Daniel Lee finds in the memory of the historic Dixie Highway a reminder of the old America, the optimistic, enterprizing, Get-Things-Done America, that was so different than today’s endlessly complaining, obstructionist, afraid-of-everything America.
Martinsville, Ind. — Just visible through the trees off Indiana State Road 37, south of Indianapolis, there was for many years a derelict iron bridge carrying a fragment of an older incarnation of the highway.
You wouldn’t have known to look at it, but that old pony-truss bridge was an indirect ancestor not only of State Road 37, presently being converted to the southern-Indiana leg of Interstate 69, but of the whole American interstate system.
The conversion of Indiana 37 is the latest step in a controversial project that began near Evansville in 2008 and has been marching up the 142 miles between southwest Indiana and Indianapolis ever since. Presently there are about 30 miles to go.
Waiting in my car amid the dust and roar of earth movers recently, I noticed that the old iron bridge was gone, finally giving way to time and progress, cleared to make room for a county road exit ramp.
It’s too bad. The bridge was one of the last remnants of the old, winding two-lane State Road 37 that was replaced in 1976 by the four-lane on which I’m stopped in construction traffic. Old roads don’t just magically vanish when bypassed. Through the years they tend to fade slowly away, a bit like Cheshire cats, leaving traces of themselves behind. The bridge was one of those traces.
Old 37 today is just a lane here, a weed-covered track there; in places a longish driveway. A piece of it winds for a lovely ten miles or so through the Hoosier National Forest above Bloomington, along wooded ridgetops and past old rural settlements like Hindustan and Dolan, now just loose scatterings of well-lived-in roadside homes.
Some places it’s plainly marked as Old 37. Other pieces bear different names: New Harmony Road, Liberty Church Road, Hacker Creek Road. The practiced eye can spot these ghosts of the old highway by their character of meandering Indian trail (which they quite likely grew from) compared to the squared-off grid of county-road systems.
There are people who make a hobby of finding and tracing these old tracks — the forgotten slivers of crumbling cement, asphalt, and sometimes brick they call “alignments,†the tag ends of early motor-age roads like the old east-west Lincoln Highway and its successor, the more famous Route 66. These hobbyists are a bit like explorers of an America that is in the sad process of disappearing, buried by time and poor choices.
As it happens, the old, two-lane 37 was in its turn the descendant of one of these older traces, call it the ur-37, the Indiana portion of a route from the Midwest to Florida known as the Dixie Highway, which existed under that name from about 1915 to 1926, when the country moved to a more uniform highway-numbering system.
The brainchild of Indianapolis businessman Carl G. Fisher, a principal in the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and an auto-parts inventor and salesman, the Dixie Highway was created to be an escape route from bitter Midwestern winters to warm, sunny holidays in the South — especially another Fisher creation, the resort city of Miami Beach.
The Dixie — at first merely a skein of loosely connected local roads — zigzagged through parts of Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, and Kentucky, labored up and through the mountains of Tennessee and northern Georgia, and then coasted down through the tobacco fields and pine barrens into Florida. At a time when roads almost invariably centered on and served rural America’s innumerable tiny villages, the Dixie Highway became in a sense the nation’s first primitive interstate-highway system.
It also prefigured and midwifed the birth of the automobile age and the explosion of travel by road. As detailed in the book Dixie Highway, by Tammy Ingram, an assistant professor of history at the College of Charleston, road-building then shifted from a chaotic, locally controlled process-on-the-fly to a high-priority national project.
But it wasn’t easy. Ingram describes the fractious process of choosing the Dixie’s route, with communities vying for its promised tourism dollars and access to regional markets. A 1915 planning meeting in Chattanooga brought the competing parties together and promptly devolved into a donnybrook that earned the nickname “The Second Battle of Chattanooga.â€
Eventually, Fisher and the Dixie Highway Association simply chose not to choose, essentially doubling the communities it served by creating two north–south branches instead of one main trunk. Connector roads between the branches almost accidentally gave the Dixie its prototypical highway-system character.
Like the Dixie Highway, the planning process for Indiana’s southern leg of I-69 — the work presently underway here — was also a rough road, so to speak. There were lawsuits, protests, and angry slogans painted on the statehouse. But this time people weren’t clamoring to be included; they wanted out. They demanded that the highway project be stopped or rerouted away from them. …
“Argerich’s pianism is remarkable for combining seemingly effortless technical resource with temperamental volatility. Yet the vehemence of her playing is seldom to the disadvantage of the extraordinary subtlety of her art. Moreover, despite the limits she places on her repertory, such is the spontaneity of her approach that each of her interpretations, no matter how familiar in broad outline, is characterised by a profusion of contrasting details beneath the surface.”
Zman is ranting, and it’s perfectly understandable.
Kenosha Wisconsin has now become the pivot point for the revolution from above being waged on middle America. Riots have convulsed the city for three nights since a violent black rapist was shot by police after resisting arrest. Large swaths of the city have been burned as the mayor cheered on the rioters. This led to the shooting of three rioters by a 17-year old kid, who volunteered to help defend the property owners. The video of the incident has become a world-wide sensation.
Of course, this being Jim Snow America, the white kid is now charged with capital murder and faces life in prison. White people who kill in self-defense get charged with capital murder, while blacks who kill for sport are allowed to go free. You see, the former is exercising white privilege and is guilty of being white. The latter, on the other hand, is the victim of white privilege and is justifiably angry. In post-reality America, privilege means being stripped of your rights and dignity.
If Kyle Rittenhouse was a black or an immigrant from the third world or even a transexual, he would not be in jail right now. He would be held up as a hero by the mainstream media. President Trump would send Air Force One to bring him to Washington for a special ceremony. Speakers at the RNC convention would be told to mention his name in their speeches. He is white, so no one at the convention will mention his name. They have not mentioned Cannon Hinnant either.
Unlike other cases where the media can suppress the truth while spreading lies, this time the truth was all over the internet before the media could act. As soon as it happened, social media had video of the attack on Rittenhouse. He fell to the ground as violent criminals attacked him and he opened fire on them. There can be no narrative in which he is the villain. He may have been naive, but he was simply following the civic nationalist code and doing what he thought was his duty.
This is Jim Snow America. A white kid following the rules is guilty, no matter what the facts say, so he sits in prison. His family started a defense fund on Go Fund Me, but it was immediately taken down. Again, in Jim Snow America, whites are not allowed to avail themselves of the resources for self-defense. The system will now wage war on this kid’s family in order to prevent them from defending their son. In Jim Snow America, white people just have to take it.
It is an infuriating reality, for sure. In a better world, the mayor of Kenosha would already be swinging from a tree.
It’s actually been this way for decades in every major metropolitan area. A career criminal shooting an innocent victim provokes a yawn, and his crime gets cursorily processed and plea bargained down. A middle-class white person shoots a criminal and, the system goes into high gear, throwing the book at him.
Jennifer van Laar, at Red State, explains what Justice as administered by minority left-wingers elected with George Soros-funding looks like.
Last week we brought you the story of Nichelle Holmes, a Deputy District Attorney in California who made social media posts proclaiming “We want more than a citation for vandalism†for the couple who painted over a Black Lives Matter mural in her jurisdiction. The office has now charged the couple with a “hate crime.â€
Holmes’ boss, Diana Becton, is in her first term as elected District Attorney, one of a number of district attorneys heavily supported by lefty billionaire George Soros. Sources tell RedState that as soon as Becton took over she implemented major changes in the way the office was run and in the way crimes were charged and how aggressively cases were prosecuted. One recent change, which I’ll address further in a moment, has to do with charging people for “looting,†which is basically stealing during a state of emergency (i.e., protests or riots).
Becton is BFF’s with St. Louis’ Kim Gardner and Chicago’s Kim Foxx, who’ve been in the news for their terrible policies. This week she co-authored a Politico op-ed with Gardner, Foxx, and two other Soros-funded DA’s explaining their philosophy and 11-point plan for further ruining America’s cities.
The quintuplet started off by sharing their completely inane understanding of the origins of our justice system (apparently not understanding that criminal legal systems pre-date the colonization of North America):
“Our criminal legal system was constructed to control Black people and people of color. Its injustices are not new but are deeply rooted in our country’s shameful history of slavery and legacy of racial violence. The system is acting exactly as it was intended to, and that is the problem.
“We should know: We’re Black, we’re female, and we’re prosecutors. We work as the gatekeepers in this flawed system. And we have some ideas for how to fix it.â€
Say what? And the fact that they’re the gatekeepers is scary as hell – not because of their skin color or their gender (wait, is gender actually a thing anymore?), but because they want to remove the blindfold from Lady Justice’s eyes.
Instead, these prosecutors place a duty to enact societal change upon their deputies and believe they must “rectify past wrongsâ€:
The decisions that prosecutors make can either work to rectify the inherent harms in the legal system or perpetuate them. Part of our responsibility, as elected public servants, is to be self-aware and recognize that we are part of the problem. It is our moral and ethical duty to start advancing racial equity-minded policies—and community advocates and voters should hold us accountable for doing so.
Becton, the Contra Costa County DA, is already putting “racial equity-minded policies†in place and enforcing them in her office. The following “Looting Guidelines†document was provided to RedState by a confidential source and verified as authentic by a separate source familiar with the office’s policies. [see below]…
So, let’s get this straight. Deputy District Attorneys and/or the county’s law enforcement officers are supposed to go through a flow chart, including a psychological and financial analysis, to determine if looting charges should be filed?
This is what’s happening in the Bay Area right now.So, let’s get this straight. Deputy District Attorneys and/or the county’s law enforcement officers are supposed to go through a flow chart, including a psychological and financial analysis, to determine if looting charges should be filed?
This is what’s happening in the Bay Area right now.
And if the property owner points a gun at looters, these DAs will indict for assault.
Sean Collins of Spiked interviewed Joseph Bottum who, in 2014, published a book explaining very well the etiology of the hysteria and insanity afflicting America these days. This one is a must-read item.
One person who has long been exploring the religious fervour of today’s increasingly moralistic politics is the essayist and author Joseph Bottum. Indeed, his 2014 book, An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America, seems almost prophetic. There he argued that the demise of traditional Protestantism in the US has led liberals to transfer their religious beliefs, habits and passions into the political realm, moralising it in the process. Our age of ‘post-Protestantism’, he concludes, has eroded the boundary between the religious and the political, infusing politics with a religious mindset and discourse. …
The Mainline churches helped define American culture in several ways. First of all, the churches were mostly apolitical, which has had a profound effect on American culture. For instance, there’s never been a great American political novel. The average French streetwalker in a novel by Zola knows more about politics than the heroes of the greatest American novels. What is it to be an American? At the highest artistic level, it is to be concerned about the cosmos and the self. Politics is incidental to Moby Dick, The Scarlet Letter and Huckleberry Finn. And that’s because Mainline Protestantism rendered politics secondary to what it deems is most important — namely, salvation and the self.
Second, Mainline Protestantism defined the structure of the family, and the shape of everyday life – baptisms, marriages and funerals. It effectively shaped the social life of communities. When Tocqueville talks about these non-governmental associations in America that he found so fascinating, the two examples he gives are volunteer fire departments and burial societies. People banded together to make sure they had funding, and attendees, for each other’s funerals. This Protestantism will also shape the idea of the nuclear family, provide a sense of the arc of life, and frame how we understand what’s driving our behaviour, and how we think about politics. So when 50 per cent of the country belonged to these churches, these churches were still shaping social life.
The third thing Protestantism gave us was a shared language of the Bible. When Adlai Stevenson, the former Democratic governor of Illinois, was asked why he decided to run for president for a second time in 1956, he said, ‘It was not like Paul on the road to Damascus’. There was a cultural assumption that people would get this sort of Biblical reference. That too gave a unity to American culture. As much as the Lutherans were not the same as the Methodists, and so on, the churches shared what Tocqueville called the central stream, the main current in American life.
In the 1970s, the old Mainline Protestantism starts to break down. A question of what might replace its centrality in American culture emerges. There is a period in the 1990s and 2000s when it seems that Catholicism might provide the moral language that Mainline Protestantism no longer did. In the event, that project failed, primarily because liberal Protestantism did not disappear – it just shifted into post-Protestantism. ….
What we’re seeing now is an amplification of what I wrote about five years ago: an intense spiritual hunger that has no outlet. There’s no way to see people kneeling, or singing ‘Hands up, don’t shoot’, or swaying while they hold up candles, and avoid acknowledging that it’s driven by a spiritual desire. I perceived this when I wrote about Occupy Wall Street, and it’s become even more like this. It is an intense spiritual hunger that is manifesting itself more violently. Because to the post-Protestants, the world is an outrage and we are all sinners.
As a follow-up to The Anxious Age, I wrote an essay in 2014 in the Weekly Standard, called ‘The Spiritual Shape of Political Ideas’. The first idea I addressed was white guilt – that there is this inherent guiltiness that comes from being white. This notion has the same logical shape and the same psychological operation as Original Sin. The trouble is that, unlike Original Sin, there’s no salvation from white guilt. But the formal structure of white guilt and Original Sin is the same. How do you come to understand that you need salvation? By deeper and deeper appreciation of your sinfulness.
Similarly, there is ostracising and shunning. Cancel culture is just the latest and most virulent form of the religious notion of shunning, in which people are chased into further appreciation of their guiltiness. Two years ago, the Nation published a poem about an older panhandler giving advice to a younger one, about how to get people to give you money. The Twittermob went after that poem, on the grounds that the poet was a white man from Minnesota. And the magazine apologised, and the poet apologised for writing the poem. That’s what the shunning is looking for. If you profane, if you’re shunned outside the Temple, the only way back is to become fanatic, to convince people that you understand how guilty you are. And even then I’m not sure there’s any way back.
At the very least, one of the effects of the shunning is to frighten everyone into silence. Its purpose is to get people fired, to put people beyond the pale, to get them out of our sight. This is for a couple reasons. First, it is to ensure we are not infected by this sinfulness. And second, it is a public declaration of our power. It says, look how powerful we are, that we can do this to people.
We live in just the strangest times. But understanding the historical roots of these radicals as post-Protestant, and understanding the spiritual hunger which has no outlet for them, helps us to explain it.
There can be no question that he is right. Leftism generally is nothing other than the recrudescence and amalgamation of several earlier prominent Christian heresies, and contemporary Woke Leftism is an obvious outbreak of religious hysteria based on that heretic cult.
Been reading Isabel Wilkerson’s new book, “Caste,†and if you were of the opinion that the United States wasn’t nearly as bad as Nazi Germany, how wrong you are. Can’t encourage you enough to read this masterpiece.
Journalist Jemele Hill is joining The Atlantic as a staff writer, The Atlantic’s editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg and editor of TheAtlantic.com Adrienne LaFrance announced today. She begins with The Atlantic next week.
Hill will be covering issues related to sports, race, politics, and culture for both the magazine and TheAtlantic.com. She will be based in Los Angeles, where The Atlantic is establishing a second California bureau after opening an office in San Francisco this summer.
“Jemele is a wonderfully talented journalist who is famous for her acute commentary, fearless writing and encyclopedic knowledge of sports,†said Goldberg. “But what drew us to Jemele in particular is her deep commitment to reporting. There are a million stories to be uncovered at the intersection where sports, race, money and politics meet, and Jemele is the exact right person to do this uncovering, and The Atlantic is the exact right home for this sort of journalism.â€
“The Atlantic made perfect sense to me because during this period, it’s critical to be aligned with people who understand this mission: Sports is a great entry point for exploring what’s happening in the wider society,†said Hill. “You can’t talk about sports without talking about race, class, gender and politics. I want to explore the complications and discomforts with a publication that has a long history of supporting this kind of work.â€
In her nearly 12-year career at ESPN, Hill rose to fame for her exceptional coverage on the air and for ESPN.com. She was a columnist, a host of “SportsCenter,†and a college football sideline reporter. Most recently, she covered the intersection of sports, culture, and race for ESPN’s The Undefeated.
Hill began her journalism career at the Raleigh News & Observer before moving back to her hometown to cover sports for the Detroit Free Press, and later the Orlando Sentinel. She joined ESPN in 2006.
Frankly, instead of being employed in highly-paid, prestigious establishment positions as commentators and editorialists, I’d contend that people this delusional ought to be netted and taken away to the laughing academy where their excessively rich fantasy lives will no longer pose a danger to themselves or anybody else.
Turner Classics Movies is broadcasting “Gone With the Wind” (1939) tonight at 8:00 PM EST. It might be advisable to catch what may be one of the famous film’s last public viewings. Woke hysteria finds the social attitudes and language of 1939 every bit as unacceptable as those of 1859.
Today, GWTW must be presented with a warning label:
“Presented as originally released in 1939. Includes themes and character depictions which may be offensive or problematic to contemporary audiences.”
Bruce Bawer has a good essay, just out in the New Criterion, that corrects a large number of common misconceptions about the novel.
Gone with the Wind tells the story of the flirtation, lasting from the eve of the war until many years after, between Scarlett and Rhett. They’re drawn to each other, Mitchell wants us to understand, because they’re both, by nature, at odds with the social system into which they were born. If Mitchell celebrates anything, it’s not the conformist pre-war lives of planters and their families but the spirit of nonconformity exhibited by Rhett and Scarlett. During the war, the other members of their race and class are devoted heart and soul to what they describe as “the Cause.†In her account of the Atlanta bazaar, Mitchell describes the devotion of the women present to “the Causeâ€â€”“A Cause they loved as much as they loved their men, a Cause they served with their hands and their hearts, a Cause they talked about, thought about, dreamed about.†But neither Scarlett nor Rhett has any attachment whatsoever to the “Cause.†He runs Union blockades, he tells her, only to enrich himself; as for Scarlett, it’s plain from the first page that she has no attachment to the Confederacy. Toward the novel’s end, he says: “We are both scoundrels, Scarlett, and nothing is beyond us when we want something.†When Scarlett finally realizes that she loves not Ashley (the now-useless embodiment of pre-war Southern knighthood) but Rhett, she sees that “he, like her, saw truth as truth, unobstructed by impractical notions of honor, sacrifice, or high belief in human nature.†With this long-delayed self-insight, Scarlett fully embraces Mitchell’s own cold-eyed realism.
No, this is assuredly not a soggy, sentimental drama of cavaliers and chivalry, but a candid, even cynical, study of two strong-minded survivors set against the backdrop of America’s greatest social upheaval. Nor is it, as Mitchell readily and repeatedly admitted, a beautifully written book or a masterpiece of plotting. (She could never grasp why it became a bestseller or won the Pulitzer Prize.) But there’s no fictional work that paints a more sweeping and meticulous picture of the South at war, or that contains more characters of that place and time—women and men, black and white—who stir our sympathies and tremble with life. It’s a puzzlement, then, that Selznick—who in supervising the writing and rewriting of the script was almost fanatically insistent that, wherever possible, it was preferable to use dialogue from the novel rather than to write original lines—decided to frame the film with a title card that invites audiences to view the pre-war South with a romantic nostalgia that Mitchell’s book itself urges the reader to reject.
In a just world, Peggy Noonan would have repented publicly for turning her coat and endorsing Barack Obama in 2008 and then retired to a nunnery to spend her remaining years making grape jelly. But, no, alas! she is still holding forth regularly as a “conservative” commentator at the Wall Street Journal editorial page.
Just last week, Peggy horrified some of us afresh with a gushing puff-piece praising Joe Biden’s running-mate to the stars.
She is an excellent performer of politics. Like Bill Clinton she enjoys and has a talent for the necessary artifice. She takes obvious pleasure in campaigning—making speeches, waving, laughing, pressing the flesh. In committee hearings she cocks her brow in the closeup to show skepticism. Her glamour, and her consciousness of it, were vivid enough to be spoofed by Maya Rudolph on “Saturday Night Live.â€
Reading her 2019 autobiography, “The Truths We Hold: An American Journey,†it occurs to you that what she’s really bringing Joe Biden is the things she doesn’t say and the stories she doesn’t tell on the trail.
She was born and raised in a climate of liberal activism in Oakland and Berkeley, Calif., in the 1960s and ’70s. Her father, Donald Harris, born in Jamaica in 1938, was a student there and went on to be an economics professor at Stanford. Her mother, Shyamala, was born in southern India, graduated from the University of Delhi at 19, and earned a doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley. Shyamala, who died in 2009, was expected to return home for an arranged marriage; instead she met Donald. They married, had two children and divorced.
When Kamala Harris was a toddler, her parents brought her to civil-rights marches. “I have young memories of a sea of legs moving about,†she writes. Her mother liked to tell a story. Once Kamala was fussing in her stroller, and Mrs. Harris leaned down and asked, “What do you want?†“ ‘Fweedom!’ I yelled back.â€
The general atmosphere was ’60s Berkeley—diverse, full of passion, consumed by identity politics and debates about liberation.
They took periodic trips to India. “My mother, grandparents, aunts, and uncle instilled us with pride in our South Asian roots. . . . We were raised with a strong awareness of and appreciation for Indian culture.†(India looks to be an increasingly important ally as America’s relationship with China deteriorates. If Biden-Harris wins and her background is helpful, good.)
She went to ballet class, sang in the choir in the 23rd Avenue Church of God, went to a black cultural center called Rainbow Sign on Thursdays. She saw Rep. Shirley Chisholm speak and was electrified.
By the time Ms. Harris graduated high school she wanted to become a lawyer like her heroes Thurgood Marshall and Constance Baker Motley. Also like her Uncle Sherman and a family friend named Henry. “Any time someone had a problem . . . the first thing you’d hear was, ‘Call Henry, call Sherman. They’ll know what to do.’ . . . I wanted to be the one people called.†…
[W]e get a sense of gusto. She admires toughness. She is a natural pol. She was bred to achieve in an aspirational immigrant environment. She loves to compete.
She is warm, humorous. Like most of the men around her in politics, she enjoys being important. She isn’t embarrassed by attention.
Peggy omits mentioning the unpleasant reality of exactly how a graduate of a third-rate law school, who flunked the bar exam, rose so rapidly to the upper levels of California democrat party machine politics.
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This week, Peggy delivered a tepid critique of the democrat convention: boring, artificial, and way too full of grievance-mongering. But, she also endorsed, and enthusiastically echoes, all the scurrilous crap they flung at Donald Trump.
All summer I’ve been running into two kinds of people. One kind says, “That man is a living shame on our country and must be removed.†The other kind says very little. They don’t defend him. They say, “I can’t believe I may vote for him, but . . .†And always they explain it this way: “What the other guys are gonna do on taxes,†“What the other guys will do to my industry,†“What the Democrats will do to the economy.â€
I’m getting the impression that for a lot of people, the ballot this fall won’t read “Trump vs. Biden†but “Trump vs. What the Other Guys Will Do.†…
Barack Obama’s speech will stick in history; it won’t just slide away. No former president has ever publicly leveled anything like this criticism at a sitting successor: “I did hope, for the sake of our country, that Donald Trump might show some interest in taking the job seriously, that he might come to feel the weight of the office and discover some reverence for the democracy that had been placed in his care. But he never did. For close to four years now, he has shown no interest in putting in the work.â€
This is a former president calling the current one shallow and lazy. He also suggested he’s greedy and intellectually incapable. Unprecedented? Yes. Unjustified? No, alas. And I’m not seeing Trump supporters rise up in indignant defense. They know it’s true, too.
Reading this, my blood boiled and I marveled at the extent to which long residence in the elite community of fashion bubble has distorted and impaired her perception of reality.
OK, it is true that Donald Trump talks differently from the typical representative of the national upper middle class elite. He boasts and brags. He constantly indulges in exaggeration and he interrupts his own sentences, inserting annoying little modifiers like “the most beautiful.” Trump also dresses and grooms himself peculiarly. His suits are always identical and blue and look like they came from Robert Hall. He wears (almost always) monochrome neckties, usually red, and always tied too long. And he dyes his hair and wears it peculiarly long and combed over elaborately in a very strange fashion obviously contrived to cover at any cost his baldness.
Trump offends the delicate sensibilities of people like Peggy Noonan, too, by his conspicuous lack of inhibition and propriety. Trump gets online and tweets what he thinks and feels, insulting and attacking his opponents in government and the media with no consideration to his own dignity or that of his position. Trump obviously is not lazy. His problem is hyperactivity.
I think “shallow” is also not the mot juste. Trump is not so much shallow as undomesticated and unrefined. Donald Trump offends the dickens out of our national elite, because he is clearly “not one of us.” Trump is an outsider, a parvenu from the Outer Boroughs, who dresses, walks, talks, and behaves like –oh, dear! oh, dear!– one of the common people.
Donald Trump is not glib and smooth-talking. He cannot produce the same kind of ever-so-nice sounding gaseous rhetoric as Obama. He does not understand how he’s supposed to behave. He breaks all the rules and knocks over the tea set every time.
Why all this rankles, why this stings so sharply, lies precisely in the fact that the people’s elevation of Donald Trump constitutes a distinct rejection, an undeniable slap in the face to the entire America establishment elite. The people rejected the democrat elite’s left-wing insanity, and they also rejected the Republican elite for having failed for so long to defeat Leftism absolutely and decisively. And, there is an especially sharp, added level of pain for establishmentarians looking on: Trump is winning, Trump is faithfully, unprecedentedly fulfilling campaign promises. The horrible, uncouth and unworthy Trump shrugs off easily the worst the democrat opposition can do, and marches on, trampling taboos underfoot, from victory to victory.
I didn’t support Trump in 2016. I had all the same stylistic reservations as Peggy and George Will and all the other Never Trumpers. However, I gradually observed that Trump really is patriotic and sincere. I liked many of his appointments and I really like the majority of his policies. Sure, I recognize that Trump is eccentric and flawed, but I also recognize how much he has accomplished and how willing he is to fight. You can’t come to me and tell me that Donald Trump is too dumb and too shallow to be president, we have to have Joe Biden instead! If Donald Trump owned a dog, it would be smarter than Joe Biden. And that dog would be more principled.
Benito Mussolini (1883 – 1945) going for a drive with his pet lion cub ‘Ras’, a gift from Aldo Finci.
Daniel Pipes has collected a number of comments on dictators and tyrants, demonstrating the propensity of Western establishment intellectuals to feel, Ã la Chris Matthews, “a thrill running up the leg” when in proximity to power.
Arnold Toynbee, the influential world historian, interviewed the Führer in 1936 and reported being ‘convinced of his sincerity in desiring peace in Europe’.
Jerome Davis, a famed Yale Divinity School theologian, thought ‘it would be an error to consider the Soviet leader a willful man who believes in forcing his ideas upon others’.
John K. Fairbank, Harvard’s dean of American China scholars, asserted that ‘the Maoist revolution is on the whole the best thing that happened to the Chinese people in centuries,’ and concluded that Mao’s China ‘is much more our friend than our enemy. It is peculiarly self-absorbed and nonaggressive abroad.’
Edward Said, a university professor at Columbia, said the Palestinian leader ‘made the PLO a genuinely representative body’.
Richard Falk, a Princeton political scientist, judged that the Iranian ayatollah had created ‘a new model of popular revolution, based for the most part on non-violent tactics’. He went on to conclude that ‘Iran may yet provide us with a desperately needed model of human governance for a third-world country’.
Acclaimed novelist Norman Mailer flattered his Cuban host with ‘you were the first and greatest hero to appear in the world since the Second War…you are the answer to the argument…that revolutions cannot last, that they turn corrupt or total or they eat their own.’
University of Chicago historian Bruce Cumings depicts the North Korean dictator as ‘a homebody who doesn’t socialize much, doesn’t drink much and works at home in his pajamas… He most enjoys tinkering with his many music boxes, sitting on the floor… He is prudish and shy, and like most Korean fathers, hopelessly devoted to his son.’
Suzanne Conklin Akbari is a Professor in the English Department of the University of Toronto.
Old fogeys like myself characteristically think the role of the university professor is to cultivate the mind and character of the young by exposing them to the best intellectual and artistic productions of the civilization they live in and whose traditions they are by birth inheritors.
Silly me. Today’s professoriate has found a more interesting and important mission, described in Lithhub by Suzanne Conklin Akbari: the mission of leading and instructing the young in the processes of apology and repentance for Western Civilization’s accomplishments and success, particularly for eclipsing the Stone Age cultures of Amerindian tribes, who apparently rather than penning essays speaking as individuals, just naturally collectively participate in grooving over “that which is not seen, not known, what is cherished and hidden.”
Instead of cherishing and cultivating our understanding and appreciation of the Western canon, our proper role apparently is to “decolonize” it as a form of reparations for settling North America in the first place, creating Canada and the United States, building cities and universities and modern technological civilization, thus permitting millions to live in material abundance, peace, and in the possession and enjoyment of vastly more sophisticated forms of thought and art. Shame on us for supplanting and absorbing the descendants of the original thousands of representatives of diverse hunter/gatherer tribes who once freely wandered the undeveloped wilderness in a state of constant rivalry and war, generally living lives solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Assimilation, you see, was just another of our crimes.
We ought presumably to kick those Injuns out of our wicked Western universities, take away their centrally-heated houses, televisions, and pick-up trucks, issue each of them a breech-cloth, a pair of moccasins, and a bow-and-arrow, give then back their tomahawks, “self government and autonomy,” get back on the boats and go home to Europe leaving the noble red man living in his teepee or his wikiup. He understands, which we don’t, that everything’s like a basket….
This, this is contemporary Academic thought!
[W]hat would it mean to decolonize the canon, specifically, the canon of essay writing puts Montaigne at its foundations and inscribes Woolf at the summit? Washuta and Warburton [in Shapes of Native Non-Fiction, 2019, in which “Editors Elissa Washuta and Theresa Warburton ground this anthology of essays by Native writers in the formal art of basket weaving. Using weaving techniques such as coiling and plaiting as organizing themes, the editors have curated an exciting collection of imaginative, world-making lyric essays by twenty-seven contemporary Native writers from tribal nations across Turtle Island into a well-crafted basket.”] lay out a path for “the process of decolonization†through their account of the “exquisite vessel.†Yet we must also remember that decolonization, as Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang have influentially argued, is not a metaphor; it is about land and water, real things in the real world. It is about reparations, self-government, and autonomy. We—by which I mean settler people, those who are not native to these territories—must be ready to give up things in order to embrace decolonization.
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What would this require of us, in terms of the literary canon? Can we keep Montaigne and Woolf, even as we embrace the “exquisite vessel� When we incorporate Indigenous writers into Eurocentric canons, it is not enough simply to add in a few writers. Instead, we need to think about how the inclusion of Indigenous writers—including their ways of knowing, their philosophies, and their ways of thinking about literary form—disrupts the very idea of “canon,†of “essay,†of “literature.†This necessary question is one that we have begun to ask through The Spouter-Inn literature podcast: what does it mean to have a canon? What is included, and what is excluded? What works are juxtaposed? Who speaks, and when? Who listens? What would it mean to be an active listener, a witness, instead of a passive one? What can books made us do—not just alone, but together?
