Culture

Sis Boom Bah

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No, this has nothing to do with exploding sheep.

Linking a Powerline article on the election at Hot Air, Ed Driscoll takes issue with one of its points:

I’ll disagree with my friend John a bit here. There has been a cult of personality around Trump, which is what happens with charismatic figures in politics. There was a cult of personality around Obama too, which Obama purposefully cultivated, and one around Reagan that came together more organically.

Hinderaker doesn’t deny a cult of personality, he just says correctly that personality did not drive Trump’s campaign.  “[H]e ran on the issues. He talked relentlessly and effectively about inflation, the border, and war and peace.” Other candidates with personality cults also ran on issues. The hip, personable Bill Clinton (the last fun Democrat to run for Prez in the general) ran on blaming Bush for the recession, whose root cause was undoubtedly the S&L crisis (in which the Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan played a tiny part). The quasi-Messianic Obama ran on War on Terror criticisms and on blaming the Republicans for the Great Recession.

Recall the pep rallies of high school, and their outrageous taunts of the opposing team. People from all factions bring this spirit into politics. It seems that scarcely anyone other than the right applies the other key element: over-the-top aggrandizement of the home team. This looks weird to many leftists and to many conventional schlubs on the right because their approach to their own candidates is more subdued; to them hilarity must directly deprecate the other candidate. As a larger-than-life personality facing outlandish political enemies, Trump is a magnet for pep rally treatment. He is seen in memes as comically heroic, riding an eagle or wearing a superhero outfit or leading dogs and cats to safety away from the clutches of migrant diners. 

They Have Their Exits

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I’ve been following the various social media over the last week, reading and watching various reports of how local volunteer efforts are handling disaster recovery in the mountainous areas blasted by Hurricane Helene. FEMA and various other federal departments are helping – sort of – or hindering, interfering, preventing access or flat-out confiscating donations, according to some rather irate reports, which reports are indignantly condemned as rumors by all the established media sources and FEMA’s own public affairs representatives. No smoke without a fire, as the saying goes, and hacks – err, that is “reporters” for the established media certainly don’t appear to be venturing deep into the Appalachian weeds to report on such matters first-hand. Although, recalling the dog’s breakfast that the national establishment media made of covering Hurricane Katrina, that might be all to the good in the long run.

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Mwen Rekòmande Panik Imedyat

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Having sensed that my public is calling: “In fair Springfield, where we lay our scene …”

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Visible Signs

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My daughter and I have done a handful of long road trips over the last few years, especially after Texas sensibly lifted the most onerous COVID restrictions. For many of these trips we preferred to take country roads; various two or four-lane routes which meandered through miles of Texas back country, hopscotching past small ranches and passing through small towns of varying degrees of prosperity. One thing we often noticed in passing was a scattering of Trump banners, many of them weathered and obviously left over from the 2020 campaign. It was a hard-fought campaign; obviously many Trump supporters out here in flyover country remained sore about the steal. Also rather obviously, residents in rural Texas aren’t worried about random retaliatory vandalism to their property or vehicles by displaying such political partisanship.

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