The mass freak-out following upon the election of The Donald to the highest office in the land continues unabated to this very day and hour. It’s been a little more than ten months; you’d have thought that the Hillary fans and the Bernie bros would have gained a bit of perspective, even a soupçon of philosophical acceptance. All contests, except for those held for elementary school-aged children where everyone gets a participation trophy, have winners and losers. But the political loss of the Dowager Duchess of Chappaqua to Donald Trump would appear to be the very first time that her loyal courtiers have ever experienced a tragedy of that magnitude, and so animus against Donald Trump and the people who voted for him continues unabated; loud, proud, 24-7 and ever more unhinged. (I’ve written before about this, here at Chicagoboyz and at NCO Brief.) It’s kind of hard to tell who the Hillary-adoring glitterati, entertainers, intellectuals and bureaucrats hate more; Donald Trump or the regular Joes and Josies who voted for him. And it’s not just the Trump-hate, but the continuing, relentless social justice warrior posturing about everything from gay marriage, transsexual privilege, to members of the black urban underclass having an unfortunately terminal encounter with the forces of law’n’order. It’s all become quite exhausting, even keeping track of who is supposed to be outraged by what.
Culture
Our only enemy was gold
I’ve always thought Edwin Muir’s poem ‘The Castle,’ like Burns’ ‘Parcel of Rogues,’ referred to the Acts of Union of 1707. Many Scots considered the union of Scotland and England to be a corrupt bargain in which Scottish nobles and landowners who’d been ruined by the Darien scheme were bailed out with English money in return for signing over Scotland’s independence. (I don’t want to argue the merits of that theory; historians have been batting it around for four hundred years without reaching agreement. I just want to point out that the attitude exists.)
It did just occur to me recently that there could be another, slightly anachronistic interpretation of the poem. If Edwin Muir had been given a glimpse of Scotland’s condition today and the destructive effects of welfare dependency, he might have written exactly the same poem. For generations Scotland was a poor country whose greatest natural resource was its people and their devotion to education. They educated their young people and sent them out all over the world, and as George MacDonald Fraser said, “A Scotsman on the make is a terrible thing.”
The expansion of the welfare state has eroded that, perhaps fatally.
All through that summer at ease we lay,
And daily from the turret wall
We watched the mowers in the hay
And the enemy half a mile away
They seemed no threat to us at all.
For what, we thought, had we to fear
With our arms and provender, load on load,
Our towering battlements, tier on tier,
And friendly allies drawing near
On every leafy summer road.
Our gates were strong, our walls were thick,
So smooth and high, no man could win
A foothold there, no clever trick
Could take us, have us dead or quick.
Only a bird could have got in.
What could they offer us for bait?
Our captain was brave and we were true….
There was a little private gate,
A little wicked wicket gate.
The wizened warder let them through.
Oh then our maze of tunneled stone
Grew thin and treacherous as air.
The cause was lost without a groan,
The famous citadel overthrown,
And all its secret galleries bare.
How can this shameful tale be told?
I will maintain until my death
We could do nothing, being sold;
Our only enemy was gold,
And we had no arms to fight it with.
Happy VJ-Day, Plus 72 Years
Happy Victory over Japan Day!
On August 14th in 1945 Imperial Japan accepted the terms of the Potsdam Declaration and averted Operation Downfall, the two stage invasion of Japan. On Sept 2, 1945 the surrender was signed on the USS Missouri in Tokyo bay, This invasion would have resulted in at least a million American casualties (see below) and likely millions of Japanese dead from direct effects of the invasion plus the mass starvation that would have been sure to occur in its aftermath.
Since August 2010, it has become an eight years and counting tradition (See link list at the end of this post) for the Chicagoboyz web site to commemorate the major events closing out World War II in the Pacific and address the leftist agitprop surrounding those events. Where the worst recorded war in human history became a nuclear war via the August 6th and 9th 1945 A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, followed by the Imperial Japanese acceptance of the terms of the Potsdam Declaration, and the Sept 2, 1945 formal surrender on the battleship USS Missouri.
This years year’s Chicagoboyz commemoration will focus on the academic “revisionist history” controversies regards American casualties in an invasion of Japan versus the use of two Atomic Bombs.
- The controversy traces from the rise of the leftist “Atomic Diplomacy” revisionism in 1946-1965.
- Atomic Diplomacy’s subsequent credibility collapse of “Atomic Diplomacy” historical underpinning in the 1995 Smithsonian Enola Gay Exhibit controversy.
- Its enshrinement as a leftist academic virtue signaling cult in the aftermath.
Color Photo of the Sept 2, 1945 surrender ceremony marking the conclusion of WW2 on the Battleship USS Missouri.
Iconoclasm
Something was nagging at the back of my mind about the recent push to destroy all Civil War monuments in the South. The argument usually advanced is that these statues celebrate the Confederacy and slavery so they should be removed. That case is facially plausible.
However, the destruction of monuments seems to be accelerating, with a move from organized removal, lawfully conducted, to mobs toppling the statues spontaneously.
Watching this video is a good example of the trend.
Then I saw today that activists are demanding that statues of Theodore Roosevelt be taken down, because he was apparently also “racist”.
And today the Lincoln Memorial was vandalized.
In the past, there have been outbreaks of this sort of behavior, and they have tended to get out of control. There was the original iconoclast movement in Byzantium. There was a massive destruction of religious images during the Reformation. There was a similar outbreak of mob attacks on religious statues and images during the French revolution. During the early days of the Spanish Civil War, mobs spontaneously attacked and destroyed churches. There is a famous photo of men in civilian clothes taking pot shots at a large crucifix, somewhere in Spain in 1936.
The Wikipedia article lists many such outbreaks.
The Chinese Cultural Revolution seems the most apt comparison to where this is going. The Red Guards tried to stamp out the entirety of Chinese history up to their own time. Everything that had occurred before their revolution was corrupt and any attempt to preserve it was a political offense requiring the harshest possible personal attack, including violent attack, and including death. Further, the activities escalate because people must engage in increasingly extreme behavior to show their commitment and fervor. Slacking off becomes suspect.
The fact that this is a recurring phenomenon, with similar patterns repeating in various cultures over thousands of years, suggests that there is a generalized psychological impulse which can express itself anywhere if conditions are right, especially an ideological motivation.
The inner logic of Political Correctness, in the USA, in 2017, has no stopping point.
The existence of Trump is a helpful rhetorical crutch, since people can say that they are just striking out in rage at having a fascist in the White House. But that is a justification not a cause.
Genuine, deep hatred of the past, of everything the USA has been and stood for, is the motivator.
This is the result of several generations of indoctrination, in the government schools. The indoctrination has been spectacularly successful.
Absolutely everything that occurred in the American past is necessarily, in this view, tainted and corrupt, valueless and worthy only of elimination. For example, most of the Founders were slave-owners. All depictions and references to them must be destroyed. George Washington, a slave owner, was no better than a Nazi. All institutions and documents associated with slave-owners, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, are no better than Nazi documents. All of them must be destroyed.
Christian churches have traditionally been associated with condemning homosexuality as sin, or fighting against Islam. These religious buildings and their images must also be destroyed, by this logic.
Buildings traditionally associated with male privilege, or capitalism, for example old office buildings with traditional lobby spaces, or clubs that were once restricted to men, are tainted. These also have to be destroyed.
At a certain point public monuments will be attacked if they are old or have figurative statues simply because everything from the past falls short of the ideal politically correct standard and is therefore evil.
If you watch the video of the crowd tearing down the Confederate soldier statue, they are not engaged in any kind of rational political act. They are in a frenzy. They are motivated by hate, and they are literally angrily kicking and punching an inert mass of crumpled metal.
Mobs, once they taste the pleasure of mass violent action and ritual destruction, will want more of it. The conduct will not stop, but will escalate. It is a process that can get out of control.
The psychological compulsion to engage in this behavior, and the feeling of group solidarity which comes with the activity, the chanting, the sense of triumph in destroying something that is valued by people the attackers hate, is intoxicating.
Conventional politicians on the Left will find it hard to find a principled way to condemn the behavior, and will say they understand the impulse but condemn the excess.
Conventional politicians on the Right will apologize for racism and oppression in the past, but insist on law and order.
Neither will engage with the revolutionary and nihilistic impulses which underlie this behavior, or the indoctrination which made it possible.
Expect to see this behavior continue, ratchet up, break out in many places.
Expect high levels of serious vandalism and arson directed at the types of monuments and buildings I mentioned.
As usual with such predictions, I hope I am wrong.
Let’s see how it looks over the next few months.
UPDATE:
TThat didn’t take long!
In Chicago today: Local pastor calls on Emanuel to change names of 2 Chicago parks.
Bishop James Dukes sent a letter to Mayor Emanuel and the Chicago Park District on Monday asking the City of Chicago to rename Washington and Jackson Parks which commemorate former presidents George Washington and Andrew Jackson, key historical figures and known slave owners.
The article notes: “On the topic of removing the statute of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, the president said, ‘I wonder, is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after?'”
President Trump is a pretty smart cookie!
But it didn’t even take a week.
According to the article, this pastor “is meeting with a city official soon to discuss the process for changing the names.”
We have a whole damn state named after Washington!
That has to change.
And Washington’s head has to be dynamited off of Mount Rushmore.
And the money? Washington’s face is on the money! That has to change!
And all those statues! Take ’em down!
That will help to bring about healing.
Stand by.
UPDATE 2:
To Save the Union
Before the Civil War, the two sides often read different authors, saw different newspapers, read different novels. Some northern works were not easily available in the south and the levels of literacy differed. Of course, today, all is open. We choose to narrow our options: a Fox listener is likely to be a Wall Street Journal reader who begins surfing with Instapundit. A CNN listener is more likely to read the NYTimes and check out HuffPost.
So, we can speak to each other, but anyone listening to the rhythms of Obama and those of Trump, the voices of the average humanities teacher and of the dirty jobs guy, may well wonder if they would understand. (Though, of course, it is a perspective rather than position Rowe and Victor Davis Hanson, as academically credentialed as they come, understand each other thoroughly.)
Listening to Trump’s speech on Charlotte, I heard something reporters didn’t mention. The speech’s rhythms came from an emphasis we’ve heard before: in Trump’s inaugural, in Lincoln’s second inaugural and blended them in Trump’s less rhythmical, less evocative but direct and emotion-driven voice. It lacks the distance and gravitas of Lincoln, but its purpose is similar.