← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · il ragno
Thread ID: 19484 | Posts: 10 | Started: 2005-08-07
2005-08-07 21:19 | User Profile
[COLOR=Indigo]I guess the most depressing thing about Life In These United States These Days is that even the battles we think we're fighting are fixed. If you're furious at the no-neck GOP and their warmongering, you're labelled and shoved over onto the side that's pro-gay/abortion/multiculturalism. If you're agitated over 'diversity' and the moral and cultural relativity that empowers same, you're assumed to be a GOP/FoxNewsbot even though these folks are mass immigration's, and "diversity"'s, loudest cheerleaders.
The facts are these: if you are against both the AIPAC War and mass third-world immigration....if you despise both the Jerry Falwells [B]and [/B] the Sidney Blumenthals among us....if you feel that the commonwealth is imperilled by both runamuck media trash [B]and [/B] by Moral-Majority thought-policed media trash....if you believe in the value of both Church and State but violently resist being forced to choose one in order to declare war on the other.....
......[B]there's no place for you![/B] It's as if you don't exist. You will either be characterized by one side as belonging to the hated Other, or - more likely - you will be assiduously ignored by both sides; made a nonperson with nonbeliefs.....a statistical bubble in the Great Bathtub of Human Events. If by chance you are noticed and aren't immediately labelled as part of the Opposition, you will be laughed off by both sides as a Luddite trying to bring back leech-treatments and the square wheel. And the first step towards achieving this new Untouchable state is to identify yourself as white [I]sans [/I] flinching with conditioned shame [B]or[/B] rifling through Scripture to prove God likes white folks the best. To be a white man or woman who values white culture and civilization and views [I]its deliberate dismantling[/I] with terror and alarm, is to begin this wonderful process of Involuntary Invisibility.
The thing is that I think there are more - many more - of us than even realize it themselves. But their vanity (and fear of ostracism) pushed them to lean towards one side or the other, reluctantly accepting certain positions they don't themselves believe in as The Price of Still Being Able To Be Seen by the world around them. Because even though the drama of our age supercedes and in fact obliterates simplistic divisions of Right and Left, the decision has been made that only Right and Left will register on the spectrograph.
I began sinking into this pond of anomie while reading a series of James Wolcott blog entries - excerpts appearing below. Wolcott, a name-dropping, frappucino-sipping VANITY FAIR editor, is a kind of antidote to Mark Steyn and Jonah Goldberg in that he's a catty, funny writer who attacks neocons instead of the fashionable Left. There are few scribes out there who will savage the neos with as much lively bile as Wolcott, but - sigh - once off the topic, he's as depressingly in favor of mass immigration and gay marriage and burning all the churches so that the mosques and synagogues might thrive as any Modern White Educated Fool whose personal ten commandments begins with "There is no such thing as [I]race[/I]: it's all a construct invented by the White Man, who does exist, but shouldn't." [/COLOR] [QUOTE][B]Little Miss Sunshine [/B]
To keep the baseball analogies going a bit, Rich Lowry, editor of the National Review, reminds me of a centerfielder backpedaling for a ball destined to land way over his head. Or should I say "backpeddling"? Twas barely a few issues ago, and he was trumpeting loudly and unambiguously in a NR cover story on Iraq, "We're Winning." The situation migrated south since then, and today he has an article on NRO hedging, "It's Winnable." So we were were definitely winning in Iraq a couple months ago, and now it's still possible to pull out a win, and presumably a month or two from now it'll be "There's Still an Outside Shot at Winning," and a few months after that it'll be "How We Could Have Won If All of My Previous Articles Had Panned Out." I particularly enjoyed his opening to today's installment. "There is no doubt that the insurgency has increased its lethality in recent months, and that can’t be spun away. But neither is it cause for existential despair." You know, like they have in those smoky cafes where Chuck Hagel and William Lind stare into the soulless depths of their expresso. He also brought a thread of silver lining into the Corner with a post about the latest lousy Iraq poll numbers titled, I am not making this up, "PUBLIC OPINION ON IRAQ--COULD BE WORSE." If he keeps lowering the bar, he's going to become a limbo master. 06.28.05 [/QUOTE] [QUOTE][B]A-Roving We Will Go [/B]
Victor Davis Hanson, who's supposed to be one of the Mature Voices on NRO, has pulled a Karl Rove. As Karl Rove recently said--well, everyone knows what he oinked. Bush apologists at NRO are falling all over themselves to defend Bush's spongy gray matter, deploying every bit of sophistry they have at their greasy fingertips. Now I don't expect Rove to apologize for his slander, any more than I await an act of contrition from a sociopath. And I spy a similar beam of hope that Billmon does in his brilliant analysis of Rove's calculated affront. "...I actually think Rove's rant should be seen as a somewhat encouraging sign. Rove and his idiot chorus aren't roaring at the top of their lungs to try to drown out the liberals -- that would be absurd overkill, given how effectively the corporate media has ridiculed and/or demonized the likes of Howard Dean and Dick Durbin. No, Rove's hate rally is aimed squarely at suppressing the growing doubts of the great silent majority -- and even, to a certain extent, those of the conservative true believers, some of whom are showing ominous signs of war weariness..." "Things are even worse, in fact, than I had thought. In a previous post, I misreported the results of the latest Gallup Poll when I wrote that only 39% of those surveyed by Gallup had answered yes to the question: 'Do you think it was worth going to war in Iraq?' The question actually was much more straight forward (and forward looking): 'Do you favor or oppose the war in Iraq?' "In other words, nearly 60% of the American people are now willing to say, flat out, that they oppose the war in Iraq. That's a remarkable statement. I'm not sure 60% ever opposed the war in Vietnam. "So Rove is falling back on his classic strategy of rallying the base. What's more, he's mainlining it a much rawer and more savage version of the conservative message than the White House usually permits itself. While the customary surrogates -- Fox News, Rush, the blogger hyena pack -- have snarled and snapped, the results apparently have been found wanting. Now Bush's 'brain' is stepping into the ring himself. "But, like fellow psychopath Mike Tyson [Billmon says psychopath, I say sociopath: we're probably both right], Rove isn't just telegraphing his punches, he's also displaying the depths of his fear. The rhetorical ear chewing and head butting is a clear sign the champ doesn't have the juice any more, and knows it. Rove is trying to get by on sheer intimidation. He's pushing as many primordial conservative buttons as he can -- leaning on them, in fact -- in hopes he can once again make the dreaded liberals the story, not the march of folly currently sinking into the Iraqi quicksands." Rove will no problem rounding up a posse. They're already galloping ahead of him. Bill O'Reilly wants the hosts of Air America rounded up. Ann Coulter routinely conflates liberals and traitors. Etc. And today Victor Davis In Excelsis Deo Hanson contributes his own more tasteful flavor of McCarthyism. Ignoring the snickers of the peanut gallery, he argues that conservatives have a harder time waging war than do liberals, which will come as news to the moaning ghost of LBJ. Here is his reasoning: [I]"In a leisured and liberal society, it is very difficult in general for a conservative to wage war, because the natural suspicion arises — as a result of the conservative's tragic view of human nature and his belief in the occasional utility of force — that he enjoys the enterprise far more than a lip-biting progressive, who may in fact order more destruction."[/I] It's certainly news to me that the conservative George Dubya nurses a "tragic view of human nature," or even a mildly saturnine one. He is forever thumping on in public about how optimistic he is and in private giving the rhetorical buzzoff to what he calls "handwringers." Helen Thomas has hinted loudly that Bush is the one president in her long memory who wanted to go to war. Kicking off a war with a "Shock and Awe" extravanganza certainly does not suggest the sobriety and gravity Bush idolators such as Peggy Noonan attribute to him. Sobriety and gravity aren't conspicuous among his neoconservative Iagos either. The sort of libertarians and paleocons who publish at Lewrockwell.com and in the pages of The American Conservative may recoil from the glorification of the mystique of war but neocons revel in it, taking testosterone infusions from the powerful drumbeats to arms from Max Boot, Robert "Indian Fighter" Kaplan, and Hanson himself. Norman Mailer once quipped that Norman Podhoretz's idea of amour was wrapping his arms lovingly around a missile, and the ideological Sons of Norman are even more besotted with the West's destructive capability to wage democracy. What amazes me is that more Americans now blame Bush for provoking the war with Iraq than blame Saddam Hussein. That's not an argument I've heard anyone make on cable talk or on the op-ed pages. Somehow Americans drew that conclusion all on their own! The tide of popular opinion turning against the war is washing away walls we didn't even know were there. 06.24.05 [/QUOTE] [QUOTE][B]Kristol Ball [/B]
For a tuff-talkin' Texas, President Bush is awfully punctilious about reporters' trying to double-dip questions during press conferences. During the one wrapped up a bit earlier today, he took a sarcastic swipe at a foreign reporter for picking up the "American trick" of asking two questions when the quota is one per customer. He's a stickler about that. Before the war Bush didn't know the crucial dif between the Sunnis and the Shiites, according to a NY Times magazine piece (on the eve of invasion he had to have it explained to him by an Iraqi exile), but this sort of infraction he pounces on like John Simon affronted by a dangling modifier. The press con itself was mostly a familiar reiteration of his War on Terror halftime pep talk; more interesting was the byplay between Bill Kristol on Fox News and the shiny host, whose name escapes me but who seems to be competing with Fox's Shepard Smith to radiate avidity on camera--they're brotherly chipmunk anchorman holograms. What their chat boiled down to is that as a second-term president Bush doesn't have to heed the declining poll numbers over Iraq. He has the luxury of being unswayable. This was said by Kristol with the prissy superarrogance that we have come to expect from Beltway neocons, for whom no sacrifice is too great to make for the grand mission as long as some other chump is making it. Gazing into his Kristol ball, son of Irving said that Bush basically has a free hand for another year or so to defeat or at least subdue the insurgency, regardless of how much the press clamors and domestic support slides. This marks a tactical shift from the stay-the-coursers. Only a few weeks ago, White House flacks and their shoeshiners in the media were shrugging off the bad poll numbers with "Hey, polls go up and down." You know, sorta like the stock market. You just gotta ride out these bumps. But now that it's clear even to Bush fantasists that the polls numbers on Iraq aren't going up and down, they're only going in one direction, and picking up speed as they descend, they're saying that the opinion of the American people must be discounted for their own good. The will of the people must take second place to the wiser, stronger will of those in charge. The most ludicrous poll-dismissing ploy was attempted by David Brooks, who harkened back to George Washington at Valley Forge. It was not a parallel flattering to Bush. George Washington served with his troops at Valley Forge, endured what they endured. Bush froze on 9/11 and hasn't done a single thing since that would inconvenience him, his supporters, or his Republican donors. Historical parallels have lost their spine-stiffening efficacy. We're all Churchilled out, this isn't 1939 or 1865 or 1776, the disaster is unfolding here and now and in front of our eyes and if Republican conservates want to perservere despite eroding support then they should pull all those future lobbyists and leeches out of the Heritage Foundation dorm and march them over to a recruiting station, where they can learn how to shoot off something besides their Rush-quoting mouths. Here's what I'm wondering. Bush is making a major national address on Tuesday about Iraq. With each speech he masticated about Social Security "reform," approval for his non-existent program sagged. His sixty-day sales tour was a Willy Loman flop. Suppose he makes a rallying call on Tuesday and his poll numbers subsequently drop even more? I recall when LBJ would go before the nation with a televised address to shore up support on Vietnam, and it was too late, the nation had had enough. I'm not saying that will happen next week--Bush's speechwriter may whip enough enough eloquence for a temporary boost in the polls--but suppose it does? If Bush comes forward, and the American people recoil, I suspect a line of perspiration will begin to form even along Bill Kristol's thin upper lip. 06.24.05 [/QUOTE] [QUOTE][B]Super-Patriot Performs Premature Mass Burial [/B]
Now that things aren't going their way, conservatives, neocons, and fingers-of-fury bloggers are upping their blame game to organize a pogrom against liberals and other traitors within. The furor over Senator Dick Durbin's recent comments about Gitmo and torture really opened the cages and released the banshees. As David Neiwert wrote at Orcinus, "[C]onservatives are deliberately misrepresenting what Durbin said, and twisting his words into a campaign to paint liberals as treasonous vermin worthy of extermination." They have to redouble their apoplectic fits in order to preemptively blame Democrats and the media for the debacle in Iraq, which is losing more and more support among the American people. It is Vietnam Revisionism Redux, with America's withdrawal from Vietnam being attributed not to the American people having had enough but to the softening of the country's spine and moral fiber by Walter Cronkite and all those campus lefties who now form what Gerard van der Leun at American Digest considers a domestic Quisling class. "Your feelings about this war, unless you are very alert [like me], are in the main manipulated and determined by the tacit collusion of several generations of ex-Vietnam/Watergate media professionals and their professional children and grandchildren. These people, now institutionalized, form what is for all intents and purposes both a Fifth Column and, more importantly, a Fifth Estate -- an unelected and self-appointed shadow government that was not envisioned by the Founding Fathers, and hence is not provided for in their system of checks and balances." He should set his imagination on the window sill to cool, then close the window. No Fifth Column or Fifth Estate or Fifth Dimension would have cheered the invasion of Iraq as uncritically as the American press did, nor quiescently self-censored the graphic footage of American and Iraqi casualties in the years since. The Bush administration has been able to keep such a tight vise on coverage than even Senator Joe Biden, as he told Face the Nation today, is prevented from entering the military airbase at Dover (in his home state of Delaware!) to pay his respects to the flag-draped coffin of a slain soldier. In fact, the media has been playing catch-up to the public disillusionment with the war, just as it did with the public disgust over the Terri Schiavo travesty. Indeed, van der Leun doesn't let the American people off the hook. He blames them too. He more than blames them, he consigns them to the fate that befalls those who will not learn the lessons of history. They are going to have to pay the price of failing to learn from 9/11, and that price is another 9/11, and then maybe they'll learn, those still alive, that is. Hear him now and heed his stomach rumble from mighty Olympus: "Quite obviously and without a doubt," he writes with the pedantic certitude of the truly pompous, "it will take thousands of dead American civilians: men, women and this time our children too. They will die here on our soil because we did not have the will, the policies, and the guts to pursue this war as a war, using all the terrible power that we command. The dead will be your family and your friends and your neighbors. They will be the cost of the current administration's vapid policies coupled with the unremitting agenda of the Fifth Estate. "That is precisely what it will take. Not one body more. Not one body less. And although our enemy will be at fault, we will have nobody but our own weak and fat souls to blame." In the comments section, a poster notes a similar sentiment kited by the Mephistophelean (my characterization, not the poster's) Daniel Pipes, who used the phrase "education by murder" to describe this brutal awakening. For neocons, the learning curve is an arc of death. Now we know that the neocon Project for a New American Century said that a "catalyzing event--like a new Pearl Harbor" might be needed to unleash the forces of transformation envisioned by Perle and company, but 9/11 certainly fit the bill. Now we're being told that that wasn't enough, Americans are still too complacent on the couch, and that another 9/11 is needed to piggyback on the first 9/11 and then maybe we'll get serious about terror--"that nothing absent another significant attack on the homeland will wake us from our media induced stupor." Blogging from the front lines of Laguna Beach, California, van der Leun sounds awfully resigned and so-be-it in consigning imprecise thousands of his fellow countrymen to extinction--he could at least give us a round number of the death toll necessary for the national wakeup call instead of indulging in rhetorical hooga-booga like "Not one body more. Not one body less"--because he's frustrated that most Americans aren't as keen as he is to unleash "all the terrible power that we command." 06.19.05 [/QUOTE] [QUOTE]The Times of London reported that a number of neocons were appalled at Bush's declaration that "intelligent design" (i.e., creationism rebranded) be taught along evolution so that the future losers of tomorrow had a menu of theories to choose from before deciding which megamall church to join. Now whatever their moral depravity and colorful varieties of hubris, neocons do believe in science, because it only through science and reason that we as Americans can design bigger, more destructive weapons to make the world safer for all the companies on whose boards Richard Perle sits. One such sensible, rational warmonger is Charles Krauthammer, who apparently benefitted from not being homeschooled. "Charles Krauthammer, a neoconservative commentator, said the idea of teaching intelligent design — creationism’s 'modern step-child' — was 'insane.' “'To teach it as science is to encourage the supercilious caricature of America as a nation in the thrall of a religious authority,' he wrote. 'To impose it on the teaching of evolution is ridiculous.' "Krauthammer’s scathing article appeared in the current issue of Time magazine before Bush expressed his opinion." Now you would think, assuming you still can, that Bush's pronouncement would therefore discomfit Krauthammer. Disappoint him. After all, if you believe teaching "intelligent design" is idiotic, then having the Idiot in Chief endorse it would be your worst educational nightmare come true. “'It is very clear to me that he is sincere about this,' Krauthammer said [after Bush's statement]. 'He is not positioning.' "However, he added: 'If you look at this purely as a cynical political move, it will help in the heartlands and people of my ilk care a lot more about Iraq than about textbooks in Kansas.'” So first K praises Bush for the sincerity of his convictions--as if sincerity were the measure of anything. The Hale-Boppers who committed group suicide were sincere in their beliefs, but their beliefs were cuckoo. One of the conservative indictments of modern liberalism has been that wishy-washy libs are willing to tolerate and excuse all sorts of crackpot and heretical ideas as long as they're sincerely held, and now it's conservatives and neocons elevating Sincerity to the level of virtue. Because now they have their own flanks to protect. Then, Krauthammer turns around and goes Dick Morris on us, saying, in effect, that if Bush is being cynical, it's politically shrewd because it'll play well in Topeka. Sincere, insincere, makes no diff. As long as there's a political upside to extract. Which betrays Krauthammer's own cynical expedience. Look at how much snobbery is behind his remarks. Me and my ilk--i.e., the pundit class in DC--are too busy thinking about Iraq to bother with school textbooks, so what the hell let Bush throw them a bone to gnaw on in Kansas, it'll give The Faithful something to be excited about. Whether Bush is being sincerely ignorant or cynically opportunistic, makes no diff to Krauthammer, who thinks--as do so many of his elitist cronies--that there's a moat around them that'll keep the peasants from crashing their cocktail parties and badmitton tournaments.[/QUOTE][QUOTE][B]The Early Bird Gets to Squirm [/B]
Having a delicate constitution when it comes to twaddle, I avoid the early morning talkshows as much as poss to spare myself celebrity interviews and sob-sister stories unfurled between jolly weather reports and camera pans of grinning yokels outside holding up signs and waving at their idiot friends back home. Today I found myself staring at Diane Sawyer in all her buttercup glory making one of her caring-sharing faces with her head tipped to the side in a show of empathy. Having not watched her in years (having had my fill of her in primetime), I had forgotten what a gold-plated sellout she is. A true thoroughbred phony, descended from Mount Olympus to mop up the tears of mortals and heal our pain with her oozing compassion. When her voice adopts that tell-me-where-it-hurts tone, it's enough to curdle the very soul. This morning Sawyer was interviewing the mother of missing teen Natalee Holloway, last seen in Aruba on May 30th. Interviewing isn't the right word. The questions were more like opportunities for Sawyer to become the golden chalice into which the mother--Beth--poured her hopes and memories as Sawyer nodded with an understanding too deep for words, though she kept using them. I found the mother's mood of reverie rather odd given that she doesn't yet know the (possibly awful) fate of her daughter--she told a story about Natalee blond-highlighting her hair before leaving for Aruba that seemed too neatly cellophane-wrapped as a Personal Anecdote--but it isn't for me to calculate how fraught a parent should be under such circumstances. Perhaps what made the interchange so creepy was the intimate way the mother dropped Sawyer's first name into the conversation--"as you know, Diane," etc--that made it sound as if they were a couple of soulmates having an intimate chat rather than the mother of a missing daughter being interviewed by a supposedly professional journalist. The conversation seemed to take place in the strange cotton-candyland of American unreality where personal confession and media promotion come together for a good cry. At some point I switched over to MSNBC's Imus in the Morning where Tucker Carlson was being vilified as a "skeeter peter titty boy." That's more like it, I thought. 06.14.05 [/QUOTE]
I tried restricting myself to his better stuff to not depress myself, but - just so you know - he provides a ton of sentiments like these, as well:
[QUOTE]New Yorkers don't have the luxury of or inclination to demonize Arabs and Muslims and hat-tip Michelle Malkin or run sceered every time a couple of Them materialize in our visual field. Every time we step into a cab or enter a store, there's a good chance that the driver or manager may be Pakistani or Iranian or Iraqi or Palestinian and they don't represent the Other, they're fellow New Yorkers, we all have get on each nerves here as best we can, and if we wanted to hang around nothing but white people concerned about their car insurance and those noisy skateboarders who have no respect for private property we never would have moved here in the first place. [/QUOTE]
[QUOTE]It’s amusingly obvious why NRO has thrown its weight behind Cinderella Man. It's everything Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby quietly, subversively wasn't. Eastwood's allegorical chamber drama violated the pious strictures of family-value entertainment as chiseled on stone tablets and brought down from the mountain top by Michael Medved. The fighter’s family in MDB is a gimme-gimme pack of trailer-trash Snopeses; Braddock's family in Cinderella man is a warm, movable hearth. [Oh, if only our poor people today could be as Christian meek as those simple folk back in Ron Howard's imaginary Depression.] Million Dollar Baby enters a dark tunnel and travels the length of it to accept death as a personal choice and deliberate destination. For all its somber coloration, Cinderella Man is as life-affirming as a Frank Capra movie without all the corny humor of contrived eccentricity. Million Dollar Baby took a girl-power story and existentialized it. Cinderella Man enshrines masculinity in a humble wooden frame. "Cinderella Man is not really a movie about boxing, it's a movie about what it means to be a man. In the character of Jim Braddock, we can read what today's audiences are wistful for: a man who works hard to support his wife and kids, who teaches his kids to be honest, who communicates his delight in his wife with every glance." It isn't audiences that are wistful, but politically motivated critics who want to turn back the clock to that character-building time before the New Deal wove a safety net so that men didn't have to bash each other senseless to keep their families decently clothed and fed. [/QUOTE]
[COLOR=Indigo]You see? You can't f***ing win. Even when they single out, say, a Krauthammer for displaying Jewish pragmatism, the microchip implanted in them won't let them say so. When they screech at neocons as paper tuff-guys who run home to their gated suburban manors, safe from any blowback from their own policies, they fail to mention that driving home to Connecticut at the end of the day in order to limit your own exposure to 'diversity' to a sensible 8 or 9 hours a day is the same principle grafted onto domestic policy, rather than foreign. When they pride themselves for [I]not [/I] shitting themselves when encountering a Paki in a deli, it never dawns on them that they're simply indulging in an exclusionary white elitism: Wolcott didn't extend his analogy to [I]five loud blacks boarding his locked subway car at 1am[/I].
And note, please, the 'moved here in the first place': a potent reminder to all those struggling wannabe Times and Vanity Fair scribes of tomorrow (currently elbowing past Ray-Ray and Inez to get inside their overpriced rathole apartments and snort up a $20 bag of street cocaine and [I]make the diversity go away for awhile[/I]) to stay the course, demonize the 'normal' until 'normality' has no tangible meaning, lionize the black and brown and aggressively foreign, turn your nose up at religion and tradition and continuity of culture and [I]any [/I] but insulting references to whiteness, and you too may get the book deal, land on the A list, and drive home to Connecticut - the white suburb of the Virtuous - one fine day.[/COLOR]
2005-08-08 00:46 | User Profile
[QUOTE=il ragno][COLOR=Indigo]I guess the most depressing thing about Life In These United States These Days is that even the battles we think we're fighting are fixed. If you're furious at the no-neck GOP and their warmongering, you're labelled and shoved over onto the side that's pro-gay/abortion/multiculturalism. If you're agitated over 'diversity' and the moral and cultural relativity that empowers same, you're assumed to be a GOP/FoxNewsbot even though these folks are mass immigration's, and "diversity"'s, loudest cheerleaders.
The facts are these: if you are against both the AIPAC War and mass third-world immigration....if you despise both the Jerry Falwells [B]and [/B] the Sidney Blumenthals among us....if you feel that the commonwealth is imperilled by both runamuck media trash [B]and [/B] by Moral-Majority thought-policed media trash....if you believe in the value of both Church and State but violently resist being forced to choose one in order to declare war on the other.....
......[B]there's no place for you![/B][/COLOR][/QUOTE]
That's OD's purpose right there, IR. We're forging that path.
Think about it. Dr. Francis is no longer with us, but truth be told we're his ideological legacy. We're plowing the ground and planting the seeds that will grow into a fruitful harvest some day, though we may well not be here to see it.
Keep the faith, brother. Truth and righteousness will always prevail.
2005-08-08 02:45 | User Profile
Well, if you take a Speglerian view, we are at ca. 130 B.C. The old Republican virtues explemplified in the constitutional order of Consul and Senate should be giving way to widespread corruption. The Gracchi brothers are dead except for one who will live another 10 years and institute more social welfare legislation. The conservative backlash to this legislation in the (2015-2025) time frame will be savage, but far from restoring the Old Republic will usher in an era of Civil War mid-century with the populist democrats winning at first (to 2045), followed by a bloodthirsty elite aristocratic regime. Among the descendants of the losing liberal faction will be born, about 2035, the military leader who will reunite the liberal and conservative factions of the Republic in an Imperium, populist and multiethnic in fact, but conservative and patriotic in its institutional forms--a somewhat meaningless victory, however, as the old virtue and blood will have spent itself on the expansion project. In the two centuries following, the degree of corruption and debasement and raw military power that America or some other lucky country will wield over the world at that point will make today's American dominion look quaint. The really nasty bits (think Caligula or Domitian) will be about 170-230 years off.
An Old Republic in 130 B.C. would have to wait a long time for his descendants to be free Romans again.
2005-08-08 03:10 | User Profile
On a lighter note, if that is Gerard vander Leun of vander leun associates, the literary agents, their big hit (his wife's really) was "All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten". LOL you've picked the real heavyweight hitters there. Maybe there's hope after all.
2005-08-08 13:42 | User Profile
[QUOTE=il ragno] [COLOR=Indigo]And note, please, the 'moved here in the first place': a potent reminder to all those struggling wannabe Times and Vanity Fair scribes of tomorrow (currently elbowing past Ray-Ray and Inez to get inside their overpriced rathole apartments and snort up a $20 bag of street cocaine and [I]make the diversity go away for awhile[/I]) to stay the course, demonize the 'normal' until 'normality' has no tangible meaning, lionize the black and brown and aggressively foreign, turn your nose up at religion and tradition and continuity of culture and [I]any[/I] but insulting references to whiteness, and you too may get the book deal, land on the A list, and drive home to Connecticut - the white suburb of the Virtuous - one fine day.[/COLOR][/QUOTE]
Rootless Cosmopolitanism at its worst and well summed up IR.
2005-08-08 16:20 | User Profile
What's the problem with Falwell?
2005-08-09 03:40 | User Profile
[QUOTE=OPERA96]What's the problem with Falwell?[/QUOTE]Falwell is a disgusting Zionist pig and one of the key figures in the Christian Zionist lobby. As far as he's concerned, we all exist to serve the Jews.
2005-08-09 03:54 | User Profile
Angler,
And Falwell too!
2005-08-09 20:38 | User Profile
[QUOTE]An Old Republic in 130 B.C. would have to wait a long time for his descendants to be free Romans again. [/QUOTE] And he would still be waiting, were he still alive. There will never again be any Romans, free or otherwise, for the simple reason that they miscegenated themselves into oblivion many centuries ago. The parallel situation today is that the Americans, by which I mean "native stock" Americans, are now at the point where they have to pray that alien European stock, i.e., "Americans" not descended primarily of the British founders, will save their country for them in some glorious "White Nationalist" revolution. However, even if such an improbable revolution came about, it would be but a Pyrrhic victory, for the originating stock would soon come to be no more.
The USA, both the country as well as the nation that birthed and sustained it, are long dead. But as we say on the mean streets of New Spengler City, :dung: happens.
2005-08-13 02:32 | User Profile
[QUOTE=il ragno][QUOTE][/QUOTE] [color=#4b0082]The thing is that I think there are more - many more - of us than even realize it themselves. But their vanity (and fear of ostracism) pushed them to lean towards one side or the other, reluctantly accepting certain positions they don't themselves believe in as The Price of Still Being Able To Be Seen by the world around them. Because even though the drama of our age supercedes and in fact obliterates simplistic divisions of Right and Left, the decision has been made that only Right and Left will register on the spectrograph. [QUOTE][/QUOTE] [/color]
This is a brilliant post, il ragno. I agree with you that most people are accepting ideas and agendas that they don't necessarily agree with just to "fit in" and be heard. I've spoken to a few too many White housewives from Nebraska who defend Israel just because that is what "Team O'Reilly" says and if they want to remain a part of that "team" they've got to agree. Imagine the analogy of two bands with two new albums out. You hear one of the hit songs by the Democrats on the radio and you think, "Wow, I need that song." Now you hear one of the Republican songs on the radio, "Wow, I need that song too."
Okay, you go to the store and buy both the Democrat album and the Republican album. You take them home and ugh the majority of the songs from each band are just awful..the Democrat album only has 3 good songs on it, the Republican album has 4, so between 2 bands you've got 7 songs that you like out of 20?? What are you supposed to do? Join the Republican band's fan club? You only like 4 songs!!! Are you supposed to hang out with all of those people who love 8 songs or the whole album? NO THANKS...We need a 3rd band to choose from!!!!! :lol: