A naked, very good-looking young man skied down the mountain, evoking shrieks of laughter and admiration from the hundred or so skiers lining the slopes. He turned out to be J.T., my son, and it was an act of protest against the mind-numbing conversation of some people at the Eagle Club who were talking about titles. A friend had skied ahead and was waiting for him at the bottom with a blanket. Needless to say it became the subject du jour, and someone even filmed young women cheering the streaking skier as he schussed his way down at record speed.
His naked run to glory at least changed the subject up at the club. Unlike the ghastly Stephen Fry, who uses foul language in place of talent or wit, J.T.’s action spoke loud and clear. Talking about one’s titles is a no-no, and should be left to N.O.C.D.’s (not our class, dear). Once upon a time Fry was considered funny. No longer. He only talks about himself and his same-sex partner or wife or whatever, and uses the F-word as an adjective for everything. He should be gently put to pasture.
Otherwise everything’s hunky-dory up in the Alps. I saw lots of a wonderful man, Wafic Saïd, and his wife Rosemary, and we laughed about how things have changed. When he was very young he applied for a loan from his London banker. When asked what collateral he had, he said his collateral was his word. He got the loan. That’s how it was back in my day also. (I’m older than Wafic.) But if I were a banker, I wouldn’t try this today. Last week my daughter tapped on someone’s car window and asked if they would advance, as they had blocked the whole street. Some horrible Brit emerged and screamed, “Who the F… do you think you are, knocking on my window like that?”
Alas, I was somewhere else—you’re never there when I need you, Daddy—but it could have been interesting. A 78-year-old teaching a horrible yob nouveau millionaire a lesson, or conversely, being given one. Anyway, it would have been fun to send a newly rich pig to the dressing station for bullying my little girl, or take the lumps and the de rigueur visit to the dentist. I guess we won’t know until next time. If there is one, which I’m sure there will be, as manners are becoming extinct among the new rich.
Oh! for the days when the worst offense was asking a foreign dignitary’s wife if she “Likey soupy?” as the great Sir Denis Thatcher once did. Now it’s immediately the F-word and threats of physical violence by the heavy next to the newly rich pig. (And I apologize to our porcine friends, who would be appalled by the comparison if they could read.)
But as I’ve said time and again, such are the joys of living in resorts visited by such people. Many of us remember the time when care, courtesy, and respect were part of everyday life. Now the culture is one motivated by spite, envy, greed, and gloating, not to mention bragging and showing off muscle, mostly that of others you pay to come to your rescue. Not that the state does not interfere. The omnipotent state has replaced the ethos of the landed aristocracy and that of the Church, with one that ensures no one’s self-esteem ever takes a dive.
It has codified behavior and how we speak and think, and we have to think in the lowest common denominator. Back in the cities everyone’s into care and therapy, but up here in the Alps they’re into hedge funds and other such gadgets. Mind you, I’ve been taking a few lumps about Greece, a country my family has served loyally for generations, but one I’ve given up on until a political party like Golden Dawn is elected.
The trouble with Greeks is they’re so predictable. That clown that had his picture all over the newspapers and on television for ten days, Yanis Varoufakis, was all show, no substance. As is Tsipras: Fidel without the beard. Wearing an untucked shirt and one’s collar up might impress the cheap women in Syntagma Square, but it does not get one relief from the hated bailout conditions.
Intersectionality fail “ Dweebs reach for victim status “ Victimhood
tournament “ Bibi stay home “ Rudy, Obama, and the Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Dead Horses “ The Four Comprehensives “
Mandarin panderin’ “ Happy Birthday, Cap’n Bob! “ Nanoaggression of
the week “ Lost in the mail “ So many feelings
On Tuesday, the New York Post covered their front page with the headline “All About the Money,” featuring Eric Garner’s daughter rubbing her fingers together to define Al Sharpton. The image was from a stunning sting video that James O”Keefe’s Project Veritas just put together to expose Al Sharpton for what he really is: an extortionist.
“Let’s call it what it is,” says a Brooklyn businessman and self-proclaimed friend of Al Sharpton in a Trayvon rally video included in the series. “They”re shakedown [guys].” Later, a prominent Mike Brown activist admits she’s “not quite sure what Al Sharpton did” to help, despite all his self-aggrandizing over their cause.
O”Keefe’s latest work is a conclusive trifecta that proves the supporters of Garner, Martin, and Brown don”t see Sharpton as an ally. They see him as a self-promoting cash shark.
Being the oblivious buffoon that he is, Sharpton responded by paying these people to promote him. He started a trust for Garner’s daughter which she admits will be used to “help with bills and my 5-year-old daughter.” After receiving the money, the family got together to issue a statement that mentions Sharpton and National Action Network half a dozen times each, and concludes: “[T]he best way to continue to seek justice and honor Eric” is to attend a rally with Sharpton and NAN. It appears the only things that matters more than black lives are greenbacks.
Full disclosure: I”ve been working with Project Veritas since summer and was tangentially involved with this whole operation. James and I went undercover to a die-in at Grand Central Station and I attended several anti-cop rallies armed with a hidden camera. For every five seconds of gold Veritas gets, there are hundreds of hours of garbage left on the cutting-room floor. James is very picky about his footage and unless it’s blatant hypocrisy and corruption from a major figure, he doesn”t have time for it. When Gaddhafi declared himself the “King of Kings“ in Africa, he kept hidden his disdain for “ignorant Africans.” That’s the kind of scoop Project Veritas is focused on. I”d love to get something like that in the future, but for now I”m stuck on the cutting room floor. However, there are still a lot of fun tidbits in the detritus. At the very least, it’s funny down here.
When we went to the die-in, we were given the opportunity to hug a man who knew someone who was killed by police. The circumstances behind the “murder” were not clear but the white protestors didn”t care. They were looking for self-flagellation. One white guy started bawling his eyes out as he held the unimpressed black man and I had to bite my lip not to laugh. I approached this crybaby after the incident, and he told me how gut-wrenching it is to meet someone who has experienced “the loss in their own life,” and alas, the world doesn”t understand what’s going on here. He was holding a sign that said “Racism kills,” and I can”t imagine him ever getting laid or having any friends at all. Ghetto blacks at war with police don”t appreciate crying white liberals. They see them as weak because they are.
I attended a #BlackLivesMatter at their “Solidarity Center” and sat next to a young black woman who went straight to sleep the second she sat down. She didn”t wake up until it was time to leave two hours later. Across from her sat a grotesquely obese, white “homeless” man who didn”t stop stuffing his face with free chicken until it was time to check his iPhone. He went back and forth with both indulgences without looking up the entire time. When we got there, every single person in the room had to say who they were and where they were from. There were 50 of us so it took up almost half the meeting. At least conservatives get to the point. This ridiculous mess is a big part of today’s civil rights experience.
It’s depressing if you don”t drink, but as an alcoholic, I find it all pretty darn amusing, especially Sharpton himself. He’s hilarious. The “Al Sharpton vs. the Teleprompter” videos, which have millions of views, show him mispronouncing words like “giddy,” “tortoise,” “hubris,” “Limbaugh,” “Cairo,” “Latvia,” “Beijing,” “appropriate,” and “protection,” to name a few. I would gladly donate to NAN if they could get him to read “aerosol” aloud.
While garbage-picking through the footage, I began to notice a pattern. The sleeping woman was not an anomaly. Something fishy was going on here, and it reeked of heavily-funded communism.
When we were at the die-in, there were two tiny lesbian-looking lawyers who were handing out beautifully made signs that were anything but grassroots. The rally consisted mostly of our leader (I believe her name was “the Justice Jester”) leading a repetitive chant. She”d say things like “WE REJECT” and we”d all go, “We reject.” Then she”d say, “THE INJUSTICE,” and we”d mumble “The injustice,” before she added “BROUGHT DOWN ON US BY THE POLICE,” and we”d say, “Brought down on us by the police.” (We were surrounded by hardworking cops who would prevent commuters from harassing us this whole time.)
They”re not exactly subtle about their brainwashing. It’s textbook Stalinism. A good portion of all these meetings and demonstrations had attendees who were clearly not interested in anything but their daily stipend. I asked a cop in St. Louis about it, and he said, “This sustained assault on public order is most certainly not organic, and I believe more than racially based, it’s funded and directed by commie front groups.”
It sounds like a very Archie Bunkerish thing to say, but communist propaganda is all over the place at these meetings. I grabbed every pamphlet I could and it was hard to find one without a red star on it. The magazine Red Flag has a hammer and sickle above black protestors and the headline, “It is Right to Rebel.” Half the time I had to check to make sure I wasn”t at an Industrial Workers of the World convention.
In fact, the IWW often gripes that #BlackLivesMatter spends too much time on black lives and not enough on the workers. “People need to stop making things about race,” lamented the IWW blog The Organizer. I got on a #BlackLivesMatter email list and was disturbed by a sentence in one of the daily letters about protests that week (there must be at least one a day going on since Ferguson).
If the sadists of ISIS are seeking—with their mass executions, child rapes, immolations, and beheadings of Christians—to stampede us into a new war in the Middle East, they are succeeding.
Repeatedly snapping the blood-red cape of terrorist atrocities in our faces has the Yankee bull snorting, pawing the ground, ready to charge again.
“Nearly three-quarters of Republicans now favor sending ground troops into combat against the Islamic State,” says a CBS News poll. The poll was cited in a New York Times story about how the voice of the hawk is ascendant again in the GOP.
In April or May 2015, said a Pentagon briefer last week, the Iraqi Army will march north to recapture Mosul from the Islamic State.
On to Mosul! On to Raqqa!
Yet, who, exactly, will be taking Mosul?
According to Rowan Scarborough of The Washington Times, the U.S. general who trained the Iraqi army says Mosul is a mined, booby-trapped city, infested with thousands of suicide fighters.
Any Iraqi army attack this spring would be “doomed.”
Translation: Either U.S. troops lead, or Mosul remains in ISIS’ hands.
Yet taking Mosul is only the beginning. Scores of thousands of troops will be needed to defeat and destroy ISIS in Syria.
And eradicating ISIS is but the first of the wars Republicans have in mind. This coming week, at the invitation of Speaker John Boehner, Bibi Netanyahu will address a joint session of Congress.
His message: Obama and John Kerry are bringing back a rotten deal that will ensure Iran acquires nuclear weapons and becomes an existential threat to Israel. Congress must repudiate Obama’s deal, impose new sanctions on Iran and terminate the appeasement talks.
Should Bibi and his Republican allies succeed in closing the ramp to a diplomatic solution, we will be on the road to war.
Which is where Bibi wants us.
To him, Iran is the Nazi Germany of the 21st century, hell-bent on a new Holocaust. A U.S. war that does to the Ayatollah’s Iran what a U.S. war did to Hitler’s Germany would put Bibi in the history books as the Israeli Churchill.
But if Republicans scuttle the Iranian negotiations by voting new sanctions, Iran will take back the concessions it has made, and we are indeed headed for war. Which is where Sen. Lindsey Graham, too, now toying with a presidential bid, wants us to be.
In 2010, Sen. Graham declared: “Instead of a surgical strike on [Iran’s] nuclear infrastructure … we’re to the point now that you have to really neuter the regime’s ability to wage war against us and our allies. … [We must] destroy the ability of the regime to strike back.”
If Congress scuttles the nuclear talks, look for Congress to next write an authorization for the use of military force—on Iran.
Today, the entire Shiite Crescent—Iran, Iraq, Bashar Assad’s Syria, Hezbollah—is fighting ISIS. All these Shiites are de facto allies in any war against ISIS. But should we attack Iran, they will become enemies.
And what would war with Iran mean for U.S. interests?
With its anti-ship missiles and hundreds of missile boats, Iran could imperil our fleet in the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea. The Gulf could be closed to commercial shipping by a sinking or two.
Hezbollah could go after the U.S. embassy in Beirut. The Green Zone in Baghdad could come under attack by Shiite militia loyal to Iran.
Would Assad’s army join Iran’s fight against America?
Here’s a clip from my read-it-and-weep folder. It showed up in a February 11th Washington Post article, headline: “College sexual assault prevention has unlikely model: U.S. service academies.”
Midshipmen”that is, trainee officers”at the U.S. Naval Academy are being broken to the state ideology, Cultural Marxism. We listen in on a class discussion.
Spirited debate broke out after the sophomores watched a video that said the “three most destructive words” a boy hears when growing up are “be a man.”
Speaking personally, I”d say that the three most destructive words I heard when growing up were “In your dreams,” uttered by an attractive young female. I heard that a lot; but perhaps my upbringing was abnormal.
[A class member] pointed out: “When someone says, “Be a man,” the alternative to not being a man is kind of being a female, being a woman.” He said that implies women”including their own female classmates at the academy”are not as strong as men. “That’s a lot of the root causes of all these things,” he said. “That’s wrong.”
If you want to be an officer in the US Navy nowadays, you”d better pretend to believe that it’s wrong to think that women are not as strong as men.
Since women in the generality are not as strong as men, the authorities at our service academies have to figure out some way to prevent reality from intruding on the CultMarx fantasy. My guess is they do this by scaling down the physically strenuous aspects of training. Thus the girlification of our civilization proceeds.
It’s the same with civilian armed forces.
The New York City Police Department’s new “retraining” program has instructed cops to “take a deep breath” and close their eyes when interacting with people who are mad. The new-age lesson is part of a special, three-day “smart policing” training dreamed up by Mayor Bill de Blasio and Police Commissioner Bill Bratton. [Daily Caller, Feb. 24th]
Perhaps the NYPD should issue smelling salts to officers for these stressful situations, or strings of pearls for them to clutch.
We reactionaries have been complaining about girlification for decades. (Here was I doing so 14 years ago.) Where are we headed with this? What’s the future of sex roles? Here are some common opinions.
CultMarx Utopia. There are no innate differences in personality, interests, or aptitude between men and women. The perceived differences are socially constructed. That is to say, there is some possible configuration of society in which they would disappear.
We just have to get to that configuration, and we shall! Resistance is futile!
Incredibly, this bizarre point of view is the reigning dogma of our society, to the degree that you can lose your job by openly contradicting it. It seems to me more improbable than the transmigration of souls; more improbable than hollow Earth theory; more improbable than leprechauns or centaurs; but it reigns supreme, and if you depend on a salary, you”d better pretend to believe it, like those midshipmen at Annapolis.
The fact that this doctrine is dominant among our ruling classes is, in my opinion, one of the strongest lines of evidence for the hypothesis that our culture has gone batshit crazy.
At the other end of the opinion spectrum you have:
The patriarchy strikes back. Outside the zone of Western liberal democracy, the patriarchy still waxes strong. Islam illustrates this most plainly, but there are supplementary examples elsewhere. I count just two gals in Vladimir Putin’s 28-member cabinet; and check out the Chinese Politburo.
It may be that a society far enough gone in girlification can offer no resistance to enemies that have held on to the masculine principle. In evidence for this possibility I offer the PC-broken midshipmen of the U.S. Naval Academy.
In further evidence, here is Exhibit B: a video clip of British police fleeing before a Muslim mob. One hopes the bobbies took deep breaths and closed their eyes in the de Blasio-approved manner before taking to their heels, but the poor video quality makes it hard to tell.
That clip should be preserved in a time capsule so that archeologists of the future will understand the collapse of our civilisation.
If I could eradicate one sin from the world, I would free writers and journalists from our desire to make a heartfelt splash, and damn the facts. Exaggerated reporting in the service of a hunch is even worse if your hunch has a germ of truth. You”ve now made a straw man of your own idea”and the more attention you get with your hollering, the more damage you”ve done.
Last month, on the heels of the Charlie Hebdo shootings in Paris, security expert Nolan Peterson led Fox News on an unfortunate series of rants against what they repeatedly called “no-go zones” in France, an irritating abuse of both assonance and reality.
The idea was that swathes of the Parisian map and suburbs had become completely impenetrable to police, emergency services, and all non-Muslims. In these thrilling no-go zones, Sharia law was the only law”sort of like the American wild West, but with harems instead of whiskey; other commenters and newscasters repeated the claims as the left-leaning TV channel CanalPlus fought back with sub-Onion irony.
Nolan Peterson’s original claims were more bipartisan in their weirdness than Fox in general blew them up to be. Peterson said that part of the reason for the growth of Muslim “ghettos” was that “some of the French Muslims that I became friends with couldn”t get apartments in downtown Paris because of uh, certain cultural divisions””hinting that it was shadowy discrimination that pushed Muslim immigrants out of the nicer areas.
“No-go zone” is a bizarre misuse of a military term, considering that Peterson includes the US Army on his resume. He went so far as to directly compare the feel of the alleged no-go zones”including Ménilmontant, which is, at press time, the current waxed-moustache hipster capital of the universe, complete with open mics“to war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The claims were blatantly goofy; apparently the red-rimmed “no-go zone” map that Fox showed was cribbed from a government report on “Zones Urbaines Sensibles,” the very rough equivalent of TIFs. The city of Paris threatened to sue, Fox apologized, and all is well.
Er, except for those stupid crackers in France who have to live with the reality that Peterson was trying to approximate.
The recent death of a friend has made it necessary for me to venture into what should have been the reddest of the red outlines on Fox’s map of skeeve. A quarter-century ago, when it wasn”t all that bad, my friend and her husband bought an apartment in the suburb of Saint-Denis.
Saint-Denis is the home of the oldest Gothic cathedral in the world, where the French used to bury their kings. Nowadays it’s a suburb of Paris with one of the highest concentrations of Muslim-religion immigrants and”what’s more important to Islamist recruiting: their bratty kids”in the Western world.
Buying a place there seemed like a good idea to her at the time. Apartments were cheap, and the town was genuinely multicultural, with a nice Chinese restaurant downstairs and goods from all over the world in the market. It was homey.
When my friend died, unfortunately, I hadn”t been there to visit her since 2007. At that time there had already been a few changes. The owner of the Johnny Hallyday-themed bar where we used to drink perroquets in the 1990s had passed on, for instance. Said owner’s wife had apparently become the disturbingly bruised-looking property or employee of a new, Muslim owner. My friend and I, in our newly conspicuous status as ladies unaccompanied by men, were now distinctly unwelcome at the bar. The Johnny Hallyday jukebox and posters were gone, and the old French guys who used to drink there were nowhere to be seen. But I don”t recall that the streets themselves were ever as unfriendly as they were last week when I arrived in mourning.
I went for a walk with the widower as soon as I got in. We both needed some fresh air badly; as soon as I set foot in my dead friend’s apartment I felt all those things you feel when you realize someone is really gone. The walk was fine”I had a male escort, although I didn”t think much of it at the time. I”m a Western girl.
The next day, however, the husband was at work, and when I got restless I had to go out for a walk alone. I”ve taken many strolls alone in this town, and thought nothing of it. But a few blocks out, a group of men in caftans ran me off the sidewalk and out into the road, muttering about my skirt and my degree of whoreness and laughing quite unpleasantly.
I had briefly thought about whether my skirt might offend before going out, but decided I was being silly and paranoid: it was two inches below the knee, and I was wearing plain black stockings plus thick woolen leg warmers.
Next Tuesday marks the 100th anniversary of American movies as the premier pop cultural force on the planet. On March 3, 1915, director D.W. Griffith released The Birth of a Nation, an unprecedented epic about the Civil War and Reconstruction that commemorated the 50th anniversary of Appomattox and the assassination of Griffith’s hero, Abraham Lincoln. The first full-length movie to fully integrate the early silent era’s rapid advances in storytelling techniques, Birth of a Nation earned about $60 million at the box office”the equivalent of about $1.4 billion in current dollars, or twice what Avatar garnered in a vastly wealthier and more populous 21st-century America.
Griffith was the son of a Kentucky Confederate colonel; his theme of national reconciliation””The soul of Daniel Webster calling to America: Liberty and union, one and inseparable, now and forever””resounded with the American public during the Great War in Europe. While the Continent shredded itself, America was united and invulnerable, the once divisive issue of sovereignty resolved by the blood spilled a half-century before.
A little-noticed aspect of media power is the ability to decide what constitutes an anniversary and what doesn”t. Thus, the 100th birthday of Birth of a Nation went unmentioned at Sunday’s Academy Awards, despite the movie’s seemingly timely concern with the rape crisis of the late 1860s.
People have a difficult time avoiding either underreaction or overreaction to the threat of rape. It’s enormously shameful not to protect your womenfolk from rape, so dereliction of duty tends to incite fantasy and rage.
In 2014 alone, for example, we saw such bizarre manifestations as Heisman Trophy winner Jameis Winston leading Florida State, a deep Southern college bankrolled by conservative whites, to the national college football championship while university officials languidly investigated a white coed’s charge that he had raped her; the Rotherham Report finally rendered undeniable the long cover-up of Pakistani pimps raping some 1,400 adolescent English girls; and the Haven Monahan hysteria at the U. of Virginia.
College football coaches face powerful incentives to scrape the bottom of the behavioral barrel harder than their rivals in recruiting large violent men. Not surprisingly, this leads to numerous scandals involving white coeds accusing black athletes of rape, allegations that are frequently made to go away by the local power structure, helped along by the discomfort modern Americans feel over becoming aware of black-on-white rape. It’s unpleasant to notice because it’s so noticeable: according to federal statistics for 2001-2003, there were 15,400 cases of black-on-white single perpetrator rape versus 900 cases of white-on-black rape: a 17 to 1 ratio.
The systemic rapes of young English girls by Pakistani whoremasters were
covered up by politicians and the media for a couple of decades to hamstring anti-immigration arguments.
By contrast, Virginia frat boy and gang rape initiation rite organizer Haven Monahan doesn”t, technically, exist. But he fit the casting sheet for today’s most desired rapist. Similarly, in 2006 a hoax accusing the Duke lacrosse team of raping a black stripper was fabulously popular.
It’s almost as if the dominant worldview these days were less concerned over rape in general than over who is purported to be raping whom.
In Griffith’s retelling of 1865, the assassination of the merciful Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth unleashes the most vengeful elements among the Northern Republicans who attempt to control the South using illiterate black voters. Political power encourages black sexual self-confidence. In the single most hated scene in Birth of a Nation, an ardent freedman chases a beautiful white woman up a mountain until she leaps to her death.
This is almost universally denounced as embodying the myth of the black rapist. In researching this article, I didn”t find a single source who dared to imagine that allegations of interracial rape during Reconstruction weren”t wholly made up. You might think that somebody would cite the Law of Large Numbers as suggesting that it’s not entirely impossible there was some bit of factual basis to all this, but that would be dangerously heretical today.
Oddly, though, American moviegoers in 1915, only 38 years after the end of Reconstruction, seemed to find Griffith’s movie about their parents” era not implausible.
Despite Griffith’s advances in narrative technique, early silent films are relatively alien to us. But David O. Selznick’s Gone With the Wind from 1939 remains highly watchable, and it’s central to Hollywood’s self-image. For example, Max Steiner’s “Tara’s Theme“ from Gone With the Wind has been used countless times at Academy Awards ceremonies to conjure up Hollywood grandeur.
But Selznick’s movie reflects the same view of Reconstruction as Griffith’s (although the two men who attack Scarlett are one of those integrated white-black gangs you see more of in the movies than on the street). The saintly Ashley Wilkes then leads an off-screen Ku Klux Klan raid on the shantytown to avenge Scarlett’s honor. In turn, Ashley is saved from angry Yankee occupiers only by Rhett Butler’s wiles.
It’s probably just a matter of time before the use of Steiner’s music on the Oscar broadcast is accused of triggering fears of the KKK and is junked.
Over time, it became a mark of upper-middle-class refinement to not believe white (cough-trash-cough) women who accuse blacks of rape, as in the 1960 bestseller To Kill a Mockingbird.
“Martin Luther toy becomes fastest selling Playmobil figurine of all time.”
Has anyone been keeping an eye on Germany lately? Because I think they”re getting even weirder than usual, and we all know what happened the last time (and the time before that).
“The unexpectedly popular Martin Luther figure … sold out its first edition run of 34,000 within 72 hours,” according to the Independent.
Remember: We”re not talking about some beloved Disney or Pixar or Marvel Comics character. This is a long-dead old white guy”a religious figure, no less.
Playmobil’s little “Hello Kitty”-looking Luther has such an adorable wee face, you just can”t imagine him thinking mean stuff about the Jews. He wears a period academic gown and cap, and”cue Saturday morning commercial announcer’s voice circa 1972″comes complete with accessories: a white quill pen and an open Bible. I don”t read German, so for all I know, those squiggles read, “F—- the Pope!” and “I”m running off with a nun.””
Come on, lighten up. Wait, I forgot: Protestants aren”t allowed to. “Sex might lead to dancing” and all that. It annoys me no end that when Jews make fun of “the Gentiles””with their white bread and white mayo and white golf shoes”they dump us Catholics in with them.
I may be the world’s worst Catholic, but, as Hilaire Belloc said, at least we papists know how to party. Check out The Simpsons“ classic “Catholic vs. Protestant heaven“ sequence”which, come to think of it, probably only Catholics find “funny “cuz it’s true.”
When we split up, we kept the best painters, writers, and, later, filmmakers, from Coppola and Scorsese to John Waters”plus the jokes, (most of) the booze, the smokes, and the food.
Protestants ended up with Thomas Kinkade, Jack Chick, grape juice, and marshmallow & Jell-O “salad.” And, weirdest of all to us, they seem pretty goddamn (I mean, darn) self-satisfied about that arrangement.
Yep, Protestants even swapped out swearing”one of life’s under-sung delights”for a supposedly more edifying ejaculatory habit: quoting scripture chapter and verse with compulsive, military precision, like a drill sergeant with Bible Tourette’s.
That’s one of those dubious “talents””like the ability to refer to flowers by their Latin names”that’s best kept under a bushel, if you ask me. (Or is that “buried in a field”? If only I wasn”t using my concordance as a coaster …)
Twenty years after the allegedly hugely influential and deeply shaming The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, our cute little Protestant friends have managed to cough up”what?”Jim Bakker, “Christian rock,” and I can”t think of a third thing. (I won”t hear a word against Tammy Faye, mind.)
Yeah, I call them that. “Our Cute Little Protestant Friends” is one the oldest categories at my personal blog. It’s reserved for news stories like “Progressive Evangelicals Spot Anti-Christ Message in John McCain Ad,” or, more recently, that super helpful and compassionate reminder by and for Southern Baptists that those recently slaughtered Copts weren”t really Christians. (So, ha! Joke’s on YOU, stupid ISIS guys, I guess!):
Frankly, now is not the time to confuse for the entire blooming world what it means to be a Christian. We cannot consider the Coptics an unreached people group (…) one day and then call them Christian martyrs the next.
Outside the courthouse where the trial of accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is slowly getting under way, one woman stands a lonely vigil. Her name is Karin Friedemann, and she’s Tsarnaev’s number one fan. Her devotion to the young man she calls “Jahar, the kid” led to a well publicized skirmish last December with one of the victims of the bomb blasts.
She describes herself as “insignificant” in the eyes of the media. And she almost certainly is. But her attitude regarding Muslim terror is not insignificant. In fact, it’s alarmingly popular among the conspiracy fringe.
I set off to find out what makes Friedemann (who also goes by the name Maria Hussain) tick. I asked her why she would devote her time to defending Tsarnaev. She was more than willing to share.
Friedemann: As I told reporters, I am advocating for a fair trial for the kid. Bill of Rights has to apply to the least of us, or else it doesn”t apply to any of us. So far, no evidence has been revealed to the public, so we have to assume he’s innocent, or in any case we have the right to know the truth of what happened because it’s obvious the media and government are making up stories.
I”ve seen this before: people with an ideological agenda cribbing the language of the Innocence Project. “We just want to make sure everyone gets a fair trial.” Great, fine. Who can disagree with that? But then I quoted one of Friedemann’s own blog posts back to her:
Cole: “Jahar seems resigned as a noble Chechen would be, to the fate of Allah.”
That’s about as non-objective a statement as I”ve ever read. Many, many people in the U.S. fight for the rights of the wrongly accused, but you”d never catch them making such a statement. May I ask what your particular bias is? Is it religious? Is it “conspiratorial?” Or do you just like this kid on a basis more personal than political?
Getting ideologues to spout about their bias is as easy as getting a monkey to fling poo.
Friedemann: His family has told supporters that he would rather die than plead guilty to a crime he did not commit, and I believe that this kind of level of personal integrity is part of being a real Muslim, especially in the Chechen interpretation of it.
I have been following FBI railroading of Muslims for over a decade, so I believe it’s more than probable that he is either innocent or else there is FBI involvement. My emotional involvement in the case is, I guess, not only because it’s local but because a whole entire family has grown around it. Every family that has lost a son has now new connections with the other families and their supporters. It’s a very exciting and vibrant community to support prisoners in general, but in this case it’s all live on Twitter so there are so many very young people waking up to the fact that governments lie. For most of them it was a coming of age.
So I had to ask:
Cole: Have you ever encountered a case in which a Muslim, of free will and not FBI or CIA backed, has killed people?
Friedemann: I have not come across it in this country. Muslims generally come here for the freedom. If there is proof of his involvement in the bombing (other than a photo of him on a cell phone) then my next question would be, what is the bigger picture? His brother had been approached by the FBI to become an informant. Traditionally, if you refuse, they destroy your life. This could be that.
And now it gets fun:
Cole: But isn”t there an incompatibility to, on the one hand, the idea that the U.S. government attacks, torments, provokes, and oppresses Muslims”and to then claim, on the other hand, that Muslims never get angry enough to attack back? If it’s true that no Muslim has ever killed of his/her own free will, then isn”t it the logical extension that we needn”t fear repercussions from our policies in the Muslim world? If, for whatever reason (religious, genetic, upbringing, etc.) Muslims can”t murder, then where is the risk to the U.S. when it comes to pursuing a foreign policy of intervention and aggression? Heck, it seems to me that taking the position that Muslims never kill only encourages the type of U.S. foreign and domestic policies you probably despise. I mean, what do we have to fear, right?
Friedemann: Well, do you know of any Muslim that committed a crime?
Cole: I”m asking a theoretical question, Karin. I”ve never known a Hindu who had measles, but all logic and science point to the fact that a Hindu CAN get measles, like any other human. If someone were to argue that a Hindu can”t get measles, my own limited scope of personal, practical experience would be meaningless. Rather, it would be up to the person making the claim to demonstrate why Hindus can”t or don”t get measles. Therefore, when you argue that Muslims don”t kill, the responsibility is on you to explain why. Is it the faith? Is it genetic? Is it their upbringing? Is it some other factor?
Friedemann: I am aware that there is a lot of fighting going on that involves Muslims overseas, but in the USA, I have been following most of these cases very closely, and I have yet to see any act of violence that was successfully perpetrated by a Muslim immigrant, and in almost every case the FBI was involved.
Homeland Security/FBI is to Muslims what the Nazi Gestapo was to Jews. They generally get imprisoned for “thinking about” doing a crime or having a strong opinion about politics, or fund-raising for charities.
Well, there was that one guy who was a military veteran who shot a bunch of soldiers, but he was probably having PTSD and freaked out.
Regarding the Boston bombing suspects, there simply was no motive, no suspicious behavior, and no bomb making materials found. They loved this country and had a lot of friends. They were not mentally deranged. The only organization they had ever been involved with was the FBI, which had been pressuring Tamerlan to become an informant. In many cases, after a Muslim refuses to work for the FBI, they retaliate by destroying their lives. It happens again and again. That’s why it’s wisest to be skeptical.
I”ll be the first to admit, I was having fun at this point.
Is there a man among us willing to shed a tear for the poor persecuted albinos of modern East Africa?
No?
Tough crowd.
OK, how about if I were to sketch out a convoluted and highly dubious scenario in which African albinos were the ancient progenitors of modern Caucasians, that they were driven into Europe tens of thousands of years ago as a result of racist persecution from black Africans, and that any resultant pillaging and plundering of Africa by white Europeans can then be justified as payback against our original oppressors?
It’s unlikely, but it’s fun to pretend it’s plausible. It’s fun in the same way that the Solutrean hypothesis is fun”whether or not it’s true, even attempting to argue that the “original” Americans were European rather than Asian subverts the whole Guilt Narrative in a way that confounds, flusters, and befuddles those misguided losers who are always seeking repentance and reparations.
By the same token, arguing that white-skinned Africans were the first large-scale victims of racial persecution in the world”that the original great human exodus from Africa was less a peaceful migration than it was a violent purge of light-skinned undesirables, that it was less “out of Africa” and more “get the hell out of Africa””gives white people a moral leg up in the stubbornly idiotic game of racial karma and intergenerational guilt-tripping.
Last Wednesday, Tanzanian police reported that they found the hacked-up body of a year-old male albino. His missing body parts are presumed to have been funneled into a highly lucrative black-magic market where a single albino body can fetch up to $75,000. You see, many Africans”including those well-heeled enough to cough up $75K just for a dead albino”believe that even though albinos themselves are cursed, their body parts can work magical wonders and bring great health, prosperity, success, popularity, sex appeal, and all of the other things that dumb primitive minds who believe in magic always seem to lack.
Estimates vary, but since the year 2000 anywhere from 70-200 albinos have been mercilessly hunted “like animals“ and hacked to death in East Africa to fuel this odd and gruesome corpse-grinding market demand. Victims often have their limbs severed while they”re alive due to a superstition that their dead body parts will glow with added mojo if the victim was screaming while they were being slaughtered.
In Zimbabwe, HIV-afflicted men will often rape albino women based on the superstition that it will cure them of their incurable disease.
Far be it from me to ever suggest that such a chokingly thick climate of prehistoric superstition may in some way be related to many of the travails and indignities that persist to this very day in modern Africa. As previously implied, my intention here”however insincere”is not to malign black Africans but instead to instill a sense of kinship, however fraudulent, between white people and albino Africans.
Phenotypically, the most easily targeted “cultural other” on the planet may be the hapless albino stranded somewhere in the malarial backwaters of sub-Saharan Africa. Folkloric traditions teach that albinos are ghosts and therefore less than human. They are “treated like lepers“ and routinely pushed to society’s fringes. “Over time, the frustration is so much that it affects you negatively,” one female Zimbabwean albino with an unpronounceable name laments. “”If you keep on thinking about what people say about you or do to you, you will have tears on your cheeks forever.”
In a way”and this is rare with me”I can empathize. I”ve always felt sorry for albinos mainly because they”re so goddamned weird-looking that I can”t imagine life is easy for them. And I must seize this opportunity to announce that at various times in my life I have owned records by the white albino Edgar Winter and the black albino Yellowman, so it cannot be said that I”ve ever personally discriminated against an albino, at least not to my recollection”or at least, as memory serves, not when anyone was watching.
I claim no expertise in human migratory patterns over the past 100,000 years or so, which is why I elect to rely entirely on crudely designed black-nationalist websites that argue modern Caucasians are the direct descendants of African albinos. At least that way, no one can accuse me of being a racist.
