Eulogy for the ZMan

I have a long trip tomorrow morning and I wasn’t sure I would post tonight but the ZMan’s death seems to require a post.  And interestingly, yesterday my mind was on mortality.  Just a coincidence but a strange one nonetheless.

I guess I’m looking to process the news a little bit to make it feel less strange.  From what I remember, he was in his late fifties.  I knew he wanted to lose a few pounds and was happy that the yard work around a rural property afforded him the excuse to do more manual labor.  I guess with all the excess mortality after the COVID debacle he may be another victim of our regime’s ill-conceived and incompetently handled bioweapons program in China.  I think everyone’s vitality has taken at least some damage from the spike protein saturating our environment.  So maybe that is the primary cause of the ZMan’s untimely death.  Or maybe he had an underlying condition that he did or didn’t know about.  I’m guessing I’ll never know any more about it.  So, let’s put aside his surprise death.

What about his work?  I’ve been reading and (later) listening to the ZMan’s content for about ten years.  I was already reading material from various “alt-right” sources and ran into some of his posts as links from other sources.  And right away I could tell that his insights and his thought patterns were head and shoulders above most of the blogs I was then reading.  Eventually he became my primary source, not for political news but rather for reaction to the news and for his take on what were the motivations for the actions that were going on in the world around us.

And I found his insights very useful.  He could fit the events into a framework that accounted for the various factions and their agendas; the radical Left, the managerial state, the establishment Republicans, the Neocons, the rank-and-file Democrats and all the rest of the clown parade.  He could lay out their machinations and even predict their feuds and friendships.  And he did it in an entertaining and polished manner.  And his Friday podcast added in the benefit of his suave speaking voice that I playfully referred to as the “Voice of Saruman.”  Yes, the ZMan was a quality resource.

Now as much as I respected and agreed with much of his analysis of the political goings on in Washington and elsewhere, I had and have a very different political ideology from the ZMan.  At heart I’m just a red-pilled civic nationalist and ZMan was a full-fledged member of the dissident right.  What that means was that although I agreed with his diagnosis of our ills I disagreed with his prescription for a cure.  I wanted to eliminate things like affirmative action and illegal immigration and restore an America that had existed before the Johnson New Society.  I wanted the government to leave people alone to decide how they wanted to live their lives and let the government be a color-blind referee that only stepped in when a race war or something equally insane appeared in the streets.

The ZMan believed it was impossible to re-establish that kind of America.  What exactly he believed was the radical solution to the dysfunctional condition of the United States he never explicitly revealed.  On a number of occasions, he did state that a civil war wasn’t in the cards.  I assumed he believed that a negotiated settlement that produced some number of successor states, one of which would be more pleasing to the dissident right, was the desired outcome.  Well, I guess I’ll never know for sure now.  But obviously we differed quite strongly on political ideology and for this reason I never commented on his site.  After all, I was obviously not the target audience.  As much as I admired his abilities as an essayist and a student of political history my positions on these matters would only lead to me being hounded off the site.  And what fun would that be for me?

So, I read his content and linked to the essays that I found especially convincing or entertaining and time passed.  I remember when he had that dustup with Michael Anton and that seemed to confirm that moderates would not be dealt with moderately.  And although I said at the time that everyone is allowed to decide who is and isn’t their enemies, I had no desire to be in that position.  So I lurked and enjoyed his work when it agreed with my views and ignored what did not.

But I will say I’m very sad to hear of his death.  He seemed to be a genuinely good fellow.  If I were on a train or plane with him and all we discussed was New England weather, Thucydides and the antics of Donald Trump I think we could have had a very enjoyable discussion.

And I’m going to miss his Friday Power Hour podcast.  I looked forward to it every week and he provided entertainment and matters to contemplate, on a very consistent basis.  And I always did hope that if Trump and his confederates had ever managed to “fix” the country and get back our rights maybe the ZMan would call a truce with the civic nationalists.

But now we’ll never know.  Rest in peace, ZMan.  You were an American original.