The moment Trump won re-election pic.twitter.com/nEuUp8F0zp

— Secular Talk (@KyleKulinski) August 18, 2020

From 2016, but awfully topical right now. These ladies can really sing!

That certainly looks like fun!

Vanderleun came up with this one.

Defaced Lee Monument, Richmond.

Helen Andrews, in the American Conservative, in a brilliant essay, puts the Jacobin Left’s War on Statues, particularly the shameful attacks on the memory of General Lee, in the precisely correct perspective.

America is currently in the middle of one of its periodic orgies of tearing down memorials to the past. The iconoclasts always have an advantage in these fights, because their opponents have different breaking points. Some Americans were happy to conciliate the protestors until a mob in Portland defaced a statue of George Washington. Others reserved their indignation for when a mob in Golden Gate Park toppled Junípero Serra, Francis Scott Key, and (of all people) Ulysses S. Grant in one night. In New York, the city council is proposing to trash the city’s statue of Thomas Jefferson, which will at least be accomplished by an orderly vote rather than a howling crowd. Some people have persuaded themselves that that makes it all right.

For me, a line was crossed this week when the faculty at Washington & Lee University voted to demand the school drop the second half of its name to erase its affiliation with Robert E. Lee. The moderate conservative’s justification for why it’s good to tear down Confederate statues but not those of the Founding Fathers is that Confederates are honored for defending slavery whereas the Founding Fathers are honored for other things despite their slave-owning. Whatever the general validity of that maneuver, it is obviously wrong here. Lee was president of the university; he gave it its distinctive character. His service as its leader was one of the great public-spirited acts of his late career, the most enduring of his many postwar gestures of patriotism and reconciliation. …

no Confederate has been judged more deserving of being honored as a national hero. President Dwight Eisenhower kept a photo of Lee in his office, and when a constituent wrote him a letter saying, “I do not understand how any American can include Robert E. Lee as a person to be emulated,” the general responded eloquently. “Through all his many trials, he remained selfless almost to a fault and unfailing in his faith in God. Taken altogether, he was noble as a leader and as a man, and unsullied as I read the pages of our history.”

The reason we have forgotten why Lee is worth honoring is the same reason we have forgotten why we needed him in the first place: we have lost our appreciation for old-fashioned virtues like duty and filial piety. I saw a pundit on Twitter, otherwise a pretty conservative guy, say recently: “Robert E. Lee literally had the privilege of choosing which army he wanted to lead in the Civil War. He chose wrong.” It’s true that Lee was offered command of Union forces in April 1861, but it is a modern anachronism to assume from this that he had a choice.

Duty is the virtue most associated with Lee, and it really was the guiding light of his life. When his old commander Winfield Scott asked him why he turned down the Union’s offer, despite personally opposing secession, Lee replied, “I am compelled to. I cannot consult my own feelings in this matter.” His loyalty was to Virginia, and he had to follow his state. Later, at Appomattox, Grant wanted Lee to sign surrender terms not just for the Army of Northern Virginia but for the whole Confederacy. Lee believed that was for President Davis alone to decide. Grant did not waste time telling Lee all the reasons it would be better for both sides to have a general surrender signed quickly. As he put it, “I knew there was no use to urge him to do anything against his ideas of what was right.”

Virtue shines best by contrast, so consider Lee next to someone who was his opposite in every way: Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner. Even his defenders must admit that Sumner was a man of deep principle but absolutely no honor. He would break any promise, betray any confidence, reverse any position to serve his liberal causes. He once won a Senate vote by persuading a Republican nay, who had paired with a Democratic yea who was deathly ill, to break his vow to abstain. He used the Constitution as a cudgel against his Southern opponents while feeling himself at perfect liberty to ignore any provision he disagreed with, on the grounds that nothing “against the Divine Law,” as he liberally interpreted it, could be binding.

Sumner’s greatest flip-flop was on pacifism. Peace had been his signature cause even before anti-slavery, going back to a notorious speech in 1845 where he called all wars “organized murder” and denigrated West Point as “a seminary of idleness and vice” that did nothing but train young men in “farcical and humiliating exercises.” When war came, Sumner could easily have sided with the Garrisonians willing to let the South depart in peace, confident that slavery would soon collapse under its own weight and in the meantime glad to have it off their consciences. But Sumner saw that martial law would give Lincoln a constitutional loophole to abolish slavery in every state. So he reversed himself on his oldest moral crusade and became one of the war’s most vindictive cheerleaders.

No one blamed the abolitionists for abandoning their long-held pacificism; the war was the opportunity of a lifetime. But that is the point. Duty means doing the right thing even when no one would blame you for doing otherwise. That’s what made Lee, whatever else you want to say about him, utterly dependable. He was a rock. He could be counted on. The only thing you could count on Sumner to do was to betray all of his allies eventually, even fellow Radicals like Thaddeus Stevens, the minute he convinced himself that they stood in the way of his political goals.

***

Here we arrive at the question at the heart of the statue debate: Are people constrained by any duties, any external obligations at all, or is everything always up for negotiation? Are we free to choose which heroes we want to celebrate and then equally free to choose again differently tomorrow?

Heredity is one source of unchosen obligations. It was very much in mind when Americans were debating how to handle reconciliation after the Civil War. How could we possibly strike a balance between asking Southerners to swear allegiance to the Union, which was vitally necessary, and forcing them to spit on the graves of their fathers and brothers, which was morally unthinkable to ask from any but an abjectly conquered foe? Amazingly, America succeeded in bringing the South into the country again, but only because we did exactly that: struck a balance.

History is another source of unchosen obligations, one more powerful in many ways than heredity. To be loyal to the United States means being loyal to its history. You can’t treat America like a conquered province, the way the crowds defacing Winston Churchill are treating London. Lee and Sumner were both very stubborn men, which made them superficially similar, but the difference was that for Lee the ultimate arbiter of his conduct was external whereas Sumner recognized no higher judge than himself. Acknowledging unchosen obligations means accepting that some things about America, like its history, aren’t yours to change at will — which is good, because stable and unchanging things are what Americans can unite behind.

The left has a counteroffer to this. We can heal all our divisions, they say, if you will only join with us in rallying behind our revised list of heroes. But that would mean consenting to make your position on your country’s history infinitely changeable, and infinitely changeable at the whim of someone other than yourself. Because, of course, the right side of history we’re all uniting under will be different again tomorrow, and you won’t be on the committee that decides what it is. Nothing is fixed; no principles stand firm. You will be like Sumner, a man in whom nothing can be relied upon except his sense of his own self-righteousness.

To live like that, you must either have an unshakeable sense of yourself, as the egotist Sumner did, or else no sense of yourself at all. There are some political systems that prefer their citizens to be infinitely malleable with no bedrock sense of self, but they are not democratic ones.

***

I used to side with the people who wanted to tear down all Confederate monuments. If Southern gentility means anything, I thought, it means not causing gratuitous offense. It means being willing to accept that a statue might mean one thing to us but something different to our fellow citizens, to whom we have an obligation to be considerate. I took people at their word when they said, we don’t hate the South, we just want you to celebrate what’s best about it, not what’s worst.

That gave them too much credit. In truth, they don’t want to celebrate anything about the South, or America, or the past. Everything falls short of their Year Zero standards. Considering the absolutism of their ideology, perhaps I should have seen this coming. Others did. Either way, Confederates are in the rear-view mirror now and Washington and Jefferson are the ones up for condemnation.

The left argues that name changes and statue topplings are a way for people and institutions to demonstrate their commitment to real change. But at this point, it is not ordinary Americans who need to demonstrate their good faith to the left. It is the statue-topplers who need to convince us that they are genuinely committed to pluralism and not, as their actions would suggest, just sparing some statues temporarily while they bide their time to wait and see what they can get away with tomorrow.

RTWT

American Greatness:

Syracuse University recently announced that it will soon be unveiling a newly-revised policy on “racial bias” that includes possible punishments for students who are guilty of simply witnessing an incident, as reported by Breitbart.

The announcement came from Keith Alford, the Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer at Syracuse, who declared in a press release that “The Code of Student Conduct has been revised…to state that violations of the code that are bias-motivated – including conduct motivated by racism – will be punished more severely. The University also revised the code to make clear when bystanders and accomplices can be held accountable.” Alford said that the code will be “distributed” to students in the fall, where all will be forced to sign.

RTWT

Bolivia’s wall of dinosaur tracks: Spread across a limestone slab a mile long and almost 300 feet high, this great wall at Cal Orcko near the city of Suvre reveals more than 5,000 footsteps, with 462 discrete trails.

My father (on the left, wearing jacket & tie, holding the large envelope), aged 26, was the oldest in this group of Marine Corps volunteers from Mahanoy City, Pennsylvania, September 1942, so he was put in charge.

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William G. Zincavage, Fall 1942, after graduating Marine Corps Boot Camp

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Military Police, North Carolina, Fall 1942
He was only 5′ 6″, but he was so tough that they made him an MP.

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Third Marine Division

I Marine Amphibious Corps

First Amphibious Corps, Third Marine Division, Special Troops:
Solomon Islands Consolidation (Guadalcanal), Winter-Spring 1943
New Georgia Group Operation (Vella LaVella, Rendova), Summer 1943
“The Special Troops drew the first blood.” — Third Divisional History.

“We never saw them but they were running away.” — William G. Zincavage

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III Marine Amphibious Corps

Third Amphibious Corps, Third Marine Division, Special Troops:
Marianas Operation (Guam), Summer 1944

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V Marine Amphibious Corps

Fifth Amphibious Corps, Third Marine Division, Special Troops:
Iwo Jima Operation, February-March 1945

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Navy Unit Commendation (Iwo Jima)
Good Conduct Medal
North American Campaign Medal
Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal with Four Bronze Stars

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While recovering from malaria after the Battle of Iwo Jima, he looked 70 years old.

But he was back to normal in December of 1945, when this photo was taken shortly before he received his discharge.

The Wall Street Journal reported the bad news.

To step into the Nat Sherman Townhouse in Midtown Manhattan is to step back in time, say fans of the 90-year-old tobacco emporium.

It is a place where smoking isn’t only allowed, but also is encouraged. The store sells all manner of high-end tobacco items, from hand-rolled cigars to premium cigarettes, including some that it produces under the Nat Sherman banner.

In days gone by, its customers included such boldface names as Humphrey Bogart, John Wayne and Henny Youngman. Even now, store employees say chief executives, prominent politicians and athletes are among the regulars.

But Nat Sherman is soon to become a piece of history itself. The store, which is owned by tobacco giant Altria Group Inc., is closing Sept. 25, company officials said.

Nat Sherman’s own brand of cigars, including its Timeless line, also is being discontinued. But Altria will continue to produce and market Nat Sherman-branded cigarettes, a company spokesman said.

Altria, which acquired Nat Sherman in 2017 from the Sherman family for an undisclosed price, put the store and the cigar line up for sale last October, saying the business wasn’t core to its tobacco portfolio. But a deal with a buyer couldn’t be completed in the months thereafter and the onset of the coronavirus pandemic served to complicate any potential transaction, store officials said.

Michael Herklots, vice president of Altria’s Nat Sherman International division, pointed to the fact that the emporium, situated near the corner of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, saw much of its business from Midtown office employees. Now, about 90% of that customer base is no longer there, he said.

The tragedy, he added, is that the city is losing one of its most treasured retail names.

“We are as authentic to New York as Hermès is to Paris,” he said. …

The store is a place to talk about cigar preferences—mild and creamy or full-bodied and spicy—with tobacconists who have years, if not decades, of experience. Moreover, it is a place just to kibbitz in general—about your work, your family or, better yet, about nothing in particular.

The store offered customers, from those famous names to everyday white- and blue-collar workers, plenty of places to sit back and enjoy a “stick,” to use a cigar smoker’s term, after they shopped. Those who wanted to commit to $3,000 in purchases a year could become members of a private downstairs lounge.

Celebrity chef Geoffrey Zakarian is among the regulars who frequented Nat Sherman for a leisurely smoke.

“You walked in and you felt like you were part of something,” he said.

RTWT

I’ve never been a Hawaiian shirt man myself. Too demotic for me. But, if they’re going to be a symbol of anti-PC-ism, I’ll have to get some. The version Taj Mahal is wearing in “Six Days and Seven Nights” (1998) would be good.

The (Woke) Economist is indignant at a recent development in male fashion.

In the 1930s the Nazis designed their own shirts and commissioned Hugo Boss to produce them in black and brown. Their modern American cousins buy them off the rack at high-street beachwear boutiques. The “Boogaloo Boys” as they are known, an amorphous coalition of gun-loving anti-statists, white supremacists, preppers and libertarians, have adopted the Aloha shirt as regulation. A garment once associated with golfing seniors and barbecue dads now wraps the bodies of American militiamen gagging for a second civil war.

The Boogaloo Boys are harder to classify than previous generations of right-wing militias. Some of their actions are predictable, like holding rallies against gun laws and coronavirus safety measures, but they’re also turning up in their tropical togs to Black Lives Matter (BLM) marches. This is not always, as some reports have suggested, to insist on the importance of White Lives – but because they hate the cops. “We’re against the state,” a smooth-faced young man told BLM protesters in Texas on May 30th: “We won’t stop you burning down the police station.” He was wearing a baseball cap, a Kevlar jacket and a short-sleeved shirt, hot with yellow and turquoise flowers.

This Aloha habit first became legible in late 2018, when Joshua Citarella, a visual artist who studies online culture, noticed the shirts adding colour to the plainer alt-right ensemble of streetwear, assault weapon and bottle of Jack Daniels. Like so much extremist culture, the trend developed from a confluence of internet jokes and memes – the same kind of semiotic tangle that spawned Pepe, the amphibian mascot of anti-liberal politics, from 4Chan gaming slang and the image of Kek, the frog-headed Ancient Egyptian god of Chaos. The word “Boogaloo” is borrowed from a film, “Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo”, a hastily shot 1984 sequel to a popular break-dancing movie. When an activist posts a picture of himself in a respirator and Aloha shirt and pronounces himself “ready to boog”, he’s casting himself in the sequel to a well-known historical event starring Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee. A further pun, “big luau” – the name for a Hawaiian hog roast – encodes hostility towards the police and it leads, somehow, to cotton printed with palms, petals and piña coladas.

Want a less convoluted explanation? You’ll find it in a self-published novel from 2019 by an author who writes under a pseudonym, Carl Snuffy. (Nobody knows his real identity: he’s the Elena Ferrante of alt-right gun-fan forums.) “Boogaloo” is set in the near-future during an internecine conflict in which armed American Marxists – whose battle cry is “For BERNIE! FOR AOC!” – have taken refuge in the sewers much as the Viet Cong occupied the Cu Chi tunnels. On the eve of his first battle, the hero is issued with a Hawaiian shirt to ensure that no one mistakes him for a member of the hated Antifa, an amorphous group of anti-fascists: “If we have these on…we won’t get shot at by the cops or vigilantes.”

In Honolulu, which many of the Boogaloo Boys doubtless refuse to believe is President Barack Obama’s place of birth, there is understandable disquiet. “We’re Hawaii”, thundered the capital’s main newspaper, “and we want our shirts back.”

RTWT

Ann Coulter hits the nail on the head:

why are antifa boys scrawny beta males?

White men who go around denouncing other white men as “fascists” are wimpy losers who think they’ll attract women with suck-up speeches about racism. But even stupid left-wing girls prefer alpha males. Sissy boys should drop the left-wing politics and try lifting weights and making money. Freud was a fool and reductionist, but sexual strategizing by losers is the source of nearly all left-wing ideology.”