RUTHFULLY YOURS

When Time picks an abstract concept as its ‘Thing of the Year’, it’s the kiss of death.

The magazine’s 2011 edition celebrated the Arab Spring’s ‘Protester’ just as the worst of the civil wars were getting started. In 2006, it picked ‘You’ just as the big web companies began crushing individuality on the internet. In 2002, it cheered the ‘Whistleblowers’ you haven’t heard from since. And in 1993, it put Arafat and Mandela on the cover as the ‘Peacemakers’. Good luck finding that peace.

So #MeToo was headed for trouble as soon as it became Time’s ‘Thing of the Year’. The cover, with the accusers dressed in somber black, foreshadowed the black dress code at the Golden Globes.

The cover wasn’t a win. It was a sigh of relief. Hollywood, the media and other cultural industries had been running scared of the scandal for months. Now they were finally getting a handle on it. In public relations, you get ahead of the scandal. You understand what makes it tick and take it apart.

Awards season was looming. And the culture industries were figuring out how to take #MeToo apart.

Harvey Weinstein had tried to shift the conversation from the women he was accused of raping to the NRA. Hollywood followed the same basic strategy without being quite as tacky as Harvey. It moved the conversation from #MeToo’s rape accusations to virtue signaling about diversity in the industry.

The best way to fight one hashtag was with another hashtag. #TimesUp replaced #MeToo. But where #MeToo was a raw personal accusation, #TimesUp was an impersonal leftist slogan of political urgency. #TimesUp for all the bad things we don’t like. Especially #MeToo. #TimesUp was safe where #MeToo was risky. US Weekly could advertise 9 #TimesUp products that showed you were down with the cause.

They included a $380 sweater.

#TimesUp had plenty of female stars out front. But they didn’t claim to be victims. Instead they were taking the safe Hollywood position of supporting victims. Victims as far from Hollywood as possible. #TimesUp’s official site features a huge letter from the “sisters” of Hollywood vowing to stand with female farm workers, janitors, health aides and illegal aliens suffering from sexual harassment.

You can’t redirect the problem any further away than farm country.

His prophesy: ‘We shall have regimentation and conformity, without respect for the needs of the individual soul; the puritanism of a hygienic morality in the interests of efficiency; uniformity of opinion through propaganda, and art only encouraged when it flatters the official doctrines of the time.’

In 1938, T.S. Eliot wrote The Idea of a Christian Society. Eliot’s major theme—a sketched outline of what a Christian society might entail—is stimulating despite the limitations of its context: it deals with England’s situation with the prospect of war casting its grim shadow. But his minor theme—the slide of a liberal society into a type of totalitarian democracy—has a broader, provocative relevance. The degeneration of Italy and Germany into dictatorships and the malignancy of the Soviet Union provided Eliot with examples of nations whose governments made much use of the words freedom and democracy, but twisted them to fit their preferred meaning. Eliot saw this lamentable pattern developing in liberal countries. His nuanced vision is worth revisiting, nearly eighty years later.

Eliot thought that liberalism would do most to prepare the way for a type of totalitarian democracy. (Eliot capitalised Liberalism, but I won’t so that the political project isn’t confused with the Australian political party.) This “totalitarian democracy”—seemingly an oxymoron—would be:

a state of affairs in which we shall have regimentation and conformity, without respect for the needs of the individual soul; the puritanism of a hygienic morality in the interests of efficiency; uniformity of opinion through propaganda, and art only encouraged when it flatters the official doctrines of the time.

Hispaniola is a beautiful island located in the the Greater Antilles…..It is the second largest island in the Caribbean after Cuba. It is divided into two nations: Haiti in the west and the Dominican Republic in the east. Christopher Columbus landed there in 1492 and named it “La Isla Española”…thus the anglicized name.

In 1966 the United States gave one hundred million in foreign aid to the Dominican Republic …an amount gradually whittled down to 10.5 million by May 2017. Although the Dominican Republic has the largest GDP in the Caribbean many people live in poverty….not hunger….and the nation has thriving and productive farms and sugar, banana and coffee plantations. What were open air markets have given way to well stocked supermarkets. And their export of base ball players is legendary. The literacy rate hovers around ninety percent and child mortality rates continue to fall. It is a representative democracy with an elected president.

And it is a lovely place to visit. Its lovely beaches and beautiful resorts attract tourism year round and contribute to the growing economy and employment opportunities.

Haiti, right next door suffered a magnitude 7.0 earthquake of Jan. 12, 2010, that left 220,000 people dead, 300,000 injured and rubble nearly everywhere. $13.5 billion dollars in aid from nations and private charities were delivered. Given the total amount given one may well ask why has so little been gained? Why is the major city Port Au Prince still lacking a sewage system? Why are there still tent cities?

Cholera stalks the nation, with hundreds of thousands of cases and 10,000 deaths, an epidemic attributed to UN Forces from Nepal who carried the disease, but the U.N. has avoided its responsibility.

Of the billions in aid only a meager fraction under one percent went to the needy population. Major projects such as the Clinton Foundation’s garment factory which were to have created jobs fizzled due to construction corruption and lack of proper infrastructure- roads, bridges and transportation have not been rebuilt. Less than half the population is literate.

Haitians are the most downtrodden by corrupt politics and leaders from the Duvaliers, through Aristide, and the present government of Moise. Outright theft and bribes have enriched speculators and thwarted reconstruction.

Are the people to blame? No! No! and No! Haitians are the nicest people victimized and ruled by tyrants and s***heads and ignored by those harpies that call Trump a racist while they say not a word about Haiti or any of the Black nations of Africa that suffer famines, epidemics, and genocide….rsk

“We don’t care about facts. We ignore them. It’s racist to cite facts. It’s our feelings that determine what is real or relevant, not facts. What we feel is the true reality. We have our own truths. Oprah said so.” However, as many “non-#Resistance” commentators have observed, there is no such thing as one’s “own” truth. There is just reality, or facts. An individual doesn’t own reality, nor is it true if he does assert he that does. To him, reality is malleable, changeable, clay putty to be turned into anything he wishes, because he “doubts.” He is the practicing icon of Descartes’s dictum, “I think, therefore I am.” And they don’t care if they’re called hypocrites. Labels, after all, mean nothing to these doyens.

Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe (D.) swore on national TV that if he runs for President against President Trump in 2020, he’ll hit Trump, if he stands behind him, as he did to Hillary, and knock him down. He also said it earlier on an independent boast on the Virginia state site. “You’d have to pick him up from the floor.” However:

Under United State Code Title 18, Section 871, it is a felony for an individual to “knowingly and willfully” make a “threat to take the life of, to kidnap, or to inflict bodily harm upon the President of the United States.” The punishment for this crime is severe, with a possible 5-year prison sentence and a fine of $250,000.

Doubtless the Secret Service would intervene immediately and cuff him on serious charges, one of which would be assaulting the President. Synonymous to treason. Jail time for the pugnacious governor. McAuliffe’s madness is indicative of the rampant, emotion-driven hatred exhibited for Trump and his supporters by him, by most Democrats, and by the MSM. All because his supports helped Trump wipe the floor and used a broom to sweep her from presidential aspirations. McAuliffe and #Resistance all suffer from reckless delusions of wanting to be like Rocky. But all they ever do is “float like a butterfly” but never sting like a bee. Trump seems to be immune to their snickers and sneers.

The best way to confuse a Democrat or anyone who professes to be a Progressive is to insist on arguments from facts. To separate his feelings from what is. He’ll refuse to do it. He’ll sputter and look demonic and spray you with his drool. End of argument. He’ll be so divorced from reality you could convince him that a bar of butter is a bar of gold. Asking a Progressive to think is like asking a turtle for the square root of 2.

The fallout from the presidential s***hole continues. On the one hand, Republican senator Lindsay Graham pushes back against Trump:

I’ve always believed that America is an idea, not defined by its people but by its ideals.

On the other hand, most of us don’t get to live in an “idea”, but in something rather less abstract called “reality”, which is for better or worse “defined by its people”:

Not far from where I’m writing this, the kosher butcher shop is long gone; across the street, the church that once stood tall is now boarded up.

But next to it stands a mosque newly built and freshly painted. English in the neighborhood is a foreign tongue and nobody knows Frank Sinatra.

The boys don’t play stickball. The girls in their veils don’t play hopscotch and all the cabs are driven by men from Somalia and Afghanistan.

Strangers are not greeted warmly.

That’s a snapshot of what troubles President Trump…not the mosque, but the culture shift.

The novelist Martin Amis once described me as “a great sayer of the unsayable”. Since then, a lot more has gotten unsayable. So saying it becomes a revolutionary act: That’s what Donald Trump did in June 2015 when he came down the escalator and started talking about Mexico “not sending us their best”. “S***hole countries” is going down better with his supporters than almost anything he’s said since. At this stage, there would be disappointment if it turned out he hadn’t said it; the lack of s**t would hit the fans, badly.

The soft totalitarianism of our time – as manifested by CNN, Lindsay Graham et al having the vapors over Trump – requires that ever more should go unsaid other than the self-flattering sentimentalism of the Official Lie. When you discuss immigration, you’re supposed to say, “Well, my Guatemalan pool-boy is the hardest-working fellow I know” – or start yakking about your Moldovan grandfather. That’s it, that’s all. The notion that it’s public policy, not a heartwarming Hallmark Channel movie of the week, and that those public-policy needs might have changed since the days of Tsarist pogroms, must never be allowed to take hold.

The great question is whether the romance of Senator Graham’s “idea’ is so seductive it will utterly overwhelm reality – as it has in the scene from Paris at top right. The City of Light is becoming, as an Irish Trump would say, the City of Sh*te.

~Some countries are full of s**t, other countries are full of shorts. From The Derby Telegraph:

Derby terrorist Munir Mohammed was strict Muslim who told his neighbour off for wearing shorts

The neighbor pushed back:

There is nothing wrong with shorts.

Mr Mohammed is “a Sudanese asylum seeker who arrived in the back of a lorry in February 2014”, having been misinformed as to the prevalence of shorts in the United Kingdom. Seeking an accomplice to help him blow up his adopted but short-ridden country, he went to the online dating website SingleMuslim.com and was instantly smitten by Rowaida el-Hassan:

He sent her gory videos of IS executions, including some carried out by children.

She asked him to “send more” and helped guide him to the right chemicals for his bomb.

That’s some serious sexual chemistry.

There was almost too much news these last 24 hours:

~As listeners to yesterday’s Q&A well know, my view is that mass transformative immigration is an existential threat to western civilization. That’s why Trump caught my eye two-and-a-half years ago, and that’s why I re-emphasized the point a week-and-a-half ago: his presidency will stand or fall on immigration. There’s no market for a Trump who suddenly decides, whaddayaknow, Mexico is sending us its best.

Was yesterday the Humpty-Trumpty Falls Off The Wall moment? The soi-disant immigration hardliners at VDare are oddly relaxed about it; Ann Coulter (the “lowest day” of Trump’s presidency) and Tucker Carlson (“What was the point of running for president?”) are not. As an unassimilated foreigner, I’m not sure I’m 100 per cent on top of Tucker’s Chicago Cubs/World Series analogy, but, if I get the gist of it, I think it’s a sportier version of my immigration-is-all point. That said, I spent much of yesterday talking about the subject in a European context, so I’ll save my extended thoughts for later in the week.

Nonetheless, in the scheme of things, President Trump’s ability to crush Steve Bannon like a bug and piss all over a three-day teacup-storm like Michael Wolff is less important than whether or not he still has the determination or inclination to crush like a bug the open-borders loons in both parties and extinguish apparently indestructible bipartisan euphemisms like “comprehensive immigration reform”. That last evasion leads to the Californication of the entire electoral map. In 2016, a Republican year, the supposed GOP bastion of Orange County voted for the Democrat presidential candidate for the first time since 1936. Why do you think such healthy middle-aged Republican congressmen as Darrell Issa are deciding to “retire”?

~No man is a superhero to his valet: The latest sex-fiend swept up in the ongoing Pervnado is Marvel Comics supremo Stan Lee, who, unlike his creations, likes to get out of the long underwear. I met the great man when I was covering the Democrat Convention in 2000, so yes, put another one in the Dem column. For those of us a-wearying of Spider-Man reboots every fortnight (see my closing paragraph here), the question is:

a) Will they simply do as they’ve done to Garrison Keillor on NPR, Charlie Rose on PBS and Jonathan Schwartz on WNYC and vaporize the guy’s entire oeuvre, including all those godawful Reboot-Man vs the Fantastic Franchisers post-origin pre-sequels? In which case, there’ll be nothing at the multiplex except The Emoji Movie, The Lego Movie, The Lego Emoji Movie and The Lego Darkest Hour in 3D.

When my kids were admonished by my husband, the good cop in family discipline, for using vulgar terms they created their own vocabulary:

Shithole became Shi-thole pronounced like shoal

Ass hole became A-shole again pronounced like shoal

Shithead became Sh-thead pronounced like need.

The meaning of their invectives were the same but sounded better.

As for President Trump’s uncouth language, Roger Kimball- always witty and erudite…points out:

“…..the potency of taboo is still strong in our superficially rational culture. There are some things—quite a few, actually, and the list keeps growing—about which one cannot speak the truth or, in many cases, even raise as a subject for discussion without violating the unspoken pact of liberal sanctimoniousness…….”Uncouth. Crude. But was it untrue?We live in a surreal moment when it becomes ever harder to tell the truth about sensitive subjects. Donald Trump has strutted across our timid landscape like a wrecking ball, telling truths, putting noses out of joint. The toffs will never forgive him, but I suspect the American people have stronger stomachs and are up to the task.” rsk

It is curious how close certain seemingly contrary emotions can be. Consider, to take just one example, the feelings of glee and outrage. At first blush, they seem very different. Glee occupies a positive register in the metabolism of human emotions. There is such thing as malicious glee, of course—the German word schadenfreude captures that perfectly. But by and large, I believe, glee is a sunny, allegro emotion.

Outrage, on the contrary, is a dour beast. It glowers. It fulminates. It glories in moral indignation, which it eagerly manufactures whenever it is in short supply.

And it is there, in the manufacture, affectation, the pretense, of moral indignation that that outrage shades in smarmy gleefulness. You can see this in operation right now, today, by the simple expedient of turning to CNN and watching commentator after commentator explode in gleeful outrage over Donald Trump’s alleged comments about the relative desirability of immigrants from countries like Norway, on the one hand, and countries like Haiti, El Salvador, and various apparently unnamed African countries on the other. (I say “alleged” not because I doubt the substance of the report, but simply because the president has disputed some details of the reporting.)

Two questions: Were all those commentators at CNN (and the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other purveyors of sanctimony)—were they more delighted or unhappy about the president’s comment? Think carefully before answering.

Sometimes, the experience of outrage, and its accompanying moral indignation, is essentially a feeling of displeasure—at a wrong done or suffered, an injustice or cruelty observed, etc.

But sometimes, outrage is but a patina of indignation whose chief motive is incontinent delight. Which is it for the talking heads at CNN? Are they genuinely morally offended by the president’s comments? Or are they really absolutely delighted by the opportunity he has given them to say “shithole” over and over again while also running endless chyrons reminding viewers that the president referred to (if he did refer to) Haiti, El Salvador, etc., as “shithole countries” from which we should not seek immigrants?

There’s a great scene in the wonderful 1982 movie My Favorite Year, which is set in 1954. Peter O’Toole plays a semi-washed-up actor named Alan Swann, famous for swashbuckling roles. For reasons too complicated to explain here, Swann tries to shimmy down the side of a building using a fire hose. He ends up dangling just below a cocktail party on a balcony. Two stockbrokers are chatting when one of them notices Swann swinging below them. “I think Alan Swann is beneath us!” he exclaims.

The second stockbroker replies: “Of course he’s beneath us. He’s an actor.”

It may be hard for some people to get the joke these days, but for most of human history, actors were considered low-class. They were akin to carnies, grifters, hookers, and other riffraff.

In ancient Rome, actors were often slaves. In feudal Japan, Kabuki actors were sometimes available to the theatergoers as prostitutes — a practice not uncommon among theater troupes in the American Wild West. In 17th century England, France, and America, theaters were widely considered dens of iniquity, turpitude, and crapulence. Under Oliver Cromwell’s Puritan dictatorship, the theaters were forced to close to improve moral hygiene. The Puritans of New England did likewise. A ban on theaters in Connecticut imposed in 1800 stayed on the books until 1952.

Partly out of a desire develop a wartime economy, partly out of disdain for the grubbiness of the stage, the first Continental Congress in 1774 proclaimed, “We will, in our several stations, . . . discountenance and discourage every species of extravagance and dissipation, especially all horse-racing, and all kinds of gaming, cock-fighting, exhibitions of shews [sic], plays, and other expensive diversions and entertainments.”

Needless to say, times have changed. And I suppose I have to say they’ve changed for the better. But that’s a pretty low bar. I don’t think acting is a dishonorable profession, and I’m steadfastly opposed to banning plays, musicals, movies, and TV shows.

But in our collective effort to correct the social stigmas of the past, can anyone deny that we’ve overshot the mark?

Watch the TV series Inside the Actors Studio sometime. It’s an almost religious spectacle of ecstatic obsequiousness and shameless sycophancy. Host James Lipton acts like some ancient Greek priest given an audience with Zeus, coming up just shy of washing the feet of actors with tears of orgiastic joy. I mean, I like Tom Hanks, too. But I’m not sure starring in Turner & Hooch (one of my favorite movies) bestows oracular moral authority.