“It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” Sydney Williams
http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com
The title of this essay comes from Stanley Kramer’s 1963 mad-cap comedy. With his dying words Smiler Grogan (Jimmy Durante) mentions a stash of loot buried under the “Big W.” The movie is about a bunch of crazies’ search for the money, reminding one of today’s political scene and the race for the Presidency.
We are not living a Hollywood film; but an alien from another planet would be excused for laughing. The ridiculousness of what is being said and done justifies a belly laugh. Writing recently in City Journal, Heather MacDonald noted: “Student protests have always been hilariously self-dramatic, but the current outbreak is particularly maudlin, in keeping with female self-pity. ‘The university would rather see us dead than divest,’ said a member of the all-female press representatives of UCLA’s solidarity encampment on X.” Yascha Mounk, an Associate Professor at Johns Hopkins, wrote in a recent issue of The Spectator of some “absurdist moments” at Columbia. Student protesters demanded the university deliver food and drink to them: “When a surprised journalist asked why the university should have such an obligation towards people engaged in blatantly illegal activity, she insisted they had a moral right to ‘basic humanitarian aid.’”
Max Boot, writing in The Washington Post, quoted the Columbia University Apartheid Divest manifesto: “We believe in liberation. All systems of oppression are interlinked: The fates of the peoples of Palestine, Kurdistan, Sudan, Congo, Armenia, Ireland, Puerto Rico, Korea, Guam, Haiti, Hawaii, Kashmir, Cuba, Turtle Island, and other colonized bodies are interconnected.” Really? Do the citizens of Ireland, Puerto Rico and Hawaii know they are colonized? Who besides Haitians and Koreans have colonized Haiti and Korea in recent years? And Mr. Boot asks: “What the heck is Turtle Island? A quick internet search revealed that this was the name used by some indigenous groups for Central and North America.” Do wizards at Columbia expect descendants of settlers to abandon the farms, towns and cities they and their ancestors have now lived on and in – in some cases for 400 years – so progeny of those long dead can occupy them?
More than seven million illegal (sorry, undocumented) migrants have crossed the southern border since Biden took office, roughly triple the number under President Trump. But this is not a crisis, according to the Biden White House. It is a “challenge,” said Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. In other areas definitions have become confusing. Wikipedia defines a woman: “Typically, women are of the female sex.” Typically, I guess. But not always, “as their gender identity may not align with their sex assignment at birth,” Wikipedia explains. The Federal Government has threatened to withhold funds from public high schools that do not comply with new Title IX rules regarding transgender female athletes – and this is an Administration that claims to care about women’s rights! I guess they mean trans-women’s rights.
While officials at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities are careful to say that Social Security is not bankrupt, they add, parenthetically, that “in the unlikely event that policy makers fail to act” benefits will be cut by 25% after 2035. Congress, as we all know, is hesitant about amending this 90-year-old entitlement. Keep in mind, life expectancy in the U.S. in1935 was 62 versus 79 today. But nothing to worry about, the age for receiving benefits has risen from 65 in 1935 to 67 in 2023. However, Dan Mitchell of International Liberty predicts that Social Security’s long run shortfall is now $61.7 trillion. Even in a nation with 756 billionaires that is a lot of money. Climate Cassandras are intent on shuttering liquified natural gas exports, even as the U.S. has reduced its carbon output as a percent of GDP, largely due to natural gas replacing coal. The decision is forcing other nations to increase coal output and/or looking to enemy nations, like Russia and Iran, for their energy needs. Those like Greta Thunberg take a “let them eat cake” attitude toward third world nations who are forced to pay more for energy.
But what makes the times truly crazy are the choices Americans will likely have in November, when we go to the polls to elect an heir to George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan:
President Joe Biden – a man in early stages of dementia, a man about whom Robert Gates, Defense Secretary under President Obama, said ten years ago: “I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” Proving Gate’s observation, during Biden’s first term we witnessed the chaotic and costly evacuation from Afghanistan in 2021, Russia invade Ukraine and China threaten Taiwan, and now we are abandoning Israel in their Hamas-provoked war for survival. Deficits and debt have risen. Inflation is the highest it has been in forty years. Republicans are expected to nominate former President Donald Trump, a man who reminds one of a carousel barker – a man who has perhaps never read a book, one with the morals of a Billy goat and the mouth of a stevedore. He has promised recrimination against his political rivals. Democrats, however, in their battle to “save democracy,” have helped Mr. Trump, as they use undemocratic means to keep him from office.
The two other minority candidates are scarier. Robert Kennedy, Jr., a scion of Camelot, is no King Arthur. He tells us his brain was eaten by a worm, which, given his antics, feels like it is true. Jill Stein, the perennial candidate of the Green Party, was recently arrested at Washington University in St. Louis for assaulting a police officer – not a good look in a country where crime is on the rise.
Why has this great nation fallen so low? Why have absurdities risen so high? Despite an inclination to laugh, this is not a happy time. I don’t pretend to have answers, but I believe an emphasis on identity politics – the division of the people by race, sex, religion, gender and heritage – has played a major role. As well, categorizing people as victims or oppressors is a simplified way of making some people feel good about themselves without having to take responsibility for their actions.
It is a mad world, a world without a moral compass. We wander from crisis to crisis. As the centrifugal forces of today’s culture and politics increase we are pulled to the edges – some to the left and others to the right. “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” wrote William Butler Yeats in his 1919 poem, “The Second Coming.” The words lend meaning to today’s absence of civility and compromise: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.”
Despite the craziness, there is little that is fun about the predicament in which we find ourselves – a predicament of our own construction. I don’t know about you, but I need to catch my breath and laugh. When I finish Erik Larson’s The Demon of Unrest, the story of the five months leading to the start of the Civil War, I will take up P.G. Wodehouse’s The Adventures of Sally, a book I haven’t read for several years. As Evelyn Waugh once pointed out, Wodehouse writes of a world “that cannot become dated, because it never existed.” But it is a world in which one can lose oneself, at least temporarily, a world where one laughs with the author at characters who are creations of his brilliant and pleasant mind.
We have made it this far; so perhaps we will survive, as the epigraph suggests. The election will take place, but then I think of the giants who have occupied the White House, and I feel a great sorrow. Maybe I will stay home, something I have never done. Probably not, though. We still have over five months to go.
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