The 8th of November and the eleventh hour

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  

I. PIE FILLING: PEANUT BUTTER CONFECTION 

 

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

Form and flatten into size and shape approximate to piecrust 

Press into piecrust, before shedding pieplate

    

II. PIECRUST: CHOCOLATE SHORTBREAD 

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

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

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

Roll to fit pieplate, press into plate, trim excess

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

 

III. PIE TOPPING: TEMPERED CHOCOLATE 

 

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

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

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

Turn out onto pie filling and spread smooth 

Vote of no return; or, Hyperventilation in prose

(Apologia: Lest the dear reader find the entry following to be overwrought, a sort-of hyperventilating in prose, I'll plead preemptively that I know something of what I write, for a change. I've lived for the longest time cheek-by-jowl with the Latin invasion, I know immigration law and am acquainted with demographics, and I'm fairly fixated on how it is that societies and nations and civilizations are made and unmade by numbers and will, as in England and in America and on the tiny island in the Atlantic Ocean which is the place of my birth and my first couple decades.)

A country is the people in it; change the people and the country is changed. Like the losing candidate on election night who wishes to "elect a new people", it has been the project of the Left to import a new American people, legally and otherwise, and anyone alien to Americanism will do.

Never in my lifetime have I known anxiety for anything in the way of politics and government to approach my anxiety for the judgment of November 8, but never in my lifetime and very possibly not since 1864 has this country known a vote for president to decide it all. This campaign of 2016 will decide what is called in this country by the misnomer of "immigration", and immigration will decide the rest: jobs and wages for natural-born Americans, or rather jobs and wages for those natural-born Americans below the untouchable elite; the overburdened government services left over for natural-born Americans; the neighborhoods and communites lost to natural-born Americans, below that untouchable elite; the national culture if not also its undivided language; and the composition of the national government and course of the country.

If the Hillary Clinton program is effected then a good part of Latin America and some part of the Mideast are emptied into the United States, in numbers we can't now fathom, with the border left open wide to the Noah's Flood of humanity which must surely follow any amnesty of a dozen million illegal aliens, and the "chain migration" of resident-but-not-citizen sponsors and "family-based visas" and like provisions of the immigration law since its rewriting by Ted Kennedy.

And the Congress will have nothing to say about it: the Supreme Court has split 4-4 on Obama's arrogation of unilateral authority in immigration law -- the unconstitutional and unconceived-of power of the presidency to determine immigration policy, even unto the point of repudiating the duly-enacted law of the duly-elected Congress -- and the next president will nominate the ninth justice to break that tie.

Late in the evening on the last day of August Donald Trump might've thrown away the election and the nation, in doing as every elite said he must and would, and surrendering on the illegals question. The press in unison with the Clinton campaign had for days delighted in claiming "Trump flip-flops on immigration," but the press are not to be trusted, least of all in reporting what it is Trump is for and what he's against or even what he's said. It's something like that old standard "Do Nothin' 'til You Hear from Me"; unless and until Donald Trump declares a change, there's no change.

And in that earth-shaker of a speech in Arizona on the evening of August 31, Trump's Ten Points on Immigration, Donald Trump made plain that he'll make like Sam Houston and drive Mexico south of the Rio Grande. Criminal illegals are to be jailed, deported forcibly, and banished; the lesser illegals are to be squeezed where possible 'til they're left with no alternative but to quit the country voluntarily; petitioners for entry to and status in the United States from the Muslim world are to be scrutinized pitilessly; and the border with the Latin American Third World is to be sealed, by a "big, beautiful wall".

And so Donald Trump now has ratified his platform as Hillary Clinton has affirmed hers, on "immigration", which is to say the lawless and ruinous invasion and colonization of the United States by the Latin American Third World. To vote for Clinton is to vote for the Latin conquest of America; vote Trump and the nation is saved.

It may be that America's election for president has a very near precedent in Britain's referendum on Europe in June of this same year. Any number of issues figured in that Brexit vote and very few of those issues were inconsequential, but it was immigration which drove Britain's vote to quit the European Union and reassert its sovereign nationhood. The great cousin-nations have been known to be seized more or less in parallel by great shifts, as in Thatcher in Britain prefiguring Reagan in America, or Clinton in America prefiguring Blair in Britain. And never mind Britain's June referendum prefiguring America's November election: some months before the Brexit vote it was immigration which elevated Donald Trump over a field of fifteen to the nomination for president of half of the Big Two national parties, with the most votes and the greatest turnout in a Republican primary since there's been such a thing.

This contest for president, I shudder to say, has a finality about it never intended for a quadrennial election in this limited-government constitutional republic; it is, God help us, the vote-of-no-return. Trump in his Ten Points speech said it, that this election amounts to "our last chance".

I remember Mark Steyn in the '04 campaign writing that George W. Bush would win his reelection and more than that, if Steyn was mistaken on a question like that of the American soul, then ipso facto he'd have ceased to know the nation and would thus cease to write on it, or something very like that. So to modify Steyn, if the next president of these United States is other than Donald Trump then the nation will have voted for its abolition, and to write on the subject will be pointless.

The question is an open one, it must be said, as to whether any candidate for president can win and any candidate lose, with the press and popular culture and institutions doing all in their power daily to see one installed in the White House and the other ruined. The press and popular culture, as of the '08 campaign and in their effect, function something like the state-run media in an authoritarian or totalitarian system, preserving the elite and enforcing their dogmas. And in Donald Trump the elite and their enforcers recognize far and away the greatest menace yet to their project. But Trump makes the first Republican for president since Reagan to beat the press, albeit unevenly. A Trump victory as much as anything would be a victory over the elite and its enforcers in the press and popular culture and institutions. And a victory by Trump also would constitute a new model for Republicans and conservatives, to win the ballgame despite that the umpires which are the press and pop culture will call Democrat balls for strikes, and Republican homeruns for long fouls.

It must be said also that in this contest for president the energy and effort, the new and big ideas, the getting-to-grips with the reality of the real world and the real people in it, the earnestness, and the urgency, are on the side of Donald Trump, who to his everlasting credit says of himself in this campaign that he's "just the messenger, folks".

The polling has shown Clinton up over Trump but also it's shown Trump up over Clinton, and often enough it's been margin-of-error, this-thing-could-go-either-way craps-shooting. So if God has not yet abandoned the Great Republic then may God bless America, and save it, and may the judgment of November 8 be Donald Trump, 45th president of these United States.

Still more miscellany: War will ever be with us; Hostile takeover of a grand old party; Epitaph for a campaign; The woman question; On Coltranian verticularity

War will ever be with us

"Peace" in the English-speaking world amounts to those periods when the wars are smaller and more neglectable by the society at large, left to the professional, standing forces who dirty their hands and risk their limbs and lives so the great majority may pursue our happiness. Leadership inclined to war-making will carry on wars, and leadership inclined against war-making will be compelled to carry on wars despite themselves, by the realities which until they held power they were at liberty to reject, and not infrequently the war-skeptics and pacifists will bring war by their very aversion to it. It is not given to the English-speaking world to know "peace"; that is for lesser and less-honorable nations, nations without the will or the way to fight, which know peace as a gift of the English-speaking world or else as defeat and surrender. Anglo-Saxon Civilization is too great and too honorable to know "peace"; there are wars to be fought, we're the ones to fight them, and 'twas ever thus.

Hostile takeover of a grand old party

It may be that the Trump ascendancy does not rise to the order of the supplanting of one of the Big Two parties by what amounts to a third party, but to my way of thinking for whatever little that's worth, the election of Donald Trump as Republican nominee for president of the United States is at the least the hostile takeover of the old-line Republican Party by an "alt-Right" alternative conservative third-party movement; the triumph, albeit undeclared, of the Tea Party.

The name "Republican" is intact and the personnel are not much changed, and only time will tell if this hostile takeover is thoroughgoing and enduring, but that it is a hostile takeover is I think indisputable: the Republican establishment were about as unanimous as they were strenuous in their contempt for Trump, and Trump won the nomination of the Republican Party by running against the Republican Party about as much as he ran against the other side.

And I'd go one further and venture that this hostile takeover is more likely than not to be thoroughgoing and enduring: even if the most Donald Trump may manage is eight years in the White House, he is today half of the alternatives for next president of the United States because he won more votes than any single candidate in a Republican presidential primary since there's been such a thing, and if Trump were to drop dead of a coronary tomorrow, those masses who voted Trump would be there still, and their principles unaltered.

It was a century and a half ago that a Big Two national political party was last supplanted by a third party, when it was the Republican Party that played third-party usurper. The Whig Party had ceased to represent the people who voted for it, on the question of the abolition of slavery particularly, and by the election of 1860 the erstwhile Whigs had migrated to the novel Republicans and elected a Republican president, a Whig-turned-Republican called Abraham Lincoln. 

1860 is not a very precise parallel to 2016, but the conditions for the partisan reordering are near enough, namely a Big Two party's ceasing to represent the people who vote for it, the Republican Party as constituted before the Trump ascendancy having ceased to represent their people on such questions as the invasion and colonization of the United States by the Latin American Third World and the ancillary question of the immigration to the United States of adherents to a certain world religion who want us all dead and burning in hell.

Now to fill out the parallel will take a Trump presidency, and among the earlier steps to that end Donald Trump and we Trumpians must make nice and make peace with the old-line Republicans and as much of the R establishment as can be brought onside, because they're necessary and because they are after all not on the other side in this war; those people are countrymen of ours, and there's a war to be fought.

Epitaph for a campaign

But before the aforesaid nice-making, a little leftover sport-making. It says something about John "No Hoper" Kasich that on that day in May after Donald Trump had won Indiana in a romp, Kasich didn't quit the race 'til after the first runner-up Ted Cruz had conceded to the Trump ascendancy. Kasich's carrying on in the Republican race so long after he'd been statistically eliminated necessitates that he imagined the party muckety-mucks at the convention might well hand him the nomination that the people in the primaries hadn't voted him. Kasich would point to polling showing him beating Clinton in a general election, but that says more about Hillary Clinton than John Kasich: the average American outside Ohio doesn't know John Kasich from Adam's off-ox, so when they were polled on Hillary Clinton versus John Kasich, they'd hear "Hillary Clinton or John-so-and-so" and shrug and vote John-so-and-so, or so I suppose. But if the voters of the Republican primaries who did know Kasich weren't buying what he was selling, then surely he'd never have sold with the average American once he was known to them.

If some magic wand were waved elevating John Kasich to president of the United States, he wouldn't see what's broken never mind fix it, and as a campaigner he couldn't place second in a three-man race in his own party. Come to that, Kasich placed fourth in the three-man race, after Marco Rubio who had quit the race months before. There's a line Trump ought to have flogged, and an epitaph for the Kasich campaign: In a three-man race, John Kasich placed fourth.

The woman question

From a badly mismatched ad in my e-mail, per my memory of it: "Stand with Hillary and get your official Woman Card." I take it that's meant to be amusing, what the kids call "ironic", and certainly it's a joke, albeit not in the way the Clinton campaign had in mind. Setting aside the inadvisability of official campaign humor, is that not effectively exclusionary, and exclusionary of something over half the population; does it not translate to "Would-be boosters of the Clinton campaign who happen to belong to the larger part of the population which is male need not apply"? The line on Hillary Clinton is that she's not a natural campaigner, but I wonder if whatever professional campaigners she's hired are very much less ham-fisted.

The vote in November and its exit polling will vindicate or repudiate me on this score, but my thinking as of now is that any woman whose vote is decided along the lines of, "I'm a woman and Hillary Clinton is a woman so I must vote Clinton," is not a woman whose vote was Donald Trump's to lose. And I'd go one further and offer that any woman ought to be insulted by the presumption that women will vote Clinton for the reason that Hillary Clinton is biologically female.

Bill Clinton and I both are male WASPs, tribal Baptists and tenor saxophonists, even blue-eyed and pasty-thighed, and yet I have scarcely a good word for the man, precisely because I'm a man and a WASP and all the rest and thus my vote is not decided by the DNAs or denominations etc. of the candidates on offer, but by their ideas and capabilities. And I refuse to believe that the women of America will decide their votes on so base a reasoning as "I'm a woman and Hillary Clinton is a woman so I must vote Clinton," and if Hillary Clinton and her campaign and the Democrat Party and Left and the press and popular culture presume that women voters are so unthinking, then that's still more reason to vote Trump.  

On Coltranian verticularity 

There are in jazz improvisation two principal approaches, called "lyrical" which is to say melodic, and "vertical" which is to say harmonic, "vertical" making an apt description for the ascending and descending of scales or occasionally modes and arpeggios, which is what a more harmonic improvisation very often amounts to. John Coltrane was a vertical sort, but only lately and long since my retirement from saxophony have I got what I suppose to be a handle on Coltranian verticularity.

Coltrane would ascend and descend the scales in keeping with the "changes" or chord progression, which was and is common enough, but beyond his being especially virtuosic and inventive in that way, he added a trick: Coltrane would interrupt his ascending and descending something like the climbing of many flights of stairs will be interrupted by the landings, plateaus among the up and down. He'd linger over those sort-of landings with melodic riffs like a more lyrical soloist, which also is not so uncommon, but what is less common, Coltrane would not infrequently punctuate his ascents and descents with honking assertions, something like a train blasting its horn at a crossing: "Too-toooot! Too-to-toooooot!!" He did after all play a horn, and "trane" was after all half his surname.

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

Rules are rules, and rotten

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

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

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

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

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

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

Confident as they are clueless

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

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

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

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

Blessed in his enemies

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

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

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

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

The race is run

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

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

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

Things to come

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

To shake the earth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 9/11 catch-22

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

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

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

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

Short-shrifting the Soviets, and rightly

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

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

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

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

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

The trouble with sci-fi

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

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

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

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

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

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

The barbarous Continent

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

The suicide-pact Left

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

Mission accomplished and the tide of war

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

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

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

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

Aryanism for Chinamen

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

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

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

Where the enemy is not

We were where the enemy was not.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I. Eisenstein's Ivan The Terrible

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III. On decking the "halls"

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

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

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

Story of the Cape Island boat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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