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“The Purge” Relocates to Minneapolis

Oscar Wilde was famous for having written, “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life”. Come to think of it, I agree. A super-majority on the Minneapolis City Council – 9 of 13 – are in favor of bringing the plot of the “The Purge” to their fair city by abolishing the police department. More than that, they are anxious to become the next Detroit. When did ruin become so fashionable?

If you’ll recall, the story of the “The Purge” centers on a legal holiday for criminal pandemonium once a year. Kudos to creator/screenwriter James DeMonaco for being so prescient.

The predicate for our current sanctioned anarchy was the sin of commission by one Minneapolis cop as three others performed a sin of omission for not interceding in the killing of George Floyd. All four are charged, but legal action against the four is left in the dust as the video goes viral and the ever-present hair-trigger mob gets another opportunity to display their militant bonafides. The issue has been nationalized and internationalized. It’s no longer the misbehavior of four people but the purported misbehavior of nearly everyone not black – and black too if they don’t hold the prescribed views – and all cops everywhere, no matter the skin hue. It’s a singular incident to feed the “woke” mill.

The officers charged in the killing of George Floyd.

Activists disguised as elected officials, fully marinated in the secular doctrine of perpetual victimhood, have announced their push for nihilism. If you thought that Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland couldn’t be placed in the nonfiction section, read this encounter between CNN’s Alisyn Camerota and Minneapolis City Council President Lisa Bender.

Alisyn Camerota (l) and Lisa Bender.


Camerota (I paraphrase): Are you saying that you want to dismantle the police department, that you want a “police-free” future?
Bender: “Yeah, and you know a lot of us were asked if can you imagine a future without police back in 2017 when we were running for office. And I answered ‘yes’ to that question. To me that future is a long way away and it would take an enormous amount of investment in things that we know work to keep people safe.”
Camerota pressed (I paraphrase): What if my home was broken into in the middle of the night? Who would I call?
Bender: “Yes, I hear that loud and clear from a lot of my neighbors. And I know — and myself, too, and I know that that comes from a place of privilege.”

Besides the wallowing in the mental maturity of a 6-year-old, Bender escapes into cloudy abstractions. These are abstractions without clear definition and therefore not provable, but they don’t have to be in order to be useful in the crusade. One is “systemic racism” (or “institutional”) and the other is “privilege”. The words are thrown about like magical incantations. Just using the words, they believe, will unveil a hidden gnosis to “woke” initiates. And it’s on this basis that public policy is concocted. Amazing.

So, Bender and eight of her comrades on the Minneapolis City Council are in a rush to ape Detroit. Chronic disorder and violence aren’t a selling point to any city’s chamber of commerce. Bender’s recipe of things that “we know work” – the free stuff and counseling galore pumped into the inner city – won’t stem the chaos and won’t stem the desire of anyone (black, white, or otherwise) with even the most meager means to skedaddle. Bender and her colleagues are Jim Joneses dispensing Kool-Aid.

Their model is Detroit, whether they realize it or not. The 1960’s riots were amphetamines for the huge exodus of whites and blacks. Detroit, like many other cities experiencing riots and high crime, violated the diversity god by becoming more monochromatic – overwhelmingly black and poor. From 1950 to 2010 (the last census), the white cohort in the city plummeted from 1.5 million to 75,000. As others have written, median incomes of black families tanked in the city because the middle-class ones fled. Sure, the self-immolation of the Big Three didn’t help, and there’s always a symbiosis between social and economic conditions, but you can’t call barbarity on the streets a harbinger of growth. It matters little whether you are white or black or a millennial or hipster if your kids were forced into a gang initiation or if one of your roommates was beat to a pulp for his wallet. Graffiti and crack houses don’t make for good neighborhood cohesion.

Abandoned home in a neighborhood of abandoned homes in Dertoit.

The scene was repeated in Watts, Chicago, Washington, DC, Baltimore, Newark, Atlanta, the South Bronx, etc. Bender and company are a clan of Dorothies prancing down the yellow brick road, the road to a bombed-out city.

*Demonstrators push against a police car after rioting erupted in a crowd of 1,500 in the Los Angeles area of Watts in this file photo taken August 12, 1965. (AP Photo/File)

In an earlier post, I suggested, “Get out of the cities”. If history is any indication, you will. More than that, get a gun and hold it dear. Call it your Bender gun.

RogerG

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College and the Ubiquity of the Cultural and Political Left

Protesters gather around after setting fire to the entrance of a police station as demonstrations continue after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minn., May 28, 2020. (Carlos Barria/Reuters)

It’s everywhere. The story of America is reduced to “systemic racism” to such an extent that the chants of Black Lives Matter are made mainstream. Logging onto my Facebook page confronted me with “Act Against Racial Injustice: We stand with the Black community and against racism. Together we can support causes working towards racial justice and equality.” Going to the Bing search engine brought out the announcement, “We stand in solidarity with the Black community and all those working toward racial equality. A message from our CEO.” At least the techies are all in for a campaign against the alleged pervasiveness of racism.

The headliner for an email from CEO Satya Nadella to Microsoft employees.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

And then we have the New York Times weighing in with “The 1619 Project”. It’s an unadulterated attempt to boil the story of America down to racism. The tale is directed at the kiddies in K-12 curricula from the screed’s website. So, the kids get a bald-faced version ladled on top of what they receive daily from intellectually corrupted teachers, textbooks, and supplemental materials. The story is the same: Racism persists everywhere in an overt/covert and individual/institutional manner. To keep the story rolling, it’s better for the cause that the supposed threat be imprecise, vague, hidden, and forever true no matter what.

Sen. Tom Cotton penned an op-ed to the New York Times on the entirely reasonable option to use federal troops to quell our current wave of riots. The Constitution, The Insurrection Act, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Little Rock during Eisenhower’s White House residency are testament to its feasibility and legality. It’s an entirely different question to ask whether this is the time for it. In my view, we are getting there. Still, the reaction in the Times’s newsroom was open rebellion. The woke crowd in their work stalls had their sensitivities enflamed and threatened mass resignation.

But is the story of endemic racism true? Color me skeptical. Maybe you too.

Andrew C. McCarthy’s article in National Review Online, “The ‘Institutional Racism’ Canard”, puts lie to the charge. His case is strong. Quoting Heather McDonald, “a police officer is 18½ times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer.”

Andrew C. McCarthy

There’s more. A quarter of unarmed suspects killed by police are black, even though blacks make up 13% of the population. An argument for the Left? No. The lawlessness of many of our urban neighborhoods is illustrative of the fact that blacks compose 53% of murders and 60% of robberies. They have many more run-ins with the cops and a much higher potential to fall into the killed-by-police category. And the victims are overwhelmingly black and so are the ones reporting the crimes. It’s amazing that the number is “only” – but still sad – 9 unarmed blacks killed in contrast to 19 whites in 2019. The whole story that the marchers and rioters are bull-horning is manufactured.

Why does the story have resonance? In military parlance, the ground has been prepared. Decades of K-18 victimhood is extracting a price in combustible cities and hijacked minds. The matriculants filter into Fortune 500 boardrooms, cultural institutions, journalism, the arts, and everywhere people occupy positions of influence.

Undeniably, most impactful factor is the philosophical bias in the schools.

One person (David Bahnsen) even speculated on the role of colleges and universities in making California left wing from top to bottom and in and out. The more pervasive the campuses, the more pervasive the ideology. This circumstance might partially explain the uncompromising leftward tilt of the state.

Other blue states may periodically vote a split ballot: an occasional Republican for governor or mayor and Dems down-ballot (Mass., N.Y., N.J., Maryland for instance). Colleges are present in these states but not so wall-to-wall as in the Golden State. 115 community colleges exist in the state with 1 out of 4 community college pupils in the U.S. attending one in California. 119 4-year colleges and universities of a variety of shapes and sizes exist in the state, including the massive 33 public ones of over 670,000 full-time enrollees. No state has the capacity to disseminate leftist thinking as does California. There’s no corner of the state to escape the culture-smog. It penetrates everywhere and a super-majority of the electorate.

Students of UC Berkeley.

All kinds of nonsense and maliciousness sprouts in the pervasive academically-influenced soil of California. New and novel ways to repeal the Second Amendment in the state; outlawing separate boy/girl toy isles in a store; attempts to ban any alternative to the government schools; ham-handed efforts to force abortion and the LGBTQ agenda onto religious organizations and their social mission; environmental central planning; declaring war on preexisting and longstanding industries in favor of a destructive utopia; the nullification of federal immigration law; and the scare story of racism, racism everywhere, are taken seriously in this peculiar hothouse.

Do we need any more proof of the damage caused by the deformation of learning in our schools? Build more colleges in your state in this day and age and watch your politics go to hell. Real reform that moves us away from the precipice of perpetual victimhood, riots, falsehoods, and malignant crusades begins with the real reform of our schools. An unchallenged and malicious ideology shouldn’t be allowed to take root and then undermine the state and nation. This is no demand for the rule of another monolithic ideology, but rather a call for balance. Now that’s real reform.

The cry of “throw the bums out” begins with a focus on those in critical public agencies in education and the teacher-training colleges. Stop the madness by going to the source.

RogerG

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Get Out of the Cities

A man poses for a photo in the parking lot of a AutoZone store in Minneapolis in May of 2020. (photo: Carlos Gonzalez/AP)

And, I might add, get out of any deep blue state.

In an earlier post, I mentioned the odd reality of the government requiring everyone to be masked. Now we have it! Rioters in cities across the country are masked as they pillage, burn, loot, maul bystanders, and hunt down cops. It’s doubly difficult now to do any facial recognition to bring to justice any of the miscreants.

Masked or unmasked, if you live in any of the liberally governed American cities, and if those cities reside in a deep blue state, get out and get out now. The governing classes in these places are moving to cripple the thin blue line. Once the line has been reduced to a wispy strand, you can’t even get a gun to defend yourself, family, and property. A ten-day waiting period awaits you in California … and the purchase could very well be rejected by Commissar Becerra (California AG) anyway. New York City dictates a city permit to own a handgun, and if you have the patience of Job and get one, don’t dare take it out of the safe. If you happen to defend yourself with it, you’ll experience the full force of the law, something not to be applied to a mauler and pillager of the innocent public.

38-year police veteran, police captain, and police chief, David Dorn, was murdered helping to defend a friend’s business from rioters.
A Las Vegas police officer was shot and critically injured late Monday as police attempted to take protesters into custody. He was identified Tuesday afternoon as 29-year-old Shay Mikalonis.

This comes at a time when the activist base of the Democratic Party cries for the defunding of the police. They say, “If you want an AR-15, join the police.” Well, there won’t be much of a police force to seek employment, and you still won’t have anything to defend yourself. Absent a cop and gun, prepare to prostate yourself before the mob. If that is an unappealing prospect, move!

LA mayor Garcetti announced today a $150 million cut in the LAPD’s budget. His message for the residents of LA is simple: you had better wear a mask as you get pummeled by the mob.

I don’t know what else to tell you. In other similarly governed nations, people risk dangerous deserts and the Florida Straits to escape the chaos of the drug cartels, MS-13, and the workers’ paradises. You have ample company.

Cuban refugees fleeing to Florida in a raft, August 24, 1994.

RogerG

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Riots Hurt the Left

A protester runs past burning cars and buildings on Chicago Avenue, Saturday, May 30, 2020, in St. Paul, Minn. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

Ross Douthat, no admirer of Donald Trump, has penned an op-ed for the New York Times that is a clear warning to left/progressives to watch out (see below). If they soft pedal the violence, they may face a similar backlash as in 1968 when Nixon won a close election on a wave of the “silent majority”. Then, in my view, Douthat goes off the rails when he predicts Biden is better positioned than Trump to win in 2020.

Ross Douthat

Anyway, the crime spike in Obama’s last years in office, the riots in Ferguson and Baltimore, the current conflagrations in our cities, and the screeches coming out of a much more radical Democratic Party should be dire warnings to any Democrat of longstanding.

Demonstrators stand in the middle of West Florissant as they react to tear gas fired by police during ongoing protests in reaction to the shooting of teenager Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri, August 18, 2014. (REUTERS/Lucas Jackson)

Sure, as others have noticed, Trump’s mouth is his own worst enemy. He grates against the sensibilities of the vast middle of the electorate. His rhetorical mannerisms can frequently upset an otherwise judicious message. Thus, he makes his reelection tougher by the day.

But, no matter Trump’s faults, they don’t take place in a vacuum. The center of today’s Democratic Party has moved ever closer to the SDS’s Port Huron Statement of 1962. It’s a radical party that is morphing into a revolutionary one.

A little backgrounder is necessary. For those who’ve either forgotten or were never taught, the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) is a direct descendant of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society of 1905. Here’s the genealogy: Intercollegiate Socialist Society > League for Industrial Democracy > Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID) > Students for a Democratic Society.

The SDS national council meeting, 1963; Tom Hayden at far left. (Photograph: C Clark Kissinger)

No red-baiting here. People who would be comfortable in the SDS – Bernie and his bros, and the dominating activist base in deep blue states – are in the driver’s seat of the party. The Port Huron Statement – the constitution of the 60’s radical left – could very well be the party’s 2020 platform, with concessions to the lunacy of identity politics. How repellent would that be to middle class voters just wanting to get back to work and their kids in school? Do I have to answer?

Biden can’t run from that. Biden can be made into a comforting figure for the general election but he can’t run from the party who chose him. The duty of the Republican Party in the fall campaign would be to make Biden and the Democrats more indefensible than Trump’s tweets. The radical and preening Squad is one thing, but burning cities threatening to spread to the suburbs, and the spawning of a crime wave from no-bail and non-prosecution policies may do to the Dem Party what happened to them from 1968 onward. When a party cements a reputation as a threat to civil order, they’re in trouble … big trouble.

California Democratic Party Chairman John Burton leads a “F***k Donald Trump” chant at the California Democratic Party Convention in May of 2017.

Trump’s greatest ally is his opponents. Douthat underestimates the moral corruption of the Democrat side of the political equation.

RogerG

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Waco and What We’ve Become

“Waco”, the miniseries currently airing on Netflix.

I was surprised and disappointed that Clint Eastwood’s “Jewell” didn’t do better at the box office. The poor showing wasn’t due to a lack of cinematic craftsmanship. It was well-made and acted with a riveting script. I have only speculation, but it sure seems like today’s public is squeamish about such offerings. Could it be a byproduct of a broad revulsion of our incendiary politics? Escapism might be more appealing because the quality of our public discourse is so appalling. That’s my guess. I hope that Netflix’s “Waco” doesn’t experience the same fate. It cries out to be seen.

Eastwood’s story is riveting, as is “Waco”. Richard Jewell was tarnished by nothing more than a FBI profile (of the “lone bomber” and the “hero syndrome” psyche hypotheses) – profiling being an investigative technique to narrow the range of suspects, not to ignore evidence and hound a person. An institutional psychosis grips and propels agents toward a particular suspect or set of actions to the exclusion of any other possibilities. All of it is based on nothing more than an abstraction that straitjackets the minds of government agents.

The potential for tunnel vision, fueled by this institutional psychosis, intensifies as the responsible agency is administratively removed from local circumstances. The FBI in 1996 was obsessed with Richard Jewell in Atlanta, and the ATF/FBI in 1993 was consumed with Vernon Howell, aka David Koresh, outside Waco, Texas, as the US Marshals Service and FBI were with Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992. Caricatures were formed and plans made from afar, and then imposed on a locality. The fallout included Jewell’s unjustifiably tarred reputation, 79 dead in the inferno at Waco, and the killing of Weaver’s wife, Vicky, and son, Sammy (age 14), at Ruby Ridge. We might as well include the yang of the Oklahoma City bombing, killing 168, to the yin of Waco. Innocents all; lives cut short. It’s not a matter of saints and sinners. It’s a matter of a grotesque abuse of power that is broadly ignored as such. Easy to do when decision making is centralized and distant.

Randy Weaver and family. Federal authorities would kill his wife, Vicky (next to Randy) and son, Sammy (seated at his mother’s feet).
Randy Weaver’s home at Ruby Ridge, southwest of Bonner’s Ferry, Idaho.

By the way, what was with the 1990’s? Now that’s a question awaiting serious consideration.

Far more troubling for us today is the public’s apparent assent to this state of affairs. Are we becoming the type of people who are increasingly willing to turn over our right to govern ourselves to a narrow class of specialized “experts” employed in government service? Are we becoming sheep? One has to wonder.

Interestingly, the character of Janet Reno had a brief appearance in Netflix’s “Waco”. She approved the final assault on the Branch Dividian compound when informed of unproven accusations of child abuse at the Mt. Carmel estate. Janet Reno cut her teeth on successfully prosecuting child abuse cases in the 1980’s as chief prosecutor of Dade County, Florida, and rode her success to fame and the office of Attorney General of the United States under Bill Clinton.

Janet Reno takes the oath as attorney general during a ceremony at the White House on March 12, 1993, while President Bill Clinton watches. (photo: Barry Thumma/AP)

Oh, one important fact about Janet Reno: she devised a prosecutorial recipe – the infamous “Miami method” – for carrying out a mammoth miscarriage of justice by railroading many innocent people into long prison terms and setting off a daycare child-abuse hysteria that gripped the country in the 1980’s and early 1990’s. Almost all of the convictions have been overturned and ample payouts awarded for false prosecution by states and localities who followed the Pied Piper of Dade County. The story is vividly portrayed in PBS’s “The Child Terror” and in the work of journalist Dorothy Rabinowitz in publications like the Wall Street Journal. From her perch in Washington, DC, Reno was inflicted on the Branch Davidians.

A page from the PBS website for “The Child Terror”.

Part of the problem in our thinking is the nomenclature for the government headquartered in DC. You know, the one surrounding The Mall. We try to avoid calling it what it is: a “central” government. “Central” is unsettling to a nation who sees itself as geographically and culturally diverse with the accompanying and long-established regional loyalties, and a governmental structure to reflect it. If you doubt the belief’s persistence, attend a pro or college football game. Regionalism is rampant.

The word “federal” in reference to the one headquartered in DC is the odd duck in the field. “Federal” pertains to a system of state and national sovereignties, not just the central one. The word is an awkward fit when applied to those manning our national bureaucracies. More accurately, they are “national” or “central” government authorities.

The fuzzy wording hides the reality that the DC government has been centralizing since Woodrow Wilson took the oath of office in 1913 (or maybe it was TR in 1901). The zenith of concentration is a very high plateau of power for our DC authorities running from the New Deal of the 1930’s through the Great Society of the 1960’s to our current Great American Shutdown. The decentralizing efforts of the Nixon/Reagan/Gingrich triumvirate were just hiccups along the way.

Let’s count the ways of DC’s consolidation of power. How do we, the general public, view our national chief executive? George Will’s use of “caesaropapism” for the popular conception of the presidency is apt. DC has been a hot real estate market since FDR’s alphabet soup of “federal” agencies. The commerce clause of the Constitution has been exploited to impose a national floor on wages, the amount of allowable particulate matter in a locality, our car’s fuel economy, whether to cut down a tree, bans on guns that look mean, and nearly everything between … including light bulbs. Huge swaths of our population are dependent on a national bureaucracy’s paycheck or handout. The Supreme Court through its edicts has turned the states into handmaidens of DC. With its ATF, Marshals Service, and FBI, DC has extensive and expansive police forces with a very long reach. Many of them in personnel and behavior mirror the other armed branch of the central government, the military.

The DC government is primed and ready to be at war with its citizens. I have warmed to the complaint about the militarization of law enforcement. Long a talking point of the left, it nonetheless has resonance in light of the increasing recruitment of ex-military into law enforcement, the formation of law enforcement special forces in the form of SWAT teams, and tactics and equipment more appropriate for storming Baghdad. David Koresh looked out the window of his Mt. Carmel compound and saw something familiar to Wehrmacht and Russian officers as they viewed the soon-to-be battlefield of Kursk in 1943.

Tanks in the final assault on the Branch Davidian compound.

Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge might have thought that he was beset by Viet Cong and North Vietnamese regulars like Lt. Colonel Hal Moore’s battalion in the Ia Drang Valley in 1965 (captured in Randall Wallace’s and Mel Gibson’s film, “We Were Soldiers”). “Enemy” patrols and snipers surrounded his family cabin, but he didn’t have Moore’s advantage of airpower and artillery. More aptly, he was Custer at the Little Big Horn.

The thread of concentration runs right through the past and onward to the Great American Shutdown of 2020. The potentates in DC without reservation, in essence, commanded us to stop living. It was a nationwide cease-and-desist order to end the actions that define living. Many governors – mostly blue state ones – see themselves as mini-Woodrow Wilsons, or caesaropapists, and began arresting dads playing with their children in parks or surfers 30 yards offshore. When a local government stood in his way, California’s Governor Gavin Newsom steamrolled Newport Beach. Many of them announced the extended euthanization of their states well into June, maybe beyond. Do you doubt any of them, if they won the presidency, would hesitate in making the act of going to work a crime or using their immense law enforcement powers to assault any group not culturally and politically correct? The real viral threat is this massive abuse of power, not a bug from China.

SAN RAFAEL, CA – MARCH 22: McNears Beach County Park in San Rafael, Calif. was among the parks to close in Marin County on Sunday, March 22, 2020. (Sherry LaVars/Marin Independent Journal)

The stage is set for an edict to kill society at the start of every flu season. Is that even possible? Yes, it’s possible, but not sustainable. It’s no more sustainable than to allow more law enforcement power to accrue in the DC headquarters of the FBI, ATF, and other branches of centralized police forces.

We need to be constantly reminded of the dangers. See Netflix’s “Waco” for a refresher course.

RogerG

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The Real Risk Factors

New York City residents in March 2020.

Mark Twain popularized this phrase of unknown origin: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Much of the talk about the pandemic is proving him right. CNN reports that the US has the highest number of coronavirus cases in the world at 82,000. Such isn’t all that surprising since we are the home of top-flight and broad-based health care and research. We are rich and capable enough to uncover the instances. I’m sure that CNN meant this to be an indictment of Trump, but it should be less surprising given our capabilities.

The above isn’t the only instance of our media making a muddle of our public discussions. Take for example the talk about “risk factors”. Yes, there are genuine physical risk factors such as age and the notorious “underlying conditions”. Completely left out, though, are the social risk factors. Just look at a map to see what I mean.

The areas most vulnerable are fronting onto the global economy, with globalized populations (“diverse” in today’s woke parlance), and with a critical mass of compacted dwellers. In addition, these places are politically captured by the cultural and political Left. So, they are ripe for infection due to the pipeline for pathogens from tourism and the to-and-from travel of residents with foreign relatives. Many of these cities are ports to boot. The governing personalities are enthralled with the mistaken notion of the bigger the government, the better — an idea born to disappoint. Need I say more?

So, what are we to make of this after-the-fact finger pointing? Not much. Neither Trump nor de Blasio is to blame. These things are black swan events with very little warning, especially if the country of origin is an even bigger-government state with every reason to hide the truth. We could bankrupt the country in the futile effort to prepare for unknown unknowns, to borrow a bit from Donald Rumsfeld.

Then, what are we to do? Get back to work, except for the intensely infected cities and a few other areas. The one-size-fits-all approach to public policy is ridiculous. The places most affected need to be treated differently.  Lockdown and quarantine them. Everywhere else should carry on … and be leery of migrants from de Blasio’s Eden.

RogerG

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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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Today’s Recommendation, a Documentary: “One Child Nation”

Showing on Amazon Prime is “One Child Nation”, a deeply disturbing excursion into the cruelties of Communist Chinese social engineering.  Social engineering is the sine qua non of communism.  An allegedly wise cadre of elite apparatchiks sit on top of a society and pronounce from the summit measures to bring about the better world, as they are totally uncaring and devoid of understanding of the unintended consequences.  And for Communist China, the one-child policy is replete with state-manufactured horrors.

Don’t expect the host/narrator to endorse the pro-life position, though.  She doesn’t, in a rather befuddling way.  She equates in a perfunctory fashion the grotesqueries of the Communist policy with US and our state governments’ actions to restrict abortion.  Both are nonsensically lumped together in her mind as government attempts to “control a woman’s body”.  Don’t let that dissuade you from seeing the film if you are pro-life.  There’s enough in it to soil the entire concept of abortion and the social engineering endemic to an assumed omni-competent state, the kind that would be erected by Bernie or Joe.  The two differ only in scale.

From 1979 to 2015, the CCP enforced a 1.0 birth rate on the whole country.  It was barbarous both in its implementation and results. In 2015, the potentates pulled another number out of their hat: 2.0.

Abortion weighs heavy in the story, along with forced sterilizations, the killing of babies who survived the procedure, and the lingering psychological scars from participation in the campaign.  The malefactors even received awards for their “service”.  One Chinese artist in the 1990’s was shocked into opposition when he discovered fetuses (or babies, depending on your preference) in yellow and green plastic bags marked with “Medical Waste” in garbage dumps and landfills.

The Chinese artist who discovered aborted fetuses in yellow bags in landfills. Also pictured are fetuses that he collected, suspended in formalin.

The demography of China became tilted toward males as the females were aborted or abandoned to die, all due to a Chinese cultural bias in favor of the males.  Older people many years later were in tears reminiscing on leaving a baby in a box alone in the countryside or street, fearful of the repercussions for exceeding the quota.  Abandonment supplied the wherewithal for an new international adoption industry, much of the proceeds lining the pockets of government apparatchiks.  What happens when an entire population of over a billion is so emotionally scarred?

Like it or not, the film doesn’t skirt the issue of the legitimacy of abortion very skillfully.  If Sen. Charles Schumer had seen the flick, he might not had been so enthusiastic in his threats to a couple of pro-life-leaning jurists.  What he and, ironically, the film’s host ignore is the first question at root in the dispute: Is the entity in the womb (and all of us were an “entity in the womb”) a human being?  If “yes”, euthanizing a prenatal baby is an act of killing.  No amount of a person’s “control of their body” can atone for the immorality.  If “no”, the fetus is the equivalent of a tumor.  The Chinese artist puts the “no” position in an awkward spot when he displays dead pre-natal babies suspended in jars of formalin.  They look like my two sons at their birth; only these are dead.

Sen. Charles Schumer at pro-choice rally outside the Supreme Court , March 4, 2020.

See the film, but ignore the self-contradictory commentary at a short juncture at the end.  Whether forced or not, the flick puts abortion in a bad light.  If you’re pro-choice, abortion shouldn’t be construed as a sacrament, as some hard-core activists screeched outside the Supreme Court.  Whether it’s legal or not, it’s still a horrible thing.  No mistake about it.

RogerG

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Frighteningly Familiar

Today’s movie recommendation: “The Rope” by Alfred Hitchcock, 1948, starring James Stewart.  Two well-to-do young men, fresh from their elite colleges, both considered smart with above average IQ’s, committed a murder because they thought themselves to be above morality.  Hitchcock probably got the idea from a famous 1924 murder case.  The script and the reality are eerily similar.

A scene from the movie with the James Stewart character between the killers.

The reality: On May 21, 1924, Richard Loeb (age 19) and Nathan Leopold (age 20) planned and executed the killing of 14-year-old Bobby Franks as he as walking home from school.  Loeb, the son of a millionaire Sears and Roebuck executive, and Leopold, the son of a millionaire founder of a box manufacturing company, would be legitimate Mensa Society members.  Leopold was a scholar of botany and ornithology, mastered 10 languages, and translated classics from their original Greek and Latin.  Loeb was the youngest graduate, at age 17, of the University of Michigan in 1921.  They would reunite in a couple of years for their ultimate and horrifying stick-it-to-the-man caper.

Nathan Leopold (l) and Richard Loeb at their trial. Their kinship for each other developed into a sexual relationship.

Bobby Franks, age 14, shortly before his murder.

Both were fascinated with the philosophical writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, in an extremely garbled fashion.  They were attracted to Nietzsche’s notion of the rise of “supermen” after he predicted the fall of traditional institutions and norms, an idea that resonated with both National Socialists and the Bolsheviks: Lenin had his “vanguard elite” and Hitler his Aryan supermen.

Friedrich Nietzsche

It wouldn’t stop there.  An emphasis on an elite of “smart” people with the appropriate college credentials would be a keystone of late 19th-century Progressivism.  Progressives valued an unelected class of administrators and regulators – a technocratic elite – to govern society.  The conceit is still with us in our expansive administrative state, and as Democrats parade about with their constant use of the term “expert” to nullify opposing views.  Their proposals – The Green New Deal for instance – would fast-track the ongoing trend of transferring great power to their preferred class of elite college-credentialed overlords in ever-expanding agencies.

Have we been softened-up to accept this state of affairs?  As a 30-year veteran of the classroom, I think so.  In the movie, a prominent teacher (James Stewart) is presented as a powerful influence on the minds of the killers, until the teacher discovers too late the wayward extent that they took his classroom musings.  The earlier pride in his clever mental gymnastics in the classroom is wiped off his face as he discovers the body later in the story.  Then he comes to realize his huge mistake.

A similar corruption of the mind was noticed by CS Lewis in his famous tract “The Abolition of Man”.  Lewis worried about the dehumanization of young minds occurring in British classrooms of the mid-20th century.  In a chapter titled “Men Without Chests”, he wrote of the degradation of rampant subjectivism and relativism in English instruction.  Out goes firm standards of good and evil, in comes the unrestrained individual.

CS Lewis

Progressivism performs a similar trick.  Essential to their understanding is a denigration of the past as corrupt while the present is an improvement on the way to a better world.  There’s not much veneration for the old and true.  No wonder church attendance is down. Our schools and culture are depressing it.

How about some serious thought of what we are doing to ourselves?  Watch the movie.

More on the Leopold and Loeb murder case here.

RogerG

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The Decline of Memory and Bernie Sanders

Bernie Sanders, Oct. 30, 2018. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File)

In our times, 5 decades is too long.  Our historical memory seems to not last beyond one decade.  What have our families, institutions, and schools done to us?  One possible cause for the memory loss is a kind of imperialism of the present: an unexamined assumption that the past is a lesser, corrupted life and the present is all that counts.  The lack of memory exaggerates the present and puts us in a position to repeat past mistakes, not realizing them as mistakes.  Thus, to no surprise, we are seeing a rekindling of socialism and the rise of Bernie Sanders – a Super Tuesday and general election away from the White House.

The fabled 60’s counterculture gave birth to a willful forgetfulness of the past. The tenor of the times was captured in one of my favorite songs, “Let’s Live for Today” by the Grassroots.  Great song, horrible philosophy.  Here’s a good rendition:

The song came to mind as I was reading about Reagan’s strangulation of the USSR that would lead to its ultimate demise.  He instituted steps to shrink hard currency (the stable currencies like the pound sterling and US dollar) to the monstrous behemoth.  He lifted the price controls on our own crude oil production (imposed by Carter).  The price controls led to a shuttering, for instance, of the oil fields around Bakersfield, where I lived, and across the country.  Bernie promises to relive the disaster that was the malaise of the 70’s.

Man begging in Moscow in the 1980’s. Looks like a homeless encampment in one of our Democrat-run metropolises.

The price controls destroyed our own production, increased our dependency on foreign sources, and created shortages and inflated prices at the pump.  Bernie wants to leap beyond Carter and reregulate the economy while imposing huge tax hikes on it, as well as bring Soviet central planning in the form of The Green New Deal to America.  What Carter did to the US oil industry and the Soviet Union did to its people, Bernie wants to do to us.

Now, the Dems in Sacramento want to accelerate Bernie’s version of eco-terrorism – The Green New Deal – by “managing the decline of the oil industry” in the state.  This isn’t about “price controls”.  It’s about economic euthanasia.  Wow be to those in the oil-producing regions of the state.  No amount of utopian retraining will replace the loss.

Kern River oilfield outside Bakersfield, Ca.

I put the blame for the rise of Sanders and the crazy left in Sacramento squarely at the feet of pop culture’s corruption of our schools, families, and institutions — a present from the Summer of Love.  It’s a form of engineered social amnesia.  Are we about to institutionalize calamity because we have the memory of a hormone-addled teenager?

Drug-infused ecstasy during the Haight-Ashbury Summer of Love, 1967.

RogerG