There are few things more marvelously entertaining than watching a Party implode. And this year we might just get a twofer! The Democrats aside, Trump is unprecedented, so I frankly don’t blame members of the Establishment for losing their collective mind. I do suspect, though, they are already coming to terms with their grief and anger and ready to accept the inevitable. Continue reading
In 1967 George Kennan, elder statesmen and man-of-letters, wondered about the members of the increasingly boisterous, radical Left found on American campuses. A contemplative man like Kennan naturally clashed with such youth and faced their dismissive ire, but his criticism is as apropos as ever. Simply put, student activists need to stop screaming and start reading.
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Walker Percy with dogs
Walker Percy in one of his essays discusses how modern man, unmoored from faith, has become an alienated being that can only think of life in terms of sex and death. All we have left are moments of pleasure and the fear of death. It’s a generalization, sure. But in the aftermath of my personal marital catastrophe, I’ve been struck by how many secular friends have suggested I need to just get a girlfriend and get laid. It’s the default response and a crude one at that. Percy got it right.
So here I find myself sitting on the roof in the dark, and from the stairwell bursts a man and a woman. Drunk. Talkative. I’ve had drinks myself but I’m lucid and the man engages me in conversation. Within a word or two I realize he’s gay (Check that, I discover later he’s bicurious. Either way I find the gay inflection as annoying as the macho bro’s style of discourse. Stop putting on an act and talk to me like a goddamn human being. In this way I’m an equal opportunity bigot.).
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The Revenant has some things going for it. For one, the cinematography is beautiful. Tom Hardy proves, yet again, he has acting chops. Leonardo DiCaprio, after much grunting and groaning over the years to get an Oscar, gets a role where he literally grunts and groans his way the whole movie to achieve the allusive gold (really, I want to see the script). The script itself is fine and there are great, dramatic moments throughout, but on the whole it needed editing (over two and a half hours long). What irritated me most, though, was the eye-rolling, ahistoric, cliché moralism of the film.
Yes, it is the historian in me that is annoyed, but it isn’t over presentism (see every Ridley Scott movie) or pedantic historical inaccuracies. Rather, what irks me is the Zinnian tripe in which the white man is the invading oppressor and the red man is the oppressed (not the first time I’ve gone after Zinn the “historian”). Granted, Zinn presents a fun and simplistic morality tale and as with most morality tales there is a kernel of truth, but in the end, it is just that: a tale, which as expected, has sparked equally obnoxious right wing backlashes. It is a truism among historians that bringing politics into the study of history leads to bad history. And bad history begets more bad history, which, not surprisingly, worms its way into our films. I had hoped a skilled director would have handled the topic with more care, but alas.
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The country folk have strange customs and are a danger to themselves.
In upstate New York they refer to folks from the Big Apple as City-iots. In the Big Apple they maliciously joke about the ignorance and barbarism of the inbred yokels of upstate. The City-iots aren’t entirely wrong. New York’s burned-over district of the early 19th century has now become the Rust Belt and folks there are hard up for Jesus and cash.
Based on the Trump phenomenon, they’re as mad as hell and they’re not going to take it anymore. Who knows where that might lead. I digress. The City-iots definitely have a leg up in more ways than one.
Guns: so much ink has been spilled on the topic, and a good deal of blood (if you pay heed to the media). It is one of the fault lines between country and city. And yet it is one area where the country folk have an advantage. City-iots, for all their intelligence, have an experience gap. Guns, in the abstract, frighten them. But the abstract is not where life is lived. Their general lack of tactile experience, understandable though it is, leads to ignorance and an impasse in the discussion over firearms in society.
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I’ll protect you from the corporations.
Hillary recently published a piece on CNN decrying campaign finance laws (see Citizens United) and state’s “restricting voting rights.” I’m not convinced that Citizens United is the great evil it’s cracked up to be. Jeb(!) with his grand war-chest is on life support. Trump is playing the game with pocket change. So much for buying elections. Nor do I think that efforts to improve the integrity of the voting process necessarily imprudent (we don’t want dead people voting, do we?). But I’m not interested in either of these issues at the moment. What interests me is Hillary’s belief that democracy, and more of it, is a good in-of-itself. As she puts it: “Let’s restore people’s voices and people’s votes to their rightful place — at the center of our democracy.” Clear away the barriers thrown up by corporate money and voter restrictions, let the unadulterated voice of the people ring forth, bring freedom to the oppressed, and the nation will rise to a glorious future. In this assumption, Hillary is joined by her competitor, Bernie. Of course, it’s Hillary, and she’s received gobs of money from corporations and so I suspect Hillary’s appeal is fundamentally disingenuous, and yet the belief in the will of the people is deeply ingrained in the progressive left. Continue reading
“How could Nixon have won? Nobody I know voted for him.” —Pauline Kael
The quote is tongue-in-cheek and somewhat apocryphal (Kael, a highbrow film critic for The New Yorker, was aware of her own elitist bubble) but it is apropos to the Trump phenomenon.
Over Christmas break I had a conversation with our traveling correspondent, Argos (see his reports from Belgium, Jordan, and Sweden). A white collar, pragmatic conservative not given to flights of fancy over winning the culture war through legislation, he expressed some discomfort with the Trump’s boorishness and doubts over his electability. I caught up with him the other day to discuss the subject again.
The mood has changed and it’s telling, though anecdotal. Simply put: if the election was tomorrow, he’d vote for Trump in a heartbeat.
National Review has seen better days. Their impotent flailing against Trump demonstrates that something is rotten with (at least some of) the thought leaders of the right when the orange haired man runs circles around them and builds a sizable electoral base on a shoestring budget (and that’s saying something for a fellow not short on cash). But it isn’t all bad at NR and just the other day they published a devastating piece on abortion. If the following excerpt doesn’t hit you in the gut, I don’t know what will:
After injecting the hormone into the patient’s womb, the doctor left the syringe standing upright on her belly. Then, Selzer wrote, “I see something other than what I expected here. . . . It is the hub of the needle that is in the woman’s belly that has jerked. First to one side. Then to the other side. Once more it wobbles, is tugged, like a fishing line nibbled by a sunfish.”
A little while ago Argos, our European-African traveler, visited Stockholm Sweden for four days.
(See here his reports from Belgium and Jordan).
Argos, mind you, is of conservative persuasions, and the Scandinavian fling with socialism does not suit him. And yet he found it hard to deny that Stockholm had it going on: “It was maybe the most beautiful city I’ve been to.” Despite the absence of mountains (something Argos has always loved), the water was gloriously clear, the buildings magnificent, the streets clean, and the people gorgeous, which probably had something to do with the fact that, wherever he looked, he saw Swedes running, biking, and walking. Continue reading
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I have three rules for my classes: 1) Come to class. 2) Come to class on time. 3) Come to class prepared (do the work and bring a notebook and writing utensil). Most of the time my students comply.
The other day two Russians raised their hands and in unison asked for pencil and paper. I’m usually an easygoing teacher, but when given the opportunity (i.e. breaking one of my three rules), I ream my students out, and that’s what I did: “I wake up every morning at 6:20 so I can be here on time to teach you! And when I show up, I’m prepared! Show some respect, and show up prepared yourself! Bring your own stinking pencils to class! And, no, I’m not giving you a pencil! Find one yourself!” I never yell, and I’m not mean, but students get the point. In this instance, the Russian students begin inquiring around while I fired up the powerpoint.
I said “Russian” but really what I meant was an ethnic Korean raised in Kazakhstan, and a Tatar, who were both native Russian speakers. (Its easy to forget that Russian influence and culture is bigger than Russia proper.) After a minute of searching, the Korean, Kazakhstani Russian speaker raised his hand, and upon acknowledgment asked, “Mr. Bellewether, are you Jewish.” Confused, I answered in the negative. “Why?” I asked in clarification. A come-on-you’re-not-stupid look spread across his face and he responded: “Paper, pencil…so cheap.”
Speechless I covered my mouth with the papers and stifled a laugh.
The Feral Yawp 