Dug-in Like an Alabama Tick

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So they finally whacked federal funding for PBS and NPR.

Sorry I’m not that excited.

The Republicans have been promising to do this for 40 years. A friend of mine uses the term “porcupines” when it comes to budget cuts, those agencies or departments which while small rustle up enough political muscle to make any attack on them not worth the cost. I think that’s what we are describing here; the feds spend about $1.1 billion over two years for the Corporation for Broadcasting (CPB), a fraction of the cost for single US Navy destroyer, but because of the heat it generates one of the hardest cuts in town.

It really should be one of the easiest. The CPB was founded in 1967 on the twin premises that it was virtuous for the government to fund programming that nobody would pay out of their own pocket to consume and that the only way to deliver such programming was through VHF/UHF-based TV and AM/FM radio.

Needless to say 2025 is a very different world. Use the thought experiment of going back an equivalent 58 years from 1967 and you are in now in an era where more people used horses to get around than cars and it would be another decade for commercial radio to emerge. I know it’s an analogy, but it’s also a useful heuristic for us to know when to revisit certain assumptions. I mean heck in 1967 TCP/IP hadn’t even been invented.

In reality CPB is about culturally useful as a non-STEM college degree is economically functional, but they both serve the same purpose in that they are socially useful by setting their respective clientele above the the rest of society. I am sure given the modest dollars involved and the fact that PBS viewers and NPR listeners hold college degrees at a higher rate than the rest of the population, the CPB will make out okay. It will just have to monetize its product. Oh the humanity.

This episode merely illustrates that the Left treats the federal funding of the CPB as more sacred than the clear text of the Constitution.

Just keep in mind it took the Trump’47 wrecking ball to finally do something which was blindingly obvious 40 years ago. The fact that it took times so extraordinary to do something so obvious is not something to celebrate.

Absence of Abilities

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I took on a few more sewing projects in the last few weeks, and pulled up some videos and movies to watch, as I finished the hand-stitching; attaching buttons, finishing tacking down facings and waistbands. The movie was The Highwaymen, a retelling of the hunt for Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, the infamous bank and gas-station robbing duo who died in a hailstorm of lead on a Louisiana back country road in the spring of 1934. The duo signally failed at a life of crime. They did not die rich and of old age in a lavish villa in some country with no extradition treaty to the US but did achieve a degree of tawdry celebrity as a glam pair of 20th century mid-west Robin Hoods. Their violent lives and even more violent deaths made all the headlines back then, and a previous movie which glamorized them out of all recognition. Anyway, I liked The Highwaymen when I first watched it (reviewed here) and even more the second time around. A suspenseful story told through intelligent and insightful scriptwriting, humane and sympathetic main characters combined with expert direction, and without a single shred of obvious computer-generated special effects that I could detect. Finally, a spot-on sense of time and place in location shooting. Yes, this is what Texas looks like, and while I am not old enough to remember the Thirties, I am familiar enough with contemporary photos and films to be certain that’s what it looked like, back then. It’s purely amazing how well – sometimes – that creators of our entertainment content can do such stories.

Well, even if ninety percent of anything in movies, genre fiction, music and TV is absolute crap, according to Sturgeon’s Revelation – but when it comes to movies lately, it seems like it’s more like 99.9%. Which is rather dispiriting to contemplate: where have all the skilled and experienced creators gone, that our pop entertainment warhorses in this country present such a dismal prospect? I wasn’t the first to observe that of the last round of Oscar awards, not only had I not seen any of the nominated movies, but I also hadn’t even heard of them in the first place. I didn’t want to want any of them, either. Life is just too short and time too limited to take a chance on a lecture with visuals.

But the ability to just tell an interesting, engaging story without climbing up onto a current hobby-horse to bore us all sh*tless with a lecture appears to have left the room.

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The Passwords and the Barbarians

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I’ve previously cited a passage from the novel of ideas Citadelle (aka Wisdom of the Sands) by the French writer-aviator Antoine de St Exupery.  Citadelle represents the musings of a fictional desert prince: on society, on government, and on humanity.  Here are some excerpts from the passage I want to discuss:

“Nevertheless,” I mused, “these men live not by things but by the meaning of things, and thus it is needful that they should transmit the passwords to each other, generation by generation.  That is why I see them, no sooner a child is born, making haste to inure him in the usage of their language; for truly it is the key to their treasure.  So as to be able to transport him into this harvest of golden wonders they have reaped, they spare no toil in opening up within him the ways of portage.  For hard to put into words, weighty yet subtle, are the harvests it behooves us to transmit from one generation to another.

“..But if the new generation lives in houses about which it knows nothing save their utility, what will it find to do in such a desert of a world?  For even as your children must first be taught the art of music, if they are to take pleasure in playing a stringed instrument; even so, if you would have them, when they come to man’s estate, capable of the emotions worthiest of man, you must teach them to discern, behind the diversity of things, the true lineaments of your house, your domain, your empire.

“Else that new generation will but pitch camp therein, like a horde of savages in a town they have captured. And what joy would such barbarians get of your treasures?  Lacking the key of your language, they would know not how to turn them to account….(the barbarian) throws down your walls and scatters your possessions to the winds.  This he does to revenge himself on the instrument which he knows not how to play, and presently he sets the village on fire–which at least rewards him with a little light!  But soon he loses interest, and yawns. For you must know what you are burning, if you are to find beauty in its light.  Thus with the candle you burn before your god. But to the barbarian the flames of your house will say nothing, for they are not a sacrificial fire.

“..This, too, is why I bid you bring up your children to be like you.  It is not the function of some petty officer to hand down to him their inheritance, for this is something not comprised in his manual of Regulations..You shall build your children in your image, lest in late days they come to drag their lives out joyously in a land which will seem to them but an empty camping place, and whose treasures they will allow to rot away uncared-for, because they have not been given its keys.”

Doesn’t this passage go a long way toward explaining what has been going on at places like Columbia University?  We see a confluence of two categories of barbarians:  American natives who never learned the passwords, having either never heard of them or been told to actively despise them…and foreign students / immigrants who come from cultures with entirely different passwords and, unlike previous generations of immigrants, have no interest in learning the American ones.

I’m also remembering something Hilaire Belloc wrote:

The Barbarian hopes — and that is the mark of him, that he can have his cake and eat it too. He will consume what civilization has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort, but he will not be at pains to replace such goods, nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being. Discipline seems to him irrational, on which account he is ever marvelling that civilization, should have offended him with priests and soldiers.

The Barbarian wonders what strange meaning may lurk in that ancient and solemn truth, “Sine Auctoritate nulla vita.” In a word, the Barbarian is discoverable everywhere in this, that he cannot make: that he can befog and destroy but that he cannot sustain; and of every Barbarian in the decline or peril of every civilization exactly that has been true.

We sit by and watch the barbarian. We tolerate him in the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid.

We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creed refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles.

My previous post referencing St-Exupery’s Citadelle are Transmitting the Passwords–or Not,  When Sleep the Sentinels, and Of Springs and Cables.

Your thoughts?

The Democrats and the Necronomicon

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The other week a group staged an ambush outside of a Texas ICE detention facility, firing some 20 to 30 rounds from AR-15-style rifles, hitting one local police officer in the neck. A number of the group had staged a riot outside the facility, vandalizing buildings and cars, presumably to lure ICE personnel and local police to the scene where they could be ambushed.

Local law enforcement quickly made 10 arrests, with many of the suspects armed and in tactical gear. A search warrant executed on a suspect’s Dallas house, which served as an assembly point for the group, found Antifa literature.

Antifa, you say?

Byron York had a piece earlier that week about the increasing pressure Democratic politicians were facing from constituents and activists to do more to confront the Trump Administration.

“Our own base is telling us that what we’re doing is not good enough,” said one Democratic lawmaker (out of nine) quoted in the Axios article. “Some of them have suggested … what we really need to do is be willing to get shot [in protests at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities] … that there needs to be blood to grab the attention of the press and the public.”

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Book Review: Nice Work, by David Lodge (rerun)

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What happens when an expert on 19th-century British industrial novels—who is a professor, a feminist, and a deconstructionist—finds herself in an actual factory?

This not being a time-travel novel, the factory is a contemporary one for the book’s setting in mid-1980s Britain.  It is a metalworking plant called Pringle’s, run by managing director Vic Wilcox.  Vic is not thrilled when his boss  (Pringle’s is owned by a conglomerate) suggests that he participate in something called the “shadow” program, designed to make academics and businesspeople better-acquainted with one another, but he goes along with the request.

Robyn Penrose, literature professor at a nearby university, is also not thrilled about her nomination to participate in the program, but she is concerned about her job in an era of reduced university funding, and also thinks she had better do as asked.  The way the program works is that Robyn will be Vic’s “shadow,”  joining him at the plant every Wednesday, sitting in on his regular activities, and learning just a bit about what is involved in managing a business.

Vic is a self-made man, not well-educated and with few interests outside work.  He is acutely aware of the danger that faces Pringle’s under the current economic climate, and is resolved that his factory will not join the long list of those that have been tossed on the scrapheap.

There is nothing quite so forlorn as a closed factory, Vic Wilcox knows, having supervised a shutdown himself in his time.  A factory is sustained by the energy of its own functioning, the throb and whine of machinery, the unceasing motion of assembly lines, the ebb and flow of workers changing shifts, the hiss of airbrakes and the growl of diesel engines from wagons delivering raw materials at one gate, taking away finished goods at the other.  When you put a stop to all that, when the place is silent and empty, all that is left is a large, ramshackle shed, cold, filthy and depressing.  Well, that won’t happen at Pringle’s, hopefully, as they say.  Hopefully.

Robyn and Vic dislike each other on first meeting:  Vic sees Robyn’s profession as useless, while Robyn sees Vic’s managerial role as brutal and greedy.  She is appalled by what she sees in her first tour of the factory…especially the foundry:

They crossed another yard, where hulks of obsolete machinery crouched, bleeding rust into their blankets of snow, and entered a large building with a high vaulted roof hidden in gloom.  This space rang with the most barbaric noise Robyn had ever experienced…The floor was covered with a black substance that looked like soot, but grated under the soles of her boots like sand.  The air reeked with a sulphurous, resinous smell, and a fine drizzle of black dust fell on their heads from the roof.  Here and there the open doors of furnaces glowed a dangerous red, and in the far corner of the building what looked like a stream of molten lava trickled down a curved channel from roof to floor…It was the most terrible place she had ever been in her life.  To say that to herself restored the original meaning of the word “terrible”:  it provoked terror, even a kind of awe. To think of being that man, wrestling with the heavy awkward lumps of metal in that maelstrom of heat, dust and stench, deafened by the unspeakable noise of the vibrating grid, working like that for hour after hour, day after day….That he was black seemed the final indignity:  her heart swelled with the recognition of the spectacle’s powerful symbolism.

But still:

The situation was so bizarre, so totally unlike her usual environment, that there was a kind of exhilaration to be found in it…She thought of what her colleagues and students might be doing this Wednesday morning, earnestly discussing the poetry of John Donne or the novels of Jane Austen or the nature of modernism, in centrally heated, carpeted rooms…Penny Black would be feeding more statistics on wife-beating in the West Midlands into her data-base, and Robyn’s mother would be giving a coffee morning for some charitable cause…What would they all think if they could see her now?

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