Tag: american exceptionalism

He Begins Well

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I had to work on Inauguration Day.  When I took a break, I had a chance to hear the speech.  The words are good.  Whoever wrote it earned his pay.  There is no soaring rhetoric.  Its power is in its relevance.  I heard a few simple messages.  The time for talk is over.  The time for action is now.  Buy American, hire American.  America first.

I am no longer an overly enthusiastic or optimistic man.  I do not assume that good intentions are enough to solve problems.  But I note that just as Trump spoke during the campaign to the underlying blindness that republican leaders exhibited to the concerns of the people on the right so his speech here cleaves to his primary message.  He declares his mission.  Restore America for Americans.

I’ll keep this short and sweet.  He begins well.

Making the Greatest Show On Earth Again

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When I was about eight years old my father took me and my brothers and sister to see Ringling Brothers’ Barnum and Bailey Circus at the old Madison Square Garden in Manhattan.  Before the performance, we walked through the menagerie and saw lions, tigers, zebras, a huge bored gorilla and most importantly the elephants.  They were the stars of the circus and from the point of view of a little boy, the real reason to go to the circus.  Now, don’t get me wrong, I liked the other acts too, the tightrope walkers, the clowns, the lion tamers and the trapeze acrobats.  They were fun and some were exciting.  But what I wanted to see were the elephants.  Watching these giants go through their routines and seeing the trainers perform their acrobatics on the backs and heads of these amazing monsters was thrilling.

When I had kids of my own, I would bring them every year to the circus.  At this point I preferred the Big Apple Circus because they provided a retro and more intimate experience.  And of course, they had elephants.  My kids loved the clowns and the trapeze acts but what always brought the oohs and aahs was the elephants.  There weren’t as many or as big as the ones I remember from my childhood but they did the trick.  When my kids were a little older I decided to bring them one last time to see the circus.  Much to everybody’s surprise and disappointment there were no elephants.  I assumed that the Big Apple Circus had fallen on hard times and couldn’t afford them anymore.

Over the last few years I had heard that animal rights activists were the reason that circuses had been forced to eliminate the elephants.  They worked to get municipal laws passed making elephant training and control equipment illegal.  They picketed the circuses and harassed the patrons.  Among all the other outrages of the Social Justice Warriors I never considered how this particular campaign would impact the world I live in.  A few years ago, I went with my grandsons to the Ringling Brothers show and there were the elephants.  All was as it should be.

Today I read that Ringling Brothers’ Barnum and Bailey Circus was going out of business this year.  The last performance will be this spring.  Reading the article I discovered that the last year or two the circus finally caved in to the pressure and eliminated the elephants from the circus.  The circus officials attributed the large drop in attendance to this change.  The article said the Barnum and Bailey Circus was 146 years old and was actually older than baseball.  So, the SJWs killed the circus.

Well, that’s about the perfect emblem of our era.  Politically correct harassment and knee-jerk regulation strangled one of the most legendary symbols of happiness and childhood adventure.

For the activists who supposedly did all this for the sake of the elephants, I think it might be interesting to consider what the law of unexpected consequences might have to say about this development.  Now that children won’t be thinking about elephants as much anymore there’s a chance they won’t grow up quite as interested in elephants.  Currently, elephant populations are under enormous pressure in their native ranges.  In fact, both Asian and African elephants are being decimated by the combined pressures of habitat destruction and poaching.  A time may come when only a concerted effort by conservationists using heroic efforts will preserve a population of elephants.  This would require a large amount of money on a continuous basis.  This money will not come from Asia or Africa.  I think it is entirely possible that if governments aren’t in a position to underwrite something like this for political and financial reasons it will require the sympathy of individuals in first-world countries to make this effort possible.  However, if elephants are no longer a popular or common concept perhaps there will be little interest in underwriting their well-being.  So, if Dumbo isn’t a figure that parents remember fondly, maybe they won’t bring their kids to see the new version.  And one day the kids will be unaware that elephants are any more interesting than sewer rats.  And when they drop off the face of the earth the activists can rail against the callous ignorance and selfishness of people.  And no one will know or care.

In the weeks and months going forward President Trump may be able to make many American institutions and aspects of life “great again.”  Unfortunately, I don’t see any hope of making the Greatest Show on Earth “great again” or even making it again at all.  And we are all poorer for it.

Trump vs Reality

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Donald Trump (DT) – Hey Pence!

Mike Pence (MP) – Yes Mr. Trump.

DT – Hey, why don’t you call me Mr. President?

MP – Because you’re not president yet Mr. Trump.

DT – Well then, why is Schumer calling me president?

MP – He’s trying to tie your hands by blaming you for things that happen before you get into the White House.

DT – What a weasel!  That’s it!  I’ll make sure his Aunt get’s thrown out of that rent-controlled apartment in Trump Village.  Fine.  But remember in a couple of weeks you’re gonna have to call me Mr. President.

MP – Yes, Mr. Trump.

DT – Hey, anyway, the reason I called you is I need to start figuring out what this government business does.

MP – Well, it runs the country.

DT – No I don’t mean what it says it does.  I mean what it actually does.

MP – I’m not sure I see the distinction.

DT – Sure you do.  You are the governor of a state.  You know where the bodies are buried.  You know which are the sacred cows that don’t do anything but can’t be touched because they have juice.

MP – Oh, I think I see.  You want to know where the fat is and why.

DT – Exactly.  I want to know where the pork is and more importantly, who are the rabbis.

MP – The rabbis?

DT – Rabbis, godfathers, whatever you want to call them.  The guys who know where the bodies are buried and who collect the fees.

MP – Yes, I see.  Mr. Trump that is a very big job.  You’ll need your cabinet working for months to just begin to understand where the waste and featherbedding is.

DT – That’s what you think.  I’ve been talking with the Thiel guy.  He may be a little light in the loafers but he’s plenty smart.  He’s working on an algorithm to find this stuff.  I’ll bet he gets it done in days or weeks.

MP – Mr. Trump, that sounds like science fiction.  I hardly think you’ll be able to streamline the US Government in a few weeks.  You’ve got to be realistic.  If we can slow down the growth a little while we’re in office it will be a great achievement.

DT – Now that’s exactly what’s wrong with this country.  You want to drain the swamp with an eyedropper.  I want to use an atom bomb.  Look, Mike we only have about a hundred days to build up some momentum.  After that we’re dead meat.  So, look alive.  You know the saying, “Lead, follow or get out of the way.”  Well, I’m leading so that just leaves you two options, and there’s no way to get out of my way so hurry up and follow.  And bring along a crow bar ‘cause we’ve got a lotta demo to do.

MP – Okay Mr. Trump I’ll do my best.

DT – Look, Mike.  You’ve gotta start thinking on your feet.  I’m gonna hand this show over to someone in four years.  If you wanna be that guy you better wake up.

MP – Well when you put it that way, lead on.  I think there are a couple of agencies that haven’t produced anything but pensions in the thirty years I’ve been around and I can tell you who to start firing right now.

DT – That’s better.  I knew there was a reason I didn’t go with Christie.  Besides his taste in suits.

2017: The Dawn of the Age of the Deplorables

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As I noted in my previous post, I spent a very nice week and a half relaxing and enjoying the Christmas holiday.  As part of that I read an awful lot of right wing and sort of right wing commentary.  And it occurred to me that things are definitely looking up on our side of the blogosphere.  Christmas Eve I watched the beginning of this five hour (!) set of interviews.

 

 

The host Stefan Molyneux has a series of videos where he interviews people about politics, philosophy, religion and life.  Ostensibly this series of interviews are about Christmas.  But that’s a jumping off point in some cases to discuss the year just passed and the new year coming up.  If you are not familiar with most of these people then I’ll say that they are spread across a continuum of ideologies starting on the left at about what used to pass for a liberal (but now would be too mild for the left today) all the way to some pretty hard core alt-right types.  Happily, for me, none of them here have joined the goose-stepping lunatics that abut this political neighborhood a little too closely for comfort.  But they are all unapologetic in their scorn for social justice warriors, America-haters and other lefty lunatic types that reflexively attack all things normal and good.  Some of them are not Trump fans, others came around by the end and some were predicting his win a year, ago.  But all of them are part of the new media.  They have cast their lot with the new way of reaching the people.  They run their own businesses and have their own audiences and get paid for telling a side of the story that the main stream media doesn’t tell.  They are more interesting and more relevant than most of what Fox provides and a thousand times better than the nonsense on CNN, ABC, NBC or CBS.  It’s very hard to predict if any of these folks will survive the brutal competition that exists in the media environment today.  I hope they do.  They inject humor and wit and points of view that aren’t permitted to exist on the network shows.  And interestingly they seem to be plugged into some of the trends that everyone else missed this year.  If that fact indicates a better grasp on what really will be happening in the near future, then maybe they’ll thrive.  I recommend that if you’re interested in what different voices are saying about our changing world then look around and see what’s going on.  You may be pleasantly surprised.  After all these are the deplorables that that Hillary warned us about and you remember how well that worked out for her!

Heinlein Part 2 – The Juveniles

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Heinlein: What’s the Deal With Him?

The Juveniles.  That is where it all began for me, and I was probably typical.  Exploring the science fiction shelf in the kid’s floor of the library I found and read “Red Planet.”  Fantastic.  The characters were intelligent (well the good guys were) and the story combined adventure, humor and a young protagonist that we could root for.  As I worked my way through the series I had no idea that most science fiction (especially juvenile sf) was nowhere near as good.  And I didn’t know why I liked these books so much.  But I do now.  Heinlein had identified something important in how Americans of my generation viewed ourselves and the future.  We believed it was time for humans to push the frontier beyond Earth.  Heinlein had translated the Western into science fiction.  His heroes are easily seen as descendants of the pioneers who pushed across the plains and forests of North America in the 19th Century and colonized a continent.  His families (and they often came as families) were colonizing the Solar System.

Consulting my on-line encyclopedia (specifically Infogalactic) I find the following chronology:

Rocket Ship Galileo, 1947

Space Cadet, 1948

Red Planet, 1949

Farmer in the Sky, 1950

Between Planets, 1951

The Rolling Stones aka Space Family Stone, 1952

Starman Jones, 1953

The Star Beast, 1954

Tunnel in the Sky, 1955

Time for the Stars, 1956

Citizen of the Galaxy, 1957

Have Space Suit—Will Travel, 1958

 

Interestingly, Rocket Ship Galileo was always the weakest (in my mind) of the novels both in terms of plot and character development.  In fact, it’s the only one I’ve never re-read.  I can see that he had not quite come up with the formula he later perfected.  And just to personalize this, here is my list in order of personal preference (top being favorite):

Have Space Suit—Will Travel

Citizen of the Galaxy

Starman Jones

The Rolling Stones

The Star Beast

Farmer in the Sky

Red Planet

Tunnel in the Sky

Space Cadet

Between Planets

Time for the Stars

Rocket Ship Galileo

Of course, I probably could move around anything other than the top and bottom entries depending on mood.  But this tells you more about me than about the author.

So, as I approach sixty why do I consider these children’s books interesting or relevant?  Was it the extraordinary prose style or absolute unique character of the protagonists?  Not at all.  Heinlein was a very capable writer and wrote clean prose but he was no Faulkner.  And many of his young adult characters are almost interchangeable.  The real reason was because these novels combine all the components of good fiction.  The plots are lively and interesting.  The characters are engaging, sympathetic and admirable.  To my mind, Heinlein in this series is the heir to Kipling’s “Kim” and Stevenson’s “Treasure Island.”  You recognize in them a voice that isn’t confused about the rightness of the endeavor his characters are engaged in.  There’s very little of the moral ambivalence that became the defining characteristic of the 1960s and beyond.  This was the spirit of the post-WWII optimism.  This was the high noon of the American Century and it was beautiful.  We would get another taste of this spirit when Ronald Reagan brought back American optimism in the 1980s.  We’ve had precious little of it since.

I’m of the opinion that adopting the same kind of feel to sf today would be popular.  For this reason, I think the Heinlein juveniles (and some of his better adult stories and novels) have value as a template for what to look for in a sf story today.  Lately I’ve seen the beginning of this idea occurring and I see that as a hopeful sign.  If this return to optimistic story style coincides with some kind of a Trump resurgence in American optimism in general it could be a fortunate thing for the sf fans of my grandsons’ age.  So, hat’s off to RAH (and his editors) for producing a set of young adult sf novels that could last a hundred years without aging at all.  I think I’ll re-read “Have Spacesuit Will Travel” for Christmas.

True Grit: The Duke, The Dude and the Dutiful Daughter; Part I

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“I call that bold talk for a one-eyed fat man.” When was a better line ever uttered in a Western?

What red-blooded American male doesn’t love True Grit? I liked everything about the old movie (other than that truly awful song Glen Campbell sings).  I like everything about the new movie (except for the awful politics of the actor who plays LaBoeuf).  But until recently I had never read the source novel.  Now, having done so, I have a renewed admiration for the film makers.  The differences between the novel and movies are creative choices that must have required a bit of reflection on the differences between reading and watching.  All in all, I’m hard pressed to claim that the films are less than the book.  They are each excellent.  But ultimately, the book provides more of the protagonist’s inner voice.  Mattie Ross is the fictional autobiographer here.  It’s her story and she tells it from her very idiosyncratic point of view.  If the main facts of the plot are outlined (young woman goes forth to avenge the murder of her father) it would seem obvious that enormous sympathy should exist for the heroine.  But she’s not the most sympathetic character.  She takes advantage of her formidable lawyer to bully an innocent tradesman into paying her for damages he did not cause.  She is pathologically self-righteous and judgmental.  And she lacks any tact or charm.  Basically, she’s a jerk.  But at the same time, she possesses courage, fortitude, energy and intelligence.  She has worked out the situation around her father’s murder and planned a campaign to redress it.  She has not spared herself (or anyone else for that matter) and follows through with it without concern for pain, weariness or danger.  She is a very original and convincing character.

All through her odyssey Mattie meets up with a number of characters, some barely sketched, others carefully fleshed out. Most vivid of course is Rooster Cogburn. but others, Ranger LaBoeuf, Lucky Ned Pepper, Colonel Stonehill and even Tom Chaney, are fully drawn and interesting personalities.  And here is where the movies don’t let us down.  The portrayals of Stonehill and Pepper in both movies are excellent.  The actors are given a very small window to work in, just a couple of scenes.  But both convey the personality we are meant to see in a specific setting  that reveals interesting components of his character.  At almost all points the plot mixes humor and drama in believable measure.

The Texas Ranger named LaBoeuf (pronounced by him “LaBeef”) is the foil for both Mattie and Cogburn. At every turn his opinion and motivations are at odds with one or the other or both of them.  This allows for Mattie and Cogburn to develop some solidarity.  The scene where LaBoeuf attempts to switch Mattie to force her to abandon the search confirms the respective places for each of these characters.  In a strange way they resemble a family, with Cogburn as a sort of father and Mattie and LaBoeuf as younger daughter and older son.  Now granted this would be a particularly dysfunctional family but considering the status of Mattie to her recently deceased father it is not unreasonable.  It is this dynamic in the story that I think is chiefly responsible for the appeal of the story for women, but of course that is just one man’s opinion.

And finally (at least in this first installment) we come to the climax of the action. The Duel and the Catastrophe.  If there is in all western cinema a closer analogy to a knightly duel I haven’t seen it.  The hero no longer needs to confront his enemy.  The damsel is rescued, the aim of the quest (the capture of Chaney) is accomplished.  But he is honor bound to conquer or die.  A more perfect tableaux for the American West, I cannot imagine.  And then the reversal, and another reversal, and another.  By the time Rooster is carrying Mattie back to town and doctor we have reversed the journey from adventure to real life.  Chaney’s fate is no longer important, Ned Pepper and the other outlaws are debris on the field.  Even Mattie’s beloved pony Blackie is expended in Cogburn’s single-minded endeavor to save her life.  And here the new movie adds to what the original left out.  The rattlesnake bite costs Mattie her arm.  She recovers and grows up to be a wealthy spinster.  And the last act of the book has her belatedly trying to meet up with Rooster at a Wild West Show that he has ended up in.  Cole Younger, one of his fellow “exhibits” informs her that Rooster had died several days previously.  She has his remains moved to her family plot.  Thus completing the idea that Cogburn had become something of a father figure to her.

I intend to discuss some other features of the True Grit movies and book in future posts.

 

True Grit – Part 2, Rooster Redux

The Coffee Walk Bunch II – The Trumpocalypse Aftermath

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For those who read my earlier post, The Coffee Walk Bunch , this is the follow-up.  I was away from the office on some training during election week.  There were some e-mails to acknowledge the momentous events but the face to face had to wait until the next Monday.  To say it was a contrast to the pre-election mood would be a gross understatement.  That  dispirited assemblage of men had been replaced by a jolly band of strutting conquistadores.  Gone was all defeatism.  Cast aside was the doom and gloom.  All talk was of the stunning victory and the accompanying despair of the progressives.  Schadenfreude was rampant.  And personally gratifying was the acknowledgement of my brilliance as a steadfast proclaimer of the Trump victory.  In fact my Tubman wager (although not literally possible to collect on due to the unavailability of a Tubman $20 bill) was celebrated with a framed and inscribed Jackson presented with all appropriate acclamation for the winner (that was me).  I modestly accepted the winnings and gave a brief and animated address on the folly of betting against someone of my obvious accomplishments.  Enthusiasm for this speech was, in my opinion, undeservedly muted and they instead congratulated themselves for being on the winning side.  I let this Trump Triumphalism go on for about fifteen minutes just to be fair and also because I really enjoyed it too.

After that I brought them back to earth.  “So you think God is in his heaven and all’s right with the world in this best of all possible worlds.  Suckers!  All you’ve got is a reprieve.”  I spelled out the problems they faced.

  1.  Although Trump had shown great discernment in identifying immigration as the underlying issue that needed to be addressed by a candidate, there was no way of knowing if he could or would solve that problem.
  2. The Democrats wouldn’t just fold up and go away and let Trump and Republicans have a free hand in undoing the Obama agenda.
  3. Trump was a completely unpredictable player.  He might be a great help or he might actually do great harm to the country.
  4. Regardless of eventual success or failure of the Trump presidency, the weeks and months ahead would be full of frustration and uncertainty.
  5. The country itself had not unified.  A few hundred thousand votes in a handful of states separated the progressives and conservatives from majority to minority.  The nation was just as disunited as ever.  Probably more so, based on the post election violence on display.

I’m not sure if they believed my assessment.  I’m not sure if I wanted them to believe it.  After all, the holidays are supposed to be a time of happiness and generous spirit even toward your enemies.  Maybe we should embrace optimism at this time of year.  It’s definitely more enjoyable than pessimism.  Even the lousy coffee served by the cafeteria was described as better by those who somehow imbibe it.  So I’ll grant them their respite until the Obama retreat.  Then we’ll renew debate and solve the world’s problems, one lousy cup of joe at a time.

Trump vs. the Cabinet Picks

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Donald Trump (DT):  Pence!  Where the hell have you gone now!  Will you get in here?  I need your so-called opinion.

Mike Pence (MP):  I’m right here Mr. Trump.  I was just on the phone with George Stephanopoulos.  He wanted to know if you were sorry for your history of hate speech against a metabolically challenged member of the LGBTQ community.

DT:  What?  Who the hell is he talking about?

MP:  I think he was talking about Rosie O’Donnell.

DT:  You can tell that muppet troll of a fake journalist that he can kiss my ass.  Now come on.  We have work to do.

MP:  How can I help?

DT:  I don’t like these picks we’re getting for the Cabinet.  These guys are all old and boring.  I mean Romney?  We need someone tough and smart.

MP:  Well, sir, what qualification would you rate as most important; confirmability, expertise, loyalty?

DT:   Balls.

MP:  Excuse me?

DT:  I want somebody who’s not afraid to tell the Press or Congress or the Europeans to pound sand when they start whining.

MP:  Mr. Trump, I don’t think you understand the art of compromise.

DT:  I don’t do compromise.  I fight.  I get what I want by knowing what the other guy will and won’t do.  That’s the kind of men I want working for me.

MP:  Could you give me some examples of this type of man?

DT:  Of course.  The history books are full of them.  Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Vlad the Impaler, Alexander the Great, Napoleon.  All my heroes.

MP:  Sir, those are brutal conquerors.  They hardly reflect the American spirit.

DT:  Fine.  How about George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, George E. Patton, Robert E. Lee?  They were Americans, weren’t they?

MP:  Yes, but those are wartime leaders.  We’re at peace.

DT:  Bull!  We’ve been at war in this country for over a hundred years with the communists.  I need men who know how to fight.

MP:  Nevertheless, I don’t think men of that caliber exist today.  Where could you find them?

DT:  Pence, did your mother ever give birth to any children that lived?  The military of course.  All those high-ranking officers that Obama fired for not kowtowing to the LGBTQ mafia.  They’ll be perfect.

MP:  Mr. Trump, that’s brilliant!  I’ll get right on it.

DT:   Ding, ding, ding.  Finally, you hear.  Hey, do me a favor.  See what you can do about returning the name to War Department.  I think that kind of rebranding will attract the right kind of recruit.

MP:  Yes, sir.

DT:  And find out if I can transfer the Corporation for Public Broadcasting into the Army.  I have this idea about having Big Bird court-martialed and hanged for treason.

MP:  Uhhh, okay?

Peter Thiel’s Zero to One: A Short Book Review

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This book is a bit of a departure from my usual fare of science fiction and fantasy.  It’s a book based on a course the author gave on business start-ups.  And considering that Thiel was one of the founders of PayPal I guess he knows a thing or two about innovation.  The title “Zero to One,” is a way of describing the invention of something new, literally something out of nothing.  He contrasts this to the current business paradigm of amplifying existing businesses by small incremental improvements mostly involving decreasing business costs.  This might seem like a narrow topic that would only interest business school types and in one sense that’s true.  What makes it important to the general reader is how he frames this situation as a symptom of a larger societal problem that effects us all and threatens to make permanent the recession that has gripped the United States for the last thirty years.

Thiel defines the parameters involved as two binary variables.  The first pair is optimism versus pessimism.  As examples of these he compares American culture in the post WWII era (optimistic) with other cultures that tend to pessimism (e.g. Modern Europe, Modern China).  That’s easy enough to understand and familiar to most readers.  The other parameter he describes is definite versus indefinite.  The dichotomy here is the difference between believing that you can shape the future (definite) versus believing that the future is ruled by luck or random events.  Putting these two sets together you can come up with four cases, Definite Optimism, Indefinite Optimism, Definite Pessimism and Indefinite Pessimism.  With respect to the United States he claims that we have shifted from the Definite Optimism of the 1940s and 50s to the Indefinite Optimism of the present.  He maintains that Americans tend to regard the future as optimistic but instead of the bold plans for creating the future in the 40s and 50s (characterized by such bold endeavors as the Manhattan Project and the other engineering marvels of the times) we just assume that everything will turn out well without actually having a blueprint of what needs to be done to achieve this prosperity.

This framework is then extended to other areas of human activity such as finance, politics and even philosophy.  These observations seem genuinely compelling.  The analysis is uncomplicated and fairly obvious once examined.  I find this section the most interesting from a general interest perspective.

The majority of the book returns to more concrete elements of what a successful start-up business should look like (and that is something that is interesting to more than just venture capitalists and computer savants) but sprinkled throughout the book are arguments that show Thiel’s divergent view on modern business goals.  His thoughts on the desirability of monopolies is clever.  And finally, he examines the consequences of automation on human society.  He recognizes the disruptions to older life styles inherent in these technologies but offers an opinion on how it can be made to serve society instead.

News that Thiel is being considered for a role in the upcoming Trump administration strikes me as a positive turn of events.  He appears to be an original thinker who seems to possess insights into how innovation is central to the American Dream.  I think it’s almost prophetic that both Thiel and Trump seem to be telling America to return to a winning strategy.

This book is primarily for those interested in what makes for a successful start-up company but I would recommend it to anyone who wants to know why America is faltering economically and even spiritually.

Of Trump, the Alt-Right and Me

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So, the Trumpocalypse came to pass, as foreseen by the Alt-Right.  Some will argue that he got lucky, that he was just as likely to choke and lose as badly as a mainstream republican like JEB!.  Possibly, but I don’t think so.  Reading the reasons that the Alt-Right give for Trump’s success I think they have identified some very important facts:

  1. There was a pool of white voters that felt unrepresented by both the democrats and republicans. These were the so-called Reagan Democrats who stopped voting after 1988.  They were forgotten by George Bush Senior and didn’t like what either the democrats or the republicans were doing to the heartland.  They were abandoned by the corporations who used globalization as a way to access cheap labor in Mexico and other developing countries.  This stayed the same under Clinton, Bush Junior and Obama.
  2. The Progressives have successfully moved forward an agenda over the course of the last fifty years that is aimed at progressively disadvantaging and demonizing white people in general and straight white men in particular. To achieve this, affirmative action laws and the progressives in the media and education were used to incrementally deprive them of opportunities and dignity.  The narrative of female and minority oppression at the hands of straight white men was endlessly reinforced on television, in the movies, in the news, at school and by government agencies that enforced these discriminatory practices.
  3. The Democrats were endeavoring to bring in enough Illegal immigrants to ensure that white Americans would no longer be a majority of voters. This would allow them to easily remove the parts of the Constitution (freedom of speech and right to bear arms) that interfere with them permanently controlling the country.
  4. And finally, the Republican Establishment, from Bush Senior on, was complicit in this immigrant plan as a way of providing cheap labor for their crony capitalist friends. In addition, they were allowing these corporations to shut down all major industrial activity in the US and move it to the third world (China).  This was the so-called new world order of Bush Senior.

The only one of these that is at all surprising is the last.  It had always seemed perplexing that Bush Junior was unable to achieve any conservative reform during his first term when he had a virtual mandate from heaven to do as he pleased and which Congress would rubber stamp.  He lowered some taxes but that was for his corporate friends more than for anyone else.  All his other efforts were indistinguishable from progressive programs.  Now it seems clear to me that the Bushes, McCain, Romney and most of the rest of them are identical to the Democrats.  They use fear of progressive control to get themselves re-elected every few years but they are much more interested in their own careers and the connections they cultivate in office than in helping to conserve the way of life that is systematically under attack from their friends on the other side of the aisle.

On all these points, I am now in unanimity with the Alt-Right.  Beyond this is where I differ.

Many (if not all) on the Alt-Right feel that racial differences preclude modern America from going forward as a united country.  They predict that the US will splinter into separate racial homelands with descendants of the British colonists self-segregating themselves into one nation and other groups dividing up along ethnic lines.  They state that a propositional nation based on rights and equal treatment will not last and shouldn’t.

They believe this will be sparked when white people become a minority in the US and revolt at the treatment they receive at the hands of the minority majority.  In their estimation, this would have preceded more quickly if Trump had lost the election.  They see a Trump administration as a band-aid and a delay before the inevitable revolt.  They believe that the other ethnic groups and their allies in the sexual grievance communities (women, the various sexual deviants) will push white men too far and they will secede from the country.

So here we are.  I will be the first to admit that much that they say about our present situation is accurate.  And I’d be the last to deny that the treatment of white men in the last fifty years has been outrageous.

From my point of view, the leftists have followed a strategy that will divide this country in much the same way Yugoslavia disintegrated.  This is a truly frightening possibility.  The misery and destruction such a conflict would represent is hard to overestimate.  When you consider the possibility of outside forces getting involved, the scope of the disaster could be virtually apocalyptic even on a global scale.

But I shy away from the idea that people can’t exist under a government that treats its people impartially.  To this end I tried to envision what changes to our government would forestall this rupture of the American people.  Here they are:

  1. The recognized status of the family uniquely defined as a man and a woman producing and raising children.
  2. The elimination of government interference with parents raising their children as they see fit.
  3. The elimination of affirmative action or protected status in any government law or program based on race, gender, sexual orientation or any other discriminatory factor.
  4. The elimination of government interference to free association. This includes any forced association by government decree.
  5. The elimination of automatic citizenship to the children of non-citizens.
  6. The curtailment of all but minimal immigration for the foreseeable future.

I believe that if these changes were made to the government, normalcy would be restored.  Of course, seeing these kinds of changes initiated would require action by the three branches of the government well beyond any effective action seen since the Great Society legislation of the 1960s.  So, it’s hard to see how this will happen.  And although I am unhappy with the Alt-Rights vision of the future, I don’t think I can dismiss it as unrealistic.  Based on the wide-ranging disruptions occurring every day around the world it’s a bold man who would preclude almost anything as impossible.  So, that’s where things stand.

I admit to the accuracy of the Alt-Right’s assessment of what is going on in the world right now.  I hope that they’re wrong about the fate of our country.  I think I see what changes would improve our union.  And I don’t have a sense of how likely it is that we’ll fix these problems.  Time will tell.  In the meantime I’ll enjoy the spectacle of the Trumpocalypse for as long as I can.