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Larry Grathwohl’s book about infiltrating the Weather Underground is now available on Amazon in Kindle format, and pre-orders for hard copies can be made at the book’s website.  The hard copies should be available for sale within the next few days.  Larry is touring Florida in May, then hopefully in Atlanta, and he is available for interviews.

We are especially interested in hearing from police officers who were attacked by the Weathermen during the Chicago Days of Rage or who were targeted by their fire bombings and other attacks on police.  These stories are being suppressed by the academic establishment and especially PBS, which is trying to make the Weathermen out to be self-sacrificing cultural heroes fighting only for “peace.”  We need to tell the truth about them, their ties to foreign terrorist groups, their violence, and their real plans to imprison and “re-educate” ordinary Americans using Maoist brainwashing they used on their own cult followers.  It is a disgrace that schoolchildren are being taught to look up to these murderous lunatics.

Here are links to some of my previous blogging on the Weather Underground, Susan Sarandon (who plays the Kathy Boudin figure — as heroine — in Robert Redford’s vile and dull paean to the Weathermen, The Company You Keep)  and other sickening cop-killing radicals:

(Weathermen) Marilyn Buck, Cop Killer: Five Less Than Six Degrees of Separation From Barack Obama 

(Sarandon) Aesthetic Tragedy, New York Times Style: Mime Panic Buttons Defunded in California

(Sarandon) Rwanda and Columbine: The Politics of Forced Reconciliation

(Sarandon) Tina Fey Defiles Memory of Murdered Actor and Mocks Male Victims of Child Molestation While Denouncing “Hate Speech”

(Sarandon) The “Benjy Brigade”, Part 1: Boston’s Finest Mount an Attack on an Elderly Victim of Rape

(Weathermen) Something Else Barack Obama and Bernadine Dohrn Share, Besides Secrets with Terrorist Bill Ayers . . .

. . . they find vicious murders of women pretty funny.

Bernadine Dohrn in December 1969, joking about the Manson family murder of Sharon Tate:

Dig it! First they killed those pigs and then they put a fork in pig Tate’s belly. Wild!  Offing those rich pigs with their own forks and knives, and then eating a meal in the same room, far out! The Weathermen dig Charles Manson!

Barack Obama in October 2012, joking about O.J. Simpson’s attempt to flee justice after murdering his wife Nicole:

“You didn’t know this, but for all you moms and kids out there, you should have confidence that finally somebody is cracking down on Big Bird,” Obama said, alluding to the famous O.J. Simpson chase scene. “Elmo has been seen in a white Suburban. He’s driving for the border.”

Sharon Tate’s blood on her living room wall

Nicole Simpson’s blood on her backyard walkway

Who jokes about things like this?

Sharon Tate was nearly nine months pregnant at the time she was killed.  She had been stripped and tortured before death, a rope strung around her neck and hung from a beam.  She begged the killers to temporarily spare her life, kidnap her, and let her deliver her baby before they killed her.  They laughed and killed her anyway.  She was buried with the body of her deceased son cradled in her arms.

After Tex Watson stabbed Tate to death, Susan Atkins stuck her finger in Tate’s wounds and wrote the word “pig” on a wall with her blood, an act that delighted Bernadine Dohrn when she heard about it.  Dohrn and other Weathermen adopted a four-fingered “fork” salute to signify the act of stabbing Tate in her pregnant stomach.

Still not funny: Dohrn, now a “Children’s Rights Law Professor,” smiling with her FBI Most Wanted poster

There are days when the weather seems to have blown a fuse, and everything’s skin temperature and slightly damp, and your mood mimics the atmosphere: malaise.

But then something shows up in the post to cheer you up.  I received a delightful piece of hate mail yesterday.  It’s nice to see people making an effort.

The letter is from “Steven,” who claims to be a professor of English and Media Studies but wishes to conceal his real identity.  This raises an obvious question: wouldn’t a professor of media studies know that his e-mail can be traced to the CUNY (CCNY) server from which he sent it?  I’m no Steve Jobs, but even I get that.

I actually sympathize with Steven’s technological pratfalls.  The internet remains mysterious to me, too.  It feels like a sentient yet alien creature living in my house, even inside of me.  We sometimes forget the uncanny nature of modern electronic communication.

Gregor Samsa, having a bad morning

One of the unpleasant uncannyness-es of the internet is its ability to blow past all the social barriers that once defended against unwanted intimacy.  The last thing we need today is more intimacy: we are already practically living in each other’s tonsils.  A dear friend of mine who went a little unhinged while writing her dissertation (an entirely ordinary thing, and she did it charmingly) took to calling language “a virus.”  For a long time, I politely nodded at this, while secretly wondering what the heck she was talking about.  But I think I finally get it.

I am a quotidian thinker: un-theoretical, literal, plodding, and slow — a soil person, not a fire or light person.  In my earth-clumped mind,  Language is a virus means that the antibiotics we currently have won’t work against it.  This is all the more reason to long for the days when one could live like the characters in I Know Where I’m Going!, a movie I recommend to “Steven” to cheer him up, because the very fact of my existence appears to have gotten him very, very, very down.

It’s a nice movie to watch when you are tired of words, because, throughout the entire film, the characters can hardly hear each other, for the wind is howling so loudly.

Among its many virtues, I Know Where I’m Going! introduces the uninitiated to the existence of the Corryvreckan Whirlpool.  Once you know that the Corryvreckan Whirlpool exists, the earth feels like a different place.  Here is some interesting trivia I did not know until I consulted Wikipedia.  If language is a virus, Wikipedia is the herpes of the internet.  But, a good herpes:

In mid-August 1947, the author George Orwell nearly drowned in the Corryvreckan whirlpool.  Seeking to focus his main energies on completing a novel destined to become the dystopian classic Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell had fled the distractions of London in April 1947 and taken up temporary residence on the isolated island of Jura in the Inner Hebrides.

On the return leg of an August boating daytrip to nearby Glengarrisdale, Orwell seems to have misread the local tide tables and steered into rough seas that drove his boat near to the whirlpool. When the boat’s small engine suddenly sheared off from its mounts and dropped into the sea, Orwell’s party resorted to oars and was saved from drowning only when the whirlpool began to recede and the group managed to paddle the distressed craft to a rocky outcrop about a mile distant from the Jura coastline. The boat capsized as the group tried to disembark, leaving Orwell, his two companions, and his three-year-old son stranded on the uninhabited outcrop with no supplies or means of escape. They were rescued only when passing lobstermen noticed a fire the party had lit in an effort to keep warm.Orwell completed a first draft of Nineteen Eighty-Four about three months after the Corryvreckan incident, with the final manuscript not finished until late 1948.

And here is an excellent story by Robert McCrumb that goes into more detail about Orwell’s encounter with the Corryvreckan Whirlpool.  Every detail of this event grows more interesting as you examine it: the great author misreads a text and nearly drowns for it; Homeric oars must be resorted to when the engine falls off.  Don’t you feel better about the world knowing that passing lobstermen are responsible for the existence of a great literary classic denouncing totalitarian intellectual oppression?  Lobstermen plucked Orwell from the sea!

Somewhere inside, a tremendous unifying metaphor lurks.

Anyway.  Onto Steven.  I think I finally understand why reading his letter made me think of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis.  It’s the tone.  One of the difficult things about reading Kafka is the unpleasantness of his main characters.  Even as you witness them suffering horribly, you find yourself inching to the door to escape their elemental whininess:

I’m wondering, Dr. Trent, whether this is blog is a template or if you penned the directions for comments: “Please be nice and tolerant, don’t offend. Thanks!”

I ask because the level of vitriol in your writing seriously undermines your arguments. The problem with allowing emotion, especially anger and contempt, to drive your arguments is that it conveys your fanaticism and leaves your readers convinced your mind was made up before you even began your research.

Now, I have to thank Steven for bringing this information to my attention.  I am obviously deeply opposed to niceness and tolerance, and I had no idea that my readers were being subjected to such a demand when they deigned to weigh in.  Yes, Steven, this blog is a template.  And I intend to obliterate those comment directives as soon as I figure out how to use the internet .

I also like the use of the word “vitriol” here, but I wonder if the sentence wouldn’t have been stronger if Steven had left off the word “seriously.”  Merely undermining my arguments seems work enough, and I don’t think there is such a thing as unserious undermining.

Or is there?

I do not, however, intend to abandon fanaticism, anger, or contempt.  I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with them.

Here, that strange and creepy thing about the internet rears its head: Steven assumes a troubling intimacy with me.  It would be easy just to make fun of his hapless efforts to sound rational and objective — allowing emotion, especially anger and contempt, to drive your arguments – but there is something darker underneath all the academic foppery.  There is an ugly need to control people, to get into their heads and classify thoughts as appropriate and inappropriate, politically correct and incorrect.  Orwell would have quite a bit to say about Steven, if he stooped to bother, but my immediate thought upon reading his letter is of the quotidian, earth-clot sort:

Do not date this man.  He is an asshole.

Or maybe he’s just a tenured professor of media studies.  Some jobs, my clever husband said to me, warp all but the strongest personalities.  Steven continues:            

It’s quite possible that your opinions about the people and events you discuss have serious validity, but the value I attach to your blog is not one you will likely appreciate: I’m going to use it to teach my college media and English students the perils of attacking your readers with furious opinions and political agendas while you call them “facts.” Over the years, I’ve learned how easily they see through hysteria and propaganda, so I expect they’ll have no trouble deconstructing and discrediting a significant portion of your postings.

Again: would anyone want to date this man?

I am worried about the literacy of university professors.  Steven says he teaches media studies and English.  I certainly wouldn’t sign my name to something this inflated and vapidly aggressive and sanctimonious; then again, I wouldn’t write it either.  But stepping back from — oh, content and intent — shouldn’t university professors be a bit better than this at expressing themselves?

In the third brief paragraph of a tiny letter, Steven commits the “serious” redundancy again.  Doubling a redundancy does not minimize it, for good diction does not operate like the Federal Reserve.  What is “serious validity”?  Something is valid, or it is not.  I should note here that the post Steven criticizes is about terrorist Judith Clark and her apologists at the New York Times.  In the imaginary universe of the Times, and apparently Steven’s CCNY classroom, murderers like Clark are actually love-muffins spreading sunshine from their prison cells because the people they killed were pigs who aren’t really human, just cops.

You have to trot a bit to keep up here.  Shedding your moral consistency helps.

the value I attach to your blog is not one you will likely appreciate

Oh no.

I’m going to use it to teach my college media and English students the perils of attacking your readers with furious opinions and political agendas while you call them “facts.”

Steven is going to teach his students about journalistic ethics by anonymously attacking a stranger with inappropriately personal comments.  Do you want to know more?  I know I do:

I’ll leave an additional observation here as well. How many times have you addressed poverty and molestation as a cause of crime? How many articles have you written on police deceit, abuse and corruption? How often have you criticized corrections policies designed to exact revenge and ignore abuse instead of combat recidivism? Until your perspectives prove a more balanced approach to these issues, I will assume you argue for a rigid and unforgiving and, incidentally, deeply anti-Christian approach to crime.

Apparently, I have not criticized policies the appropriate number of times, nor have I scribbled enough on deceit.  I have failed to balance my voice in ways that satisfy our Steven.  He will punish me for being rigid and awaits my rehabilitation.

Sounds like someone needs to spend a little less time pawing over Fifty Shades of Grey.

But, seriously.

It is sad to imagine anyone spending classroom time performing coarse and hysterical deconstructions of blog posts.  And I say that as the author of blogposts.  So, on the off chance that Professor Dunderpants’ students are reading this, let me offer a gentle suggestion: Your school is not giving you a quality education for the money.

If you want to get really depressed about how much money and time you are wasting, I suggest you read an actually unnerving (borderline uncanny) blog — The Last Psychiatrist, specifically his two-part posting, Hipsters on Food Stamps, ought to bring the sensation of malaise barreling down on even the cheeriest sort.

I realize that it’s getting late in the post, and I haven’t said anything yet directly in response to Steven’s criticisms of me.  In keeping with his tone, I suppose I could just argue that I’m being a very disobedient little girl today, but I’m going to offer a bit more.

It doesn’t seem as if Steven actually disagrees with the serious validity of the people and events I discuss.  What he seems to want to do is to ignore my arguments about people and events and deconstruct my writerly identity instead.  This is what far too many people in the academy do all day long.  Rather than teach their students valid things about people and events, all of which takes work, they engage in the masturbatory rituals of deconstruction, which — despite the magic vocabulary involved — generally boils down to one very simple chant:

I am better at social justice than you are.

This is all Steven was writing to me to say.  He felt entitled to say it anonymously because he was speaking for a mob.  I am better at social justice than you are is the only intellectual contribution some tenured faculty make throughout their entire careers these days.

Here’s something else Steven’s students should know: education should be about things that exist somewhere other than your phone, or your professor’s warped and outsized ego.

Beware the Corryvreckan Whirlpool.

1.  My favorite overseas editorialist is Kevin Myers of the Irish Times.  He has to be overseas — imagine if anyone wrote this in America:

THE quadrennial invitation from the US embassy arrived yesterday: it is for me to enjoy American ambassadorial hospitality while watching television coverage of the presidential election. . .

. . . virtually all the Irish guests will be supporting Barack Obama, because he’s a Democrat, which indeed he is, and also because he’s “black”, which he isn’t: though even if he were, to elect someone because of his race is as stupid as rejecting him on the same grounds. . .

Now, it goes without saying that all US presidential elections are contests between two certifiable lunatics, who freely want to embitter their declining years with the Middle East, and Afghanistan, and North Korea and that outdoor madhouse, the EU.

And of course, their running mates are two slightly lesser lunatics, though with this slightly sinister dimension to their ambitions: both probably — if only deep in their sub-conscious — dream of a certain Texas school book depository moment, followed by a dramatic swearing-in and a state funeral wherein their heroic, steely-eyed modesty is probably sufficient to win the next election. (Psychiatrist, anyone?)

However, we need such lunatics, just as we need other lunatics to push their wrists through u-bends in lavatories in late December, as we need other lunatics to clean outside windows 20 storeys up on windy midwinter days, and other lunatics to wander over minefields with metal detectors. And so on.

But that said, there’s something pretty disturbing about politicians’ desires to rule other people’s lives, with their apparent addiction to the degrading ignominies of the electoral process.

Which is why I’d vote for any politician that says he wants to do less for me, and meanwhile, he’ll be as invisible and as silent as possible: hence my instinctive support for Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.

I also like their honesty: they’re both openly religious men.

I’m not sure whose religion is more absurd, the one that believes that a lost tribe of Israel ended up in the US around 400 AD, and that the new Eden’s going to be in Missouri — sorry, chaps, I’ve been to Missouri, even Louth is more likely — or the one that maintains that the body and blood of Jesus are eaten every time one takes communion.

Yet funnily enough, liberal critics of Republicans’ religious beliefs never mention Mr Obama’s.

It’s not that media bias is debatable in the United States: it is so vast that one needs to be separated by an ocean to detect the edges.  You can read the rest here.  Myers hasn’t weighed in since the election.  But here is his ‘Equality’ is the Feminist Right to Whinge for while you’re waiting:

Why do so many women claim to seek what they do not really want, namely, equality? They don’t want the equality to become steeplejacks or coalminers or lumberjacks or deep-sea welders half a mile under a North Sea oil rig. They want equality in banking and in medicine, but only provided that they don’t have to keep anti-social hours . . .

Have you ever heard of anything being “offensive to men”? Of course not . . . is it actually possible to be a militant feminist and a caring nurse? . . .in universities, feminists have turned petulance into an academic discipline and sulking into scholarship. So the simple fact that women haven’t risen to the top of everything is not related to the lack of those hormones that make men into billionaire bankers, commandoes, racing-drivers, mountain-rescuers, lifeboat men, murderers, muggers, football mobs and rapists, but to that transparent but impenetrable silicate horizontality, the Glass Ceiling . . . [women] generally don’t do chess or portraiture, or higher maths or aligned parking or astronomy, and they invent almost nothing, even feminine-hygiene things. . . Ah, here come the sisters, with their gelding shears, and no, they didn’t even invent those either.

If we all talked this way, we’d probably get along better in the long run.  But to give an indication of where we’re heading instead, Myers recently found himself charged with “Breach of Principles” for another editorial he wrote:

Ombudsman John Horgan found the article was in breach of Principle 2 (Distinguishing Fact and Comment) and Principle 8 (Prejudice) of the Code of Practice for Newspapers and Magazines . . . The Ombudsman found the newspaper had failed to “distinguish adequately between fact and comment”, and the breaches were “capable of causing grave offence”.  A number of other complaints relating to truth and accuracy were not upheld.

~~~

2.  I keep waiting for American conservatives to adopt Peter Hitchens, as liberals did his brother.  He can be choleric and not always in an interesting way, but he understands American conservatism far better than many of its native spokespeople.  Immunity to political correctness seems to be thriving everywhere but here despite the lack, elsewhere, of the speech protections we enjoy.  Why is that?

Here is Hitchens on our election:

A Louse versus a Flea. Who really cares about the US Presidential Election?

You can decide which is which. It’s about the only thing in doubt.  My interest in US politics has been fading ever since I lived there, and saw it at first hand. But it sank to near-zero during the last Presidential election, when the Obama campaign became a showbusiness frenzy, devoid of reason and much more like the early, screaming years of the Beatles than like a bid for office. Yes, we can what, exactly?

I actually felt slightly sorry for Mr Obama. I had first heard of him during the previous election, in 2004, while on a visit to the pleasant town of Normal, Illinois. There was some talk, in the Illinois media, of him as a possible future star.

He had sounded modest and humorous, acknowledging that, in the age of Osama bin Laden, the name ‘Barack Obama’ might be a handicap. I thought of getting in touch with him, as one sometimes does, but put the idea to one side and never did anything about it. I doubt if anyone would have been much interested. . .

[J]ust over four years ago, I went to Chicago and, with some useful help from American-based colleagues, set out to find out a bit about Barack Obama. It wasn’t devastating. I failed to uncover the full truth about Obama’s pastor, Jeremiah Wright, being more interested in his apparent friendship with William Ayers, the former ‘Weatherman’ . I found that Obama was very much part of the unlovely Daly machine in Chicago, that his voting record in the Illinois State Senate was far from courageous, and basically that we wasn’t a very distinguished or experienced person.

It was pointless. The marketing men, and the machine men had got hold of him by then, offered him all the kingdoms of the world and swept him up into the world of bright TV lights where ( as so many otherwise unqualified people do) he glowed with a sort of electronic virtue. I think he is an intelligent person with some self-knowledge, and I do sometimes wonder if he ever regrets allowing himself to be turned into a brand and a star. But if so, it is too late. How can anyone, transformed in this way ever come back to the status of ordinary husband, father, colleague and friend? They go off as human beings to the nominating convention, or wherever the key moment is, and they never come back again.

But by then there was no audience for critical stuff. John McCain was obviously a loser, and himself not that attractive. I wouldn’t have minded if it had just been a rational decision to go for the younger, more modern guy. I wished that skin colour didn’t matter. But as the election approached I found I just didn’t care very much if he won or not. I just knew, when he did so, that his victory was a victory for multiculturalism and its allies, but so what? This only confirmed the direction the Republic had taken under Clinton, and which George W. Bush had done nothing to reverse, while he busied himself with idiotic foreign wars.

For a proper conservative, American national politics is a desert. You can choose between declared liberals and neo-conservatives who are liberal on all important issues. And that’s it. Or there’s dear old Ron Paul, who is another sort of liberal, really.  But he’s not important anyway. There’s nobody who is really socially conservative, above all nobody who will act (it’s decades too late anyway) to end the lax immigration politics which have revolutionised the country and will render it unrecognisable within 30 years. There’s nobody who will rescue the married family, or protect and recreate manufacturing industry so that ordinary people have proper honest work to do again, or reform the schools, or devise a foreign policy that actually makes the country safer.

What absolutely amazes me about this election is the way that leftish commentators try to build up Mitt Romney as some kind of conservative monster. If only he were. But his own record shows otherwise (and I might add, his running mate, whose name I can never remember, is a keen student of Miss Ayn Rand, another liberal) . . . the ‘Romney is a raging conservative’ claim must be an effort to make a dull contest between two mediocrities, for an over-rated office that isn’t really all that powerful,  appear more interesting than it is.

I shan’t be waiting up for the results. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

This appeared in the mail this morning:

Some thoughts on the election:

1. They totally stole the election. It doesn’t matter. Get over it.

There is a significant fraction of the liberal left that genuinely
believes everything they read in the Nation, even the articles the
people who write for the Nation don’t really believe. These people
will tell you there is no voter fraud in this country. They are, of
course, morons.

The movement people, when they are being honest (don’t expect to see
this on television), will tell you that voter fraud is a necessary
evil, because any serious effort to eradicate it would have the side
effect of depressing minority turnout and unfairly prejudice their
candidate. They also seriously think that laws against voting by
felons are racist and evil and thus worthy of civil disobedience.
These people created a regulatory system around elections (or lack
thereof) that may very well have won the election for Barack Obama.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It doesn’t matter. The economy is in shambles and Obama barely phoned
in a campaign without any real policy substance other than a vague
promise that we will continue to move “forward” towards a progressive
utopia. He should have lost big. See below.

2. Like it or not, there is now an Obama mandate.

You will see a lot of people talking about how this was a close
election. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that Obama got
re-elected with a left of center platform in terrible economic times,
with control of the Senate. One of two things will happen. Either the
economy will improve and he will get to pretend he did something other
than hand out a lot of candy while we waited out an awful business
cycle. Or the economy will get worse. But it is increasingly obvious
that even a continuing shambles in the economy will not help the
Republicans.

Romney would have done better in the elections if he had spent the
entire election cycle in a motel room smoking crack with Ukrainian
prostitutes. The Republicans will not learn the right lessons from
this, but they will inevitably respond to it. See below.

3. The Obama Mandate is to sacrifice our future on the altar of entitlements.

The worse things get, the better it will be for Democats. The
Republicans have been running for years on the notion that working
people have to protect their interests against a parasite class of
entitlement recipients. But this platform has always papered over the
fact that a huge proportion of entitlement recipients are retirees,
and as the bad times get worse it papers over how many of the ordinary
working majority, of every race, class and creed, are dependent on the
government.

Moreover, people increasingly realize a hard truth about
bureaucracies, which is that unserious attempts to “reform” them
usually end up hurting the class of law abiding and generally worthy
recipients without significantly reducing abuse.

The establishment take-away from this election will be that Romney
lost because he was too “extreme” about entitlement reform, so you
will in the future see Republican candidates proposing increasingly
minor “reforms” as a way of paying lip service to voters who care
about entitlements, without scaring the rest of the population. This
is a stupid strategy that everyone will see through and treat with the
contempt it deserves.

Entitlement reform has been an obvious necessity in this country for
decades. The old saying about socialism is that eventually you run out
of other people’s money. What they don’t talk about is how dire things
look when you do run out of money, and how long it can take. And this
electorate seems entirely content to play this out until the bitter,
bitter end.

4. Bill Ayers won this election.

After Obama and control of the Senate, the big winners in this
election were marijuana and gay marriage. The culture wars are over,
and conservatives decisively lost.

To the small extent that this election was not about Republicans
having a losing message on entitlements, it was about the fact that
Republicans aren’t and have never been cool. I’m not talking about
messaging any more, I’m stating a fact.

Being cool didn’t use to be a requirement for public office. But it is
now. A significant fraction of the American population would rather
die than be associated with anything they think of as being uncool.

I don’t by any means intend this as mere disparagement. Being cool is
about actual substantive positions in our society. It is cool, for
example, to have gay friends or even be gay and to have generally
positive feelings about gay sex.

And that’s cool with me. The problem is we’re talking about culture
here, and culture isn’t friendly to nuance. Culture is tribal. So if
you say, like the Republican party, “We love gay folks, but…” — you
lose. And the solution is to either keep losing or capitulate and
always be the party that used to be homophobic and probably secretly
still is.

You heard a lot of talk last night on Glenn Beck’s internet
“television station” about how we have to reform education because
this all happened in our schools. On the one hand, they are right.
Bill Ayers lost the revolution in the 70s and won it back school
district by school district in the 80s and 90s. On the other hand,
even if it were realistic to suppose that conservatives could possibly
do something to change the status quo in education in this country, it
still takes generations to make a difference that way. This may be the
only way forward, but it’s not going to win the White House in 2016.

And it still doesn’t address the part of this that is about the
entertainment industry.

5. This election was primarily about race but really had nothing to do                                                               with race.

I predict that in the next election the Republican candidates will be
Rubio and probably a Catholic white ethnic like Chris Christie (not
kidding here) against Hillary Clinton and some cool kid that no one
has ever heard of like, say, Huma Abedin. Clinton will win handily.

Talk about race in this country has become a shorthand that liberals
use to talk about entitlements (see above) and the culture wars (see
above). It has very little to do with actual racism, or any
definition of “racism” that is not simply premised around whether you
agree with the Democrats about entitlements and the culture wars. I
have known serious racists in my life. They look and behave nothing
like Mitt Romney. Most liberals actually understand this but pretend
not to understand it because they think it’s funny.

The Republicans are desperately upset about this dynamic, for two
reasons. The first is the fact that they are not, actually, racists.
The second is the realization that race is being used, unfairly, as a
way of constantly rubbing their nose in the fact that they have lost
the two key battles they somehow cannot admit to themselves they have
lost (again, entitlements and culture).

The obvious move is to try and find or manufacture as many hip, young,
minority candidates as possible. See, e.g., pretty much everyone on
Glenn Beck’s network except Glenn Beck. This is a distraction, in the
same way that trying to get younger people to vote Republican by
posting stuff on Twitter is a distraction. People don’t actually vote
based on bullshit and pandering. They vote for what they believe in,
and they don’t believe in what the Republicans are selling.

6. Libertarians are going to leave or take over the party.

Romney was, if we are being honest, a pretty lame candidate. I grew to
like the guy in the debates, but the truth is no one was especially
excited by him. Setting aside how he was portrayed by the left, people
on the right saw him as a bland, centrist candidate whose primary
audience was not plutocrats (those people voted overwhelmingly Obama)
but older, affluent and suburban — those people rightly perceived by
everyone as being on the losing end of current history even as they
are tirelessly propped up by the left as oppressors of the “99%”.

Again, not saying the winning strategy is to go out and find someone
cool. My point is, the fact that people turned out for Romney was a
combination of libertarian money, Tea Party anti-Obama sentiment
(which is in substantial part libertarian) and old people going to the
polls and pulling the lever for “R”. Look for the libertarian money to
either dry up or insist on a very different relationship with the
Party going forward.

The left would have you believe that the Tea Party is a bunch of bomb
throwing radicals who also happen to be boring suburban white folks.
Neither is true. The Tea Party is what’s left of the religious right
mixed up with genuine non-religious conservatives. And libertarians.

Libertarians are an interesting and rapidly growing segment of
society. They embrace socially “liberal” positions out of some
combination of an obscure desire to find a way to be right wing and
cool at the same time (see, e.g., Matt Kibbe’s desperate sideburns)
and genuine ideological commitment (see, e.g., David Koch’s support of
gay marriage). They have an essentially neoliberal economic philosophy
but little else that is recognizeably “conservative,” if that word
even has any meaning any more.

They are popular among the young folk and have more in common
philosophically with the significant libertarian fraction of Obama
voters than they do with the core of traditional Republican voters.
They may leave. If they stay, expect the Republican Party to be
increasingly unfriendly to conservatism as an increasingly empowered
libertarian movement within the Party attempts to save the brand from
the taint of association with stodgy old people who go to church and
don’t want their children to smoke pot.

7. Forward, into the past.

It never mattered much who ran on the Republican side. Both parties
are controlled by people who define themselves in terms of an
international elite culture that doesn’t care about this country
except in a fundamentally cynical way. Both parties depend for votes
on a population that increasingly depends on entitlements of various
types and is well aware that no meaningful alternative is being
presented to them. Both parties depend for votes overwhelmingly on
people who are not meaningfully interested in things like civic
virtue. This is what history teaches us happens to democracies. I
don’t have a policy prescription but I will say this one unfashionable
thing — don’t think the way out is through democracy any more.

Go read Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire. I’ll wait. Or I guess you could just re-watch Battlestar
Galactica.

All this has happened before, and all this will happen again.

Gene Genovese passed away today.  I was lucky to share a part of Gene’s last years with him and his wife, Elizabeth Fox Genovese, in their home.  I worked for Betsey until her brave death in 2007.  I therefore was witness to one of the great intellectual love stories of our age.

Betsey and Gene started out as prominent Marxist intellectuals and ended their journey as passionate spokespeople for the rebirth of Catholic conservatism.  A perfectly natural path.  Betsey, of course, was the one who led Gene back after “fifty years in the wilderness,” as he wrote in Miss Betsey, his memoir of their marriage.

At the end of that book, Gene wrote:

What everlasting life means I have no idea.  At the risk of contradicting these words, I pray that Betsey and I will be blended spiritually, much as our ashes will be blended in that urn.  We are told that in Heaven we shall see the face of God.  If allowed to enter Heaven, I shall see Him in her smile.

I’ll leave it to others to recount Gene and Betsey’s significance as intellectuals.  I got the delightful parts: watching Gene slip into expensive Italian leather loafers to somewhat uncomplainingly walk the inaccurately named Labradors, Patience and Prudence; watching the two of them spend the morning writing together, then share lunch of good wine, bread, cheese, and salami, then write some more . . . watching in bewilderment as two of the smartest people in the world mistakenly rooted for the wrong New York baseball team.

I also saw the extraordinary passion that carried the two of them through Betsey’s years of suffering at the end of her life.  Gene worried so much, and she worried about him worrying: it was an object lesson in endearment.  He brought the T.S. Eliot book Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats to read to her at the hospital: the smartest people in the world with the exception of their choice of baseball team found simple joy in cat cartoons after inspiring the intellectual exodus from Stalinism.

Gene and Betsey’s friends will remember evenings at Nino’s being regaled with Sinatra and martinis, pickled eggplant and stories of their first date.  Some of us will also remember lunches at Roxx Tavern, where the men out front marveled at Betsey’s persistence and the sight of two people so perfectly in love.

What Gene and Betsey taught me was that you can, you must, stop your life and take a different path once you realize you have been traveling the wrong one.  They were smart enough to be grateful.  We should all have such faith.

See Mary’s report at Accuracy in Media today:

Terrorist Professor Bill Ayers and Obama’s Federal School Curriculum

The New York Times has begun its serial misrepresentations of the protests aimed at the Republican National Convention in August.

“Tampa Restricts Protests” screams the Times headline.

Of course it does.

They’re reporting through their own freaky version of rose-colored glasses.  That changes the appearance of things.

Below the headline, Times reporter Colin Moynihan manages to troll through twenty paragraphs while only once briefly mentioning the violence and vandalism perpetrated by protesters in the past — and reasonably anticipated again this August.  In his telling, the protesters are innocent lambs being persecuted by society: society is the one throwing trash cans through the protesters’ windows.  The effect is weird.  He’s asking people to believe that the city of Tampa simply woke up one morning and decided to spend millions of dollars to randomly oppress people.  You know, non-Republican, protester people:

During the last three Republican national conventions, police officers have arrested hundreds of people as the gatherings have drawn thousands of protesters objecting to the party’s positions on a range of issues, from wars to the economy to the environment.

Police have arrested hundreds of people.  Why?  Because they objected to positions?  Is that really why they were arrested?

Even for the Times, this isn’t reporting.  It’s an infomercial for the protesters.

The infomercial continues:

[T]his time around, the protesters planning to gather in Tampa the last week in August hope their ranks will be swelled by the Occupy movement, whose members have said that they see the party’s expected nominee, Mitt Romney, as the embodiment of a financial system that favors the rich and corporations over ordinary citizens.

“The embodiment of a financial system that favors the rich and corporations over ordinary citizens.”  The protesters couldn’t have said it better themselves.  Oh, wait.

Tampa isn’t restricting the protesters: the city is bending over backwards and paying pirate’s ransom to Occupiers, “resistRNCers” and other assorted muggers in the impotent hope that, given enough candy, they won’t try to burn the city down.  It’s an unhealthy business, this shelling over of cash and prizes to people because they’re threatening you.

Tampa spent $57,000 to set up a special spot for protesters, along with scores of other expenditures that would be entirely unnecessary if the protesters really intended to obey laws — like the rest of us.  The federal government is spending $100 million of our tax dollars to ensure that violent thugs don’t disrupt peaceful, pre-election gatherings of Republicans and Democrats in Tampa and Charlotte.  So who’s really being “held hostage” and “silenced”?  It’s the public, forced to pick up the tab for all these planned temper tantrums.

Meanwhile, reporters keep mic-checking ornate fantasies about the protesters’ suppression of speech meme:

Protesters . . . said that officials may be using the specter of disorder to justify heavy-handed tactics. They added that over the last few years the authorities in cities where large protests took place have appeared to follow a script that includes pre-emptive detainment, indiscriminate mass arrests and infiltration of protest groups.

I’d like Mr. Moynihan to explain why none of these innocent and peaceful protesters would go on the record and let him use their names in normal quotes, instead of this weird, talk-through-the-reporter’s-hat ventriloquist act he’s performing.

The Occupy model of demanding special access to public property and special privileges — at the threat of destruction — should have schooled public officials to stop “negotiating” with them long ago.  It won’t work, either: after months of earnest and pricey negotiations, wasting our time and money, the protesters are merely changing their URLs and ramping up their threats.  But you won’t read any of that in the Times.  The newspaper sort-of quotes the non-named protesters claiming that they’re not going to commit acts of violence — oh no, not them:

The resistRNC Web site includes a “Notice to Law Enforcement Spying on Us,” which states that the group is not planning violent actions.

Well, if they and the Times say so, it must be true.  Except . . . this snippet doesn’t really capture resistRNC’s zeitgeist.  The resistRNC website actually states that the group, whoever they are, is committed to a “diversity” of tactics, a term which specifically references violent protest.  This silly double-talk signals that violence is expected and that these protesters have committed themselves to supporting violent actions by other protesters.  Here’s the part the Times didn’t quote:

1. Our solidarity will be based on respect for a political diversity within the struggle for social, economic and environmental justice. As individuals and groups, we may choose to engage in different tactics and plans of action but are committed to
   treating each other with respect.
2. We reject all attempts to create divisions among our movements. We agree to not publicly criticize other parts of our movement or cooperate with state or media efforts to portray good protester/bad protester.
3. The actions and tactics used will be organized to maintain appropriate separations of time and space between divergent tactics. We will commit to respecting each others organizing space and the tone and tactics they wish to utilize in that space.

The resistRNC website is directly promoting actions that do not respect the protest guidelines painstakingly negotiated by front-groups and their lawyers with the Tampa City Council.  That means the protesters are planning to break the law . . . unless there’s some third option I’m too semantically obtuse to grasp.  The resistRNC site is also intentionally provocative and threatening, listing hotels where conventioneers will be staying and plotting the sites on a map.  Why didn’t the Times mention that?

Here, not deflected through the Times’ magic optic, is the way the protesters describe themselves.  Sorry in advance for their potty mouth:

You are either for Justice, or you are in our way.  Our target is the power elite, who are fucking over every one of us, and its worse for the people of 3rd world countries as well as the environment.

We are not concerned with the police, who should be fighting for us, or the right, who should stand with us, unless you attack us.

We do not tolerate a threat to our protesters no matter where it comes from.  Self-defense is accepted under our banner of non-violence.

Well, that sounds friendly.  I can understand why reporter Colin Moynihan took them at their word.  Of course, he was also super-busy not finding things out about the one protester he quotes extensively, the Reverend Bruce Wright.  According to Moynihan, Wright is a peace and justice activist planning some event promoting the poor:

[T]he Rev. Bruce Wright, of the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign, said that he was arranging for an encampment called Romneyville to be set up on private property, where he said the city’s rules will not apply.  “We are looking at it as kind of a refuge,” Mr. Wright said of the camp, adding that on the first day of the convention it will be used as a staging ground for a march meant to highlight the problems of poverty, unemployment and homelessness.

Gosh, you’d have to spend thirty seconds or more googling Wright’s name to learn what locals down here already know about him.  You can read about him here and here and here.  But through the Times’ magic optic, he’s just the hero of Romneyville.

This is far from the first time the paper of record got snowed by some guy they didn’t vet first.

You’d think they’d learn to use that thing called the internet.

But sometimes I can understand not wanting to stare the truth straight in the eye.  You never know what you’re going to find there.  Again, language — and optic nerve — apologies in advance:

Join CODEPINK and V-Day to bring your vagina to the Republican National Convention in Tampa, FL August 27-30!  Together, we will bring our resilient, creative, powerful vaginas to Republican fundraisers and to the convention hall. We’ll also take part in the Coalition March on the RNC and other peace and justice actions. 

Sunday, August 26
1-8pm: CODEPINK Convergence and Activist Training Camp 
Location TBA

Monday, August 27

10am: Coalition March on the RNC

Permitted Rally and March

Perry Harvey Sr. Park, 1200 N. Orange Avenue

3-5:30pm: March for our Lives
Join the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign for a march to stop home foreclosures and the criminalization of the poor and homeless. 

11pm: Roving Radical Dance Party

Stay tuned for more events coming on August 28-30!

Last year, before the Occupy encampments fizzled, it was surely a comfort to parents of college-age “Occupy” protestors that police officers remained near the camps, where drug abuse and overdoses, violent fights, criminal acts of vandalism,and multiple sexual assaults were among the revolution’s few fruits.  Protestors churlishly claimed that police alone pose a threat in their utopian tent cities, but scenes of Occupiers smashing store windows or recoiling in shock as police processed yet another suicide at a Vermont camp told a different story:

Police comfort distraught Vermont Occupier after suicide at camp

When nirvana tips over into chaos, the adults must step in.

The police presence at the camps cannot have been similarly comforting for parents and spouses of police.  Their loved ones spent days and nights trying to keep order in volatile settings where hatred for police was openly celebrated, so openly that posters of cop-killers Mumia Abu Jamal and Lovelle Mixon were ominously affixed to tents.  Mixon, a convicted child rapist, gunned down four Oakland officers in 2009 as they sat eating breakfast; he is now an annointed hero of the Occupiers.

Atlanta Occupiers re-named their entire encampment after cop-killer Troy Davis, who shot a policeman in 1989 as the officer came to the aid of a homeless man Davis was pistol-whipping.  Impervious to irony, the Atlanta Occupiers thus re-christened a park where homeless people loiter after a man who bashed a homeless man, rather than naming it after the police officer who gave his life to try to save that homeless man from Davis’ violence.

The intensity of venom the Occupy protestors direct at street police, and not at the elected officials or even police chiefs, is part of an intentional strategy to incite and amplify confrontations with police and then scapegoat police for the ensuing incidents.  This is a well-worn activist strategy, one that relies on both a complacent media eager to report “clashes” between protestors and police, and on elected officials eager to curry favor curry with the activists and constituent groups that support them.

The strategy worked perfectly for Occupiers in Atlanta, New York City, Chicago, and Oakland, where Mayors Kasim “Not-What-I-Seem” Reed, Michael “Egg Cream” Bloomberg, Human Lizard Rahm Emanuel, and the buffoonish Jean Quan pandered to protestors one day, then demanded police action the next.  This was a low-stakes game for mayors but a high-stakes one for the street-beat cop who had to confront the protestors’ entrenched feelings of cop-loathing and entitlement.

While mayors and editorial boards postured, scolding the police one day and then wondering why they didn’t stop store-looting the next, the seasoned activists behind the visible Occupy encampments created no-go zones for the police on public property.  This disturbing development, like others, was accepted by authorities with barely a whimper, even when the result was serious crimes such as rapes.  Where were the feminist activists decrying Occupiers’ efforts to discourage rape victims — and witnesses — from cooperating to capture sex criminals?  Where were the allegedly pro-woman council members, and mayors?  The Occupiers’ strategy of creating ostentatious “safe zones” for women rather than using all their resources to unambiguously cooperate in capturing sex offenders placed them in the company of the disgraced football coaches of Penn State.

Quarantined tents for women to sleep in . . .

. . . while being watched over by designated monitors to prevent sexual assault in public parks: was this the utopia the Occupiers imagined?

Actually, it was.  A few raped women, and men, was apparently not a price too high to pay for striking another blow at law enforcement (in activist argot, the “fascist police state”).

Behind the visible faces of the Occupy movement — students worried about repaying their loans, aging peaceniks, and drug-addicted hangers-on — there was a wide range of professional activist organizations united in principle and practice.  The principle is dismantling capitalism, and the practice is delegitimizing capitalist institutions.  While the street protests have largely gone away, and it is not yet known if there will be disruptions at the Tampa Republican National Convention, these activists are doing precisely what they have always done: plotting the next surprise attack in their ongoing revolution against Western Civilization.

The professionals occupying the Occupy movement will continue to do so even as the movement itself disperses like a thousand cockroaches scattering before the arrival of the bug man.  Long before the first tent went up in Zuchotti Park, Angela Davis’ Critical Resistance “cop-watch” organization was teaching activists to writhe and scream for the cameras while being handcuffed, and the anarchist collective Ruckus Society was publishing how-to manuals with detailed instructions for invading buildings, disrupting mass transit and cargo movement, and maximizing chaos in the streets, while the Center for Constitutional Rights, the National Lawyer’s Guild, and the A.C.L.U. continued their tradition of defending such lawbreaking.

To wit, check out the poorly-named AdBusters, which is really one big advertisement advertising against advertisements by others . . . while its well-heeled editors direct the Occupt “revolutionaries” from very nice lofts elsewhere.  But they’re ironic, you see:

In its own sweet way, our movement is now moving beyond the Zuccotti model and developing a tactical imperative of its own: Small groups of fired up second generation occupiers acting independently, swiftly and tenaciously pulling off myriad visceral local actions, disrupting capitalist business-as-usual across the globe.

The next big bang to capture the world’s imagination could come not from a thousand encampments but from a hundred thousand ephemeral jams… a global cascade of flash encampments may well be what this hot Summer will look like.

Meanwhile, tents are up once again in Tahrir Square and youth from Quebec to Auckland toMoscow to Oakland are rising up against a future that does not compute.

Stay loose, play jazz, keep the faith … Capitalism is crashing and our movement has just begun.

for the wild,
Culture Jammers HQ

While the Tampa City Council pretends that they are negotiating with the ACLU to ensure orderly and “fair” protests at the upcoming Republican convention, Adbusters is busy recommending that these protesters join forces with the most violent and radical groups for the next phase of the revolution.  Conveniently, they publish their numbers, so the Tampa politicians don’t need to, like, Google them or anything:

Decide for yourself which groups you respect then call them for a chat or send them an email or a tweet. Ruckus Society is at 510-931-6339,ruckus@ruckus.org, @Ruckusociety; Rainforest Action Network at 415-398-4404,answers@ran.org, @RAN… Let’s nudge our friends back into the Occupy camp . . .

While it has become a cliche to say so, every one of these activist groups enjoys funding from George Soros, who not only provides millions to the legal organizations listed above but also donates hundreds of thousands of dollars to subsidize the Ruckus Society’s workshops teaching rope skills and building invasion techniques and the virulent anti-police rhetoric from Critical Resistance and the dozens of groups coordinated through the Center for Constitutional Rights’ Movement Support Coalition.

The police have always stood on the front lines against such groups, while the rest of us have the luxury of watching from a distance.  The Occupy protests are merely the latest battleground in an ongoing war on police.  What will happen in Tampa in August?  With the Mayor and members of the City Council playing patty-cake with the ACLU, rather than behaving like adults and representing the taxpayers who fund them, only two things are certain:

It’s going to be hot, and when the cops aren’t busy handing out water bottle to protesters, they’re going to be under attack by them.  What should the rest of us do?  Make sure the people we elected remember the difference between a cop handing a protester a water bottle and the protester throwing a bottle of something else back at the cop.  It’s simple, really, but somehow the politicians just don’t get it.