Today is Françoise Sagan Day at Never Yet Melted.

In the New Yorker recently, on the basis of no particular occasion, Rachel Cusk remembered Françoise Sagan, the French teenage gamin who produced a short novel that meteorically became an international best-seller in the late 1950s.

The obituaries that followed Françoise Sagan’s death, in 2004, were full of the sense of… failure. She had become, we were told, a tragic figure: destitute, isolated, tainted by scandal and alcoholism. She had, of course, produced many books, but none as successful and hence as troubling to history as her first, which was published when she was just nineteen. In that book, “Bonjour Tristesse,” she described the hedonism and amorality of youth, the hedonism and amorality of well-heeled French intellectuals, the hedonism and amorality of postwar Europe on the cusp of the sixties. Not surprisingly, it was the hedonism and amorality of her life that interested the obituary writers. For there it was, her fetter, her fate: from this slender, misunderstood novel, and from its young heroine, Cécile, Françoise Sagan never escaped. “Bonjour Tristesse” concludes with a fatal car accident, and three years after its publication Sagan, whose love of dangerous driving forms part of the legend of her life, sustained severe head injuries when her Aston Martin crashed at high speed. The disappointment among the obituary writers that the author did not submit then and there to her fictional destiny was palpable.

The hedonism and amorality of “Bonjour Tristesse” is of a most artistically proper kind. Morality, and its absence, is the novel’s defining theme: in this sense, Sagan is far more of a classicist than others of her existentialist brethren, such as Sartre and Camus. Certainly, she concerns herself with the twentieth-century problem of personal reality, of the self and its interaction with behavioral norms, but in “Bonjour Tristesse” those norms are as much psychic as they are societal. Cécile, a motherless seventeen-year-old whose permissive, feckless father has provided the only yardstick for her personal conduct, offers Sagan a particularly naked example of the human sensibility taking shape. Cécile’s encounters with questions of right and wrong, and with the way those questions cut across her physical and emotional desires, constitute an interrogation of morality that is difficult to credit as the work of an eighteen-year-old author. What is the moral sense? Where does it come from? Is it intrinsic? If not, does that discredit morality itself? These are the questions that lie at the heart of Sagan’s brief and disturbing novel.

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I read “Bonjour Tristesse” when I was young and remember it with affection for delivering a glimpse, startling and alarming to straight-laced, petite bourgeois, provincial Americans like myself, into a far more glamorous and sophisticated upper class French world of hyper-refined sensibilities and sin.

The New Yorker’s unexpected blast from the past brought back such memories that I had to blog it, and when I went looking for a suitable image, I found both a long article (in French) on Sagan’s passion for automotive speed and her delightfully colorful Telegraph obituary, both of which demanded quotation. So the irresistible Françoise Sagan is getting three blog postings, not one.

What can I say? She was indubitably the sort of girl that Conrad’s Marlow would describe as “one of us.”

Breitbart revealed a number of previous expressions of radical left-wing racial chauvinist, anti-White, Anti-American opinions by Jamie Riley, recently appointed (last February) Assistant Vice President and Dean of Students of the University of Alabama.

Alabama is a conservative state and, despite the fact that hiring people with these kinds of deranged, pathological opinions is practically de riguer for prestigious establishment institutions these days, the powers that be at University of Alabama hastily repented, and did their best to sweep the whole business under the rug. Score one for Breitbart!

Jackson Fuentes, press secretary for the UA Student Government Association, confirmed at 4:15 p.m. that Riley is no longer working at the University.

“For us right now, basically all I can tell you is that the University and Dr. Riley have mutually agreed to part ways,” Fuentes said. “So yeah, that’s true, and we do wish him the best.”

In an email at 5:03 p.m., assistant director of the Division of Strategic Communications Chris Bryant released an official statement on behalf of the University confirming Riley’s resignation.

“Dr. Jamie Riley has resigned his position at The University of Alabama by mutual agreement,” Bryant said in the email. “Neither party will have any further comments.”

Poor oppressed Jamie Riley will have to find a new job. Perhaps, he can help Ta-Nehisi Coates abuse America in the Atlantic, or join the editorial board of the New York Times. He’d be right at home in either one.

It should be obvious to any rational person that you do not put someone whose core philosophy is racially-based prejudice in a position of power over large numbers of people he hates. It should also go without saying that you don’t appoint a crackpot with a radical extremist paranoid view of History, who hates America, to a position in which he is supposed to be an example and a role model.

But, in a hilarious footnote to all of this, (T)Reason Magazine clocked in with a spectacular Liberaltarian editorial by Robby Soave lamenting the premature departure of the good Dr. Riley via Breitbart’s politically partisan agency as a regrettable instance of “Cancel Culture.”

(T)Reason and young Master Soave are obviously afflicted with a terminal case of theory-induced sanctimony. There is a Political and Culture War on. The Left is playing to win, and without regard to Marquess of Queensbury Rules. On the other hand, the Liberaltarian whatevers are playing to win virtue points in their own eyes and to strike poses of piety they can admire in the mirror.

In a state of affairs in which the Left gets to mau-mau out of Dodge anyone who crosses the PC line, but the Other Side defends the Rights of Speech and Opinion of the most rancid variety and encourages the retention of offices of trust and responsibility by avowed enemies of America and of the majority of Americans, the Left certainly gets to enjoy a tactical advantage, to say the least.

Warner Todd Huston:

My background check into Beto O’Rourke, who wants to “buy back” my guns, finds he makes violent threats on Twitter and has a history of drunk driving and hit and run. I don’t think Beto is legally qualified to buy a gun at this point. My guns have been safer and less violent OUT of Beto’s hands

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The Drawer Horror:

Some years ago I was visiting an old friend in Florida. This pal (A large man who is actually “a sensitive little forest flower.”) loves boats and boating and maintained two, count ‘em, two homes in Florida set up for boating.

The first home was his main base in Ft. Lauderdale. It was a three-bedroom two-bath operation with a swimming pool, an office, and a long boat dock where he kept “the big boat.”

The second home was a smaller house set up on stilts down in the depths of the Florida Keys twenty miles above Key West with two bedrooms, one bath, and a boat dock on a canal where he kept “the little boat.”

Since he used the Keys only now and then throughout the year he decided to rent it out. In time he rented the house for a year to a well-vetted dependable man with good references. When I visited him that lease was up and he and I went to the Keys house to check it out. A day or so before we arrived my pal had a house cleaner go in and change all the bedding and spiff up the rest of the house.

When we got there I went into the guest bedroom to unpack my things into the chest of drawers. As I opened the bottom drawer I found the renter or one of his guests had left some underwear and t-shirts in the bottom drawer. Under them, the same person has left behind a large, realistic, and battery-powered dildo in a plastic bag with some suspicious smears on the inside. Moving the switch around inside the bag without touching the dildo I determined that the batteries were, to say the least, fresh. Like Elvis’s King Creole that dildo was “jumpin’ like a catfish on a pole.”

Even though he is a manly man my pal is also a very sensitive little forest flower. The least hint of some sort of object that had spent party time somewhere inside a person’s body fills him with shivering, visceral loathing. My pal took one look at my “discovery” and walked shivering into the kitchen. He returned with his hands in rubber gloves holding a pair of kitchen tongs.

He gingerly picked up the bag containing the dildo with the tongs and then, holding it as far away from himself as possible, walked down the stairs to the carport and dropped the offensive package into the garbage can. He then dropped the tongs into the garbage can. He then removed his rubber gloves, dropped them in the can, and then – still shivering with loathing and muttering to himself — went back upstairs and took a long hot shower followed by an emergency cocktail. Like I said, “sensitive.”

Because I was an old friend who understood and deeply respected his “dildo issues,” I promptly snuck down to the garbage cans, retrieved the dildo in the bag, switched it to off, and hid it in my luggage. …

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The San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

When the liberal American establishment sets a new record in craziness, it’s usually in California.

SF Gate:

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed a resolution on Tuesday declaring that the National Rifle Association is a domestic terrorist organization. The officials also urged other cities, states and the federal government to follow suit.

District 2 Supervisor Catherine Stefani wrote the resolution and shared her thoughts on the NRA with KTVU. “The NRA has it coming to them,” she said. “And I will do everything I possibly can to call them out on what they are, which is a domestic terrorist organization.”

After citing some statistics about gun violence in the United States – like that there’s been more than one mass shooting per day in the country in 2019 – Stefani got local with how gun violence has impact the Bay Area.

She cited the shooting at the Gilroy Garlic Festival on July 28, referencing Stephen Romero, Keyla Salazar and Trevor Irby, who were killed by gunman Santino William Legan in what she called a “senseless act of gun violence that day.”

Later in the resolution, which the board passed unanimously, the NRA is blamed for causing gun violence. “The National Rifle Association musters its considerable wealth and organizational strength to promote gun ownership and incite gun owners to acts of violence,” the resolution reads.

The resolution also claims that the NRA “spreads propaganda,” “promotes extremist positions,” and has “through its advocacy has armed those individuals who would and have committed acts of terrorism.”

In addition to calling the NRA a domestic terrorist organization, the Board of Supervisors called on the city and county of San Francisco to “take every reasonable step to limit … entities who do business with the City and County of San Francisco from doing business” with the NRA.

How about that, boys and girls? We’ve got around five million (the NRA’s membership) terrorists at large in America these days. Me, I’m a Life Terrorist. And we can boast of nine US President terrorists: Ulysses Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Donald Trump.

Well, if the NRA was a real terrorist organization, we know that SF Board of Supervisors would be out there defending it and kissing its ass.

My father used to shake his head and say, when he read this kind of news of major left-wing lunacy emanating from the Left Coast: “The continent slants, and all the fruits and nuts roll out to California.”

Everyone but Keith!

Damon Linker notes glumly that the final end of Rock& Roll and the Baby Boom generation is not that far away.

Rock music isn’t dead, but it’s barely hanging on.

This is true in at least two senses.

Though popular music sales in general have plummeted since their peak around the turn of the millennium, certain genres continue to generate commercial excitement: pop, rap, hip-hop, country. But rock — amplified and often distorted electric guitars, bass, drums, melodic if frequently abrasive lead vocals, with songs usually penned exclusively by the members of the band — barely registers on the charts. There are still important rock musicians making music in a range of styles — Canada’s Big Wreck excels at sophisticated progressive hard rock, for example, while the more subdued American band Dawes artfully expands on the soulful songwriting that thrived in California during the 1970s. But these groups often toil in relative obscurity, selling a few thousand records at a time, performing to modest-sized crowds in clubs and theaters.
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But there’s another sense in which rock is very nearly dead: Just about every rock legend you can think of is going to die within the next decade or so.

Yes, we’ve lost some already. On top of the icons who died horribly young decades ago — Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Elvis Presley, John Lennon — there’s the litany of legends felled by illness, drugs, and just plain old age in more recent years: George Harrison, Ray Charles, Michael Jackson, Lou Reed, David Bowie, Glenn Frey, Prince, Leonard Cohen, Tom Petty.

Those losses have been painful. But it’s nothing compared with the tidal wave of obituaries to come. The grief and nostalgia will wash over us all. Yes, the Boomers left alive will take it hardest — these were their heroes and generational compatriots. But rock remained the biggest game in town through the 1990s, which implicates GenXers like myself, no less than plenty of millennials.

All of which means there’s going to be an awful lot of mourning going on.

Behold the killing fields that lie before us: Bob Dylan (78 years old); Paul McCartney (77); Paul Simon (77) and Art Garfunkel (77); Carole King (77); Brian Wilson (77); Mick Jagger (76) and Keith Richards (75); Joni Mitchell (75); Jimmy Page (75) and Robert Plant (71); Ray Davies (75); Roger Daltrey (75) and Pete Townshend (74); Roger Waters (75) and David Gilmour (73); Rod Stewart (74); Eric Clapton (74); Debbie Harry (74); Neil Young (73); Van Morrison (73); Bryan Ferry (73); Elton John (72); Don Henley (72); James Taylor (71); Jackson Browne (70); Billy Joel (70); and Bruce Springsteen (69, but turning 70 next month).

A few of these legends might manage to live into their 90s, despite all the … wear and tear to which they’ve subjected their bodies over the decades. But most of them will not.

This will force us not only to endure their passing, but to confront our own mortality as well.

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Alexander Fraser Tytler, Lord Woodhouselee (1747-1813).

Attributed to the above:

A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.

The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations from the beginning of history has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to complacency; From complacency to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage.

That clever old curmudgeon Victor Davis Hanson argues that colleges have been burying young people in student loan debt in return, too often, for worthless degrees in left-wing nonsense.

[T]he modern university has wrought has now outweighed its once positive role.

Let us count the ways higher education had done its part to nearly harm the United States. A new generation owes $1.5 trillion in student debt—a sum that an increasing majority of debtors either cannot pay back or simply will not.

One’s 20s are now redefined as the lost decade, as marriage, child-rearing, and home buying are put off, to the extent they still occur, into one’s 30s.

Bitterness abounds when graduates gradually learn that their liberal anti-capitalist professors and administrators were part of a profit-rigged system by which peasant students became financial cannon fodder. For all the hipster left-wing campus atmospherics, the university operated more or less as a Madoff/Ponzi scheme: for each new admitted class of students, the fed backed another round of usurious loans that could never be paid back by those of little means, and the university upped its prices.

The result was reduced teaching, a bonanza of release time, administrative bloat, Club Med dorms, gyms, and student unions, and epidemics of highly paid but non-teaching careerist advisors, and counselors.

The university was now in loco parentis, a sort of granny that babysat men and women of arrested development and encouraged the idea that they were helpless. The more students were considered “adults” in matters of loud and boisterous protests, obscene speech, binge drinking, common drug use, and hook-up sex, the more they wished to be treated as Victorian children. Suddenly kids were shocked that the inebriated acted dangerously and boorishly, upset that the targets of their attack did not like them, and furious that sexual congress without commitment and love was often manipulative and embedded within male callousness and deceit.

Adolescent-adults were oblivious to changing public attitudes that no longer put up with “college antics” but saw the university and its students and employees as pampered, hypocritical, intolerant, and often obnoxious. Shrill campus protests seemed like Antifa boot camps without the masks and clubs. …

Indebted students, many with largely worthless degrees, and few employment opportunities sufficient to repay their loans, have become a loyal progressive constituency. How odd that an entire generation, in psychologically and financially suspended animation, is seen as useful by the very politicos who created this labyrinth of exploitation in the first place.

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Ron Unz (2015):

[A]nother suspicion I’ve often had is that much of that massively-promoted total nonsense like transexualism and Gay Marriage is meant to flush out and expose potential troublemakers potentially lurking within ranks of the elite before they can rise high enough to become a serious problem. In support of this hypothesis, the leading purge victims are usually found within the fields of popular culture, entertainment, celebrity, and the media, which constitute a crucial chokepoint in controlling our society. It’s obviously much easier and safer to detect and purge a future Mel Gibson while he’s just a rising young actor than after he’s spent a dozen years as Hollywood’s #1 star.

Suppose that Kim III officially declares that the Moon is made of blue cheese. Who would question that? Dimwitted people would believe whatever they heard on TeeVee. Cowardly people would just keep quiet or mouth the propaganda. Dishonest, opportunistic people would shout the slogan and endlessly promote it. Those sorts aren’t much threat to the Regime.

On the other hand, a few people might raise questions about the dogma, revealing themselves to be exactly the sort of individuals who might eventually question other, far more serious matters. And purging them on the blue cheese nonsense tends to avoid bringing unwanted attention to those other issues. Furthermore, if some borderline people grit their teeth and publicly endorse the blue cheese question, their spirits may have been partially broken, making it less psychologically likely they’ll eventually rebel over other matters. Towards the end of the USSR almost nobody believed in the regime ideology, but most people still pretended they did.

I think Orwell made some of these points in 1984.

So the reason the King walks down the street naked in his imaginary suit is to draw out and catch those people unwilling to say they see what isn’t there.

In an actual historical example, the Emperor Caligula appointed his favorite horse to the highest official government position in the Roman State. How better to break the spirit of potentially disloyal Senators and military commanders, and determine which of them might have independent thoughts.

This sort of system tends to be metastable, holding together until sufficient pressure causes a crack to develop, at which point the entire edifice collapses, possibly in very messy ways. Eventually Caligula and almost all of his relatives were butchered in a revolt by the top imperial courtiers and the palace guard.

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Dalrymple, in 2005, similarly observed:

Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.

Leninists

Yesterday, I ran across a Dark Web blogger and contributor to Twitter who calls himself “Spandrell.”

He is, typically of Dark Web types, both clever and well read. He is, for instance, obviously naming himself after a character in Aldous Huxley’s 1928 novel Point Counter Point: “Maurice Spandrell, an intellectual without purpose or faith (based on Charles Baudelaire..). For years Spandrell has devoted himself to vice and deliberate wickedness.”

Spandrell is critical of the Hong Kong demonstrators, and claims the US is putting them up to it. His hostility to America and his obvious familiarity with Hong Kong suggest that he is a Brit and what the British refer to as “Filth”: “Failed in London, Try Hong Kong.” He boasts of being the inventor of the concepts of “IQ Shredders” and “Bioleninism.”

The latter is described here:

[Y]ou can’t run a tight, cohesive ruling class with white men. They don’t need to be loyal. They’ll do ok anyway. A much easier way to run an obedient, loyal party is to recruit everyone else. Women. Blacks. Gays. Muslims. Transexuals. Pedophiles. Those people may be very high performers individually, but in a natural society ruled by its core of high performers, i.e. a white patriarchy, they wouldn’t have very high status. So if you promise them high status for being loyal to you; you bet they’re gonna join your team. They have much to gain, little to lose. The Coalition of the Fringes, Sailer calls it. It’s worse than that really. It’s the coalition of everyone who would lose status the better society were run. It’s the coalition of the bad. Literal Kakistocracy.

There’s a reason why there’s so many evil fat women in government. Where else would they be if government didn’t want them? They have nothing going on for them, except their membership in the Democratic party machine. The party gives them all they have, the same way the Communist party had given everything to that average peasant kid who became a middling bureaucrat in Moscow. And don’t even get me started with hostile Muslims or Transexuals. Those people used to be expelled or taken into asylums, pre-1960. Which is why American Progressivism likes them so much. The little these people have depends completely on the Left’s patronage. There’s a devil’s bargain there: the more naturally repulsive someone else, the more valuable it is as a party member, as its loyalty will be all the stronger. This is of course what’s behind Larry Auster’s First Law of minority relations: the worse a group behaves, the more the Left likes it.

This is also why the Left today is the same Left that was into Soviet Communism back in the day. What they approve of today would scandalize any 1920s Leftist. Even 1950s Leftist. But it’s all the same thing, following the same incentives: how to build a cohesive ruling class to monopolize state power. It used to be class struggle. Now it’s gender-struggle and ethnic struggle. Ethnic struggle works in America because immigrants have no territorial power base, unlike in Russia or China. So the old game of giving status to low-status minorities works better than ever. It works even better, unlike Lenin’s Russia, America has now access to every single minority on earth. Which is why the American left is busy importing as many Somalis as they can. The lowest performing minority on earth. Just perfect.

If you think it can’t get worse than transexuals or pedophiles, you’re really not understanding how this works. Look at this NYT article: a black woman, ex-con, convicted of murdering her own 4 year old son. She served 20 years in prison, which she spent studying sociology or something. After leaving prison, she applied to study a PhD at Harvard, which rejected her. Progressives were up in arms. How could you!

Go to the link, and look at that woman. Look at that face. She never expressed any remorse over killing her children. She lied about it in the PhD application. She disposed of the body and never told the cops where her son’s corpse is! This is utter and complete psycho. Nobody in their right mind would want anything to do with this woman. But that’s precisely the point. In most human societies before 1900 she would have been killed, legally or extralegally. But precisely this kind of person, someone who should in all justice be the lowest status person on earth; that’s exactly the people that the Left wants on its team. You can count on her extreme loyalty to any progressive idea that the party transmits to her. And so, yes, of course, she finally got her PhD, at New York University. And unlike 97% of PhD students out there, you can bet on her getting a full tenured professorship very soon.

Yes, it’s all madness, but it works. It really works like a charm. The richest parts of America, California and New York, are now a one-party state. America has legislation which forces every private enterprise of size to have a proportion of women, of black people and sexual deviants; who of course know they don’t belong there, and thus are extremely faithful political commissars. More faithful than the actual official political commissars that Communist China has also in their private companies.

And Biological Leninism is extremely powerful overseas too. The same way that Soviet Communism all had natural fifth-columns across the world, with industrial workers forming parties and all doing Moscow’s bidding across the West; American Biological Leninism is also an extremely strong means of agitation all over the world.

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From midget faded rattlesnake, at Ricochet:

In English, we say, “It’s raining cats and dogs.” Explanations for why we say this are numerous, and all fairly dubious. In other lands, other stuff falls from the sky during heavy storms. In Croatia, axes; in Bosnia, crowbars (I’m sensing a pattern here); in France and Sweden, nails. In several countries, heavy rain falls like pestle onto mortar. In English, it may also rain like pitchforks or darning needles. While idioms describing heavy rain as the piss from some great creature (a cow or a god) may not be surprising, a few idioms kick it up a notch (so to speak), describing the rain as falling dung.

And then there are the old ladies falling out of skies. Sometimes with sticks, sometimes without. Sometimes old ladies beaten with ugly sticks. The Flemish say, het regent oude wijven — it’s raining old women. The Afrikaners, more savagely, arm the old women with clubs: ou vrouens met knopkieries reën. Yes, good ol’ knobkerries — ugly sticks, indeed! Afrikaners and the Flemish speak variants of Dutch, so it’s not surprising they share cataracts of crones, armed or not. Why the Welsh also share them is more of a mystery, but yn’ Gymraeg, again we find old ladies raining with sticks: mae hi’n bwrw hen wragedd a ffyn. Traveling to Norway, we find the outpouring of old ladies beaten with the ugly sticks: det regner trollkjerringer — it’s raining she-trolls.

I think the above illustration would have been better with literal female trolls.