Becoming the bogeyman, and feminism without the feminine

Becoming the bogeyman

As of this writing, the malicious and mendacious MSNBC proposes that the America-first president of the United States Donald J. Trump has been a "Russian asset since 1987", never mind that when they're not fantasizing of Trump as the agent of an alien and hostile foreign power, they're damning him for his militant American nationalism.

For half a century and more after the Red Scare and its McCarthyism and House Committee on Un-American Activities, it was a theme of the Left and the Democrat Party, and of the press and popular culture, that the Red Scare was as black a chapter as any in history of the republic, so if any leftist after 2016 cries "McCarthyism" then may lightning strike him, because it is the Left who have revived McCarthyism for the first time since the man himself, or more precisely they've become their caricature of Eugene McCarthy. The Russian agents and American conspirators, the wiretaps and transcripts, the Congressional committee hearings and witch trials of decent men, the guilt-by-association and the ascription of nefarious motives to innocuous words and deeds, and the hysteria, the hyperbole and hyperventilation, with its disregard for evidence and for common sense -- to the minutest particular the Left and the Democrat Party have reproduced their caricature of the Red Scare.

Any remark bearing on Russia which is not a calling-down of fire-and-brimstone on Russia, any fleeting dealing with persons from Russia or some lesser Eastern European nation in the vicinity of Russia, even an appearance in the same room with a Russian, among a hundred others, may be isolated and elevated by the Democrats and the press as still more proof of some arachnidan conspiracy for the Russian subversion of American democracy. Never mind that until not so long ago it was a theme of the Democrat Party that any troubles with Putin or Russia under Putin were down to that "cowboy" Bush, and never mind that for a century since the Russian Revolution the Left had defended and excused Russia, re-casting one of the most monstrous regimes of the 20th Century as a superior system where "the little guy gets a hand up" and other such sick-making ignorance. A century was obliterated in an evening, that evening of November 8, 2016 -- the great, psyche-rending trauma of every leftist -- and in their desperation first to deny it and then to "make it go away", the Left have become their bogeyman, the paranoiac imagining Russians "under every bed".

At the same time the Left extraordinarily have converted to cheerleaders for a bogeyman of theirs from the decade after the Red Scare, that bogeyman of the Deep State. "Deep State" is a neologism for a notion which by the late 1960s had seized the Left, of powerful and anonymous forces in the shadows of America's secret services, abusing their extraordinary powers and hiding behind their secrecy to influence events and veto elections. For going on a half-century since the '70s the leftist fantasy of a Deep State subverting democracy had been a fixture of Hollywood movies, but found only in fiction; then with the nomination of Donald J. Trump as Republican candidate for 45th president of the United States, the leftist fantasy was realized, only it turned out, the Deep State weren't conservative much less Republican, and so far from America-firsters, it was the America-first candidate for president they meant to sabotage. So when in 2018 it came out that the FBI had planted a "CIA asset" in the Trump campaign, the Left and the Democrats answered, "God bless the FBI and CIA," or rather they would've answered "God bless" except that the Left and Democrats in the 21st Century have decided that God is dead.

Then there's Watergate. In the election year of 1972 a couple Republican "plumbers" burgled some campaign paperwork from the Democrat headquarters at the Watergate Hotel; President Nixon was oblivious to the burglary and certainly he never ordered the caper, but by the time he swore publicly that he knew nothing of the business at the Watergate, he had been apprised of it. The investigations commenced, and in the end some of Nixon's administration landed in jail and Nixon himself resigned the presidency, after a deputation of Congressional Republicans made it known to him that they meant to vote with the Democrats for impeachment. I hasten to add, the Democrat nominee for president in '72 lost by 49 states to one, and the most extravagant indictment of Nixon doesn't propose that the burgled paperwork altered the vote.

For four decades since, the Left had preened about Watergate, the insufferable press and popular culture at least as much as the Democrat Party, until in the election year of 2016 the Democrat administration and the Democrat campaign for president played Watergate, and to the nth degree. The Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee commissioned a "dossier" from a dodgy outfit run by a Trump-hating ex-British-spy: seven figures for a packet of perfect lies about Trump and Russia. The campaign first peddled their costly dossier to the press, and then kicked it up to the Obama administration, who presented it to a FISA court, knowing it was the doing of Clinton and the DNC but not letting on about that to the judge. The judge signed off on the surveillance of a Republican campaign for president by a Democrat administration, on the strength of million-dollar lies commissioned by the Democrat campaign and Democrat committee, and so began the Obama administration's spying on the Trump campaign. That spying was extended well beyond Election Day, even, and is known as of this writing to have been attended by the planting of a "CIA asset" in the Trump campaign, reporting to Obama's rotten FBI; the "unmasking" of figures associated with Trump who were swept up in the surveillance but on whom there were no surveillance warrants; to say nothing of Obama's extraordinary, eleventh-hour executive order, enacted only days before he walked out of the White House for the last time, multiplying from three agencies to 17 the Deep State eyes on the unwarranted surveillance of figures associated with Trump.

(At the risk of whining, it must be said, had the spying administration been Republican and the spied-on campaign Democrat, the story would be the biggest since the Hiroshima bomb and it'd be years before the heads ceased rolling.)

And the Left in this first half of the first term of President Trump have become their bogeyman also in the way of what leftists before this time might've derided as the "sex police", namely the effort tagged "#MeToo". Sometime in the 1990s the Democrats and those arms of the Democrat Party called the press and popular culture set to instructing the nation in their New Morality: the president of the United States, so long as he was a Democrat, must be pardoned for fooling around with the help, and for lying about it to the country and to a court, and for coaching others to give fraudulent testimony in his defense, and for denying the court its subpoenaed evidence, on the grounds that "It's about sex." Allegations of sexual harassment or sexual assault, even -- outright rape -- were to be dismissed contemptuously, and accusers were to be ruined, cast as vile creatures and taunted as trash and dogs. That was the Democrat angle, and it saved their lame-duck president, although they would lose the next four election cycles, '98 through '04.

Then one day in the fall of 2017, a story appeared in The Washington Post, the Post by then having been redirected under its new ownership from Democrat Party news to Democrat Party activism. The Washington Post had bought dirt on the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in the Alabama special election that December 12, and they ran that dirt after the Republican nomination was settled and the ballot was set by state law. Because Alabama wouldn't elect a Democrat senator unless no Republican was on offer, The Washington Post arranged for effectively that: Alabama was presented with the choice of Republican or Democrat, only the Republican was effectively disqualified. The Democrats appreciated that if they accepted that an election for U.S. Senate may be decided by sexual allegations from 40 and 50 years prior, in too many instances believable but without evidence or corroboration, then they'd snatch a seat in the U.S. Senate which they had no business occupying and reduce the Republican majority for at least a year to an unworkable 51. So in an instant, and after decades of instructing America in their New Morality, the Democrat Party and the press and the popular culture traded their doctrine that what's "about sex" may not be considered in politics and government, for their New New Morality whereby sex is to determine the balance of the United States Senate.

The Democrats snatched that seat which could not possibly have gone Democrat had the vote been a question of policy and principle, and there followed a Noah's Flood of accusers of public figures high and low, termed aptly "#MeToo", their accusations having been dismissed until that time as "about sex". Which brings us to "Stormy Daniels": the less said the better about her erstwhile employment, but what may be said is that her very name is fiction, "Stormy" and "Daniels" both; she and her lawyer may be the rankest opportunists of the age; she swore in a signed statement that the relationship she swears to in television interviews never happened; and more than that, her unsubstantiated and uncorroborated claims are no grander than that Trump cheated on his wife briefly in '06, when incidentally he was a private citizen and a registered Democrat at every opportunity damning Bush and the Iraq effort. But "Stormy Daniels" under this New New Morality is elevated to household name and heroine, and her claims elevated somehow to high crimes and misdemeanors, assuring that Trump "won't finish his term." I retired from gambling after winning $5 on a bet in high school, on the principle of quitting while I'm ahead, but if I were to come out of retirement it would be to bet my ready funds that President Trump is quite safe in his White House from Stormy Daniels and her legal representation.

(And note that this takes as read those better-documented instances wherein the Left have become their bogeyman, e.g., the Left whose cry in time past was "free speech", long since appointed themselves speech police, then more recently they managed an effective prohibition on expressions of conservatism on America's college campuses, unto the point of violence and threats of violence, and just now they've gone one further, in Big Tech's blacklisting of conservatives; and of course the Left long ago became The Man, the "powers that be", to where it's a quicker job to enumerate the institutions of America that are not leftist and Democrat, because anymore there are only two to speak of, namely the churches and the United States Armed Forces.)

Feminism without the feminine

Among the novelties of this debased century is the representation in advertising of women, as men who happen incidentally to have female reproductive organs. Women snarling into the camera, muscles developed and fists clenched, throwing jabs and hooks at the viewer like boxers in a ring smashing a human face into hamburger meat; or a severe woman with severe hair and a severe mug, squatting over a barbell with her fists at the ends of her muscular arms wrapped around the steel bar, on the point of dead-lifting her bodyweight; etc., etc. -- and the product in the former ad having nothing to do with boxing, like in the latter ad the product on offer had not a thing to do with weight training.

The debased feminism of this debased century does seem to me to be devolving into a repudiation of femininity, accepting masculinity as the standard for right and good. What is feminism in the 21st Century but the rejection of roles understood by every society in every age to be feminine, and the reductionist impulse of the Left is bound to render that as a repudiation of all things recognizably female. And so we're left with this unfeminine feminism whereby the worthy woman is a man, or worse yet a cartoon of a man, like some histrionic professional wrestler, musclebound and snarling and menacing the world, who happens incidentally to have female reproductive organs. The trouble in that for the feminist Left, beyond the more obvious point that it's madness, is that they'll find precious few takers for it among American womanhood, and outside the Western world they'll find no takers whatever.

Witchfinder ISO witch; Firearms constants and fear-of-God variables; The end of the world, "Plus: Cheap Eats"

Witchfinder ISO witch

The Witchfinder General and his media shop otherwise known as CNN might occupy themselves with the revelation that the second-cousin of the ex-girlfriend of the caterer who supplied the Trump campaign with sandwiches for two weeks in February 2016, is famous for giving caviar as Christmas presents, and we all know which wicked nation it is that produces caviar: proof positive that "Russia hacked the election and Trump was in up to his neck with Russia! Impeachment proceedings to commence in a matter of hours!" But for those of us with better things to do, Russia didn't flip a vote and Trump is as immaculately unentangled by outside interests including foreign powers as any president or candidate for president in the history of the republic.

The investigations, plural, of the House and Senate and Department of Justice and FBI and special counsel, plus the totality of the press, must amount to the greatest investigative effort in any society and any age, and yet they've turned up no evidence of collusion with Russia and no evidence even that Russia flipped a vote. But instead of the manifest conclusion that nothing has been found because there's nothing to be found, the investigations proceed, so that by now it's plain there is a presumption in these investigations of guilt, inverting the American standard of presumed innocent, and more than that, the onus in these investigations is shifted from the government to the accused, the burden placed on Trump and his people to prove a negative, and of course there's no proving a negative.

Only lately the Witchfinder General has descended to ordering raids by the Federal Bureau of Investigation of the office and the home and even the hotel room of Trump's personal attorney, on questions having nothing to do with Trump: i.e., this is an investigation in search of a crime, or else the Witchfinder means to "put the screws to" lesser figures associated with Trump like in some prosecution of a mob boss, whereupon they'll "sing or compose", produce dirt on Trump or invent it. So the object of these interminable investigations can only be the vetoing of the vote of November 8 2016, by criminal or quasi-criminal allegations, affirmed and elevated by a hyperventilating hysteria in the press and popular culture, until some combination of Democrats and Never-Trumper Republicans in Congress muster the numbers for an impeachment vote. To impeach Donald J. Trump as 45th president of the United States, expel him from power and repudiate him and his works for all time, and assert again the ascendancy of the elite over those bumptious peasants who delivered to Trump 306 electoral votes of 538. Or short of that, to turn up some arguable malfeasance which might be useful politically to Trump's many enemies, if it doesn't amount to "high crimes and misdemeanors", or barring that to depress Trump's popular approval under the weight of suspicion, or at the very least to divert the energies of Trump and his administration with subpoenas and allegations and insinuations and daily developments.

The trouble for the Witchfinder General and his legions is that it turns out, Trump is cleaner than even this Trump-booster had reckoned on, and manifestly he's un-divert-able. If Trump starts his day with an ambitious agenda of ten items, and in the middle of that day some illicit and malicious leak against him explodes in the press like the Hiroshima bomb, by the end of the day those ten items are no less dispatched for the distraction. Bill Bennett who was secretary of education for the greatest president of the 20th Century after the Second World War, namely Reagan, has observed that even Reagan in his first year never ticked so many agenda items as Trump managed in his Year One. Lincoln was the Great Emancipator, Reagan the Great Communicator, and it does seem that Trump is the Great Multitasker.

So where does it end: the partisan, malicious investigation without restriction in resources or in scope, in search of any wrongdoing or arguable wrongdoing on the part of its mark or anyone even marginally associated with him, protected and promoted by an effective monopoly in the malicious and mendacious press and popular culture, against a force-of-nature president with 306 electoral votes and as it turns out with clean hands? I know no way of forecasting the future but by casting into the past, and all that I've seen of Donald John Trump and of his multitudinous and multifarious enemies since sometime in the summer of 2015, persuades me to bet on Trump.

Firearms constants and fear-of-God variables  

Since the first English settlements in North America, Americans have kept and borne firearms. The first to land at Plymouth were a deputation sent on ahead of the bulk of the Mayflower company, and when they waded ashore it was with matchlocks smoldering.

And for three-quarters of the age of the Second Amendment guaranteeing the right of civilians to keep and bear arms, firearms in America have been repeating ones. Samuel Colt's patent on the revolver was issued in 1836, and a Colt .45 in each hand gave a man 12 rapid-fire rounds. Or take the Winchester rifle, introduced by Winchester Repeating Arms in 1866, which got off 15 rounds before reloading.

In any age before ours, firearms were a more common and casual feature of American life, and for a time before the 1930s fully-automatic or machine guns were available lawfully to civilians, and yet the phenomenon of the "school shooting" is a novelty; I suppose it was the massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado that inaugurated the school shooting as we conceive it, and that's no older than a couple decades. So the gun is not the variable, in mass shootings; not the possession of firearms and not their repeat-action.

A man who fears God and Hell is a man who never will walk into a school and murder 17 innocents. Why did the Vikings murder innocents wantonly, and rape and steal, but that they were the last pagans in Europe, and why did they quit but that they also were converted to Christianity. Their Norse paganism assured them not only that murder and the rest were perfectly fine but that the bold murderer earned a place in the Norse heaven called Valhalla. That sort of thinking will fortify a fellow for a good run in raiding, but as Christians the Vikings' murderous barbarism was insupportable. The world without the Judeo-Christian God, which the Left and the elite labor daily to revive, is the world of Viking barbarism and of school shootings. 

The popular culture as much as the press, and the public schools and the universities, and the Left and the Democrat Party, have taught this generation that the universe "just happened" somehow, humanity evolved somehow from pond scum, and the Bible is a lot of lies invented by old white males to suppress the rest; too many of this debased generation have accepted that rot and a small fraction have extrapolated the thinking to its logical nth degree, whereby there's no compelling reason for not walking into a school and murdering 17 innocents, not if we're all just overdeveloped pond scum in a just-somehow-happened universe and there is no God and no Hell. The phenomenon of the school shooting is unthinkable in America until this present generation, which happens to be the first generation since human habitation in North America with any number of takers for the proposition that there is no God. 

The end of the world, "Plus: Cheap Eats"

It was my misfortune lately to be exposed to the cover of New York Magazine for July 10-23 of '17, whose feature was "The Doomed Earth Catalog; When will the planet be too hot for humans? Plausibly within our children's lifetimes." The cover was barren save for a doctored image of Earth from space, browned and its clouds mostly burned away.  

I was instructed in Armageddon-ist environmentalism in that form of child abuse called Nova Scotia Public Schools, and even then, before I knew left from right politically, I knew a hoax. In a century the observed planetary temperature has risen by 0.9 of a degree Celsius, departing unrecognizably from the precipitate skyward projections of the hysterical and unempirical computer models which prophesy Armageddon. But my question here is whether the Armageddon-ists believe that the Armageddon they're prophesying will come: I couldn't help but observe that the cover dusted itself off from the end of the world with "Plus: Cheap Eats 2017... [and] Wu-Tang and the Pharma Bro..." If a fellow believed truly that his children would perish in the Hadean catastrophe of a scorched planet, "too hot for humans", would he flip the page to read about "Cheap Eats" and "the Pharma Bro"? I never did believe the Armageddon-ism, and I wonder if the believers believe it.

Eating the steak and damning the butcher, and two lesser essays

Eating the steak and damning the butcher 

It may be that it came with the Baby Boom, or rather that cohort of the Baby Boomers whose reaction to Howdy Doody was to heave a molotov cocktail at him, those Americans who were born into the easiest lives since the Garden of Eden, by no doing of theirs, but whose reaction was a declaration of war on any and all who had planted their Garden of Eden. Their Year Zero was 1968, and for the Left in the half-century since 1968, it is forever 1968.

This is what President Trump is up against, as much as anything, what Republicans and conservatives are up against, what any American is up against who's not contemptuous of America, and what any inheritor of Western Civilization is up against who's not contemptuous of civilization: the man who's sheltered by his roof, while he damns the roof and every shingle and stick and nail in it.

It's a product of the ease of our 21st Century existence, a structural fault, and the logical consequence of human nature applied to easy lives. Any society in any age might produce an elite remote from their founding and building, remote also from the farm and the slaughterhouse on the messier end of their filet mignon, an elite with the luxury of forgetting how they came by their silken pillows and peeled grapes, and more than that of disdaining it. The peculiarity of our time and our civilization is the numbers: progressively since the Industrial Revolution life has got easier, a democratization of the lifestyles of kings, to the point where our great cities by now are crammed with untold masses with the luxury of eating filet mignon and indicting the butcher for murder.

Ours is an age of deferred mortality; lives as long as a century, and very few of us knowing very many who die before their times. The revolution in medical science which followed the Industrial Revolution has treated mortality, to where an average American aged 50 may expect not unreasonably to have something like half his life before him, albeit not the more sunlit half. Life is protracted so the stages of life all are protracted: protracted childhood, protracted adolescence, protracted emancipation, etc. And this deferring of mortality and reality cannot be expected to go without political and even religious expression.

That religious expression is atheism, the political expression 21st Century leftism: what man needs God who lives forever, and what use has he of a national defense or a system of finance wherein debts are paid, whose misspent youth ends when and if he pleases?

The great bulwark which is America's inheritance but which the rest of the West too much is wanting, is the peasant's sense and a constitutional system which is resistant even in this 21st Century to conceding the elite's veto of the peasant's vote. President Trump manifestly appreciates that America's peasants are its salvation, that the peasants demand a Peasants' Party, and that any party of the peasants is bound to win elections and determine the future.

"Elite" defined 

I'm guilty as any conservative of the overusage of "elite", so I ought at least to define it. First and most an elite is a bien pensant, a believer in whatever it is that the Left happen to believe at a given moment, e.g., global-warming-ism and multiculturalism and federal-mandates-for-public-bathroom-accommodation-for-the-transgendered, etc., etc.

But an elite also is one of those people whose existence is set apart from the facts of life, whether by affluence or professional ivory-towering, or by the peculiarities of this 21st Century which produce such phenomena as the "professional student", pursuing some post-graduate degree in some indulgent, basket-weaving course till his hair recedes, all the while living sex-drugs-and-rock-'n'-roll, with "vegan" shoes and a marijuana badge on his backpack.

An elite may be well-to-do and very often he is that, but it's not socioeconomics that determines the question of elite or not elite, only ideas and that existence set apart from the facts of life.

The coming Republican Senate

In these United States the people vote in statewide elections for president, for governor, and for United States senator. President Trump on November 8 of '16 carried 30 of the 50 states, and it's 33 states now with Republican governors, so a fellow could be forgiven for supposing that the Republican majority in the United States Senate with its two-senators-per-state-regardless-of-population would be equivalent, something like 60 to 66 percent, but of course the Senate is only marginally Republican, split 51-49. That discrepancy alone ought to be cause for anxiety among Democrats, never mind that 10 of the 26 Democrat senators who happen to come up for re-election this November 6 represent those Americans who made a president of Donald J. Trump just 728 days prior. 

A fellow could be forgiven also for imagining that those Democrat senators representing Trumpian states would go out of their way to vote with the president whenever they could justify themselves, and yet in a year no Senate Democrat broke with his party to vote with the president and the Republican majority on Obamacare or taxes or the Supreme Court: on any question worth bothering about. The story is that the Democrat minority leader has let it be known that any Democrat senator breaking with the party will be "primaried", that's to say, the offending senator will be stripped of funding and endorsement by the Democrat national and Senate committees, who between them will agree on a challenger in his primary election, and it will be that challenger who claims the funding and endorsements and in all likelihood also the nomination. 

So West Virginia, to take the most conspicuous example, is represented in the United States Senate by a character who has voted the Democrat line in this Age of Trump on every question worth bothering about, despite campaigning as a conservative-to-out-conservative-the-Republicans, and despite that West Virginia is maybe the most Trumpian of the 30 Trump-voting states, Trump and his administration having saved the West Virginia economy, unilaterally and well within their first year, and the Democrat governor of West Virginia having declared himself a convert to the Republican Party, as the featured guest at a rally for Donald J. Trump. 

Republicans in the House of Representatives with its representation-by-population came away from the general election of '16 with 241 seats of 435, and if anything the Senate ought to produce a greater share still for the party claiming 30 states in 50 for president and 33 governors. This unrepresentative representation must sooner or later be reconciled, with the consequent reordering of the United States Senate, and whether later or sooner we'll know the evening of November 6.

Captain Edgar O. Smith: A great man, as good as he was great

Edgar Oliver Smith of Cape Sable Island at the southernmost extremity of Nova Scotia died of tuberculosis one January night in 1917, when the youngest of his six children was all of 14 years old. After dawn that youngest, who happens to have been my grandfather William Edgar "Bill" Smith, waded with his elder brother Harvey into the snow to cut firewood; they were the men of the house, as of their father's passing hours before, and the day was cold and the household without fuel. Captain Edgar was born the 2nd of January and he died on that date, he was born on Cape Island and he died there, but in his 56 years in the world he saw a great part of it, and he was in his way a maker of history.

Edgar looks to have gone to sea by 1876 and the age of 15, as "bowman in a dory with his cousin Edmund". From his cousin's dory Edgar graduated to the schooner Fearless, and thence to the brig S.N. Collimore, then from 1882 to '84 Edgar fished the Triton out of Gloucester in Massachusetts, about the time the Gloucester fleet was reported by the Boston Globe to be lousy with Nova Scotians. Edgar was formally Captain Edgar by 1891 when he was certified Master in the Coast Trade, being certified seven years thereafter for Foreign Service. But by 1886 Edgar was second mate on the Hector, crossing the Atlantic and passing through the Strait of Gibraltar to Valencia on the east coast of Spain and Sete in the South of France, and by 1890 Edgar had made captain, fishing the Grand Banks for Newfoundland concerns.

Sometime in his couple years on the Grand Banks a hook caught Captain Edgar in his left forefinger, which had the effect of fixing it in a rigid extension. For the balance of his days Edgar never could crook that finger, and the bum finger is conspicuous in the photography of him.

At the risk of reinforcing the stereotype of island folk, it must here be recorded that Captain Edgar married his first cousin, in a double-wedding wherein his sister-in-law married her first cousin. Edgar married Susan Cornelia, also a Smith, which saves on paperwork, in the December-est of December weddings, on the winter solstice of 1887, and biennially from 1892 through 1902 they begat four daughters and two sons, namely Felicia and Edith and Edna and Clare, and Harvey and William, in that order. Susie was daughter to the Captain William Black Smith, also a sea captain and a great man, and as deserving of a biography. And Susie survived Edgar by 31 years, living to see victory in the First World War and the Second, and then some.

It may've been 1892 that Edgar first served as an officer on a steamship, on the S.S. City of St. John running between Yarmouth and Halifax, as second mate under the family friend Captain Arthur McGray whose biographical sketch of Edgar is invaluable. The next year Edgar graduated to pilot of the City of St. John, and the year after to captain. Then two years thereafter Edgar was taken on by the Yarmouth Steamship Company, to captain their flagship the S.S. Yarmouth, with passenger and mail service between Yarmouth and Boston. The Yarmouth company fleet of half a dozen steamers were grand ships, each with capacious dining rooms. Bill Smith reported that his father's Yarmouth-to-Boston run departed Yarmouth about suppertime and arrived Boston about dawn, and that his mother packed sandwiches, to keep their strength up till they landed in the morning.

It was in the course of his service for the Yarmouth Steamship Co. that Captain Edgar was charged with the odd job in 1898 of crossing to England, taking receipt for the Yarmouth company of the "fast sidewheeler Express", and steaming those 428 tons home to Yarmouth, with a stop at St. John's for coal. Paddle-wheelers by then had been overtaken by "screw"- or propeller-driven steamships, but paddle-steamers were in service still, and it may be that a paddler was in this instance preferred, for the reason that it was meant for the shallower waters of coastal service, between Yarmouth and Halifax "via intermediate ports". And the Express was a new construction, with two paddle-wheels and as many enginerooms and smokestacks, making 15 1/4 knots and breaking "all records" for passage from Halifax to Yarmouth. Edgar manifestly had the trust of the Yarmouth Steamship Co., and on June 20 he landed their baby in one piece, at 4 in the morning.

But Edgar's Express job was for naught: not three months into its service, the Express was wrecked comprehensively on Outer Island, called in the newspaper account Bon Portage Island, five miles from Cape Sable Island. The Express had cost Yarmouth Steamship $80,000, but after Outer Island was through with it, its 202' steel hull went for $475, although the Yarmouth company evidently were prudent souls and had insured for $60,000. The captain at the time of the Outer Island misfortune was not Edgar.

As the century turned, a year and a half after the Spanish-American War and assumption of the American protectorate over Cuba, Edgar captained the ship on "the first expedition to establish an American colony" in Cuba. He and his crew conveyed to Cuba 211 colonists from 30 states, two territories, and three Canadian provinces, "the vanguard of the first American colony planted in Cuba." Edgar's S.S. Yarmouth departed New York Harbor for Nuevitas on December 30 of 1899, recorded as "a stinging cold day" by James Meade Adams in his masterly account of that first American colony in Cuba, published 1901 and titled Pioneering in Cuba. Adams goes out of his way to commend Captain Edgar, as "a popular and efficient officer".

Adams: "[F]or thirty-six hours, in the neighborhood of Cape Hatteras, very rough water was encountered. But few on board had ever known such a sea, and sickness was universal." But Edgar's Yarmouth was "safe if not swift, [and] brought the colonists to this port without mishap." The Yarmouth also was "large and fine enough to have easily commanded the unbounded admiration and amazement of Christopher Columbus had he beheld her when he landed...near this point more than four centuries ago."

Edgar anchored at Nuevitas Harbor four and a half days after departing New York, on the fourth day of the new century. The colonists carried on to the settlement of La Gloria, and the Yarmouth carried on in the service of the Cuban Land and Steamship Company of 32 Broadway, undertaking second and third runs to Nuevitas through January and February, commanded presumably by Captain Edgar. (A couple years after Edgar's passing the Yarmouth would enter its last and least likely chapter, being sold to "noted social reformer, capitalist, and screwball" Marcus Garvey.)

And then came 1902 and the Mallory Line of New York. Edgar had of course captained the Yarmouth out of New York in 1900, but how it was that he came to be taken on by a considerable concern in Lower Manhattan is not now known to me; what is known is that Captain Edgar counted as a "staunch friend" one H. H. Raymond, President of the Mallory Line, and that he would be a Mallory man until his forced retirement in 1916. And an expedition of our family friend Otto Atkinson found Edgar's portrait hung prominently in the marble halls of the Mallory Line, three-quarters of a century after Edgar.

Captain Edgar was not at first captain, for the Mallory Line, but chief officer, on the S.S. Denver, graduating to captain on the Colorado, and captaining later the Lampasas. Edgar's service on the Mallory Line took him southward following the eastern seaboard to the southernmost extremity of the United States, at Key West off Florida, north again to Tampa on Florida's west coast, up and over to Mobile in Alabama, and across the Gulf of Mexico to Galveston off Houston in Texas, and to New York City where Edgar moved the family for half a decade. Edgar on his runs to the Gulf was three weeks at sea, per his daughter Clare very much later.

Captain Edgar's business now was in New York, and he moved the family to a house there in or about 1906, in what the baby of the family Bill Smith described nine decades later as a "countrified" quarter of Brooklyn. The family managed visits to Cape Island on holidays, but they were New Yorkers -- Bill's New York schooling accounted for the larger part of his formal education, even -- until 1911 or thereabouts. The full and true story of the family's quitting New York for Cape Island was not known to Edgar; that was a secret of Bill's and his brother Harvey's, until it was not so much a secret as a joke.

The heating in the New York house was central, and the ductwork was tin, and one fine day the boys Bill and Harvey had the idea of stuffing the vent in their room with rags. Bill explained that the tin of the ducts would turn "red hot", and after a time the rags combusted and the house burnt to sticks. The fire marshal pronounced the cause of the fire to be "accidental", and Bill and Harvey weren't minded to correct him. Bill suspected that his mother Susie suspected the boys might've had something to do with the fire, but that she was just as well pleased to quit New York for Cape Island. And so about 1911 Captain Edgar moved the family back to his house in Centreville, built incidentally by Ephraim Atkinson who along with William Kenny conceived the Cape Islander or "Novi" boat.

(As to how exactly Susie Smith and six smaller Smiths managed their sort-of commute between Brooklyn and Centreville in the first decade of the 20th Century, I can do no better than to guess, to wit: cab from house in Brooklyn to port in Manhattan, not improbably by way of the Brooklyn Bridge; steamer from New York to Boston; steamer again from Boston to Yarmouth; train from Yarmouth to Barrington, maybe connecting the port in Yarmouth and the ferry crossing in Barrington; ferry from Barrington to North East Point; and at last maybe a cab or hired cart from the ferry landing to the house in Centreville. Captain Edgar would've been counted among the wealthier Cape Islanders of his generation, and bills like those not-infrequent passages-for-seven-from-Brooklyn-to-Centreville may go some way to solving the mystery of whatever became of Edgar's fortune.)

Captain Edgar turns up in the March 1909 issue of a fraternal association periodical called The American Marine Engineer, in a moving obituary which digresses into an extraordinary commendation of Edgar. The deceased was a "Bro. G. Youmans, late second assistant engineer officer of the steamship Lampasas" of New York, on "his untimely demise at sea from injuries accidentally received while in the performance of duty." The obituarist was a "C. W. Read, Chief Engineer, S. S. Lampasas", who remarks on Edgar, "I also extend to Capt. E. O. Smith, of S. S. Lampasas, the heartfelt thanks of myself, and officers of my department, for his manliness and untiring efforts to relieve sufferings of the deceased from the instant of the accident to the end; burial disposition at port. Which goes to prove that he is the possessor in a large degree of that 'fellow feeling which makes us wondrous kind.'"

(I take it "manliness" there is Edwardian euphemism, to the effect that the scene was not for the faint of heart, and the Annual Report of the Supervising Inspector-General, Steamship Inspection for 1909 elaborates that George Youmans was "burned about the arms and the entire upper part of his body" by steam from an engineroom explosion, and that he passed after about eleven hours.) Edgar's and the deceased's are the only names to appear in the obituary, and Edgar's part in the obituary amounts to a quarter of it.

Captain Edgar in New York was a lay-preacher at the East Side Mission, and a friend to the unfortunate of the slums. A newspaper notice headlined "A Sailor-Preacher", turned up at the home of the great friend of the family Effie Atkinson, unattributed and undated but from the time of Edgar's service on the Lampasas, is unimprovable as an account of Edgar's lay-preaching, with the exception of the unrecognizable mangling of its subject's name, and so it's reproduced herewith: "Captain O. L. [sic] Smith, commander of the Mallory Liner Lampasas, regularly in service between Mobile and New York, is not only a speaker of note, but is regarded as one of the ablest sailor-preachers on the Atlantic-Gulf service. While at Tampa, Fla., recently Captain Smith delivered a sermon on evangelism at the Y.M.C.A., and has since received invitation to preach in Tampa churches when there."

Bill Smith observed of his father that he "never had a spare minute", and among Captain Edgar's extracurriculars were his membership as a Master Mason in the Philadelphia Lodge No. 47 of Barrington; his membership in the Sons of Temperance, Lifeboat Division, #158, where he was elevated for a year to Worthy Patriarch among other offices, and where he was party to great debates such as "Which have been the greater element for good in the world -- men or women?" (the formulation presumably is Edgar's) with its Victorian finding in favor of the latter; and his contributions to publications wherein "he could commend and condemn with equal facility," in the words of Arthur McGray, including letters-to-the-editor in The Coast Guard of Shelburne and The New York Times Saturday Review of Books.

The address Captain Edgar claims in his letters-to-the-editor from New York turns out to be his professional address, in Lower Manhattan, maybe half a mile from the World Trade Center and practically in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge which looks today precisely as it would've done in Edgar's time.

Captain Edgar's formal education might've amounted to a couple boyhood years, but Captain Arthur McGray in his biographical sketch of Edgar remarks on Edgar's "retentive memory which enabled him to recite long passages from the works of outstanding authors". Oceanic steam navigation did leave a captain time to pursue his reading, and that Edgar was a prodigious reader is attested by his immense oak-and-glass library -- built by his onetime ship's carpenter Ezra Atkinson -- and by Edgar's margin-notes, in pencil. Edgar's library includes among many other volumes The World's Greatest Orations, in ten volumes; Homer's Odyssey, as translated by Alexander Pope; Walter Scott's Life of Napoleon Buonaparte, the 1827 first edition published twelve years after Napoleon's Waterloo; a History of England, by the Scots philosopher David Hume; and Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur, which is a very English book with a very French title.

Also Captain Edgar did not a little writing, and to judge by what survives to us of it, he might almost have quit captaining and taken up writing professionally, with his mastery of his subjects, and his force of argument, and his grand and baroque British-English prose, and his wit.* Which is not to say that Edgar's was not a head also for figures; he was after all a sea captain in an age of charts and sextants, and his felicity for math was what struck his nephew Arthur Newell who had served under Captain Edgar. Bill Smith -- whose form of address for his father was not "Dad" or "Daddy" but "Father" -- recalled Edgar's putting to the children a demanding arithmetic riddle, involving a puncheon of molasses. Bill solved the riddle and nine decades thence he recalled every convoluted particular of it, but he evidently was too shy of his father to present his solution to the great man.

Captain Edgar developed tuberculosis and in 1916 retired to Cape Island, where he passed January 2 of the new year, his 56th birthday. Edgar was "possessed of a driving energy [and] rare judgement", in the words of Arthur McGray, and possessed also "of that fellow feeling which makes us wondrous kind"; a great man, as good as he was great.

(Acknowledgements: This biographical sketch would be sketchy biography, absent the research and compilation of my elder brother Stephen J. Smith. Also the summary biographical sketch of Edgar by Captain Arthur McGray, per my brother's compilation, was invaluable, the balance of the material being drawn from latter-day online research, interviews recorded in the 1990s of my grandfather late in his life, and family remembrances. And the notion of a biography of Captain Edgar was the doing of my uncle Laurie T. Smith.)

* - Herewith is excerpted and transcribed verbatim a tour-de-force letter-to-the-editor published 1894 in the long-shuttered Yarmouth Times, by a certain "Fair Play", namely Edgar O. Smith, depressing in the familiarity a century-and-a-quarter since of its indictments, but stirring as ever in its lion's roar for greatness:

An Earnest Protest Against Humbug.

... I wish to make a plain statement of facts which must recommend themselves to the intelligence of every voter in Shelburne County.

Almost two years ago the scheme of building a narrow guage [typographical hiccup] railroad from Yarmouth to Lockeport began first to be agitated in this county. ... We were plainly told that a narrow gauge road was the best that we could hope for, and that as a railroad it was all that Shelburne county required. This was a falsehood. ...

Narrow gauge roads have long since become almost a thing of the past. ... Comparing the miles of standard railroad with the other in the United States ends all discussion upon that point. If one is as good as the other why is not the cheaper road adopted? ...

Now I ask any intelligent voter in Shelburne to tell me what definite end has been obtained in regard to the proposed road. After two years of agitation through the press and from the platform; two years of false representations, unfulfilled promises, silly trumped up tales of capitalists interested in the project and fabulous sums granted by governments on its behalf; two years with nearly every month promises that ere its end we would see the road take upon itself tangible form. After all this we are no nearer a road than at first.

... The narrow gauge scheme in itself was an insult to our intelligence as a county; in event of its success it simply made us hewers of wood and drawers of water to a neighboring county. ... We were not far enough advanced in civilization to merit the standard railroad of the civilized world.

... Must this county with its industrious, enterprising and intelligent population; with its unsurpassed harbor and natural advantages be ever made the football of office boys and the prey of the non-supportable element within its limits? I think it is high time to call a halt and let our declaration of independence be signed once and forever at the polls on the 15th.

... Fair Play.
Centerville, Cape Island,
March 10th, 1894.

Viking Age England arcana

Suspect etymologies

I've developed a suspicion, and it is now nothing grander than a suspicion, that contemporary English etymologies for reasons I might guess at are prejudiced in claiming wherever they can get away with it that English derives from Old Norse, making out that a very considerable part of English is imported from those Scandinavian raiders and invaders of the Viking Age, which in England amounts to the century-and-a-half from the first Viking raid in 793 to the more-or-less final English victory in 954.

"Wassail" makes a case-in-point: the convention is that the Modern English "wassail" from the Old English "waes hael" derives ultimately from the Old Norse "ves heill". I esteem the American Heritage Dictionary and I consult it daily, despite that its etymology for "wassail" accepts the convention that the English abandoned their native salutations in preference to aping some boozy invocation of the monstrous Vikings who terrorized them. But that same etymology stipulates a native English pedigree for "wassail" in three iterations, recorded in even Beowulf and the West Saxon Gospels. American Heritage cites the native English salutation "wes thu hal", which in its most direct rendering recognizable to us would read "be thou healthy", and that combines the "wes" and "hal", and in the same order as "waes hael", with the marginal variation of inserting between them the pronoun "thou" for "you".

So to suppose that the merry English "wassail" derives not from the terrorizers of the English but from a native English pedigree would not contradict the documentary record, and that documentary record of English before 800 can be uneven, so that we may assume where there's smoke, there's fire: that if "wes thu hal" appears in written English, then "wes hal" absent the "thu" may've been spoken but not recorded in those manuscripts which survive to us.

But more than that, these etymologies ought to apply common sense: the English were terrorized, impoverished, brutalized, enslaved, raped, and slaughtered by the Vikings, until they drove the monsters out and kept them out by force, so this etymology that the English abandoned their native salutations for the Old Norse of the Viking monsters is about as sensible to me as imagining "hail" as in "hail a cab" is an English aping of the German "heil" heard by the British in the Nazis' "heil Hitler".

Then there's the case of the suffix "by" or "bee", which appears on a good many English placenames and surnames, as in "Appleby" or "Applebee": we're taught that "-by" or "-bee" is not native English but an import to English from Old Norse. And the "by" suffix does appear on Scandinavian placenames to this day, as in "Rinkeby" in Sweden. But see for example Naseby in the English Midlands, immortalized by the momentous battle in that place and of that name in the English Civil War. Naseby was founded in the 6th Century by a Saxon called Hnaef, as Hnaefes-Burgh, then per the Domesday Book in 1086 the name had developed to Navesberie, and it's not for some time that the name develops to Navesby and Nathesby and ultimately Naseby. So the "by" suffix in "Naseby" appears well after even the Norman Conquest, centuries after England had dispatched the Vikings, a contraction or simplification arguably of those earlier "b-" suffixes "Burgh" and "berie".

Inarguably English did take on words from Old Norse, and in those parts of the north and east of England which were subject to the Danelaw are found placenames which are altogether Norse, as for instance "Ormskirk" in Lancashire, with its "Orm" from "ormr" meaning "serpent, dragon", and its "kirk" for "church". But that etymology comports with the record, that the English word was "church" and never "kirk", and it comports as neatly with the history, that Lancashire was subject to the Danelaw.

Old Norse and Old English are after all cousin-tongues, the Germanic dialects and languages of Germanic tribes and nations in Northern Europe in the first half of the Middle Ages, and it's my suspicion that etymologies too often find parallels and imagine antecedents, that too many of those words they identify as imports to English from Old Norse are native English stock, English words with cousin-words in our cousin-languages including Norse.

And there's the practical difficulty in supposing that a very considerable part of English derives from Old Norse, which is that the window for it is narrow, in time and in space. The Vikings in England in the first 72 years of the Viking Age were raiders and not invaders; when from 865 to '78 the greatest warriors of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden did invade and overrun England with their Great Heathen Army, they were soon enough driven back to the north and east of England, to the Danelaw which by 918 the English had reduced to Northumbria; and 36 years thereafter even Northumbria was reclaimed by the English.

Plus which these Viking Age Northmen were the sorts to rob monks and rape nuns and murder both, when they didn't sell them into brutal slavery. The English had resisted the language of even the native Britons they had displaced, and they had that much more cause for resisting the influence of these heathen Northmen whose evil was not again seen in Europe until the Nazis. English imported "blitz" from German in the Second World War, but there wasn't much call in Britain for German imports about the time of the Blitz, and it defies reason to suppose that England in the Viking Age was mad for things Scandinavian, save for some naval technology and a military tactic or two.

Not to mention, it was the Northmen who converted to Christianity, not the English who converted or rather relapsed into pre-Christian Germanic paganism. It was the English who had a large literate class of churchmen, and the Northmen who were illiterate. And it was the Northmen who were the few, fleeting occupiers in a Saxon sea which had seen centuries before the Vikings and has seen a millennium and more since. I cannot accept that English is in any considerable part hand-me-down Viking-talk, and not out of my violent nationalism so much as my residual rustic common sense.
  
The historical liberties of History's Vikings

Michael Hirst's Vikings is very fine television, and Michael Hirst with his Elizabeth movies and The Tudors is a historical-drama force-of-nature. Vikings surely has driven a general education in Viking Age Europe. And I appreciate that Vikings is a TV show and not a textbook, plus which there is such a thing as artistic license. But at the same time Vikings is a co-production of the History channel, and it must be said that the history in the show is compressed by times and by times it's madness. So I offer herewith several paragraphs on the historical liberties of Vikings.

Vikings has King Egbert (the show prefers "Ecbert", and the show may have it right) of Wessex handing off to his son Prince Aethelwulf with the Great Heathen Army on the doorstep, then executing a charter conceding the Danelaw before slitting his wrists in his Roman bath, but Egbert was dead a quarter-century before the coming of the Great Heathen Army, and even Aethelwulf was seven years in his grave before that time. Wessex between Egbert and the Great Heathen Army had four kings: Aethelwulf, Aethelbald, Aethelbert, and Aethelred.

Also Aethelwulf was married to a Judith, but she was no daughter of King Aella of Northumbria; Judith was a Continental princess. And so much worse than that, Alfred the Great was not the bastard of Judith and a naughty monk, but Aethelwulf's legitimate son by his first wife Osburh.

As to King Aella of Northumbria, the show accepts the sagas' account of his death by "blood eagle" at the hands of Ragnar's sons, but the English histories report Aella died in battle in 867, and had he been tortured to death by Vikings then the English sources might've had an interest in playing that up. Also the show has Aella as king of Northumbria by the time of the raid on Lindisfarne in 793, through the coming of the Great Heathen Army in 865, but the history is that Aella was king for a year or at most five.

The invasion of the Great Heathen Army which concludes Season Four was not some blitzkrieg sweep across England, but fully a decade between landing in East Anglia and overrunning Wessex. And the invasion evidently was a reaction to the fortification of Francia which raised the cost to the Vikings of raiding there, more than revenge for the death of Ragnar. ("Revenge" there in the Viking sense, because only monsters on the order of the the Vikings would fault the English for executing the monster who had led the unprovoked slaughter and rape and plunder of English innocents.)

And Vikings has it that Ragnar Lodbrok (the show prefers "Lothbrok", and again the show may have it right) led the raid on Lindisfarne which came in 793 and which inaugurates the Viking Age, that his death was followed soon enough by the invasion of the Great Heathen Army which came in 865, and that Ragnar had a farm and family before turning to the slaughter, rape, and plunder of innocents, so that Ragnar Lodbrok would've been a man of a certain age by the time King Aella dropped him into that snake pit. Ragnar in the sagas may be a composite of more Vikings than one, and an embellishment of them, a mythological invention representing a historical reality, and Vikings evidently takes those Norse sagas very largely for its historical record. 

Miscellany, again: British reserve and British humor; English singularity; An exercise in Coltranian verticularity; In justification of a nobody with a blog

British reserve and British humor 

Britain is per capita the world's funniest country. I see no point in substantiating a proposition so inarguable as that, but because I'm a dreadful political-science sort, I am compelled to venture some theory to account for it. I don't dispute the cliche that Britain is a reserved society, and I wonder if that may make a foundation for this theory: in an otherwise-staid society like Britain's, humor is a permissible outlet. No sin or disgrace or folly in laughter, or in producing laughter. And if that humor is more cerebral then it's better than permissible, it's elevated. So it may be that British reserve and British humor are cause and effect. 

English singularity 

Among the many peculiarities of English is this: for as long as there has been a language identifiable as English, English has been a written or anyway a writable language. If it wasn't often written in those earliest times, English was at least writable, in a phonetic alphabet, and from the first. 

English is an insular development of the language and dialects of those Germanic tribesmen who migrated from the Continent to the British Isles about the time of the Fall of Rome, and among those people a phonetic alphabet had been adopted from not too long after Christ, called the "futhark", so that English was a writable language with a phonetic alphabet from the very first.  

The special and singular case of "read" and "write" might conceivably bear on this: English is alone among Western European languages in that "write" does not derive from the Latin "scribere", per the American Heritage Dictionary, and per that dictionary English is nearly alone among Western European languages in that "read" does not derive from the Latin "legere". "Read" and "write" are Old, Saxon English, not Latinate and not answered in our Germanic cousin-tongues. But then, English has been written for as long as it's been spoken, so that at no time would reading and writing have been novel or alien concepts in English, never imports demanding imported names.   

That English has been written for as long as it's been spoken may or may not account for some part of the prolific and extraordinary development of English -- the English vocabulary for instance is double the vocabulary of the world's second-largest language -- but English is a singular language among the civilizations of the world and of history, and whatever it is that accounts for English singularity must itself be fairly singular.

And another thing, while I'm about it: England is not a very old country and America is not so very much younger than the Old Country. There is no England before the Fall of Rome, and the first English colonies in America come only a millennium thereafter, and all of seven centuries after the advent of England as a unitary realm. England's not so old and America's not so much younger.

  

An exercise in Coltranian verticularity  

This extraordinary solo is as imaginative and inventive and artful and athletic a "vertical" improvisation as any in a century of jazz. The fellow who can play scales like that, can dispense with melodies. It's John Coltrane's tenor saxophone solo on a televised performance of Miles Davis' "So What" from New York in 1959, and it's a tour de force throughout. 

I've played saxophone, and tenor saxophone, and yet I can only guess at what I hear at 3:40-41. I notice the trombonist to the side looks up with a start on hearing it, and the next fellow over smirks, and I expect it'd have sounded that much more startling live or on a crisper recording. Coltrane plays two ascending scales ranging about the length of the horn, very low to very high, with such uncommon velocity that the sound practically crackles. He comes close to those same scales elsewhere in the solo, but without the peculiar effect at 3:40. I can only guess that Coltrane is moving so far, so fast, and with such a meticulous articulation, that the product is a sound unproducible to a lesser saxophonist.  

Coltrane does manage some truly fine riffs among the scales -- passages more melodic or "lyrical" than harmonic or "vertical" -- and his scales are such that they substitute for melody, but "So What" is modal and expansive and its "head" or chorus has no melody to speak of, so that Coltrane's accustomed scales-playing is just the thing. I imagine a transcription of that solo might look something like the Manhattan skyline: jagged ups and downs. In any event a solo like that isn't inspiration for a saxophonist, so much as an unanswerable argument for his retirement from saxophony.   

In justification of a nobody with a blog

I beg the dear reader's pardon for this unbecoming own-horn-blowing, but I've apprehended that my current-events bona fides need registering publicly, and that they'll go unregistered if not by me. My formal training and certification are in political science, from a university of 25,000 in a national capital and rated in that time the best in its country for political science, which rating was my solitary consideration in choosing the school. I've followed American politics and government like my life depends on it for a quarter of a century, from an age when I ought to have cared more about school dances than Iowa caucuses. I wrote on politics and government and history and war professionally for half a decade in the biggest paper east of Quebec, and unpaid for a couple years before, then there's this blog which I've kept up since '05, which in Internet Time is Before the Flood.  

And for what it's worth I was born into a political family, who had run for office and served in government and campaigned for candidates and counted votes and studied political science and staffed for a future secretary-general of NATO and knew the representatives and met the prime minister. So hate my ever-living guts if you will, for the God-Bless-the-USA-Unreconstructed-Redneck-American-Triumphalist-Peasants-Party militant that I assuredly am, but please don't suppose I don't have a clue.

Obama indicted

Barack Hussein Obama was for America and the world comprehensively a catastrophe. The indictment following is not so comprehensive, but it's unanswerable, to wit and in no particular order:

The astronomical national debt was astronomical enough by the time Obama swore to turn it back, damning Bush for his contribution to it and promising a "net spending cut"; in the event and despite Obama's hacking of defense and hiking of taxes on the wealthy and on capital gains, the piling on of the national debt over Obama's eight years comes to $9.3 trillion, near enough to doubling the debt, or amassing as much as the 43 presidents previous.

Obama makes the first president since GDP statistics have been calculated never to see economic growth of at least 3% in at least one year of his presidency. Obama managed to abolish the boom-and-bust business cycle by chopping the peaks off the peaks-and-valleys, his economic recovery, if a "recovery" it was, being the feeblest since the 1940s. GDP shrank or bounced along the bottom in nine quarters of Obama's 32, and lest it be supposed that the recession which Obama famously "inherited" accounts for that, let it be observed that the contractions or flatlinings or both come in six years of Obama's eight: 2009, '11 and '12, '13 and '14, and a flat quarter as late as the end of '15, just a year before Obama walked out of the White House for the last time.

Obama's labor participation rate was the worst since the stagflation 1970s, Americans uncounted in the labor force having multiplied by 14 million under Obama, to 95 million, which worked wonders on Obama's official unemployment rate but was not so wonderful for the real economy and the real people in it. One American family in five are unrepresented in the labor force, i.e., families having not one breadwinner amount to 20%.

Americans dependent for their daily bread on food stamps multiplied under Obama by 13 million, and Americans in poverty by 8 million.

And to round out the roundup of economic ruin, America imported more than it exported in Obama's terminal year by nearly three-quarters of a trillion, and by that blessed end of the Age of Obama the homeownership rate was the worst in better than half a century.

The first black president whose very election we were promised would "heal the racial divide" brought instead the first race war since the 1960s, sanctioning at the highest levels the racial-grievance excuse-making for ghetto pathologies, claiming "racism" behind political disagreement and law enforcement, and intimidating police forces into abandoning the policing of minority precincts, with the consequent explosion in violent crime and in race riots.

Murders in America's greatest cities leapt by 31% in these couple years past, and by 57% last year over the year before in Obama's hometown of Chicago, where the Second-Amendment-abolitionists wrote the gun laws and an old Obama administration hand runs city hall. A Chicagoan anymore is shot every couple hours, and Chicago is more treacherous than Kabul. And as many Americans were killed in Chicago under Obama as were killed in Iraq under Bush.

After two terms of the first black president, blacks uncounted in the labor force were up 18.5% and blacks dependent for their daily bread on food stamps up 58%; even homeownership among blacks was worse for eight years of the first black president. They may go to their graves in devotion to this "first black president" who was in fact half-white-American and half-Kenyan-elite, and whose only hereditary association with slavery was on his maternal, slavemaster side, and for whom discrimination was affirmative action, but Barack "first black president" Obama was a catastrophe for blacks in America.

Before Obama's preposterously-named "Affordable Care Act", cost was first among the deficiencies of healthcare in America, but Obamacare only multiplied that cost, driving up the average health insurance premium by 25% in 2017 alone.

The uninsured are with us still, and since Obamacare so too are the untold masses restricted by Obamacare to 30 hours' work and wages weekly. Then there are the everything-and-the-kitchen-sink policies demanded by Obamacare, and the outlawing of barebones, emergency-only coverage, plus the “Shared Responsibility” tax/fine of hundreds per person per year (one is at a loss as to which to call it, a "tax" or a "fine", for the reason that Obama swore it was a fine when political necessity demanded it not be counted a tax, then when the legal necessity was that it not be counted a fine, it was conveniently recast as a tax; what it is truly is an outrage and a burden). Obamacare also has dispossessed untold masses of their plans and their doctors, notwithstanding Obama's assurances, and strained Medicaid and Medicare. And that's to say nothing of the violence done by Obamacare to the American freedom of conscience, unto the point of compelling nuns to buy abortifacients.

The lawlessness of Obama and his administration is a subject fit more for a book, and a thick one, but at or near the top of any accounting of Obamian lawlessness must be its application for the furtherance of the invasion and colonization of the United States by the Latin American Third World. Obama's lawless executive orders inviting "DREAM"-ers from Latin America to America made a commonplace of the hitherto-unknown phenomenon, of the herding and driving of masses of Latin American children on foot across Latin America, to be dumped on the American banks of the Rio Grande. And Obama's administration by their own accounting released into American society something over 86,000 criminal aliens in all of two years.

And partisan in their lawlessness: Obama and his administration were "the most dagger-partisan since Richard Nixon", to invoke an old formulation of Rex Murphy's. Obama's IRS isolated 400 Tea Party groups, to take but one example, and denied them the status they demanded and deserved so as to knock them out of two election cycles.

Obama presided over the triumphal march of the international jihad over the greater Near East including countries never dreamt of as terrorist territories, before there was a President Barack Obama; the jihad has today its first nation-state, also unthinkable before Obama; al-Qaeda is dwarfed as a force and a threat by the greater jihadi army of ISIS which before Obama was unconceived; and terror attacks in this country and in Europe which before Obama were one-offs, were in the Age of Obama a commonplace: in the two months preceding the 2016 Summer Olympics jihadis managed a terror attack someplace on earth outside Syria and Iraq every 84 hours. The Navy SEALs put a bullet in bin Laden's head on Obama's watch, but otherwise the war on terror went altogether the way of the international jihad.

ISIS is the product of Obama, and for a demonstration of Obama's comprehensive, catastrophic failure on ISIS this is unimprovable: Obama had pronounced ISIS "contained" a matter of hours before the Paris massacre of November 2015 wherein ISIS slaughtered more than 100 innocents. Before there was a President Obama, ISIS was unconceived and a jihadi nation-state was unthinkable; ISIS today constitutes the government of a swath of Syria and Iraq, and its jihadi empire of ISIS affiliates reaches into 18 countries.

In Iraq Obama inherited a won war, tossed it away along with its sacrifice, and extraordinarily has bequeathed to us a new, Third Iraq War.

More Americans died in Afghanistan in just the first year-and-a-half under Obama than in the seven-and-a-half years under Bush, and for a war which Obama's half-measures and declared timetable had determined could not end in victory: in Afghanistan Obama condemned America to the cost in blood and treasure of a war-winning big push, with the defeat of a retreat and withdrawal, abandoning the field to the enemy. And seven-and-a-half years after Obama assumed command of the Afghan War, on the eve of the Democratic National Convention, 80 Afghan Shiites were massacred in Kabul, not by the Taliban or al-Qaeda but by Obama's “JV squad”, also known as ISIS.

So far from frustrating Iran's nuclear drive or better yet pushing to liberate the Iranian people from their theocracy and at the same time to liberate the world from the principal state author of terror, Obama lifted such sanctions as there were on Iran and spared the mullahs' wicked, Armageddonist tyranny for the second time in his presidency, rewarding Iran with $150 billion in international trade plus $400 million in airlifted cash, and opening Iran to development by the advanced economies, i.e., the greatest leap yet in Iran's drive for the bomb.

Before there was a President Obama Libya was an ally of the United States in the terror war; within months of Obama's intervention there, unauthorized by Congress and undebated by the people, Libya was a wild wild west for the international jihad. Not long thereafter Libya was the site of the seizure and slaughter of an American ambassador, among other American dead including those two whose deliverance of the survivors was in defiance of the suicidal stand-down order from the top, worse even than the Iranian Hostage Crisis of three decades previous and a failure of Obama three times over: Obama abandoned the American personnel in Benghazi to “normalized” security despite the manifest threats and appeals for reinforcement, then declined to rescue them in the event, and finally he made out that the affair was the doing somehow of an immigrant to America who'd spoken ill of Islam in a YouTube video. And Libya today is another project of the ISIS caliphate, to where Obama ordered it bombed in another of his undeclared wars.

Before there was a President Obama there was no notion of war in Syria; the inaptly-named Syrian Civil War today has run half a decade, killed half a million, displaced four million and driven the greatest refugee crisis since the Second World War -- a crisis in the West as much as in the Near East -- and birthed the great jihadi army that is ISIS.

China in the Age of Obama seized dominion of the South China Sea, and Russia invaded and conquered some part of eastern Europe. Before there was a President Obama war in Europe was unthinkable; since Obama and his “Russian Reset” a Continental European shooting war is the everyday.

And that's to say nothing of North Korea and others I'm sure I'm neglecting, or of the contracting and crumbling under Obama of the United States Armed Forces. What Obama pursued instead was a retro-'70s arms treaty, to take but one example, restricting America's nuclear arsenal, unused since 1945.

To hear Obama tell it, he brought sunlit uplands, but surely if his fantasy were more than fantasy then that would be registered electorally, and there the very party he's led must know as well as any that Obama brought catastrophe: Obama leaves his party and his cause a shambles, the incoming Republican president and administration being the most militantly reactionary and conservative since the advent of conservatism as we conceive it, and Obama's Democrats having lost in his time 13 seats in the Senate and 64 in the House, 13 governorships, and 33 state houses. Time will tell if Obama's principal legacy will have been the advent and ascendance of a new Americanism, conceived in reaction against him.

(NB: For a large part of the facts and figures herein I owe to the very useful compilations of Sean Hannity)

Under-observed observations on the vote to shake the earth

Losing the little guy

It was long ago and far away that Democrats were "the party of the little guy". Until 2016 and Donald Trump, Republicans had not seized that banner for themselves, but on November 8 of '16 the little guy voted "R". That little guy might rightly observe that it was the Democrat Party who left him, and as to how, let me count the ways:

The invasion and colonization of the United States by the Latin American Third World is by now a sacrament of the Democrat Party, and the Democrat purpose in the Latin conquest is to import a new American people, so the consequences to the American people of the here and now are of no account.

Illegal aliens measured in eight digits occupy whole subsectors of the economy, cramming natural-born Americans and lawful immigrants into other, cramped subsectors, and depressing wages and benefits for all but the more untouchable classes. Illegal aliens heap burdens on public services, the public schools and emergency rooms and police departments. Illegal aliens too often import with them lawlessness and violence. And illegal aliens displace American communities with Little Tijuanas, driving natural-born Americans from their neighborhoods and homes, but when an American revisits the neighborhood of his childhood to find the only English left is the "STOP" on the stopsign, a Democrat smiles. 

The minorities who constitute the base of the Democrat Party are the most abused by it. Which is not to say that the minority "little guy" has yet abandoned the Democrat Party in anything like the numbers of the white flight from the Democrats, but Trump drew more votes from blacks and Hispanics than the Republican for president had managed four years before him, by a couple percent each, and given the margins that's more than a Democrat for president can afford to shed. A "chocolate city" like Detroit which was in living memory one of the great cities of the world, resembles something post-Apocalyptic, after a half-century of majority-minority, Republicans-need-not-apply, Democrat-machine politics, where the furthest-leftward candidate wins the Democrat nomination and the Democrat nominee is elected and re-elected and re-re-re-re-re-elected till he expires in office. 

In the twilight of the Age of Obama a Chicagoan is shot every couple hours, Chicago being Obama's hometown, where the old Obama hand Rahm Emanuel is boss at city hall and the Second Amendment is a byword. Majority-minority one-party Democrat jurisdictions anymore are war zones, lawless and lethal, where the schools are jungles, retailers can't open shop for liability of theft and damage and violence, and "opportunity" amounts too much to professional sports or vice rackets. 

In Obamacare the Democrats defied the people, drove up the average health insurance premium by 25% for 2017 alone, dispossessed average Americans of their plans and their doctors, strained Medicare and Medicaid, and restricted untold masses of American workers to 30 hours' work and wages weekly. 

Democrats debase the dollar, by their wanton spending and the wanton printing of dollars to cover their uncoverable debt, which in an economy that imports very much more than it exports impoverishes the people. Obama in his eight years will have doubled the national debt, but he leaves the nation with $9.3 trillion in new debt and nothing to show for it, because anymore spending as directed by Democrats scarcely makes it past the suburbs surrounding Washington. Government spending under Democrats is spending on government, and the average "little guy" doesn't see so much as a T-shirt out of it.

Obama ascended the presidency threatening America's trade arrangements, but in maybe the only transformation of his ideological life he walks out of the White House as the world's foremost exponent of free trade, for the same reason that a good part of the Right have turned skeptic on trade, or worse than skeptic: free trade as practiced in this 21st Century is a transfer of American wealth to the wide world, a racket where America's "trade partners" deliberately debase their currencies to well below whatever impoverished valuation the American dollar has sunk, to hijack American business and profits and jobs. That is free trade as it is in the here and now, not free trade as it was or ought to be, and that is the free trade championed by Obama and his Democrat Party.

Democrats only ever place their mad dogma of "anthropogenic climate change" ahead of jobs and liberties, and let a government scientist claim "endangered species" and a Democrat administration will institute a manmade drought in a farm community. And Democrats outlaw American fossil fuels as far as their writs carry, leaving the economy to cover the shortfall with imports in what amounts to another transfer of wealth from the United States to the wide world.

What the Democrat Party manifestly do not appreciate is that Candidate Trump snatched their proverbial "little guy", and if President Trump and his Republican Congress manage a fraction of what Trump has proposed and promised, they'll have converted that little guy to Republican and appropriated the claim to championing him.

The 1994 Republican Revolution as realignment

Ten election cycles in twelve, since 1994 and at the level of U.S. House of Representatives, have gone Republican. The Republican margin in the House as of the general election just past stands at 47 seats, 241-194. In the 24 years from 1995 to 2019, the Democrat Party will have held the House for all of four years, and those four years may in light of the eight years thereafter be understood as aberrant. When in the midterm elections of '94 Congress went Republican for the first time in four decades, the talk was of a revolution, but as it turns out "realignment" may've been more the mark.

The Obamian "imperator" presidency, and sauce for the gander

Already Obama's expansion of executive power is turned against the Left. Not long before the Democrats were booted from their Senate majority, in 2013, they "went nuclear" and dropped the threshold for ratifying presidential appointments, from a vote to confirm of at least 60%, to fifty-plus-one, surrendering to the executive a good part of the institutional power of the legislature to influence nominations for administrative offices and federal courts.  

To judge by Donald Trump's nominations as of November 18, all of a week and a half after the vote, Trump appreciates that his appointments may be ratified by just fifty-senators-plus-one, and assuredly he knows also that the party he leads holds at least that number, so that effectively Trump is at liberty to stock his administration with whomsoever he darn pleases. The Obama-Reid empowerment of the executive on appointments may produce the most conservative administration since the advent of conservatism as we conceive it. Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, and that gander is Donald Trump.

Orange jumpsuits vote Democrat  

In time for Election Day, the old Clinton enforcer and now Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe availed himself of the gubernatorial "autopen", to stack the Virginia electorate with something like 60,000 convicts. It says something about the Left and the Democrat Party and the Clinton campaign, not that they'd stack the electorate with criminals who'd forfeited their right to vote, so much as that they stack the electorate with convicts on the understanding that criminal votes are Democrat votes. Republicans demand that the vote of every active-duty serviceman be counted, inasmuch as our fighting forces preserve our rights and liberties and our hearts-beating and breaths-drawing, but with the understanding also that active-duty military and veterans vote Republican overwhelmingly. That might make an evergreen campaign theme if not also campaign ad: "USAF-issue camouflage votes Republican; DOC-issue orange votes Democrat." 

The mother country and the mother's country

Someplace on the long list of those ways in which Donald Trump is unusual among presidents-elect of the United States, is his being bound to Britain. The Founding Fathers and early presidents generally had been bound to the old country in ways great and small, but presidents of the United States since that founding generation have been more remote from the mother country. Barack Obama's paternal forebears in Kenya were British subjects, it must be said, but evidently not the pith-helmet-wearing and Earl-Grey-drinking kind, Obama's grandfather being a Mau-Mau who took up arms against Britain including in the second premiership of Winston Churchill.  

Donald Trump for a start owns properties in Britain where he employs Britons and buys British and pays British taxes. But more than that, Trump's late mother came from Britain; Scotland, to be precise, which accounts surely for the forename of "Donald" and the orange-ish hair. America's mother country is Trump's mother's country. To say nothing of Trump's having been an object of debate in the Mother of Parliaments at Westminster, after a Scotch "journalist" got up a petition that his banishment from the United Kingdom be considered by the House of Commons. (As it turns out, it's handy that Parliament declined to outlaw Donald Trump, inasmuch as he is now president-elect and commander-in-chief-elect of Britain's greatest ally and friend.) 

And more than even that, Donald Trump is very highly unusual in his hip-joining to the British cause which won the Brexit referendum in June of this same year. That campaign and its voters were parallel to Trump's campaign and voters, and Trump appreciated the parallel, landing in Scotland promptly after the earthquake that was Britain's vote to quit Europe for a rarefied appearance outside the United States, and importing to his campaign the principal champion of the Quit Europe cause, UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage, who campaigned with Trump, championed Trump on the talking-heads shows, and advised Trump in advance of the second debate, which incidentally Trump won convincingly.

The 8th of November and the eleventh hour

Half of the last four contests for president were decided in their eleventh hours. Twice in four presidential cycles has the vote been decided on the weekend before Election Day, "weekend" there being invoked expansively to refer to the Thursday evening through the Monday evening before the Tuesday vote.

It was the Thursday before the Tuesday in the first week of November 2000, unless I misremember, that Joe Trippi -- now of Fox News but then of the Gore campaign -- let loose the Democrat "oppo research" that Bush had been slapped with a DUI in his dissolute youth of the dissolute 1970s. The DUI had been expunged long since and Bush hadn't volunteered it, but for some part of the Christian conservative core of the Republican base who in that time were unpersuaded of Bush's wholesomeness, the DUI and Bush's not disclosing it were affirmations of their worst estimations of the man, and they were persuaded to sit on their hands come Election Day.

And because the story broke at the eleventh hour, by design, there was not time for its absorption, not to mention this was 2000, i.e., our holiday from history, when too many of us imagined we had the luxury of deciding the presidency of the United States on such trifles as an ancient, expunged DUI. As the Left never tire of observing Bush won the electoral college but lost the popular vote, but the polling and the conventional wisdom had it that if the popular and electoral votes were to split then it'd be Bush claiming the victory and not the presidency, until that fateful final weekend when the popular vote tipped to Gore.

The vote in '04 was decided in those days following September 11 of '01 when the American people saw in President Bush the man for the hour, and that decision was affirmed on whatever day it was in the summer of '04 that the Swift Boat Vets for Truth ran the first of their TV ads and repudiated unanswerably Kerry's principal claim to the presidency, namely his months in Vietnam. Then '08 was decided on September 15 in the Panic of '08, with the graph plotting the polling per the Real Clear Politics average showing a crossover as of September 17, I believe it was: McCain's red line submerged by Obama's blue line, and those lines never again to cross.

And then in 2012 and what was probably the winnable-est challenge to an incumbent president since 1992, Romney led Obama by something like five points deep into October in the gold-standard Gallup Poll, and Gallup found Romney up over Obama as late as election eve, albeit by a solitary point. But in time for the terminal weekend of the campaign came Hurricane Sandy. The press might've reported Sandy as they had done Katrina, for all Obama and his administration managed by way of relief and recovery, but let no man number among Obama's failings as a president that he's a poor hand for a photo-op, and Gov. Christie of New Jersey where Sandy hit hardest swooned like America's cheapest date, "Barry gave me his personal number and told me to call him if I needed him," or words to that effect.

It was the least Obama could've done, and all that he need have done: the press passed over the disaster that was Sandy in favor of Obama's photo-op and Christie's swooning, and carried Obama to Election Day like so many worshipful coolies bearing their master on his rickshaw. And it didn't hurt that Romney -- whose fire-in-the-belly as it turns out is for sabotaging his successor as Republican presidential nominee and not for the fight of his life against Obama -- stood down his campaign and thus conceded to Obama and the Obama-ist press the final furlong of the race.

I write this not in the expectation that it'll make it back somehow to Donald Trump or his campaign, but because in this existential war which is the 2016 presidential election I'm perfectly powerless, except to post to my modest blog. And to pray. So I offer herewith that half of the last four contests for president were decided in their eleventh hours and so it mightn't be ill-advised if Trump and his campaign were to plan for the contingency that November 8 is decided sometime between November 3 and 7, and more than that to force the decision onto those last days, with something big.

And as to that "something big", my proposition for whatever little it's worth would be that Trump smash through the press -- who per WikiLeaks are not prejudiced for Clinton so much as colluding with her campaign -- in a paid, primetime, televised address, Donald Trump in a room with a camera, speaking into the camera and through it to the average American, in a single, unedited take, and explaining plainly, "I'm for this, Clinton's for that; There's what's broken and here's how I propose to fix it; And whatever my faults as a man, if I'm not president of the United States come January 20 then the republic is buried."

One almighty peanut butter cup: A recipe for Peanut Butter Cup Pie

My first and very possibly last recipe post, for my "Peanut Butter Cup Pie", which is to say a peanut butter confection in a crunchy chocolate shortcrust and with a shiny chocolate shell. 

NB: The quantities herein make a pie of about 9" x 1" and maybe 36 oz. The edge of a peanut butter cup may be mimicked by baking the piecrust in a fluted tart pan. Best sliced chilled, and lives long and happy sealed and refrigerated. And be warned, the Peanut Butter Cup Pie is "not a reduced-calorie food", but it's nothing if not rich so that a little goes a long way. The recipe follows, in three parts.  

  

I. PIE FILLING: PEANUT BUTTER CONFECTION 

 

Combine 4 cups powdered sugar, cup peanut butter, 2/3 cup butter, teaspoon vanilla extract

Form and flatten into size and shape approximate to piecrust 

Press into piecrust, before shedding pieplate

    

II. PIECRUST: CHOCOLATE SHORTBREAD 

Mix cup all-purpose flour, 1/2 cup powdered sugar, 1/4 cup cocoa, pinch salt

Add 1/4 cup melted butter, egg yolk, teaspoon vanilla extract

Form into ball, wrap in clingwrap, flatten; chill in refrigerator for half an hour at least

Roll to fit pieplate, press into plate, trim excess

Bake at 360 degrees for 15 minutes, or longer as need be

 

III. PIE TOPPING: TEMPERED CHOCOLATE 

 

In double-boiler or equivalent and consulting a meat- or candy-thermometer, melt 3/4 cup chocolate and heat to 110 degrees 

Remove from heat and add 1/4 cup of that same chocolate

Stir 'til remainder has melted and temperature has fallen, to 90 degrees

Turn out onto pie filling and spread smooth