Dreher's half-hearted praise of the "hallmarks of liberalism" is just so much taqiyya.