The "divided country" comes in for a comeuppance; Impeachment impeached; What they don't remember and I can't forget

The "divided country" comes in for a comeuppance

The conventional wisdom has it that ours is a "divided country", and conventional wisdom is only mostly bollocks, so it may be that this is one of those twice-a-day when the stopped clock gets it right, but it's past time the conventional wisdom came in for a comeuppance.

I sometimes wonder whether those people who cry "divided country" are less than proficient in the language, and sometimes whether they were born yesterday: I've heard "divided country" invoked to account for what is plainly "polarization", not division among the people but disparity between the parties, and I've heard "divided country" as though it were some singular feature of our age, that we were skipping along in contented comity until The Advent of The Orange. It was a handful of votes in one state that decided the presidency in 2000, then in '12 the presidency was decided by something like 400,000 votes spread over four states -- I could go on, but that "divided country" business would seem to obtain with some frequency in just these two decades, two presidential elections of four before Trump's.

Then there are the great questions of the age. Securing the border was the principal cause of the Trump campaign, and manifestly that's a question of national consensus: the Democrats won the House in '18 promising "border security", in maybe the boldest fraud and most perfect inversion of the truth I've seen in 14 election cycles. Some part of Trump's presidency has been given over to confronting China, another of those great questions of the age untouched before Trump, and on China the Hate Trump Party take care to pose for the people as standing with Trump, so I can only conclude that Trump's taking the lead pipe to China's kneecaps also is a point of agreement. Trump's disruptive, revisionist policy on trade has passed its Congressional tests with near-unanimity so again I can only conclude that trade is still another question of national consensus. And there is the rebuilding of the forces and of the roads and bridges, Trump's issues and consensus issues.

And as ever, "It's the economy, Stupid," and on that point don't take my word for it: Jim Cramer who's no great friend to Trump concluded late last year that Trump's economy is "the best of our lives." Only lately Gallup found that "personal satisfaction" was never higher, an impossible 90%. So presumably the Trumpian economic program which has wrought what may be the greatest and broadest and deepest prosperity in any society at any age, is another of those questions of national consensus, and not a small one. Anyone might point to questions that split more evenly, but there's more consensus where that came from.

It strikes me that the claim of a "divided country" coincides very neatly with the election of Donald Trump, and that it would make a convenient means for those people who claim it, of denying Trump's triumph and their defeat. If the country is "divided" then there's no winner and no loser, we haven't won and they haven't lost. Maybe they're right, maybe we're split up the middle, but we'll know soon enough, on Election Night in nine months, whether they've not lost and we've not won.

Impeachment impeached

If I were King of America, I'd decree two changes at least to the impeachment of a president. First, no 24 hours unbroken of arguments in the Senate trial, but the morning for the prosecution and the afternoon for the defense, then the defense gets the morning and the prosecution takes the afternoon, and so on. Under the rules as approved by the Senate in 1999 and affirmed in 2020, the defense sits silent for the better part of a week while a mountain of half-truths and untruths out of the other side go unanswered, and without provision for interjecting with objections, then when finally the defense gets its at-bat, there's no provision for the prosecution to answer any points of fact and arguments out of the defense which had been unknown or unanticipated.

But more than that, I'd amend the Constitution to make a partisan impeachment a practical impossibility: removal demands a vote of at least two-thirds in the Senate, so apply that same threshold to the House, raise the bar for impeachment to two-thirds and there'll be no more of this pointless, baseless partisan impeachment paralyzing the national government. Impeachment and removal are reserved for the most extraordinary national emergency and national consensus, and the two-thirds threshold for the Senate reflects that, but then that standard is exploded by the low bar in the House, a simple majority of fifty-plus-one partisan pygmies.

Unless the partisanship and paralysis that was the impeachment of President Trump is punished by the people in November, and brutally, the House Democrats like the teenager whose keys to the family car are snatched away by the grown-ups, we've no right to be surprised if impeachment takes its place as just another tool in the box for hysterical partisans in the House of Representatives, and at all events the threshold is set so low as to invite abuse.

What they don't remember and I can't forget

A vote in my high school history class in Canada a couple years after the Gulf War of 1991 went something like 28-2 against George H. W. Bush's declining to "roll onto Baghdad" and "finish the job"; America was held by the class to have been mistaken in not carrying the Kuwait war over the border into Iraq to tear down the monstrous and menacing Saddam Hussein regime and institute a decent national government in its place -- and those two dissents were the exceptions that proved the rule, namely me and a friend of mine seated next to me and watching my vote. Until '98 it was America's not going to war in Iraq that was Canada's indictment of America. And in America for a decade before the Iraq War of 2003 the consensus had it that we had been mistaken in not "rolling onto Baghdad". I lived it and I can't forget it.

The air strikes and air wars against Iraq carried on through the George H. W. Bush and Clinton administrations, including a matter of days before Clinton's inauguration in January of '93, and in December of '98 when Clinton ordered a three-day air war on Iraq a matter of hours before the scheduled vote on his impeachment. And in later years it was practically daily that Hussein's forces fired on allied aircraft patrolling the No-Fly Zone which Hussein had conceded by treaty, with practically daily return fire.

As a young conservative and a contrarian I only ever resisted the consensus that Iraq ought to have been invaded and its regime toppled, for the reasons that it looked to be a bigger and messier business than it was worth, and that there had been cause for hope within Iraq of a coup or revolution. Until in 1998 the accumulation of Hussein's defiance of the United Nations weapons inspections and the routine air strikes and air wars to keep him in his box, with the recognition that Hussein had consolidated his power, tipped the balance of cost and benefit, for me and for the Congress and president. It was 1998 that a Republican Congress and Democrat president committed the United States as national policy to regime change in Iraq, seconded emphatically by Britain's Labour Prime Minister Blair.

And whatever became of those weapons of mass destruction by the time American forces swept over Iraq in '03, it was no fantasy and no lie that Hussein was armed with WMDs because he had put them to use -- ten times. Then there are the resolutions of the UN Security Council which Hussein had defied, or the great majority demanding the Iraq War before the war, including Joe Biden and Al Gore and Hillary Clinton, and the 2002 Authorization for the Use of Military Force which was America's declaration of war on the Hussein regime, passed by a Republican House and Democrat Senate.

And that's off the top of my head, two decades hence. Our effort in Iraq, first tearing down one of the more monstrous and menacing regimes since 1945 and then instituting in its place a living democracy, was not some conspiracy on the people and the world by some cabal of "neocons", but the enactment of the consensus of a decade.

China the pretender, and the manifest superiority of feet and inches

China the pretender

Twice in the 20th Century Germany bid fair to master the world, and no sooner had we put paid to Germany than Russia threatened global dominion through its empire called the Soviet Union, but we faced down communism until that madness too collapsed. It's within my time, the '80s and into the '90s, that the conventional wisdom had it that we were being overtaken by Japan, which by the middle-'90s was an amusing remembrance. And in the '90s too the European Union was thought or hoped to be the future, a United States of Europe to overtake the United States complete with a unitary European armed forces, but Europe is decadent, weak and soft, and it always was a crazy-quilt of tribes, millennia before Brexit was a twinkle in the eye of Nigel Farage. Always the realities are reasserted, always America finds its feet and knocks the other fellow from his, always the challenger to Anglo-American ascendancy is seized by its own demons and cast down again into irrelevance or worse. 

So now that China takes its turn, I can only bet on form. When it'll come, or how, I cannot conceive, but in the end China is a big country with problems to match, a Third World country with 24-karat fillings, and the vote to shake the earth on November 8 of 2016 may turn out to have been the beginning of the end for China's good run, a run on artificial and transient advantage: currency manipulation and books-cooking, patent-thievery and corporate espionage and the outright seizure of Western technology by the People's Liberation Army, administrative convenience for Western supply lines, and above all sweatshop wages that could be had also in India or Indonesia or Vietnam, even. We've let it go too far for too long -- Clinton steered us wrong on China, and Bush and Obama drifted along that wrong turn -- and there may be a price to be paid for that, in troubles I shudder to consider, but in the end we won't be speaking Chinese.

The manifest superiority of feet and inches

Obviously the foot is a practical and human everyday unit of measure, where meters are too big and centimeters and millimeters too small, but more than that, the metric ten divides evenly only into halves and useless fifths; the Anglo-American twelve divides evenly into halves and thirds and quarters. A quarter of ten is 2.5; a third is 3.333333333 to infinity. And then for measures of less than an inch the principle is simple, sensible doubling: half, quarter, eighth, and sixteenth. A little more than a half is three-quarters; a little more than three-quarters is seven-eighths; and a little more than seven-eighths is fifteen-sixteenths. And that's to say nothing of the poetry in "five-foot-two" or "inch by inch".

Some semi-mythical orange giant with a combover, and other visions for 2020 and beyond

Addendum, November 30: Non-evidence of non-criminal non-wrongdoing in a baseless, pointless impeachment

After two months of baseless, pointless impeachment, Trump's worst enemy can't claim that he denied Ukraine its aid or that Ukraine did a thing for him in return, and neither can they claim that Trump ever said or otherwise directed that there should be any such quid pro quo; the case against Trump amounts to one man's baseless presumption and the griping and gossiping of several unelected and unknown, malicious and pretentious bureaucrats on the strength of that baseless presumption; and the only hard evidence in the case is exculpatory, namely Trump's express direction that there was to be no quid pro quo, the innocuous transcripts of every grunt uttered between Trump and the Ukrainian president Zelensky, the testimony of Zelensky and his foreign minister that there was no quid pro quo and more than that, there couldn't have been, inasmuch as no-one let on to them about the imaginary "quid", and the testimony of two U.S. senators who independent of one another spoke to Trump at this time and on this question and swear that Trump's hold on aid to Ukraine of two months had nothing to do with Joe Biden and everything to do with Trump's well-established contempt for the racket whereby America pays the freight and Europe freeloads.


So after two months wherein for the first time an impeachment repudiated the standards of eight centuries of English-speaking justice -- the rights to a public trial, to legal counsel, to confront one's accuser, to cross-examine witnesses and call witnesses, and to present evidence -- the Democrat House advance to their ad-hoc impeachment Phase Three, wherein the Judiciary Committee is meant to put the case that the non-evidence for the non-criminal non-wrongdoing amounts to high crimes demanding the overturning of a national election ten months before the re-election. Then the plan as near as I can tell is to approve articles of impeachment by partisan simple majority over a bipartisan minority before the Christmas recess, and leave the baseless, pointless business to the Republican Senate in the new year. Merry Christmas, America.

Addendum, October 7: The half-assed impeachment

The post below I wrote a day or two before the breaking of the Great Ukraine Nonstory of '19, which a week thereafter would precipitate the Half-Assed Impeachment of '19: for only the fifth time in the history of the Republic, the House of Representatives undertook to overturn a presidential election, and for the first time the House dispensed with its rules on impeachment, the fair hearing and public proceeding wherein the minority and the president may call witnesses and argue the defense, with the object of arriving at something resembling the truth. The premise of my post was that the Democrat House were disposed to impeachment, and thence to disaster; a day or two later they had their pretext, and a week after that they had their impeachment, or rather their semi-quasi-pseudo, half-assed impeachment.

The story these couple weeks has developed practically every few hours so I'll restrict myself here to some bigger and more durable questions, beginning with the beginning. Speaker Pelosi pronounced Trump's guilt and announced his impeachment about 5 PM on September 24, before the transcript of the phonecall at issue was published for the world to judge about 10 AM September 25; i.e., Pelosi consigned her party and House and country to the crisis of impeachment a matter of hours before she and the world saw the evidence for impeachment, and knowing from the lips of the president himself that the transcript was to be published in a matter of hours and that there was nothing impeachable to be found in it. The Mark Levin postulate (modified marginally by me) is that Pelosi had been sold a bill of goods by her Intelligence Committee chairman Schiff, rumors on baseless claims on gossip, and when on the morning after she discovered that the transcript was not as (presumably) Schiff had promised, there was no turning back, and all that was left was to ride the tiger and hope for the best.

And so the Democrat House commenced the search for facts and law to justify their presumption of guilt and declaration of impeachment. But extraordinarily they jettisoned three years of claims against Trump, in favor of their Great Ukrainian Hope, conceding implicitly that those less-novel claims had come to nothing. And assuming as I do that this Ukraine business goes the way of every blessed other Democrat claim against Trump these three years, the Democrats will be hard put to take up again their old hobby-horses: on the morning after, the people will be less than patient for another cry from the Democrats of "What about those tax filings from 1996!"

As to Pelosi's schedule for impeachment-by-Thanksgiving, or two months after the Impeachment Declaration, revised already to impeachment-by-Christmas, I make no claim to see the calendar in my crystal ball but I remember well enough the last big, unwanted thing Pelosi jammed through the House of Representatives: that big, unwanted thing was Obamacare, in 2009-'10, and passage took longer than hoped by maybe half a year; in the event it was enacted only by parliamentary maneuver to circumvent the rules of the Senate, which bears the uncanniest resemblance to impeachment in the House in 2019; and Obamacare was the single-greatest cause for the electoral bloodbath months later in November, wherein Pelosi's supermajority was reduced to powerless minority, the Senate Democrat supermajority was reduced to simple majority, and on the state level Democrats were purged in maybe the greatest partisan turnover in the electoral history of the Republic. And the story is that it was Nancy Pelosi, in that huddle which decided that the polls and elections would be defied and Obamacare would be the law of the land, who made the difference in darning the torpedoes.

I'll supplement this addendum as need be, and meantime the post below from before the Impeachment Declaration stands up well enough.
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When in 1998 the Republican House of Representatives approved articles of impeachment against President Clinton, it was on the strength of eleven counts of criminality. The Constitution demands high crimes or high misdemeanors as in treason or bribery, as grounds for impeachment, and the Supreme Court expounded in the 19th Century that a president may not be impeached on charges from that time before he was president. But even the Mueller Report concluded (and I quote from remote memory), "This report does not find that the President committed a crime," even on the nebulous sub-secondary question of "obstructive behavior" short of obstruction of justice, and on the most malicious construction of half the story, the doing of vicious Democrat operators acting in the name of the special counsel Robert Mueller but quite independent of him. So the Democrat House has the will to impeach the president but not the law or the facts.

Then there is the promise implicit in the Democrat campaign of '18 that a Democrat Congress would not pursue impeachment: Democrats standing for Senate as well as House were under orders from the very top that they were not so much as to utter the I-word; when one Democrat Congresswoman did invoke that dread I-word, campaigning in Los Angeles in maybe the safest district for Democrats in these United States, she came in for a spanking by the Democrat leaders of the House and Senate both, rebuked and repudiated for all the world to see, making an example of the Congresswoman and making plain to the country as much as the party that impeachment was not on.

That the Democrats would not chase vendettas into the paralysis and crisis that is impeachment was effectively a condition of their majority in the House, and yet the very month after they claimed that majority they inaugurated their impeachment, scheduled deliberately to dissect Trump's summit with Kim Jong Un for the nuclear pacification of the Korean peninsula; Day 1 of the summit was a great success, then came nine hours of impeachment televised live 'round the world, and on Day 2 Rocket Man let it be known he'd be keeping those rockets of his, and the bomb. And it's worse than a fraudulent campaign and worse even than a House of Representatives burning days and weeks and months on phantoms and fantasies: a House of Congress seized by the impulse to impeachment, chasing a bitter vendetta against a president, can only be disinclined to working constructively with that president, and with three months left of their first year the Democrat House has accomplished a fat lot of nothing. 

But all that is preamble, to the true trouble for Democrats in pursuing impeachment: if Trump is re-elected then it's less than likely that those people voting Trump for president will vote Democrat for House much less Senate, inasmuch as the people are indisposed to vote for Congress as a veto of their vote for president, on the same ballot. If on Election Day 2020 the Democrat House has burned two years in the vain pursuit of an impossible impeachment, then it's something less than likely that any American voting Trump for president will return those same Democrats to a majority in the House much less to reward their party with complete control of Congress, so that Congressional Democrats can occupy themselves for the next two years or four in overturning the presidential election. And the numbers are 18 and 31, 31 Democrat Congressmen defending in districts carried by Trump in '16, in a Democrat majority that stands now at 18. So unless the people vote Democrat for president they'll be less than likely to vote Democrat also for Congress, and to lose the presidency for the Democrats will be to lose the works.

Which brings us to the question of the vote for president. I said in 2016 that if Trump is elected then he's re-elected: the threshold for re-electing a president is considerably lower than for his election, for reasons I'll come to just below, and for Trump's election the threshold was never higher, so if they couldn't keep him out then they'll never kick him out. It's the 22nd Amendment codifying the convention observed by every president but Franklin Roosevelt, in limiting a president of the United States to two terms, that assures an incumbent's re-election as much as anything: because every voter appreciates that good or bad this sitting president will walk out of the White House for the last time in just four years, the commitment, the investment and the risk, are manageable; and unless that incumbent has presided over disasters in the economy or foreign affairs or both, or repudiated the campaign promises that were the terms of his election, the people know from experience that he can manage the job of president and that he'll honor his mandate. Hence that tendency of history whereby a president of the United States wins his re-election.

At home Trump has brought a renaissance in the economy and the national power, maybe the greatest boom in the overall for half a century, complete with the first revival of manufacturing since before free trade and the first independence from foreign energy since the '50s. Then on foreign policy Trump has neutered North Korea, in short order he won the war on ISIS in Iraq and decided the war on ISIS in Syria, he has Iran in a desperate way like hasn't been seen since maybe the Iran-Iraq War of the '80s, and he's brought the second power in the world to its knees, choking China's growth for the first time in better than a quarter-century -- all without the bodybags returned to Andrews. And Trump has been practically tedious in the best way possible, in copying-and-pasting verbatim from his campaign promises over to his executive orders and appointments and legislative initiatives; no-one friend or foe could claim Trump hasn't done all in his power to keep his promises and honor his mandate.

Then any full and fair accounting of Trump's prospects must concede that no winning campaign for president in memory overcame hurdles so towering as Make America Great Again did: Trump became the first candidate since the founding of the republic to win the presidency as his first civil or military office; the totality of the press and popular culture save for Fox News and The Wall Street Journal moved heaven and earth day and night to ruin Trump and crown Clinton; the Never Trump faction in Trump's own party which counts the last Republican president and last Republican nominee for president, sabotaged Trump all the way through election day, with the Republican speaker of the House encouraging the disowning of the man at the top of the ticket just weeks before the vote, and third-party conservative-alternative spoiler candidates draining votes from Trump by the millions; even the pope of Rome ordained that thou shalt not vote Trump. And for all that, Trump won going away: he needed 270 electoral votes and he won 306. Who can say what 2020 will bring, but can it be worse for Trump than 2016 when he scooped electoral votes like a steam-shovel?

So without counting any chickens, I can only conclude that Trump is well-placed for a second term. And don't take my world for it: no less a leftist than Michael Moore has concluded Trump is on course for re-election and the two-dozen would-be Democrat nominees for president are losers to a man.

It's my sense that figures like Donald J. Trump come few and far between -- there are all of two presidents in 44 (not 45: it's a long and pedantic story) who offer parallels to Trump, namely Teddy Roosevelt in the 19-aughts and Andrew Jackson in the 1830s -- and that they're genies out of bottles, not easily re-bottled. When a Trump materializes, and manages the impossible, then again he manages the impossible, and still again until the impossible comes to be blase, he's not likely to be turfed out on his ear. A figure like Trump who joins a vision for national renaissance and national greatness, to a drive like a force of nature, is not likely to shrink away in defeat, not in the face of titans much less the class of pygmies that is the 2020 Democrat presidential field. It's my sense that the Age of Trump has only begun, my guess that Trump's lame-duck chapter will be not so lame as is usual, and my expectation that Trump will move mountains in his second term as in his first. And if I were to venture all the way out onto the limb then I'd guess they'll miss him when he's gone, and that Donald J. Trump will lumber around the American psyche for a good while, and around the psyche of the world to the extent it bears on America, like some semi-mythical orange giant with a combover.

The best of times, where elections determine the times, and what's to be done about the miserable rest

The best of times, the worst of times. A renaissance in the economy and the national power, where a new, reactionary, and militant American conservatism is asserted: after two years of the vigorous Trumpian policy of "energy dominance" America had ascended to world's foremost producer of oil and natural gas, and for the first time since the glorious '50s exports more energy than it imports, to invoke just one measure of the American renaissance that is the Age of Trump.

But in the institutions and the culture whose powers-that-be don't stand for election the New Dark Age turns ever bleaker, as in the unremitting politicization of all things -- banking, professional sports and amateur, the back panels on bags of chips -- as in the infantilization of the society -- "She achieves her dreams, because she can," to cite a current ad for a pharmacy hawking adhesive bandages -- as in the repudiation of nature -- men emasculated and women cast as boxers and bodybuilders and combat forces -- as in the determined inversion of the reality -- black folks who account for a dozen Americans out of a hundred, represented in the national advertising as something closer to half the country. (And before the thought-police are called down on my head for that last illustrative point above, and my life and work and family name ruined, please do read my elaboration as follows: I adore black folks and always have, I was raised by folks who adored black folks, but objectively and statistically black folks are nothing like half the country, and to present them as anything like half the country is madness. No-one and no group is bettered by a turning upside-down of the facts.)

And on that last point of race, race, race: 2008 already is long ago and far away. In that presidential election year we were assured by the Left and the press that if only we'd elect The First Black President, the "racial divide would be bridged" for good and all, that the question of race would be resolved and retired if only America would vote black for president, never mind that this "first black president" was half-white and his ancestral association with slavery was to be found on the side of the slave-master. Even I imagined Rush Limbaugh had gone too far, all those years ago in '08, but Limbaugh alone prophesied and Limbaugh alone was borne out, that a first black president who happened also to be a Democrat president would have the effect of reducing every question in the national politics to race, to where demurring from that first black president on the capital gains tax rate might be damned as "racism".

A decade later half the political class and the whole of the elite, in the least-racist society in history in its least-racist age, are more hysterical than ever they were on the question of race. Only last week a Republican senator addressed a conservative conference with a weighty keynote applying the innocuous term "cosmopolitan" to our globalist elite, for no reason other than that it's apt, and extraordinarily he was damned from the Left for some imaginary "antisemitism" in his choice of words, never mind that it's leftists anymore who are the Jew-haters, and 21st Century American conservatism is if anything philosemitic. Race indisputably is the principal preoccupation of the elite in 2019, but it's one of a clutch of preoccupations which seize the powers-that-be and which they project with the manifold means available to them onto 330 million American consciousnesses, to indict the nation and to divide and debilitate it, and generally to make us miserable. So what's to be done, beyond winning elections which Republicans and conservatives manage miraculously to do more often than not, but which doesn't and can't penetrate the elite and their institutions.

My old joke about America's institutions -- that it's a shorter job to count the institutions in this country that aren't leftist and Democrat, namely the churches and the United States Armed Forces -- never was a knee-slapper and it's less funny with the passing years, but not the less for that it's true enough, and worse than that there's precious little conservatives can do to alter the fact, inasmuch as institutions in America are of course independent of government and invariably they enforce their own prejudices and preoccupations: a leftist dean in a leftist university is most unlikely to hire a class of conservative departmental leadership who offend his impeccable sensibilities, for instance, so an institution once seized by the Left, enforces and reinforces its leftism. In that special case of the universities conservatives may find a tool in the toolbox, inasmuch as a great many universities are subsidized by the state governments, and state governments are of course elected, and it'd be no more than democratic for any Republican state government to insist that any university suckling at the taxpayer's teat abolish any campus prohibition on political expression disagreeable to the Left.

But any great undertaking to yank the culture of this country from the infinitesimal and alien class that is the elite, must necessarily be directed first and most at the press and popular culture, those twin walls which surround us and blare at us daily and nightly, to invoke the imagery of Victor Davis Hanson. Take for a case-study cable news, where the monopoly of the Democrats and the Left and the elite is smashed, with just two news channels of the three in their service: the most-watched show in cable news is not coincidentally the most take-no-prisoners conservative and Republican, namely Hannity on Fox News' primetime, where CNN's most-watched show rates 36th -- not 36th on television or in cable, but 36th in cable news. Or look over the "Popular" titles at a world-beating streaming service which will go unnamed: Old Hollywood and Westerns and war movies, apolitical movies, expressly Christian and expressly conservative movies, not to mention Red Dawn which is maybe the most militant reactionary-rightist feature film of the last four decades -- all represented disproportionately, by my unscientific but sustained survey. So it strikes me that to break the leftist press and popular culture we need only break the monopoly, that if the people of this country are given a choice they'll take it.

Do as Jeff Bezos did, I say, in buying the Washington Post and converting it from Democrat Party news to Democrat Party activism: we needn't conceive a new medium or even to build a new business, only to buy out a newspaper here and a magazine there, a channel here and a studio there. And we needn't necessarily redirect those properties either from Left to Right: it's my sense that the people of this country are starved for a great and grand, neutral, national culture as in the Midcentury or The Last Golden Age, namely the '80s; a culture which doesn't hold its country in contempt, doesn't take sides on partisan questions, doesn't arrogate the function of politics and politicians, and forget and forfeit its art. The object is not to substitute one ideological instruction for another, so much as to liberate the people from the conditioning and hectoring into leftism which is unremitting anymore in the culture of this country.

And it strikes me too that this great undertaking may be a job for President Trump, in his retirement from the presidency which I'm confident will come in 2025 and not '21, an undertaking in its way as grand and as far-reaching as any triumph of Trump's presidency. Trump is placed quite singularly for a job of this sort and scale, with his singular comprehension of the mass media and his demonstrable mastery of it, from the hit reality show to the 160 million pairs of eyeballs on his "tweets", and with his singular capacity as an executive for producing prodigious and prompt results, and it doesn't hurt either that he's a multi-billionaire business emperor and seems to count as acquaintances half the mover-and-shaker class, or that he's inventive and indefatigable as a promoter. I'm a believer in the law of supply-and-demand, and a believer too that the unsupplied demand is there, for a great American culture, and that to smash the cultural monopoly may be to win the culture war.

The last elections and the next, and a word on afros

2016 and 2018

Inasmuch as the Republican president with his Republican Congress by Election 2018 had delivered what may be the greatest prosperity and peace since before Vietnam, and inasmuch as the popular approval for Congress since the Democrat capture of the House of Representatives, the last I looked in on it, was drawing near to single digits, I can't but wonder whether the Democrat majority in the House owes in some part to a critical mass of impressionable voters who after two years of investigations and of hysterical reportage on those investigations imagined that their Republican president had somehow "stolen" his election and was somehow an "agent" of a hostile foreign power, and thus demanded countering by a hostile House. I can't but wonder whether, had the special counsel proclaimed Trump exonerated on the fantastical charge against him of conspiracy with Russia, in time for Election Day, Trump's Republican Party might've held the House. I can't but wonder whether the investigation into interference in the election of 2016 -- which concluded that Russia never flipped a vote and Trump and his campaign never touched Russia with a pole -- might itself have interfered in the election of 2018.

2018 and 2020  

Counting every heartbreaker -- all those narrow margins decided days and weeks after the vote or decided by those "provisional ballots" so conspicuous in their usefulness to Democrats -- the Democrat majority in the House amounts to 18 seats, and no fewer than 31 of that majority represent districts which voted in 2016 to make a president of Donald Trump. Take as a case-study the fifth of Oklahoma's five Congressional districts, the most metropolitan in OK, taking in most of Oklahoma City and a couple outlying counties. OK-5 flipped on November 6 from R to D, but by 50.7 to 49.3%, 3,500 votes of 239,000. The district had voted Republican for better than four decades, and the balance of OK's delegation is Republican, those Republicans having won between 59 and 74% in their districts, in a "bad year" for House Republicans. So surely it's within the realm of possibility that in a presidential cycle, with Donald Trump at the top of the ticket to draw out that Trump voter and in a state that voted Trump in '16 by 66 to 29%, the turnout and the dynamic will suffice to tip OK-5 back to Republican red. And surely there are more OK-5s than one in this republic of 435 Congressional districts.

There are of course items on Trump's agenda which might on paper pass a Republican Senate and Democrat House, particularly the renewal of American infrastructure and the mitigation of prescription costs, but in light of the first hundred days of the Democrat House and Pelosi speakership it would be no more than objective observation to pronounce that the prospect of constructive, compromise legislation proceeding from the House of Representatives in the coming year-and-a-half before Election 2020, is bleak. Only so much of Trump's first-principles, American-renaissance program may be enacted by executive order or Senate confirmation. And owing to the physics of American politics and government, a re-elected President Trump may hold a Republican House in 2022 but could never expect to hold in '22 what he hadn't won in 2020, on his presidential coattails.

And so it's not enough that Trump win his re-election on November 3 of '20: he must carry with him no fewer than 18 Republicans in House districts represented today by Pelosi Democrats. Trump might appeal in so many words that "If you want me for your president then vote Republican for your Congressman, because so long as Nancy Pelosi is speaker of the House there'll be no fixing what's broken," but more substantial would be the joining of Trump's presidential campaign to a nationalized Republican Congressional campaign, along the lines of the Contract with America which delivered both houses to Republicans in 1994 after four decades of frustration.

There is as of today just the one principal vulnerability for Trump and Republicans in 2020, namely healthcare, which is an injustice inasmuch as it's the Democrats alone who decreed the healthcare monstrosity that is Obamacare, but what is not unfair is the expectation of particulars, in a campaign and on healthcare most of all. It's this nobody-with-a-blog's plea that Trump and every Republican standing for Congress, before September of next year, agree to a simplified and nationalized joint platform, covering especially healthcare, as in "President Trump and a Republican Congress will in the next two years enact legislation on healthcare which affirms the guarantees for pre-existing conditions, provides for those truly needy Americans ineligible for Medicare or Medicaid and uncovered by insurance through employers, and for the first time cuts the cost of healthcare in America, by instituting subsidized 'high-risk pools', and by abolishing the prohibition on barebones, emergency-only insurance policies, and by opening insurance to competition from out-of-state." Joining the Trump campaign to a nationalized Republican campaign for Congress, committing president and Congress both to action and to particulars, may well assuage those mostly-female voters swayed in 2018 by the cynical Democrat campaign reduced to "pre-existing conditions", and at the same time make a down-the-line-Republican of the Trump voter, delivering to Trump the presidency and the Congress and the future.

A word on afros

Afros are outlandish and surely they can only be impractical -- 45 minutes every morning in the mirror -- and history teaches us that impractical styles are fleeting, and that outlandish styles look the most dated and comic to posterity.

The King of the Mormons explained

When at their fag-end the Republican presidential primaries of 2012 degenerated to Mitt Romney versus Rick Santorum, who as near as I could tell was running for the United States presidential nomination of the Vatican, I suspended my judgment of Romney. I threw in with Mitt, accepted the assurance of Jim DeMint that he had "learned conservatism as a second language", never wrote peep against him, and on Election Night 2012 when he lost probably the winnable-est challenge to an incumbent president since 1992, I was devastated. But when I last affirmatively hated a human being, in 2011, the human being in question was Willard Mitt Romney. And half a decade later in 2016 that suspended judgment of mine was affirmed: I had it right the first time, I had the measure of the man; Mitt Romney is that vilest of creatures, the cynical politician with boundless ambition for nothing but his power and glory, who believes in nothing but his entitlement to power and glory, and who is perfectly prepared to say and do absolutely anything in the service of that power and glory.

Pardon the brutality of this honesty, brutality to Mormons and the Mormon state, but it must be said. Mormonism is ascriptural heresy and kookery, the indulgent invention of an early-19th Century madman who might conceivably be a distant cousin to me and who in some portraiture bears a resemblance, but I esteem Mormons as Americans and businessmen and genealogists and showmen, and I came by that esteem honestly, my father being an admirer of Mormon businessmen if not of their lunatic theology. And the brutal facts are these: Mitt Romney is a United States senator today for no reason other than that he's King of the Mormons, and among the 50 states is counted a Mormon state.

There was precisely one state of the 50 where Romney might expect not to be received with a hail of putrefied vegetables, so it was that state where Romney ran for Senate. Romney was born in Michigan and he worked and entered politics in Massachusetts, and so long as he had prospects other than Utah, he took 'em. But in 2018 Mitt Romney determined that he must be a United States senator, and he appreciated that if he appealed to the Mormon state for his Senate seat, as King of the Mormons, he could not be denied. In the event he nearly was denied -- Romney narrowly lost the first round of the nomination for U.S. Senate, in the party he had represented at the level of president not six years prior, and in the state which is his fiefdom -- but it's as one of Utah's finer representatives Jason Chaffetz observed on the news of Romney's Senate ambitions, "If Romney runs in Utah, he wins."

And so it was that the King of the Mormons was anointed United States senator from the Mormon state. And Mitt Romney's first effort as junior U.S. senator-elect from maybe the most Republican state in the Union, was not to offer a settlement to the crisis of the shuttered federal agencies and the unsecured southern border, but to submit an op-ed to the Democrat-activist Washington Post and to give a follow-on interview to the Democrat-activist CNN, damning his Republican president Donald Trump, principally on grounds of "character", whatever that may mean in this debased century and whatever it counts for in the existential struggle which is the politics of this age. Not to mention, this country oughtn't abide hectoring on "character" out of a cynical, self-seeking saboteur. I'll hope to be mistaken in this judgment but I find my judgment where Romney is concerned to be depressingly precise and prescient: Mitt Romney doesn't care a tinker's darn for the will and wishes of the people of Utah, or for the United States Senate or the legislation before it, or come to that for the Republic and the state of it; Romney is U.S. senator from Utah for no purpose other than that he has determined the office to be needful to his ambitions for president; and Romney's principle -- not "principles", plural, because he has just the one true principle -- is that Mitt Romney must be and shall be president of the United States, that greatest figure on God's earth.

It was only to be expected that Mitt Romney would be numbered among the Never Trumpers, those elements of the Republican elite who imagine that the enemy is not the America-hating leftism which means to tear it down and watch it burn and which today monopolizes the Democrat Party, but the force-of-nature conservative populist who means to save the Republic and build it up, namely Donald J. Trump. Romney is a cartoon of the Republican elite, and maybe the greatest living exponent of the your-father's-Oldsmobile, go-along-to-get-along Republican, those old hands who lead us to electoral defeat and who mark time in the way of policy when occasionally they do manage not to lose a vote of the people. The trouble with Romney's reaction to the Trump ascendancy was that his declaration of war on Trump in a set-piece speech, much promoted, came the day after Trump had effectively clinched the Republican nomination for president, in a primary campaign wherein Trump won more votes than any Republican for president since the advent of the presidential primary, and wherein more Americans voted on the Republican side than in any primaries since there's been such a thing. But it was so very much worse than even that.

Romney went well past the set-piece speechifying damning his successor as Republican nominee for president: he opened the Romney Rolodex of wealthy benefactors to the third-party, conservative-alternative spoiler candidate for president in Utah, at a time when the consensus was that any Trump triumph in the general election would be a close-run, that Trump couldn't hope to carry anything like the 306 electoral votes that fell to him on election night but might at best scrape over the finish-line with the modicum of 270, and that to yank out from under Trump a gimme-state for any Republican for president, by tipping just enough Republican votes to that conservative spoiler in Utah, would assure Trump's defeat and repudiation. That's to say, Romney quietly and practically sabotaged Trump's campaign in the general election with the purpose of handing the presidency to Hillary Clinton and thus placing himself for a second kick at the presidential can in 2020, as the I-told-you-so candidate. It was the news of that conspiracy that compelled me to conclude at last that I had it right the first time, that Mitt Romney was at least as despicable as my least charitable judgment of the man.

Now to the future, and if these prophesies of mine turn out to be mistaken then I'll duly enter the error in the accounting of my causes for humility. Mitt Romney plainly is delusional, as deluded as a Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton fantasizing of walking again triumphal into the Oval Office, but he's not a perfect fool, and I can only assume he appreciates that no man can win the presidency of the United States as a third-party nominee, not to say there's a statistically-significant contingent of Americans in any event clamoring for Mitt Romney at the top of some novel Romneyan Third Way ticket. Romney may be content to sponsor some loser also-ran candidate to siphon just enough Republican votes in a close contest to deny Trump the presidency, but Romney himself would never play the kamikaze, humiliated in a second presidential election and with three-point-something percent of the vote. And if "independents and moderates" wanted Mitt Romney for their president then surely he'd have been president since January 2013. And much as Democrats and the press adore Romney so long as he's damning Trump, he can't have forgotten already the savaging he took from those self-same individuals and institutions only half a decade past, once he had claimed the Republican nomination for president: any Democrat in America rejoicing today in Romney's every utterance, at the same time hates Romney's ever-living guts.

Obviously the estimation of Romney among Republicans and conservatives is that he's no conservative and no Republican, a liar and a loser, and very possibly the most self-seeking and traitorous figure in America today who's not a Democrat. So Mitt Romney is a man without a constituency; he'd be a man without a state but for the cult-with-a-state he happens to have been born into. But whatever his appreciation of those facts, I can only suppose that Romney imagines the facts to be passing: the great hope of Mitt Romney is the catastrophic collapse of Donald Trump, as in some impeachment proceeding, which in the Romney fantasy will alter the considerations unrecognizably, leaving Republicans to crawl chastened the the feet of the Mormon King, pleading "Wayward wretches were we, scorning your light, o Romney, for our Trumpian darkness! Pity us, o Romney; pity us and pardon us, and lead us to the power and the glory that is yours alone!"

That Mitt Romney means to run again for president is at this point past disputation, but the timing, the presidential cycle, is yet unknown even to Romney, dependent as it is on the demise one way or another of the Trump presidency, which I'm here to say will come only after eight years of American renaissance.

It's no more than is true and fair to pronounce Donald Trump vain and ambitious, like Mitt Romney is vain and ambitious, and there are the superficial parallels -- billionaire businessmen and Republican nominees for president, etc. -- but where Romney is a soulless calculator pristine of principles, Trump is a true-believer; where Romney will stop at nothing in the cause of Mitt Romney, Trump is an irresistible force of nature for the cause of saving the Republic and building it up; where Romney is driven, Trump is driven like no man on earth, easily the most energetic executive since Teddy Roosevelt more than a century ago; and where America is the great love of Trump's life, the great love of Mitt Romney's life is Mitt Romney.

Three paragraphs by way of a Christmas post

I think the world of Gordon Ramsay, really I do, and his unimprovable Ultimate Christmas specials from 2010 would be worthwhile if only for the music soundtrack to the more traditional half of the set, but it must be said, Ramsay's Christmas shows may be the most unwittingly amusing cookery television since Julia Child. Ramsay's thesis in Ultimate Christmas is that these dishes of his are "achievable, affordable, and won't leave you stressed", they don't "cost the earth or take forever", and I suppose that's perfectly and precisely true, for a Michelin-five-star millionaire chef with yes-sir accounts at Fortnum & Mason and Harrods.

Ramsay's dishes are cartoons of overwrought, exotic, Bacchanalian show-food. Never mind the set-piece main course on what is meant to be his more conventional menu (the stuffing incorporates a "merguez" sausage, from North Africa), for breakfast Ramsay fixes pan-seared day-old loaf-sized croissants with shaved smoked salmon and runny, cream-and-chives scrambled eggs. Then for sweets he fixes scratch mint-chocolate truffles, with a small herb-garden's yield of fresh mint, bitter chocolate and half a jar of insect-labor honey to offset the bitter chocolate, and cream and double-cream. It's all in a day's work for Chef Ramsay, but the runny eggs and the ganache for the truffles both demand to-the-degree-and-to-the-second heating which any average or below-average chef could be counted on to botch comprehensively.

Even the cream for Ramsay's Christmas pudding calls for whiskey and Irish cream too: I appreciate that 99% of the British Isles are clinical alcoholics from their teens, but surely it's not an ordinary British household that stocks whiskey and Irish cream both on any given day.

Hawking toys on December the 26th

I write this without expectation that it'll be heeded; that it must be argued at all, and has not been enacted in the regulatory regime long since, is reason enough to despair, but here goes nothing. It happens that the rarefied corner of the world I was born into is the heart of "District 34", a fishery zone delineated in the North Atlantic off southwestern Nova Scotia which may be proportionally the most lucrative lobster grounds on God's earth today. The lobster fishery today IS the local economy, despite the best efforts of my father among others to diversify: there's lobstering and there's boatbuilding and other such support for the lobster fishery, then there are the secondary services dependent for their daily bread on those producers, and nothing more to speak of; no farming or fish farming, no oil and gas, no manufacturing, etc. So to neglect the market for our lobster would be practically criminal.

The natural, next-door market for District 34 lobsters happens to be the greatest market in the world and in history, namely the United States, and in this age a lobster caught in District 34 on Thursday may have made it to the American market on Friday. The lobster season this year opens as it has for as long as I can remember, on the last Monday of November, placing it well for the market in lobsters around Christmas and New Year's, but more often than not missing by a day the market for Thanksgiving (or "American Thanksgiving", which is to say the first and true Thanksgiving).

Thanksgiving in America is of course a holiday of between one day and three, plus the weekend following, when families are reunited and eat uncommonly large and special dinners at home or out, and which inaugurates the Christmas season, with "Black Friday" after Thanksgiving Thursday being the busiest single shopping day of the 365. And Thanksgiving in America falls on the fourth Thursday of November, i.e., November 22 to 28. Thanksgiving 2019 falls on November 28, all of six days later than Thanksgiving '18 and after the last Monday in November which opens the lobster season. But seven years in ten, the lobster fishery which amounts to the totality of the economy is opened a day late for what may be the greatest demand in what assuredly is the greatest market.

I shudder to imagine the wealth that's been forfeited by setting the lobster season with such disregard for the lobster market; the lobsters couldn't be much better off for being spared a few days, but those few days could cost our tiny economy untold millions of American dollars. So I propose on this unread blog that the lobster season be adjusted marginally, to open not on the last Monday of November but the Monday before the fourth Thursday in November -- and lest it be protested that this would be an upset to the lobsters, let it be noted that every few years the last Monday does fall before the fourth Thursday, so surely the change would be inconsequential to all but our economy. But this is the universe of Canadian federal regulation, so I can only expect that the status quo will be observed universally and uniformly, without question or consideration, and tomorrow as yesterday, like a manufacturer of toys releasing its new line annually on December 26, a day late for Christmas but well placed for all those January birthdays.

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.