Production of the Chevrolet Impala will cease Thursday after six decades, making the Impala yet another Detroit sedan to be laid to rest as buyers switch to crossovers, SUVs and pickups.
Introduced in 1958 and produced continuously except for gaps in the 1980s and 1990s, the final Impala will roll down the line at Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly. Seen by many as emblematic of the all-American car, more than 16.8 million have been sold globally (not including the 1994-96 Impala SS, which was counted as a Chevy Caprice).
Impala enthusiasts around the country are sad to see the nameplate hit its expiration date and cherish even more the Impalas they have found and made their own.
Typical Americans of my generation grew up riding in our father’s full-sized American sedans, of which the Chevrolet was the paradigm example. My father proudly came home in 1960 with a new Chevrolet Bel-Air. The Impala was a slightly higher-priced, gussied-up version of the same car, and my father was decidedly resistant to opportunities to spend more money unnecessarily for image and prestige.
Europeans drove smaller, often sportier and more sophisticated automobiles. But, back then, we Americans reveled in our roomier cars fitted with bench seats and bigger engines. We had yet to learn anything about cornering and handling. And the notion that importation from the European Old World should be looked upon as evidence of superior styling and sophistication was, back then, confined to the extreme top-end American haute bourgeoisie. Most Americans considered American-made to be the best in the world and sneered at European cars as foreign junk.
How our perspectives would change after a decade or so!
Joel Kotkin, as usual, is explaining that the real constituency of Progressive Statism is the new clerisy whose class interest is intimately connected to the growth in power and reach of the Administrative State.
The term clerisy was coined by Samuel Coleridge in the 1830s to define a class of people whose job it was to instruct and direct the masses. Traditional clerics remained part of this class, but they were joined by others—university professors, scientists, public intellectuals, and the heads of charitable foundations. Since the industrial revolution, the clerisy has expanded and become ever-more secular, essentially replacing the religious clergy as what the great German sociologist Max Weber called society’s “new legitimizers.â€
Although certainly not unanimous in their views, the clerisy generally favors ever-increasing central control and regulation. French economist Thomas Piketty calls them “the Brahmin Left,†pointing out that their goal is not necessarily growth, nor greater affluence for hoi polloi, but a society shaped by their own progressive beliefs. In this respect, they are, despite a generally secular ideology, reprising the role played in feudal society by the Catholic Church, or what the French referred to as the First Estate.
Today’s clerisy are concentrated in professions whose numbers have grown in recent decades, including teaching, consulting, law, the medical field, and the civil service. In contrast, the size of the traditional middle class—small business owners, workers in basic industries, and construction—have seen their share of the job market decline and shrink.2 Some professions that were once more closely tied to the private economy, such as doctors, have become subsumed by bureaucratic structures and—in the United States, at least—shifted from a dependable conservative lobby to an increasingly progressive one.
These shifts are, if anything, more pronounced in Europe. In France, over 1.4 million lower skilled jobs have disappeared in the past quarter-century while technical jobs, often in the public sector, have sharply increased. Those working for state industries, universities, and in other clerisy-oriented positions, enjoy far better benefits, notably pensions, than those working in the purely private sector. To be sure, members of the clerisy have to suffer Europe’s high taxes on the middle class, but they also benefit far more than others from the state’s largesse.
At its apex, the clerisy today is made up largely of the well-educated offspring of the affluent. This class has become increasingly hereditary, in part due to the phenomena of well-educated people marrying each other—between 1960 and 2005, the share of men with university degrees who married women with university degrees nearly doubled, from 25 – 48 percent. “After one generation,†the American sociologist Daniel Bell predicted nearly half a century ago, “a meritocracy simply becomes an enclaved class.
All this is why so many of our Ivy League classmates and assimilated college-educated friends have become the enemies of Freedom and the political adversaries of ordinary Americans.
Glancing through the morning’s potential blog fodder, I found a Spectator piece on The Evolution of Vermont. The hijacking of that once-paradigmatic flinty conservative, rock-ribbed Republican state by goat-milking hippies and trust-fund bolsheviks is, to my mind, one of the true tragedies of our time. Seeing Ethan Allen and Calvin Coolidge replaced today by a crazy ranting Communist makes my blood boil.
The Spectator piece turned out to be a tongue-in-cheek philosophical reflection on the same theme by an imaginary old school WASP commentator from the Yale Class of ’89 named “Digby Dent.”
“Digby Dent” is the pseudonymous author of a more-or-less-monthly Wasp Life column, whose nom-de-plume is borrowed from the membership of a dynasty of two British admirals of the 18th Century. The current, quite talented Digby Dent turns out to be one Marlo Safi, a conservative Eastern-rite Catholic writer of Syrian extraction and graduate of the University of Pittsburgh.
The Digby Dent series links at the Spectator include only four columns going back to last November, but I found them all worth a read.
I’ve wintered here all my life and during that time Vermont has, like old Digby’s marital status, seen three permutations. In my boyhood, it was a poor but charming backwater, chockablock with flinty, taciturn Yankees. By bright college years, hippies were making goat-milk ice cream and the cities were run by sex maniacs and communists. Now, Vermont’s resorts are as gauche as Saddam’s bathrooms, half the tourists don’t ski and one of the sex-maniac communists aspires to lead the free world.
The permanent things endure, of course. The Green Mountains are still beautiful and I’m told they still work them like dogs at the Putney School. Still, I have my doubts. Vermont has never been much for schools and still isn’t; consistency, I suppose. But you can’t have a student kicked by a mule in the Y of Our L 2020. The damn lawyers won’t have it.
Even the skiing has changed. Last year we got the best snow in ages, but the season is indisputably shrinking. Whatever the causes, and I won’t pretend to know a damned thing about them, the climate is changing. As a devoted conservationist, I’ve done my part. The four-door I keep at my summer cottage carries a ‘Preserve the Sound’ plate. …
When I strode through Phelps Gate and onto the Street in ’89, I was full of vim and vigor, with big, bold plans to bend the world of junk bonds to my will. Those went the way of my waistline and slackened over time. That’s why God invented pleated pants.
As the gal pal clears away lunch and I watch the sun set over the woods, I think about … about my marriages, my career and all the vaporous dreams of youth, these last evanescent as a retreating shoreline. The world will be fine long after we’re gone.
Imagine there’s no bread
It’s easy if you try
No tacos or hot sauce,
Nothing cold or fried,
Imagine all the people living in the gulags
Imagine there’s no money
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to eat or drink
And no bacon too
Imagine all the people living short life spans ooooh
You may say I’m a commie
But I’m not the only one
And someday you will join us
Or we’ll shoot you in the face
Imagine no possessions
Because all your stuff was redistributed
Lots of greed and hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people sharing all your stuff, yeah
You may say I’m a commie
But I’m not the only one
Did you say you don’t like that?
Then it’s the gulag for you, son
SIG makes more than one model chambered in .45 ACP, but Lance is probably referring to the SIG 220.
Spectator jounalist Kapil Komireddi looked for advice on choosing a self-defense firearm. A retired FBI agent sent him to the horse’s mouth for the answer.
I consulted with a friend, a retired FBI special agent who teaches firearm safety. ‘What will you be using the gun for?’ he asked. ‘Self-defense,’ I replied. ‘Then the .45 Sig Sauer is the best,’ he advised. ‘But the problem with that gun is confidence. People are intimidated by its recoil, muzzle flash and noise. Shooting it often becomes spray and pray.’ He suggested I go meet a man called Lance Thomas for insight.
‘The .45 Sig Sauer is the best gun to have in a gunfight,’ Thomas concurred. I believed him. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, he faced off against 11 armed gunmen in four separate gunfights. Thomas shot six of them and killed five. He became known as ‘the urban gunfighter’ and appears in Paul Kirchner’s 2001 book The Deadliest Men: The World’s Deadliest Combatants Throughout the Ages, alongside Geronimo, Andrew Jackson and Wild Bill Hickok.
Thomas owned a watch store and back then jewelers in LA were plagued with armed robbery. ‘It was not if, but when, I was going to get robbed,’ he recalled. He arranged an assortment of pistols under the counter for the fateful day. He’d never been to a shooting range or fired any of them. Nor did he know if they would actually fire.
In the first attack, a gunman aimed at Thomas’s face. He responded as planned, pulling a gun from under the counter and shooting his attacker, who survived and went to prison. Later, two brothers came into his shop and threatened him at gunpoint. Thomas shot them both. My FBI friend visited him after those incidents and suggested Thomas get rid of most of his guns, adopt the .45 and practice using it. ‘You want a weapon that will absolutely incapacitate the person you’re defending yourself against,’ he advised.
I was surprised to find a kinship in Lance Thomas. But, like me, he wasn’t comfortable with guns. He wasn’t a hunter. In fact, he recalled his one experience shooting a bird with remorse. And he would much prefer to go after poachers than big game.
‘My self-defense started when I was alone and had a gun pointed at me,’ Thomas said. ‘It wasn’t an issue of robbing me or the watches. Those robbers were seeking to negotiate my life. My life is not negotiable.’
He told me I should have a gun I’m comfortable with and learn how to operate it. ‘Any man with any strength should go to a .45,’ he said — it has a large capacity, excellent sight radius, exceptional accuracy and reliability, and a high incapacitation factor.
I decided then and there that my favorite gun is the gun that will save my life.
The democrat nomination this year may go to the most radical candidate in US History with the inevitable consequence of Donald Trump winning by a landslide. Dominic Green contends that if that happens, it will be the leadership of the democrat party’s own fault.
The Democrats are now being unraveled by what Sanders might call the ‘contradictions of capitalism’. While the Democratic leadership was soaking Wall Street and Silicon Valley and pandering to the public sector unions, it outsourced the maintenance of its coalition to the radicals, and indulged them as they built their Potemkin villages of intersectionality. Now, as the party structure hollows out and the party leadership fails convincingly to answer Donald Trump, the radicals have the ground game and the ideology to remake the party from the bottom up. The result is a radically depraved version of the rainbow coalition, with Sanders as its Corbyn-style ‘Magic Grandpa’, a deceptively cuddly fellow traveler determined to ride their youthful exuberance into office.
When Magic Grandpa shakes the money tree, it’s not just that other people’s money falls out. A tangle of poisonous roots is also exposed. A coalition of coalitions has mobilized for Sanders: acrimonious acronyms like the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) and CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations), Jew-baiting proxies like Ilhan Omar and Linda Sarsour, woke warriors like IfNotNow and the Justice Dems, and bongwater conspiracists like the Chapo Trap House chaps and the campus wing of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
