Rules are rules, and rotten; Confident as they are clueless; Blessed in his enemies; The race is run; Things to come

Rules are rules, and rotten

Monday the 11th of April was maybe the finest day of Donald Trump's campaign to that date since the new year. That Saturday the Republican Party of Colorado had held something of a coronation for Ted Cruz. The state party having anticipated the ascendancy of Donald Trump and revised the rules to place their presidential nomination in the sure hands of 34 party muckety-mucks, those exalted 34 had voted Cruz to a man, at which point the party took to Twitter to gloat "We beat Trump," as if to dispatch all doubt as to their purpose.

The Republican establishment had by this time lit on Ted Cruz, not out of any affection for Cruz but on the calculation that Cruz was the candidate to deny Trump an outright majority of 1,237 delegates, throwing the nomination to a second ballot where those delegates bound by the votes of the people to nominate Trump would be unbound, and the establishment might bring to bear their inordinate influence and institutional power. And if somehow they could get away with it the establishment would love him and leave him, discarding Cruz on that second ballot and handing the nomination instead to some more reliably pliable establishment man.

On Monday while Cruz ran a victory lap, Trump upturned the campaign. Trump made of the Colorado coronation a kiss of death. Had Cruz seen ahead, seen that to win the delegates was to lose the people, he might've repudiated those 34 delegates from Colorado, or at the very least not gloated in them. Cruz' unlikely alliance with the party establishment puts one in mind of a groupie who spends the night with the lead singer and then the morning after when that singer is onto the next stop and the next groupie, plans her wedding to him and wonders how many children they'll have and what they'll choose for names. 

Trump's charge is not that the rules have been bent or broken but that they needn't be broken or bent, the rules are themselves rotten, written and rewritten to suit the party muckety-mucks. He elevated that by Monday to a theme of his campaign and by Friday to a plank in his platform, proposing that Republican Party presidential nominations be democratized, which is as much shrewd politics as sound principle.

And the racket which Trump proposes to reform, the party presidential nomination, was not conceived by the Founding Fathers or enshrined in the Constitution, is not the law of the land duly enacted by duly elected representatives, and does not derive from founding principles or democratic ideals, so that when the Against-Trump types taunt that Trump is "whining" or wag their fingers that "rules are rules" and any other clueless, cringe-making cliches, they defend only the residue of antidemocratic smoke-filled-rooms-behind-closed-doors party nominations as before the democratization of the process in the last half-century. 

When the rules are not law and not democratic and not unchanging -- having been amended within a matter of months precisely to deny delegates to Donald Trump -- then to answer Trump's "Let the people decide" with "Rules are rules" is to lose the argument.

Confident as they are clueless

The cluelessness -- and I hesitate to invoke so strong a term inasmuch as I esteem some of the parties to the cluelessness -- of the elite and establishment and assorted others who've arrayed against Donald Trump, is something to behold: after misjudging Trump and the primaries practically daily since the summer of '15, their confidence in their judgment is undented.

When Trump observed that "Islam hates us," the question put to the talking heads was, "Can Trump recover from this latest gaffe?" Never mind that Trump's pronouncement was an objective and obvious observation, to real people in the real world; it's precisely that sort of wrecking-ball-to-political-correctness truth-telling and vows to act on it that have elevated Donald Trump from real-estate celebrity and reality-TV showman to one of two candidates for the most exalted office on God's earth.

Or while Trump hung the Colorado coronation around Cruz' neck and sunk him with it, that larger part of the commentariat who disdain Donald Trump, or what I saw of them, sat before the cameras as confident as they were clueless and declared in defense of the coronation, "That's the way the game is played," and "The Cruz campaign has the better ground-game," etc., despite that Cruz could hardly have lost Colorado and Trump could hardly have won it, and "the game" is an antidemocratic vestige. Then toward the end of that week after Colorado, when there was national polling to show Trump lengthening his lead over Cruz to 18 points and Cruz collapsing to two points up from the no-hoper Kasich, the question put to the talking heads was, "Has Trump been drawn off-message by Colorado?" Colorado was the making of Trump, or rather his re-making, and the unmaking of Cruz.

But then, if the many and sundry Against-Trumps had a clue between them then it might be their man standing atop the hill and Trump tumbling down it.

Blessed in his enemies

Donald Trump's 2016 had not been spectacular. He had for too long been seized by a birther mania to disqualify Ted Cruz from the presidency, he skipped the debate in Iowa and placed three points back in second in the first-in-the-nation caucus there, and then came the debate of February 13 and the half-week thereafter, in South Carolina which had been Trump country from the first, when Trump waded well into the swamp of conspiracy-theory kookery, flogging fevered fantasies of events from 2001 and '03. I'd guess that some part of that episode owed to Trump's temperament as well as to his "Art of the Comeback" lesson of answering a punch with a punch: the man lashes out wildly with whatever's to hand, which may be excusable in a private citizen but is not helpful in a candidate for POTUS much less a commander-in-chief. But Trump was a Democrat at the time of the Iraq War, and it shows. And never mind that his conspiracy-theorizing was demonstrably and even self-evidently bunkum; to relitigate Iraq and the 9/11 attacks in the 2016 presidential campaign was nothing to do with the price of tea, something like arguing that Normandy wasn't the optimal site for the D-Day landings, in the campaign of 1960.

Then came February 17, I believe it was, or three days before South Carolina was to vote, when "His Holiness" the "Holy Father" Pope "Francis" of Rome ordained that the people of South Carolina and America were not to vote Trump. Pope Francis is of course a leftist and to be charitable doesn't have the interests of the United States at heart. But more than that, Pope "Francis" of Rome is or rather was Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina, and your average Latin American takes a different view of the Latin American invasion and colonization of the United States than your average American, something like your average German took a different view of the Nazi-Soviet conquest of Poland than your average Pole. So the pope formerly known as Jorge Mario Bergoglio is not high on the Trump proposal of turning back that Latin American conquest of America, and couldn't restrain himself from saying as much, from getting in the middle of an American election, or more precisely from getting in the middle of just one of the two major-party presidential primaries, to damn just one of its half-dozen candidates. And at once the clutter of the campaign cleared, and those folks who had thrown in with Trump saw again why it was that they had thrown in with Trump, and had new cause for demonstrating their throwing-in.

I can only assume the understanding of America in Pope Francis' Vatican is not intimate, because it happens that South Carolina is among the more self-consciously Protestant jurisdictions in Christendom. I.e., in ordaining that they mustn't vote Trump the pope of Rome left the good and great Americans of South Carolina with no self-respecting alternative but to vote Trump and affirm their independence from the Vatican, lest the Reformation be undone and citizens be vassals.

And so it was that Pope Francis blessed Donald Trump by damning him, or anyhow that's the story as it looked to me. Three days after the pope stuck his nose in, Trump won South Carolina with a spread of 10 points. SC GOP to Pope: Drop dead. Then after another three days Trump won Nevada in a rout, taking a greater share of the vote than the first and second runners-up together, etc., etc., and the rest is history.

The race is run

One afternoon sometime in November of 2000, I tuned my radio to a station out of Maine to hear an extraordinary announcement. The disputed vote for president wouldn't be resolved formally 'til December, but on that day in November Rush Limbaugh opened his show with the declaration that he was about to break news, news which wasn't to be found elsewhere, that the recount of the votes for president in Florida was complete and George W. Bush was president-elect. The period for the recount as per Florida election law having passed without an overturning of the result, the state attorney general had certified that result, as of which moment Bush was president-elect. To hear the press tell it, the recount was on and the result was unknown, but Limbaugh understood what the Supreme Court in the end was compelled to ratify, that the voting and the counting and the recounting were through, the result was certified, and the president-elect was Bush.

I'm reminded of that lately in following these Republican presidential primaries. Not to say the decision is anything like as official in these primaries as in that recount, but the facts are these: by the first of April or thereabouts there were nominally three men left standing in the Republican primaries, but to make it to that magic number of 1,237 delegates the first runner-up Ted Cruz would've had to collect something like 86% of the delegates remaining, i.e., a practical impossibility, and for the also-ran John Kasich to make 1,237 would've taken more delegates than there were delegates to be had, i.e., a statistical impossibility. And more than that, by the first of April Donald Trump had been at or occasionally near the top of the Republican primary polling through the summer and fall and winter and into the spring, and had won far-and-away the most votes and states and delegates, and I cannot name a candidate since the democratization of the major-party presidential nominations who managed all that but somehow did not manage to secure his party's nomination.

The conventional wisdom has it that if Donald Trump comes to the end of the voting in June with a plurality but not a majority of delegates, then come the Republican National Convention in July the party muckety-mucks will muck things up and try by hook or by crook to strip Trump of his nomination, handing it instead to a pretender, some candidate who had lost to Trump or not so much as offered for the nomination but who is more amenable and agreeable to the establishment. But if it comes to that then what comes next would be as ruinous as it is predictable: Trump would bolt the Republican Party taking with him not only his plurality but a good part of the rest of the base, outraged as they'd be by the hijacking of the vote by the same elites who had for so long disappointed them and worse than disappointed them, leaving Hillary Clinton a cakewalk to the White House with considerably less than half the popular vote, and Trump would form an "alt-Right" conservative alternative party placing second in the general election, leaving the old-line rump Republican Party as third-party also-ran. Unless I'm mistaken in all that then the party muckety-mucks may be expected in the end to think better of stripping Trump of his rightful nomination, and thus the race is run and Donald Trump has won it.

Things to come

This vision of the future is less statistical than mystical, but for whatever little it's worth it's my sense that any candidate for a major-party presidential nomination who even before he has secured that nomination has driven the news practically daily from summer to spring, has been damned by the lame-duck administration on diplomatic missions, has been the object of debate in the Mother of Parliaments, has been damned by the pope of Rome, and has been protested by the Left as though he's a sitting president already, is not a candidate who'll be swept aside come Election Day, powerless and forgotten. 

To shake the earth

I watched the opening to some documentary on some early English punk bandleader -- another of those Netflix titles one bails on a few minutes in -- and this fellow was on about 1968 and feeling then like a movement was afoot. "Year Zero", again. Well, '68 was not the last word in movements, and movements are not a monopoly of the Left, and witnessing the Donald Trump ascendancy and the Waxahachie bus-blockers and the rest, I'm getting to where I almost believe "There's somethin' happenin' here," a roiling of the resurrected silent majority, reactionary and radicalized, unabashedly rightist and unreconstructed-ly retro.

If it comes to pass that Donald Trump walks out the other end of the primaries with the Republican nomination for president of the United States, then it may be that the nomination and not inconceivably the course of the greatest nation the world has seen were decided over a couple days in December, when Trump uttered some fairly strong words, and every elite and his dog damned him as worse than Hitler, but the American people declared for Trump. No slow-news party primaries in the slow-news month of December, but a December and a GOP nomination to shake the earth.

The story of the 2015-'16 Republican presidential primaries as of this writing is that when in the summer Donald Trump came out against illegal aliens and came down against them harder than was dreamt possible, he was elevated to frontrunner while those candidates who damned him fell away; then when at year's end Trump came out against Muslim immigration and came down against it harder than was dreamt possible, to universal damnation except by the people, he achieved something of a critical mass per the polls while those candidates who damned him were washed away, leaving Ted Cruz as least-distant first-runner-up, Cruz being not coincidentally the most rightward and Trumpian of the dozen other-than-Trumps in the race.

I've lived to cringe at a prophesy or two, and these most unconventional of Republican presidential primaries have defied forecasting, but for whatever little it's worth I'm persuaded and have been since December at least that the base of the Republican party are agreed and thus the Republican primaries are decided. The header on the polls of these R primaries for near enough to half a year might as well read "Trump leads," and the details of those polls have corroborated their headlines: the runners-up to Trump are not so much alternatives to Trump as alternative Trumps, in substance if not in style inasmuch as Donald Trump stands quite alone in that way. And those candidates who go by the wayside, who poll at the margin of error or worse, are very often those same candidates who damn Trump. Plus which 2016 is not 2012: where in the 2011-'12 cycle the conservative base of the Republican Party were forever flitting from one fleeting conservative alternative to the next, never lighting on one man to translate their majority to victory, in the present primaries the base are agreed, consolidating around a "conservative avenger", in Bill O'Reilly's apt coinage.

The news-and-views types are wont to make out that the Republican Party is in civil war, although they've been reporting a "Republican crack-up" for about as long as I've followed American politics and government, but like the stopped clock that's right twice a day they may at last have a point, only not much more than a point. The party has divided, assuredly, but not the base, i.e, the real people of the Republican Party as opposed to their leadership; the divide has opened between those real people on the one side and some of their leadership opposite them. And if the base of a party are agreed, agreed on principles and priorities and agreed also on a nominee, then any intraparty "civil war" must necessarily resolve in their favor. Leadership are disposable, and the base are vast enough to carry the party away with them if they bolt, although it strikes me as of this writing that the establishment of the Republican Party are at least as liable as its base to revolt.

It's been a century and a half since last a third party ascended to the Big Two, in 1854-'60, when it was the Republicans who played third party and in a short span supplanted one of the two great national parties, namely the Whigs. The new Republican Party was very like the old Whig Party, and constituted very largely of erstwhile Whigs, with the principal distinction that these Republicans insisted on the abolition of slavery and polygamy, "those twin relics of barbarism," where the Whig platform and program were for various reasons accommodationist of slavery. The hard-line abolitionist Republican Party was founded in 1854 and by 1860 had won its first election for president, those Americans who had voted Whig or might have voted Whig but demanded a stand against slavery having migrated to the novel Republican Party, and that president being an old Whig called Abraham Lincoln. 

I don't now prophesy the formation of a third party to supplant one of the Big Two, although it has to be said that in my time I've not seen any greater prospect of it. The conditions for it are present today as in the middle-19th Century, i.e., the base of a Big Two national party find themselves unrepresented by that party on the great questions of the age. But if the base are agreed and if they nominate Donald Trump as Republican for president then that nomination in itself may have the effect of supplanting the old-line Republican Party, the base having won their argument with the leadership within the party, and wrestled the old party onto a new course.

There is the question of what it is Donald Trump proposes which has precipitated this division and decision. It is an ancillary to the Trump program of turning back the effective invasion and colonization of the United States by the Latin American Third World, and amounts to a moratorium on immigration to the United States from Islamic societies, although Trump has not always been so artful in his iterations. Some considerable part of the reaction to what is short-handed the "Trump Muslim ban" has run along the lines of "Go to hell," to quote a senior senator and also-ran for Republican presidential nominee, polling by the time of his remarks something like 2% in his home state. (And it's not without significance that the said senator, who damned Trump as shrilly as any Republican and in terms most like any leftist and Democrat, promptly failed out of the race altogether.)

Then there's the superficially more substantial-sounding "no religious test" objection, that the immigration system can't ask a petitioner's religion much less decide yea or nay on the answer, but that's to miss the point, that immigration law may restrict immigration from certain countries, and those countries may happen to be immoderate Islamic societies. Couch the Trump proposal with more precision as something like a "restriction on immigration from certain nations whose societies' beliefs are demonstrably harmful to the United States and its people, laws, and ways," and it's a good deal harder to protest. And then there's the "unconstitutional" objection, which may be dispatched thusly: the United States Constitution is a constitution for the United States, which is why we persist in calling it "the United States Constitution", and some Yemeni who turns up at the American border asking admittance has no Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms, say, because the Second Amendment to the Constitution is a protection for Americans, citizens and residents, not for the wide world and anyone in it who knocks at our door.

And has not the question of what a President Trump could and could not do in restricting immigration been mooted by the Obamian precedent of government by executive order and administrative rule-making, which Obama and his administration have applied to immigration policy as much as any? Can the Left and the Democrat Party and the press suppose that this precedent they've championed and cheered, of government-because-I-say-so, will obtain for presidents with that "D" appended to their titles but never to presidents they don't much care for? And how would that be effected, that a President Obama could do as he darn pleased, and if he were succeeded by a President Clinton then she could do the likewise, but if Obama were succeeded by a President Trump then all those Constitutional constraints on a president of the United States dead and buried in the Age of Obama would be resurrected miraculously? How do the Left and Democrats and press propose to enforce this new constitutional order, by which the powers of the presidency vary by the partisan identification of the president? Inasmuch as the Left and Democrat Party and press cannot accept that the rules are the rules, that the Constitution obtains no less for a Democrat presidency than for a Republican one, what a President Obama could get away with could be gotten away with also by a President Trump.

Then there is the question of electability. Like the New York Times wondering in a headline at a drop in crime "despite" a corresponding rise in incarcerations, the news coverage in the wake of Trump's declaring against Muslim immigration and the reaction to it, or what I saw of that coverage, marveled at Trump's holding and indeed lengthening his lead, "despite" his "Muslim ban". When in the hours and days after the Trump declaration he was rewarded in the polling and again a week later when his polling climbed higher still to the highest yet registered in the primaries, doubling the first-runner-up Cruz who's the nearest thing to Trump, the headline-level angle on the coverage ran along the lines of "Trump leads despite..." and "Trump at new heights despite...." I suppose it may be that these newsmen know better but are compelled or cowed by political correctness to play dumb, but very obviously Trump's numbers were up and his denouncers' numbers down precisely because Trump had defied the elite and their dogma of a decade and a half post-9/11 in his novel suggestion that we not import populations from that part of the world which hates our ever-living guts or wants us all dead and burning in hell, not "despite" it.

I would venture that any voter in 2016 whose vote for president is a vote for more Muslims, would on no account vote Republican or conservative, and I'd go one further and venture that a goodly number of Americans who are reliably Democrat in their voting but not so reliably leftist in their thinking would find their teeth gritted when their party and their nominee damned Trump's Muslim moratorium, even if they couldn't depart from their Democrat tribalism or their self-interest in voting themselves Free Stuff. Trump loses not a vote that wasn't lost to him anyhow, and more that that, I fail to see why any Republican should fear the electoral politics of a Candidate Trump's proposing to protect and preserve the nation while a Candidate Clinton insists that all is well and Islam is the "religion of peace" and what America needs now is more Muslims. Oppose the Trump Muslim moratorium if you will, on some principle or imagined principle, but never as an electoral calculation. 

There's a minor cliche on the Right -- "When did we vote for this?" -- invoked on immigration policy as much as any. The question of immigration, its numbers and sources, has in these last decades in this country and the wider Western world been placed well outside the democratic process, to be determined by some nameless elite, impeccable in their multiculturalism and unaccountable to the people, on the understanding that the people are not so impeccable in their multiculturalism, not so post-nationalist.

Which goes some way to dispatching the question of "electability" and brings us to the proposed banishment of Donald Trump from Britain. It seems some "journalist" in Scotland started a petition to the Mother of Parliaments at Westminster, that one Donald J. Trump be banished from the United Kingdom, where Trump owns properties which presumably employ some number of Britons and generally enhance the place, owing to Trump's proposal of the Muslim moratorium and his general offending of elite and leftist sensibilities. (Scotland incidentally is the birthplace of Trump's legal-immigrant mother and the home of his Presbyterian denomination.) The petition was heard and the banishment was debated, notwithstanding that banishment in Britain is a ministerial prerogative outside the powers of Parliament, but Parliament of course declined the measure and the spectacle of course served to "embiggen" Trump -- the Mother of Parliaments is not debating bills to do with even Barack Obama much less Ted Cruz or Carly Fiorina or the rest of the Republican also-rans -- elevating the man to global colossus and his Muslim moratorium to earth-shaker.

The Left are generally very savvy about these things, but when it comes to Donald Trump their savvy fails them and they wind up quite involuntarily promoting Trump and his campaign and causes. The Left are great ones for bans, grand ones and petty ones, on anything they happen not to care for be it firearms or insecticides or perfumes, and they're great ones also for bringing the crushing power of government down onto heads, plus which they're liable to that totalitarian impulse of making an example, ruining the first fellow to stick his neck out and say peep against their dogmas, "pour encourager les autres", so I can only suppose all that had some part in the petition to ban Trump from Britain. 

But I can only suppose too that those leftists who drove the petition are anticipating a British Trump or in any case a British answer to the Trump Muslim moratorium, and anticipating that the people of Britain assuredly would turn back the Muslim tide if only they were offered the opportunity. Why it should matter so desperately to the Left that our countries be flooded by those people most alien and hostile to us and our ways is a question with answers political and indeed electoral, and psychological; the point here is that if Donald Trump wins the nomination and presidency and institutes his moratorium, that example may be taken up in the wider Western world, it may even amount to a hinge in history, and certainly it'll shake the earth.

The Trumpian ascendancy as answer to Obamian because-I-say-so governance

For some while I've asked without satisfactory answer whether the Obama precedent of fiat, unilateral, rule-by-decree, because-I-say-so governance will die with the Obama presidency, or if maybe it will be applied to Democrat presidencies but not Republican ones, or if any president henceforth might follow the Obamian precedent and do just as he darn pleases, enforcing or not enforcing the law as he would prefer it to have been written, conveniently redefining "treaty" and "war" so as to circumvent Constitutional demands of Congressional assent, enacting society-wide and calamitous legislation by parliamentary trick and over the screams of the American people, and governing very largely through executive orders and administrative rule-makings.

Obama is objectively lawless; the catalogue of his lawlessness may be had from those researchers and authors and bloggers not driven by the cataloguing to despair for the Republic and despair of living. In times past academics and politicos and have invoked that old name of "imperial presidency" and abused it to damn any president and presidential policy they happen not to care for, but Obama's is an imperial presidency in the true and full sense, an approach to governance as seen in the emergency measures of the Civil War and world wars or in the New Deal excesses of Franklin Roosevelt, as for instance piling judges onto the Supreme Court 'til he'd made himself a friendly majority and effectively extinguished the judiciary as independent of his will.

Barack Obama is of course contemptuous of America, or else those haters of America in this country and globally wouldn't have recognized in him one of their own and descended into slavering Obama-adulation, so one is left to suppose that to advise Obama that this fiat or that would defy the Constitution or conventions of the United States, is to argue for it, to his way of thinking. Plus which Obama is nothing if not a creature of the post-1968 hard-Left, and the Left since its advent in the mad and bloody French Revolution has always and everywhere an impulse to totalitarianism: see for e.g. Animal Farm by Orwell whose words are paraphrased in the paragraph prior.

Elected Republicans have had no answer to Obamian because-I-say-so governance. To take the example of Obama's lawless executive order legalizing millions of illegal aliens, which unilateralism Obama himself had pronounced impossible and unconstitutional something over twenty times as president, the Republican idea was the classical and constitutional one, that Congress is invested by the Constitution with the "power of the purse" and may nullify an executive action by declining to fund it. That of course went noplace, made a good excuse for bad press for the Republicans in Congress by the Democrats who are the press, and left the conservative base of the Republican Party frustrated and worse.

And so we come to Donald Trump. Trump promises his presidency will be an end to that abuse and defrauding of the 14th Amendment which goes by the name of "anchor babies", to take but one example. When reflexively the elites and the go-along-to-get-along gang commence their amateur legal lectures on judicial precedent and all that rot, Trump spits back however sloppily that every American knows this practice of hurrying the Mexican girl over the border and into the emergency room for the free (i.e., paid for by someone other than the Mexican girl) delivery of her baby in United States jurisdiction, so as to anchor the mother and her family to the United States through this "American citizen" Mexican infant, is nothing resembling the intent of the framers of the 14th Amendment much less the Founders of the Republic; the Constitution and immigration law are abused and defrauded by these anchor babies, he's the man to put that right, and the elites can go cry into their milk and cookies.

To be a leftist in the 21st Century is to hate America and to make war daily in ways great and small on all things recognizably American, so it has been an alloyed joy to the Left to observe Obama do as they would have him do and at the same time to extend a contemptuous and insolent middle-finger to the Constitution which they regard as some relic of barbarism. But if the gentle reader will pardon the cliche, what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

When Julius Caesar upturned centuries of Roman republicanism, the ancient constraints on political power repudiated and the democratic Plebeian Council and constitutional Senate rendered pretenses, Rome was the tyranny of one man ever after. Caesar was not the one to formalize Rome's transformation from republic to monarchy-by-another-name, but he had crossed the Rubicon, in more ways than one. The Obama precedent of because-I-say-so governance may not be so irrevocable as Caesar's, but were Obama to be succeeded by a president whose instincts and impulses are disposed in that direction, that successor would find all the precedent he could hope for in Obama's two terms. It's as the English historian William Warde Fowler wrote in the 19th Century of Caesar's autocracy, that "it struck the keynote by which a clever successor might tune the system to the sensitive ear of the Roman world."

Any Democrat president henceforth may be expected to demand no fewer prerogatives than Obama got away with, and by now we're fully a century past the first "Progressive" Democrat president, namely Wilson, who regarded the Constitution expressly as an obsolescent obstacle to "progress", so what constraint is left to tether and fetter any Democrat president? Republicans elevate the Constitution and the founding principles of the Republic practically to a theology, and God bless them for it, but mightn't the next Republican president find he couldn't afford to play by the rules while the other side played anything-goes? And anyway Donald Trump is not a classical Republican, and is accustomed to the miniature tyranny of boss in a business bearing his name.

Those American people rallying to Donald Trump have observed this Age of Obama and the futility of resisting Obamian lawlessness with Constitutional law, and they appreciate that America is in collapse, that much has been lost and much is in jeopardy, and that it will take some extraordinary reaction to put right what has gone wrong. The Republican Party is not wrong but it is cowed and certainly it's been ineffective. And so it may be that this Trumpian ascendancy in the Republican primary is in part a reaction to Obama and his lawlessness and to the collapse and ruin of America which is not Obama's error but his policy and purpose, and a reaction also to the futility of the by-the-rules Republican answer to Obamaism.

I grind no axe for Donald Trump or against him, and neither do I venture a forecast for the primary and general elections, but were Trump to win the primary and the presidency, would he not be the type to take Obama's because-I-say-so governance for his precedent, if not also to run with it? Maybe that's to misjudge the man, or maybe some force would constrain a President Trump from doing as President Obama has been at liberty to do. But were the next president to claim the powers of the last then what consistent and coherent argument could be raised against him?

The 9/11 catch-22; Short-shrifting the Soviets, and rightly; The trouble with sci-fi

The 9/11 catch-22

The catch-22 is that America today will not act to forestall a second 9/11 attack, absent a second 9/11 attack; it'd take a second 9/11 to move America to action on a scale which would spare us that second 9/11.

And to wait on Pearl Harbor is not only to concede the first strike and condemn its victims. The war which follows is liable to be that much bigger and bloodier for the wait, the enemy having been permitted to gather and grow and to run amok long after it might've been squelched so much more quickly and cleanly. But 'twas ever thus, and this is an argument rejected by all but a certain, Churchillian, and martial strain of rightist thought, until it's accepted universally, ex post facto.

The generation of the Hitler war was converted to Churchillianism, invoked "appeasement" as the dirtiest of words, and saved us again after that war by their proaction and peace-through-strength. But the generation of their very children unlearned their lesson. And what's worse is that so far from pushing and pulling the nation toward Churchillianism, the present national leadership are among the most defiant in their repudiation of it. It's not for nothing that among Barack Obama's early acts as president was the banishment of the bust of Winston Churchill, given the American president by the British prime minister in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Obama ordering it turned out of the White House and returned to its sender.

There's nothing now to be argued, nothing to be done; they won't learn in the abstract, won't learn from history, won't learn 'til it's too late for learning, and evidently that'll be the way 'til Doomsday.

Short-shrifting the Soviets, and rightly

I've detected a revisionism in latter-day histories of the Second World War, making out that we in the English-speaking world have been blinkered or anyway neglectful in not sufficiently honoring the Soviet contribution and sacrifice, those 20 million Soviet dead and all the rest. Well, those revisionists ought to credit their own kind for a little more: we've not been neglectful much less blinkered; we've had good cause to decline to sing hosannas for the Soviet war effort.

The Soviet Union effectively allied with Hitler in their Non-aggression Pact, joined in Hitler's conquest of Poland, and conspired with Hitler in annexing the Baltic states and parts of Finland and Romania, and when the Soviets did at long last take up arms against Naziism it was only after the Nazi empire had smashed into Russia and its empire and bid fair to extinguish Bolshevism. The Soviets allied with Hitler when a Nazi-Soviet pact was on offer and in the end "only killed Germans to keep from being killed by Germans", to invoke a very fine observation from Herman Wouk's Winds of War.

A goodly part of that 20 million Soviet dead is down to the incompetence, paranoia, and stupidity of Stalin, and to the madness of the Soviet system which would elevate a man to its god. Stalin had "purged" a good deal of his finest commanders before Hitler's Operation Barbarossa invasion of the Soviet Union. Stalin was heedless even to the extraordinary personal warning from Winston Churchill of the certain German invasion, out of mad paranoia that Churchill's warning was a piece to some Western plot. Or take the moment in 1942 when half a million Soviet forces were on the point of German encirclement, and Stalin shrugged off the sound advice to order the retreat of those troops so they might live to fight another day, so that when the Germans completed the circle the day following, the U.S.S.R. was out half a million men-in-arms.

And the coup de grace to this notion that the Soviets deserve and demand greater honor for their war effort is of course that the Soviets didn't so much liberate eastern Europe from Naziism as substitute their totalitarianism for Hitler's, and enforced their Soviet empire 'til near enough to the end of the century.

The Soviets killed Germans, and bully for them, but their reasons were the basest and had it been up to them they'd have carried on as conspirators with Hitler; their losses were in some considerable part on them; and they weren't liberators but alternate oppressors. And that in brief is why the Soviet Union is short-shrifted in our honoring of the heroes of the Second World War, and may it ever be thus.

The trouble with sci-fi

I wouldn't presume to write science-fiction -- I'm not science-minded much less educated formally or otherwise in that side of things, my fiction devolves necessarily into humor, etc. -- but I do presume to make an observation or four on the universe of science-fiction of the past half-century-and-more.

What confronts me when I dwell at all on space is the size and scale of it. And yet battle scenes in Star Wars or Star Trek or Battlestar Galactica or what-have-you very often are practically glorified WWI dogfights transplanted to space. My idea is that the scale of space war would be something closer to a galactic End of Days. Maybe unengineering a solar system, to bring its heavenly bodies crashing together and smashing to atoms and burning to vapor any life therein. That sort of thing.

　
And silence: they do say space is silent, and yet even the more serious science-fiction very often inserts great, thunderous bangs and booms for sound effects to accompany their explosions in space. Maybe the directors imagine that the cinematic effect of an explosion would be lost absent its SFX, but I say depicting an explosion absent the sound would if anything be more arresting for being so alien and counterintuitive. I'd run music, maybe balletic music, for a soundtrack to any explosions in space. Mightn't hurt if the video was slowed, too.

　
And no pressing of buttons. No red buttons, no flashing buttons, no booping buttons, no buttons plus keyholes, no buttons at all. Surely if these advanced beings of science-fiction can't yet think a thing into being then they'd wave a hand or some such and the machines would take that for their cues. If a fellow means for his dog to back away then he need only look at the dog and wave his hand as if to say "Back away," and the dog understands well enough. So in science-fiction it ought to be that if a fellow, say, wants his lights out, he looks in the direction of some lighting interface and gestures "Off," and it's done. Science-fiction is crammed with buttons, and they're altogether hidebound and hackneyed.

　
Also in my science-fiction that'll never be, the tech is preposterously advanced but the society is self-consciously conservative: it'd have been scared straight by the civilizational collapse that is not only the product of leftism but its purpose. Conservatism isn't ideology or tradition, since 1968, so much as self-preservation. It's one of the more historically illiterate conceits of the Left that history moves from right to left. The '80s, the '50s, Victorianism, Puritanism, etc., all were historical shifts rightward, or "rightward" as we'd conceive it. History develops in both directions and has done since well before those directions were recognizably Left and Right, so in science-fiction as in nonfiction the future might easily run rightward.

The barbarous Continent; The suicide-pact Left; Mission accomplished and the tide of war; Aryanism for Chinamen

The barbarous Continent

The notion of Continental Europe as the home and heart of "enlightenment" is a conceit of the Left and a fantasy; it's in the English-speaking world where is found stability and decency and rule of law and inalienable rights, to a fault. In Continental Europe as I write this there is a good old-fashioned shooting war over borders, there was genocide as recently as the 1990s, and societies as far westward as Germany and as recently as the '80s were totalitarian, not to mention that Iberian fascism survived into the '70s, and to say nothing of the culling and extinguishing of European Jewry within the lifetimes of my parents, with the cooperation and collaboration of civilians in Germany and across occupied Europe, and with pan-European auxiliaries filling out the Nazi armies, and with three-fifths of France capitulating to Hitler voluntarily. Europe is not one generation removed from genocide, and is even now yawning at the dawn of a new age of violent territorial struggle, so if for instance the Muslims of France and Europe imagine themselves to be secure or their supply of supplemental Muslim immigrants to be assured, they have no grounds for it in the histories of their hosts.

The suicide-pact Left

Leftism in this 21st Century amounts to a sort-of civilizational suicide pact, to wit: the impulse to kill the goose that laid the golden egg, to starve and beat and damn the producers; the demands for wave on swamping wave of immigration, of only those most alien outsiders, or better yet the most hostile; the incapacity for taking our side in a war, damning as wickedness any measure for the national defense much less the national interest, with the attendant apologizing for the enemy; the apologizing also for convicts, casting as victims the victimizers and demanding their turning out of the prisons and onto the streets; the affirmative celebration of abortion and euthanasia and homosexuality; the denial not of religion so much as of Christianity, and persecution of its true believers; and the damning of any impulse to nationalism or patriotism, and equally an unthinking glorying in all things exotic, for the reason of their exoticism. One could go on, but QED. The Left anymore are Frankfurt Schoolers to a man, wittingly and otherwise, their cause is contempt and disdain, and their purpose to tear it down, blow it up, and watch it burn.

Mission accomplished and the tide of war

There was a time when it was great sport for the Left and the Democrat Party to observe that President Bush had stood before a banner reading "Mission Accomplished", that banner having to do with the Iraq War and the occasion being the toppling by American and allied forces of the Saddam Hussein regime in spring '03. Those Democrats and leftists were of course making hay, but they were unjust inasmuch as the "mission" in question had well and truly been "accomplished": Bush had ordered the deposition of the Hussein regime, and a matter of weeks thereafter that order had been executed to completion.

Obviously the reconstruction and democratization turned out to be long and costly and bloody, but the rest of that story is that after the "light footprint" policy was demonstrated in '06 finally to have failed, Bush remade it utterly, ordering the surge policy in January '07, that policy going into effect fully in middle June of that year and turning the war decisively as of early August. I.e., the failed Bush policy was recognized as a failure by Bush himself, whereupon he set to putting it right, and half a year after his order and a month and a half after its execution, he had effectively won the war. Or rather, Bush had won the war for some years before Obama junked the victory, cavalierly and indulgently, nullifying the sacrifice, forfeiting to ISIS and Iran what that sacrifice had won, and condemning the Iraqi people again to war and brutality and tyranny, all for nothing greater than the ideology and partisanship and vanity of Barack Obama.

The "Mission Accomplished" banner on that aircraft carrier in spring '03 was conceived by the Left and the Democrat Party as some world-historic folly on Bush's part, never mind that the "mission" in question was about as "accomplished" as any ever is, or that the unaccomplished, secondary mission also was effectively accomplished in summer '07. But for presidential pronouncements on war, there can be no folly to excel Obama's "The tide of war is receding".

Obama was precisely and catastrophically wrong in the assessment and in the thinking behind it, which guided his foreign and defense policies and determined that his "tide of war" would crash over the greater Middle East, harder and farther than we warmongering types dreamt possible. To take for a case-study just one of those enemies who want us all dead and burning in hell, ISIS presently occupies a great swath of Iraq and Syria, and operates in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Jordan, and Lebanon. And ISIS was undreamt of until this Age of Obama. The monumental irony is that the "tide of war" had turned, before Obama and despite him, and it was Obama who brought it crashing back.

Aryanism for Chinamen

The 2012 Chinese film with the nondescript and cliched title of The Assassins purports to tell some history circa 200 BC, and looks to be official, not to say any major motion picture could be released in China if it ran afoul of the Politburo in Beijing. It's a cliche of the Asian history picture, with the mass choreography and the comicbook combat and the fantastical "Forbidden City" sets and costumery. But then, the Chinese never were accused of restlessly reinventing and reimagining, and they're nothing if not slaves to uniformity and conformity. What rates notice is that the movie makes out from the outset that China was the summit of the world even as of 200 BC, and sacrifices historical authenticity for grandeur, so that anyone might be forgiven for concluding its purpose is not to tell history as it was, so much as to promulgate a mythology of Chinese greatness and superiority.

The Assassins mostly duplicates that fantastical-martial-arts-and-fantastical-Forbidden-City formula that no-one outside the hermetic seal of Chinese Communism could mistake for a representation of reality, not even those Westerners in thrall to Orientalism or the ones of our number who appreciate the genre for the preposterous fantasy that it is. It's the domestic audience that's cause for fretting: this is Aryanism for Chinamen, the sort of national mythology invoked to enact the wickedest atrocities in the world. Only a truly and deeply Christian nation can bear mythology like that, direct it to noble ends, and China like Germany is elementally pagan.

And while I'm at it, my summary review of the 2012 Anglo-Canadian-German miniseries World Without End, derived from the novel by Ken Follett: Crap dialogue, politics and preoccupations of a 21st C elite presented as 14th C history, contemporary conventions and cliches only incidentally set in the Middle Ages, unworthy and unwatchable. Magnificent title, though.

Where the enemy is not

We were where the enemy was not.

In Vietnam we contained ourselves for the most part to the South, against an enemy which operated there but based in North Vietnam and transited through Cambodia.

In Afghanistan we kept mostly to that country with its hundreds of routes over the nominal border to Pakistan, against an enemy that came and went between Afghanistan and Pakistan which was sometimes and in some ways an ally of ours but too often played host and enabler to the other side.

And presently in this Third Iraq War we constrict our halting, little-as-we-can-get-away-with semi-war in large part to Iraq, against an enemy that forms effectively a state covering a swath of Syria as much as Iraq and approximate in its territory to Jordan.

Analogies to the Second World War are frequently facile but occasionally useful, and had our civilian leadership in that war directed that we fight Germany in France or Holland but not in Germany, then Hitler might've been contained, at least until his war machine devised some means of breaking the containment, but there could've been no defeating and dismantling the Third Reich and neutering its menace.

This diminutive post will go mostly unread and wholly unheeded, and I can't think why it should be otherwise: I can't claim to be a scholar of military history and certainly I'm no holder of public office. But I do presume to have just a little sense, and it strikes me that so long as a considerable element of the enemy is in safety, with a base for supplying and regrouping and recruiting, and for undertaking fresh offensives, then there can be no prospect of victory.

Eisenstein's Ivan The Terrible; The nobody's unsolicited campaign outline for the GOP in '16; On decking the "halls"

I. Eisenstein's Ivan The Terrible

Sergei Eisenstein's Ivan The Terrible is a talking silent picture, really, or if you like, an opera or ballet set to film.

The acting in Ivan is at least as overwrought as in any silent picture, and without the silent picture's excuse of being compelled to tell its story visually, and more than that, Ivan is positively operatic or balletic in its staging and contrivances and theatrics and dialogue, but it may be because it's so very far over-the-top, so unabashed in it, and so alien, that Ivan is excused all that. Eisenstein had been a theater man and a director of silents, and it shows. Anyhow, art can't be faulted for being no more or less than it claims to be, only for pretensions to something other or greater than it is.

Ivan is nothing if not anti-German, but nonetheless for that it might justifiably be counted as a later specimen of German Expressionist influence, although it has to be said that the Nazis were not the greatest admirers of the Interwar German school of Expressionism so the Expressionists may qualify as "good Germans". The picture goes so far into Expressionism as to shoot the shadows of the actors cast against a wall for the climax to the scene where Ivan expounds his geopolitical strategy of allying with Elizabeth I and England against the Germans and Livonians, with Ivan's shadow towering over his subordinate's and arching over the shadow of Ivan's armillary sphere which stands in for a globe.

To observe that Ivan drips with politics -- ideological, geopolitical, and personal -- and politics of the bluntest, most bludgeoning sort, would be facile, because it was after all a Soviet film commissioned by Stalin personally. Communism makes politics of every element of life and has done since Marx and Engels, and Stalin was the most totalitarian of Soviet totalitarians, so when Joseph Stalin orders a biopic on the Russian tyrant he most admires, that'll be a political picture. What's less excusable is the apologia in Ivan for Stalin's murderous paranoia: even in his the middle of his siege of Kazan, Ivan is warned gravely that Tartar arrows aren't to be worried about so much as the boyars back home, who are in the film one-dimensionally villainous, forever self-seeking and plotting, forever traitors and rebels against unitary, central command.

And as masterful as any element of Ivan is its score, by another Russian called Sergei, Sergei Prokofiev, who is by my lights among the toweringest composers of any nation or age. Prokofiev had scored Eisenstein's earlier Russian history talkie Alexander Nevsky, and worked that score into a cantata which is in its own right among the greater musical works of the 20th Century. The score to Ivan is very like Prokofiev: grand and dramatic, lyrical and fantastical, irreproducibly original, and at once 20th Century and ancient. For the theme Prokofiev composed a tangled, fairly Medieval-sounding, and even counterintuitive counterpoint, blared by horns with the effect of a stylized fanfare, as befits a king or in this case a czar. Well and truly a masterful score and reason enough to watch Ivan The Terrible.

II. The nobody's unsolicited campaign outline for the GOP in '16

Assuming the bitter end of this Age of Obama turns out anything like it bids fair now to do, with Republicans in Congress passing a pile of bills while Obama in his White House plays Julius Caesar and attempts the abolition of the republic in favor of his imperial say-so, I offer herewith a nobody's unsolicited campaign outline for the Grand Old Party in 2016:

A nationalized and coordinated Republican platform with highly specific agenda items, possibly for enactment within the first 100 days of the new presidency, and with the Republican nominee for president as well as the assorted Republican candidates for Congress singing from that same hymnbook.

Items like, say: "Within the first ten days, a new Republican president and Congress will welcome construction to completion of the Keystone XL Pipeline to secure a cheap and steady supply of crude oil to American refineries from our cousin-nation to the north, and to generate jobs and business direct and indirect without cost to the taxpayer." And useful subpoints like, say: "Abolition of Obamacare's 30-hours rule which has untold masses of Americans working part-time when there's work enough for full-time hours and full-time pay."

Etc., etc. I appreciate that this is more the way of campaigns in parliamentary systems and not historically in the American one, but I don't propose that it become a fixed feature of American national elections, and of course something very like it was managed in the Contract With America midterm elections of '94, only absent the coordination of presidential and congressional campaigns. Plus which, it may be that by 2016 Congressional Republicans have a modest mountain of bills already fleshed out and written up and awaiting only a president who'll put his signature to them.

III. On decking the "halls"

I refer of course to the Christmas carol which per Wikipedia is a Welsh tune, with verses by a Scotsman, in English. Another of those ancient carols collected and published in the 19th Century, this one from the 16th Century.

The carol takes its title from those opening words of "Deck the halls". "Deck" there is applied in the sense of "decorate", which is remote to contemporary usage but not unknown. And surely "halls" isn't meant in that sense most familiar to us today, of "corridors"; surely no Christmas carol exhorts its listeners to adorn their functional little passageways and vestibules. Which by process of elimination leaves "halls" as in "great, grand gathering places": "Adorn and brighten your grand meeting places."

 And while I'm about it, I fail to see how substituting "Christmas" with "holiday" or "holidays" should appease the tiny, tyrannical minority of joyless atheists and secularists, except through semiliteracy: "holiday" means literally "holy day".

Story of the Cape Island boat

It happens that my grandfather not long before he passed helped settle a minor dispute as to the origins of the Cape Island boat. And he knew whereof he spoke. William E. "Bill" Smith was himself a builder of Cape Island boats in the 1930s and '40s and '50s, and was born at Centreville on Cape Sable Island near enough to the time of the advent of our Cape Island boat, in 1902, in a house built by one of the boat's inventors who like my grandfather and father and a good many other Cape Island boatbuilders was a carpenter when he wasn't a boatbuilder. Before he left us, Grampie explained that two men in Clark's Harbour on the Island were "building about the same thing at about the same time and about the same place," namely Ephraim Atkinson and William Kenny, known on the Island in their times as Eefy Atkins and Willy Kenny, and those two together are certainly the inventors of the Cape Island boat. My grandfather's pronouncement as I recollect it now went, "Eefy Atkins gets the credit for the boat, and he deserves it, but Willy Kenny was building about the same thing at about the same time and about the same place." My grandfather was quite adamant that the both men should share in the credit.

As to the name of the thing, Cape Islanders themselves use "Cape Island boat" because obviously a "Cape Islander" to them is a person, but outsiders use "Cape Islander", and outsiders further afield use "Novi boat" or "Downeaster". I take it that "Novi" is short for "Nova Scotia", but Nova Scotians know the boat as the "Cape Islander".

The principal idea of the Cape Island boat was to accommodate a forward engine, which would drive a shaft run through the length of the keel and fixed to an aft propeller, with a rudder mounted on the skeg directly behind, the propeller and rudder being fully submerged. The idea would succeed the sloop which had been the workboat of the Island and Municipality since their settlements in the founding migration of New England Planters in the 1760s.

The older Cape Island boats were not so long as a lot of their more contemporary descendants, very much narrower at their beams, lower at their sides, shallower in their drafts, and they narrowed more sharply toward their sternboards. The old-time boats were built low enough at the sides to where a couple strong men could pick a boat up by grabbing it around the gunwales at the stern, where anymore a man can just about stand upright in the draft of a larger Cape Island boat, "grounded out". And the tubbiest of today's Cape Island boats can run half as wide as they are long, where on the older boats the ratio of length overall to beam would be something like 3:1, and until not so very long ago 2:1 was unthinkable. But the fundamental design and idea of the Cape Island boat is unchanged from the earliest times.

The very old Cape Island boats dispensed sometimes with a wheelhouse altogether, making do with what was called a "spray hood", which is to say an oiled canvas stretched over a wooden frame to afford the pilot some shelter. The older boats were very often "straight sheer", or absent a "break", that diagonal step-up at the main bulkhead to allow for more headroom in the forecastle and more hull forward for higher seas. A pilothouse, a sort of windowed bump on the forward deck, was found on a lot of the older boats through to more recent times, before the hulls went tall enough to where there was no call for the extra forward headroom of the pilothouse.

The construction of those old, wooden Cape Island boats didn't diverge appreciably from the construction of wooden boats and ships more generally, but a point or two on wooden-age construction may be useful here. A Cape Island boat in those times began as what was called a "half-model", which is to say a hand-carved scale-model of half a hull, to be chopped into sections, measured, and scaled up for the construction of the wooden hull. A Cape Island hull is a lot of curves and not so many angles, and any hull must be perfectly symmetrical, so one side can't be duplicated exactly by hand and eye, but the one side may be measured and mirrored. The hulls as well as the superstructures on the old boats were built to their owners' specifications and so every inch of the half-model for a hull was amendable, 'til the boat was just so. Then among the finishing stages, "knees" or L-shaped reinforcements connecting the deck and bulwark were cut out of tree roots, where the tree met the ground.

The Cape Island boat was of course a wooden boat, until the 1970s and later, before Reginald "Reggie" Ross of Stony Island -- which notwithstanding the insular name is another of the communities of Cape Sable Island -- added his chapter to the story. Reggie Ross had studied chemistry in England and was familiar with fiberglass technology and appreciated the value in applying it to the Cape Island boat, and sometime in the '70s he ordered the requisite supplies and built the first fiberglass Cape Island boat. Since that time and with an interim phase when the later wooden hulls were very often sealed in fiberglass, the hulls of Cape Island boats have been formed of solid fiberglass in fiberglass molds, a mold being a sort of inside-out boat, derived from a "plug" which is a wooden hull built more or less in the way Cape Island hulls were built from the earliest times. Cape Island boats still for the most part are "finished" in wood so as to be amendable to the specifications of their owners, with any woodwork that's to be exposed to the elements being sealed in fiberglass and gelcoat, a heavy paint based on fiberglass resin. But the larger part of the history of the Cape Island boat even now is the history of a wooden boat.

The Cape Island boat never was built for speed, but for seaworthiness and workability. One very fine fisherman from Maine observed that it was "like a tank." The Cape Island boat was taken up near and far -- my family boat business alone in its time built boats for the Island and province, for New Brunswick and Newfoundland, for Quebec and Ontario, for Maine and New Hampshire and Massachusetts and Connecticut, and indeed for Oregon -- and has been in service from its advent early in the 20th Century to this second decade of the 21st Century. That's testament enough, but they do say that the Cape Island boat was known even to Lloyd's of London, as a good risk.

At one point within my lifetime and by our count, or my memory of our count, there were something over twenty working boat shops on the Island; at the time of this writing the grand total would be countable on one hand, with fingers to spare.

(My little and fairly antique website for the family boat business may be found at McGrayBoatbuilders.com. Gone but not forgotten.)

Mid-Century Modern revived, Game of Thrones and Spoils of Babylon reviewed

I. Mid-Century Modern revived

This latter-day vogue for Mid-Century Modern may in some quarters be as insincere as the handlebar-moustache pendant on a teeny-bopper's necklace, and it may even be inspired by a basic-cable TV show, namely Mad Men, but in any event the revival of that rarefied art or "design" movement of the American 1950s and '60s antedating the annus horribilis of 1968 has by now attained something of a critical mass.

The principal term there is "Modern", and the irony is of course that from our vantage Mid-Century Modern comes across as rather traditional and quaint -- nothing could be more dated than Modern -- not to mention all-American and confident, and most especially ante-1968. As of 1968, Western Civilization was "deconstructed", and some us are picking up and patching together the pieces still, with uneven result.

Andy Warhol makes a serviceable illustration for art post-'68: Warhol had a very fine eye, indisputably, but a fashion stylist may have an excellent eye and yet no-one would confuse her with the fashion designer, and in that same way, Andy Warhol was not so much an artist as a cutter-and-paster of art, and his art amounts too much to isolating fragments from the creations of others for presentation as ironies. 

That sort of thing is all well and good for purposes of satire and so on, but it can't possibly answer a creative, constructive, cohesive movement like Mid-Century Modern. Art since the Fall of Western Civilization has been too often a sifting of the rubble, or a caricature or grotesquery of what came before, where the movements before that time had been constructions of gleaming new edifices. Art Nouveau, Art Deco, Mid-Century Modern, etc.: all brave new worlds in their times, and none of them "deconstructions". The Victorian and Baroque movements may have been derivative, the one of the Gothic Middle Ages and the other of Antiquity, but they took the past for a foundation and built on it, vigorously.

So we look on a movement like Mid-Century Modern with admiration or even envy, and look around at the desolation and destitution that the Hippies and their witless younger apers have made of our civilization, and we can do no better than to invoke the Last Good Age, the last time there was confidence and creation and civilization in our civilization.

II. Three points on Game of Thrones

The sort of schtick of George R. R. Martin, author of the Song of Ice and Fire novels from which Game of Thrones is adapted, is that he makes things awfully, appallingly hard for his characters. Martin writes from Thomas Hobbes' formulation of "the life of man" in a dark-age "Naturall Condition of Mankind" as "solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short". He places his characters in bad situations, then makes things worse for them, and then worse still.

Martin is expert at invoking actual Medieval history and mythology, like Tolkien with whom he shares two middle initials. Beowulf comes readily to mind as a Martin blueprint, in its combining of real and fantastical, in its horrific, limb-severing gore, and in the implication found in Beowulf by its interpreters of the old pagan pantheon of gods giving way to the monotheist Christian Trinity. Martin is worthy of the obvious comparison to Tolkien, who was a devotee of the Dark Ages Anglo-Saxon universe that produced Beowulf.

People do make a fuss about Martin's early-going execution of Ned Stark, who is one of the few fairly unalloyed white hats of the story, inasmuch as killing off a hero to the readership or audience is supposed to be unconventional and a sacrifice for an author. But it strikes me that Martin milks that execution like a fat cow, to the point where I reckon it was no sacrifice at all: Lord Stark of the North is elevated in death to a saint, and his life and execution are invoked to where yes-siree-good-ol'-Ned-Stark becomes a sort-of shorthand for all that was good and might have been, and all that's been lost and might be again. Stark serves the story in death more than he could've done as a going concern.

III. Not quite three points on The Spoils of Babylon

IFC's spoof epic miniseries. Highest commendation possible for style, but the show is sparse for jokes, and what jokes there are, are weak, like as not. Will Ferrell accounts for the better part of the jokes, in his prologue and epilogue commentaries as author and director Eric Jonrosh, and Michael Sheen takes his small role to the nth degree and delivers the funniest line of the show outside of Ferrell's parts ("Louisa May is my guide and my compass"), but otherwise the laughs are too hard to come by. And the show's a cliche of leftism and grinds its axes indulgently.

What Spoils of Babylon gets altogether right is style. It's art, in its way, and manages to make jokes of its art; it elevates style to an end in itself, and a comic end. I'd almost credit it as a novel genre of comedy which might for want of a better appellation be termed here Aesthetics Comedy.

But it may be that the inside-out-turning comedy of this early 21st Century will come from conservatives or libertarians or anyway non-leftists, because those sorts haven't been captured by the conventions of the age.

Observations on moving to Houston

On moving to Houston from parts more northerly, a fellow is liable to observe first that palm trees here are a commonplace, and it does seem that most anything photosynthetic will take and thrive under this sun and in this soil and with this moisture. I can't imagine that there's a more treed, flowered, and shrubbed jurisdiction on God's earth. And Houston's roaches are so very big, I almost think I ought to apply for a hunting license before squashing one.

Houstonians don't tan so much as roast. The sun can be a violent, angry thing at this latitude. I'm given to understand that Houston is hot or warm for something like ten months of the twelve, and I almost wonder if it only turns winterish at all in respectful observance of Christmas: 90-some-odd degrees on December the 25th would after all be an affront to Christmasness.

They claim Houston is the fourth most populous city in the Union anymore, and having been fairly terrorized by the big-city traffic and rents here, I'm disinclined to dispute them. It's no laggard for square mileage, come to that: I've been on the road for 25 minutes and imagined that we must've crossed city and county lines, then appealed to the map and discovered that we hadn't got out of our corner of Houston. There are entire states in New England and the Mid-Atlantic not so awfully bigger than Houston.

Anyone accustomed to the tic-tac-toe board that is the map of Tulsa, OK will observe that the streets of Houston were not plotted on a grid at right angles by some civil engineer, but run at all angles, and curve and swerve, and follow their own courses and logics and histories. Houston was after all founded in the 1830s, when a street still was something that just sort of happened, as people and goods moved from one point to another through features natural and manmade.

A Tulsan will observe also the unidirectionality of Houston's streets, and the great, mounded, gardened islands segregating their two sides, with their requisite U-turning. The grander of Houston's overpasses writhe and rise into the clouds like Jack's Beanstalk, and are formidable structures unto themselves, constituting miniature metropolises of columnar towers.

Work in Houston is done when it needs doing, even if that be on weekends or in the black of night, and road crews or paint contractors may be found on the job at all hours.

Church in Houston is a going concern, not a vanishing ancient rite practiced by scatterings of semi-fossilized stragglers.

I'm no foreigner to the American institution of the Walmart Supercenter, but until I came to Houston I never conceived of one with a wine aisle and a McDonald's in the parking lot, another at the entrance, and still another at the alternate entrance, for a grand total of three McDonald'ses within a matter of yards. Not to say I'm complaining.

Houston is so very rich, I'm reliably informed that a Third Worlder resident here declined a job offer of collecting litter and posting notices for $11.50 an hour, on account of it paid too poorly. Shiny late-model vehicles jam the streets and cram the parking lots, a towering metal-and-glass cupola which may or may not be a stylized representation of a pineapple embellishes a skyscraping new hospital, refrigerator ice-makers come standard-issue, and even the busted-up, dumpstered detritus are nice. I've never felt so poor.

I'm a fellow who's written lines like "Texas accounts for half the 'net new jobs' in all America for the year," and I've been preaching about economic systems and the fruit they bear since I was too young to be preaching about anything, and yet I have no capacity to process prosperity on this sort of scale. Houston and Texas are final proof that American decline is a policy, or the consequence of policy: if certain parts of this country were more Texan, there'd be no notion of American decline, and Churchill's "broad, sunlit uplands" would stretch before America today as in the three-and-a-half centuries 'til sometime in the late 1960s.


I may yet wind up singing "Take Me Back to Tulsa", but I'm privileged to be Gone to Texas.

Vlad the Throwback

Vladimir Putin is a throwback. For Putin, it's as though the 20th Century never happened. Which stands to reason, because for Russia generally the 20th Century was something that happened someplace else.

The 20th Century was very largely a continuation of the later 19th Century 'til sometime around the end of the First World War in 1918, and Russia was knocked out of the war in '17 by the Bolshevik Revolution and descended first into chaos and before long into that Hadean nightmare called communism, 'til the 20th Century was near enough to over. And because communism can't survive the exposure of its people to the alternative, the Soviet Union had of necessity to be a hermetically-sealed hermit-state which would shoot and kill its citizens summarily rather than let them walk across its borders and out of its system. So Russia skipped from the Edwardian world of 1917 to the 1990s, and passed the intervening decades in a bad dream.

The idea that annexing territories is the worst kind of gauche in international relations is novel, coming as it does in the 20th Century among the earlier phases of Western Civilization's project of dismantling itself and reducing the towering, gleaming skyscraper to a useless, miserable little heap of broken and twisted bits. Putin is a quite conventional nationalist and imperialist like is found from the dawn of time 'til sometime in the 20th Century, as alien to the West in 2014 as it is commonplace to every civilization 'til living memory. As though Putin had skipped the 20th Century.

Plus which, it has to be said, Russia is nothing if not self-consciously un-Western, and repudiating the vogues of our Western bien-pensants is a point of pride over there.

So Vladimir Putin is unbound by our decadent 21st Century Western notions of "international law" or even "morality", which in practice amounts to voluntarily binding one or both arms behind our backs in war against barbarians who want us all dead and burning in Hell. Putin's only constraints in the end are practical ones. Putin may be expected to push, in other words, 'til someone pushes back and draws the line that constitutes the geopolitical limits of his Russia. Putin may prefer to reconquer the old Soviet or Czarist empires by maneuver, but then, even Hitler won his early conquests of the Rhineland and Austria and Czechoslovakia and Klaipeda without a shot fired, and it can only be assumed that if push comes to shove, Putin will shove.

Barack Obama's Russia policy from the very outset has been capitulation to Russian demands and psychoses, as gestures of comity to bring about some mythical global harmony or anyway as an uncomprehending rote-Left reaction against George W. Bush. Obama's defense and foreign policies generally are to retreat and contract, which only invites trouble and raises the price of answering it, because threats and half-measures won't suffice without something bigger and badder behind them. If one may be permitted to mix metaphors, a serious president with a demonstrable capacity for pulling triggers and upsetting applecarts may need only rattle a sabre to get the attention of trouble-makers or would-be trouble-makers, but an Obama can wag his finger day and night without effect, because those trouble-makers have the measure of him and understand him to have not the constitution or even the interest to give force to his finger-wagging.

And the West in 2014 isn't much in the mood for anything costly or causing of discomfort, any more than we were in the mood in the 1930s to confront Hitler on his assorted acquisitions, least of all to uphold the sovereignty of Ukraine or Georgia or whatever other old Soviet satellites and Czarist colonies Putin has in mind to reconquer.

So Vladimir Putin is liable to have things his way, and the Lord only knows how far he'll go along that way, unless and until someone pushes back and wins the shoving-match and a very different president of the United States sits in the Oval Office.

Monty Python apostasy

Python is the standard for comedy in the English-speaking world and thus the world more generally, Monty Python's Flying Circus is sick-makingly funny, including post-John Cleese, Monty Python and the Holy Grail is the standard for feature-film comedy in the same way that Flying Circus is the standard for TV sketch comedy, and indeed even the Python LPs are by times miracles of comedy, but...

John Cleese had it more or less right when he walked away from Flying Circus after the first three seasons, or "series" as they call seasons over there. Python was of a particular time and place, it could only exhaust itself and achieve a point of diminishing returns before long, and anyway less is more.

Python and the Holy Grail is cheap and cheerful; it's episodic to the point of being practically glorified sketch comedy and doesn't succumb to service of a plot; it bookends the TV series, so that the Flying Circus spirit hasn't yet gone out of the Pythons; it's All-England, England being the font of comedy in the world and the sort-of infrastructure for a very great deal of Python; and most of all it's comedy for comedy's sake -- comedy first, second, and last and none of your dreadful politics or pretensions, thanks very much.

The two later Python features Life of Brian and The Meaning of Life depart from that Holy Grail formula and are disappointments for it. Life of Brian commits the comedy sin of taking itself seriously. It's politics, it's insufficiently episodic to liberate itself from its point-making plot, its setting and subject could scarcely be any less comic, and it comes too late, after the spirit had passed.

Meaning of Life is at least a compilation of sketches, but it too much presumes to be a proper movie, a big-deal feature film, it has a weightiness if not an air of menace about it which acts as a wet blanket on the fun of the TV series and Grail movie, and by the time of Meaning of Life there wasn't material or spirit enough left in the Pythons to fill a feature film. The Pythons were too old and too changed for a reprise of Flying Circus, and anyway the time for Flying Circus had come and gone.

Which is not to say there's no life after Python, only that the Pythons stayed too long at the fair. Of all the post-Python projects John Cleese's Fawlty Towers is far and away the greatest and incidentally also the proof positive for the Cleese Doctrine of less is more, that series lasting all of two seasons and 12 episodes all told. Cleese was good in Fish Called Wanda and he near enough to hijacked Cheers in his recurring role there, so outshining the rest of the show as to have diminished it in his wake. Cleese doesn't miss too many opportunities to trade on his brand, whether in Schweppes TV ads or Harry Potter cameos, etc., but he's an institution and a sort-of ambassador for Britain, and anyway he was the one Python who got it right, that the thing to do was walk away and quit while Python was ahead.

I dearly love Michael Palin's movies and travelogues post-Python, although those don't presume to be comedy proper; they're more humor than comedy per se. Graham Chapman was a hard-case drunk and died too young, of cancer. Eric Idle has inclined more than I can abide to showtunes. Terry Jones is a politician with jokes. And Terry Gilliam who really never was so much a comic as a visual artist has made of himself a leading exponent of fantastical filmmaking.

And another thing: the Pythons didn't invent comedy or TV comedy or TV sketch comedy or even British TV sketch comedy, and would never pretend to that claim themselves. Flying Circus was derivative of Spike Milligan's Q, and Milligan's Goon Show before that, and the Pythons generally were products of England and of Austerity Britain and of the good schools and of the English way of humor, which goes back further than I'm able to put a finger on.

All that said, I suppose I'm relieved in a way that the Pythons did return to the trough one time too many, or several times too many, because otherwise we might be compelled to venerate them as demigods and despair of attempting humor ourselves.