What Do the Democrats Think They are Doing

So today Nancy Pelosi is saying that the president's defeat this year is an "absolute imperative for our country." Really?

I mean, is President Trump that far off the mid-point of anything, from political position to behavior to use and abuse of power? Is the country going to go off a cliff if the president is reelected?

See, I believe that the Democrats' problem is not so much that they have spent 4 years trying to pitch Donald Trump into the La Brea tar pits, by fair means or foul. I believe they have a bigger problem than that.

The problem is that their political world-view and program is reaching its sell-by date.

I think it was reasonable, back in the 19th century, to Do Something about the workers. After all, based on the record of the previous couple of centuries, the situation of the lower orders was extremely precarious. Agricultural workers in Britain had been starving ever since Henry VIII disarmed the nobles and the nobles discharged the excess peasants who were no longer useful as the soldiers in their private armies. But it turned out that, with or without social legislation, the workers did fine.

I think it was reasonable, back in the mid 20th century to Do Something about Jim Crow in the South. Of course, the whole point of Jim Crow was to force private actors to discriminate against Negroes, to force the railroads to have white-only and black-only railroad cars. Or, in the Davis-Bacon Act of the 1930s, to stop employers from bringing cheap black labor Up North. But, as we have seen since the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s, the real problem is racist activists and liberals trying to divide the country by race and sex.

The point is that the economy is so compicated that any government effort to set it to rights is likely to be a cure that is worse than the disease.

However, I grant that all politics is a game of loot and plunder, offering the voters something for nothing. The mere fact of grocery store specials shows how ingrained free stuff is in the human psyche.

The problem is that the game of loot and plunder is running out of good options. And the truth is that the money has been wasted. Put it this way. Social Security is baloney. People will naturally save for their old age. So that's a trillion dollars a year in government expenditure wasted. Ditto Medicare. Daughters will naturally look after the health care of their end-of-life parents. To spend nearly a trillion dollars a year on Medicare is a waste.

When I say Social Security and Medicare are a waste, what I mean is that they have taken two trillion dollars a year out of the something-for-nothing treasure chest. Imagine that the politicians had instead enacted mandatory private savings programs where everyone was forced to save their own money for retirement and end-of-life health care, with a few subsidies thrown in for luck. Think of the money and the promises that politicians could swing around today with the two trillionen released from the cold dead hands of the middle-class elderly like me.

So I think that the Democrats' present enthusiasm for Medicare-for-All and complete overturning of the economy with the Green New Deal and College-for-All and debt forgiveness for all the foolish virgins that accumilated $100,000 in college debt represents a kind of buying panic you see at the top of a stock bull market, or the selling panic you see at the bottom of a bear market. It is equivalent to the Reign of Terror and Virtue at the end of a revolutionary movement. Or the end-of-the-world prophecies of a religious cult. It is the climactic frenzy before the return to normal.

And now, I read, the Democrats are planning to take their California attack on the gig economy national. Look, I get the idea that everyone should have a full-time job with benefits. Only, suppose you just want a temporary job to make a little extra money, and you don't need the benefits because you got them at your day job. Or your husband's day job. Or you are a college student and you get health benefits at school. Yeah, I get that the unions want to force everyone into the full-time-job-with-benefits model because it benefits unions. Look. The labor market is complicated, especially now that, per progressive demand, it is no longer just male-breadwinner-working-in-factory-for-40-hour-week. There is just no way that beneficial legislation is going to magically come up with a perfect labor market that is just and fair to all parties.

But think of the Democratic problem. Their political coalition is an over-under coalition of the Gentry and the Clients, the educated creative class using the subordinate marginal lower class to provide them with meaning and power. So their political program will always be offering some sort of handout to their subordinate followers while also, behind the curtain, doling out goodies to the upper-class Gentry.

But suppose the majority of Americans are Commoners. They want protection from life's vicissitudes but not exactly in the form of a cradle-to-grave array of "benefits." In other words, Commoners respond more to President Trump's politics at his recent State of the Union speech which offers limitied goodies to make people feel good. But the basic economic policy is a growing economy in which all Commoners can participate and take a certain pride in their individual achievements in job, family, their home, their car and their 401k and being a citizen in the Greatest Nation Ever.

If the subordinate Client group is becoming smaller relative to a larger Commoner group then our Democratic friends would find that, as they press the old familiar buttons that won elections for them with the votes of the Clients for the last century, something was wrong. The candy wasn't dropping into the tray as it should.

And you would expect them to start becoming desperate, starting to see Reds under the bed and conspiracies everywhere. Maybe they would even feel that the only thing to do is impeach the president and remove him from office in order to restore the old regime that we all knew and loved.

See, the logic of the good old regime was that, after you had satisfied the worthy workers and women and minorities on their plantations, then the noble elite could implement their vision of a global world order for and by the educated and evolved elite. Obviously. We are the smart ones; we are the people that freed the slaves, liberated the women, and stopped the homophobes and gay baiters cold. We are the good guys. Our vision for the world is the just and the only vision. Everything else is hate and bigotry.

So of course they are beside themselves.

But that is the point of democracy. To give the people the opportunity to give the ruling class a kick in the pants for being totally self-obsessed and blind to the rest of the world. And to get it done without actual bloody revolution.

You can see the point. Suppose the Chinese people are fed up with the corruption and the abuse of their present government and President-for-life Xi. What do they do? There is no opposition party to rally to. There is no national election for president. There is no peaceful way to throw the rascals out.

How I thank God for the genius of our American system, that started with its man-on-a-white-horse saying, OK, I'm done; I'm going home to Mount Vernon. See yer. And then the genius of Madison and Hamilton and the Constitution they cooked up.

Do you think that the Founders thought through what would happen after an aborted impeachment effort like the recently concluded episode, where foolish Democrats evidently thought that just the process would cover President Trump with enough dirt to deny him reelection? How's that going, sports fans? The impression I get is that Trump's supporters are all arrayed, rank on rank, behind him, and the Democrats are right now depressed and demoralized. Hey, Trump! This is just the moment to send the cavalry in to bust up the Democrats' rear.

Now, it is my understanding that the point of wise and seasoned political leaders is that they can see a step or two ahead and can therefore advise their more enthusiastic supporters against foolish actions that might rebound against them.

We haven't seen too much of that lately. I wonder why. It's not as if Nancy Pelosi, 79, and Chuck Schumer, 69, are impulsive young punks too young to have finished their political apprenticeships.

Surely it can't just be that Nancy and Chuck just aren't up to the job?

Could it be that they are too old for the job, and are past their prime?

Revolution, Baby

Today Angelo Codevilla is mourning the fact that we are in the middle of a revolution, because the ruling class's "growing sense of its own separate identity, of power and of entitlement to power."

Our country is in a state of revolution, irreversibly, because society’s most influential people have retreated into moral autarchy, have seceded from America’s constitutional order, and because they browbeat their socio-political adversaries instead of trying to persuade them.

The ruling class doesn't care about elections:

Trump notwithstanding, this class will rule henceforth as it has in the past three years. So long as its hold on American institutions continues to grow, and they retain millions of clients, elections won’t really matter.

So we are in a revolution; we need to fight, to "hurt the other side until it loses the capacity and the will to do us harm."

But what kind of peace we may get depends on the extent to which we may compel our enemies to leave us in peace. And for that, we must do unto them more and before they do unto us.

Lilke I say, we are in the era of the Rise of the Commoner. What Trump means and what the response to him means is that there is growing movement of Commoners, ordinary people who are neither elitists or clients, that just want to wive and thrive in peace without having to touch our hats to our Gentry masters every time we want to do anything: take a course, make a comment on social media, or buy a car or a house. And we are rising up.

For a century, the educated Gentry class has defined itself in opposition to the middle class, the bourgeoisie. And has defined itself as the champions of the marginalized: the workers, minorities and women. Back in the day this was a cool strategy because the numbers were with the workers, with the middle class a minority band between ruling class and underclass.

But I would say that the middle class is now the Commoners, the folks that used to be workers but are now various employees in various skilled and semi-skilled trades: people with a family, a house, and a car. Yesterday on my daily walk I ran into a couple of Commoners. One was a construction worker that had forgotten where he parked his truck; the other was a contractor, born in a yurt to a hippie couple, who was building a 4,000 sq ft house right there in north Seattle. Both these men, Commoners, were as happy as clams, and their good cheer was infectious.

And thus, by an imperceptible process the Gentry that once advocated for the helpless workers is now advcating for illegal aliens, for minority tribes, and for Gentry hot-house LGBTs against the ordinary Commoner, now defined as a racist-sexist-homophobe deplorable. Happy Commoner construction guys need not apply.

Back in the day the Gentry could win the votes of the marginalized with the promise of loot: Social Security, Medicare, free education, worker benefits. But now the game has shifted. You can see that in the failure of Elizabeth Warren to sell her Medicare-for-All. What is the problem? More free stuff, right?

Right. Except for one thing. The vast majority of ordinary Americans already have health insurance through their employer or through Medicare or Medicaid. And the vast majority looks at Medicare-for-All and sees that their access to health care is going to be disturbed.

That is the problem that Democrats are facing right now. They are still offering free stuff to their clients, but the clients are no longer the vast majority of American voters, but limited subgroups. And the vast majority sees that the free stuff on offer is going to cost them personally and benefit some guy behind the tree. No sale.

I've been reading Deirdre McCloskey's Why Liberalism Works. Around p.213 she praises liberalism -- as trade tested betterment -- as the Good Thing while nationalism and socialism are the Bad Thing. Well, yeah, I get that. But liberalism, especially economic liberalism, is meat and drink for people that are up for "creative destruction" and most people aren't. Nationalism can lead to fascism and Nazis, but I'd say that it is the natural tribe of the Commoner. In other words, if you are a commoner you identify as a Brit or a Yank but not as a educated enlightened gender-crosser of the world like McCloskey. Whatabout socialism? McCloskey points out that socialism appeals to the children of the educated, because socialism is a family thing and the children of the educated stay in the family longer than most because they hang around getting an advanced education and must worry about whether they can actually make it in the world: so socialism works for the white educated SJWs because they are really terrified about facing the real world in which they might come out second best.

We are going to see more of nationalism because that is the natural tribe of the Commoner. But whatabout the Nazis? Well I'd say that Nazis is what you get after you have lost a war and the victors impose a Carthaginian peace and it seems that everything is going to hell and here is a leader who promises to fix things and restore the glories of the nation and cares about people like me.

Last night President Trump gave us a lesson in how to appeal to the Commoner. First of all he praised America the nation and Americans the people. And how we were going from strength to strength. That is how you appeal to Commoner men and show that you care about Commoner men like them. Then he set up a stack of emotional catharses with people in the gallery. The kid who wanted to be an astronaut and -- wait for it -- whose great-grandfather was a Tuskegee airman right there next to him! The mother and two children whose husband was in Afghanistan and -- wait for it -- here's the father back from Afghanistan right here in the Capitol: tears and hugs all round! Even Rush Limbaugh, diagnosed with stage four lung cancer, so you have Melania hand a Presidential Medal of Freedom around his neck right there in the House gallery! That is how you appeal to Commoner women and show that you care about women like them.

How come. How come, you might ask, does a huckster real-estate mogul and reality TV star figure all that out?

I don't know. But I can tell you that there are dozens of politicians around the US and A right now saying to themselves: I Can Do That. Maybe they can, maybe they can't. But Trump is showing us Commoners the way out of our subordination to the proud and dull rule of the educated administrative elite of the globalist Gentry.

Maybe it will all end in a successful revolution that humbles the educated Gentry. Maybe it won't.

But at least Trump is lighting the way. Maybe not the way, but a way.

And that is better than just sitting there letting the SJWs walk all over us.

More Proof That God Exists

Suppose God wanted to give President Trump a helping hand in his reelection campaign in 2020. What would he do?

Would he appoint Rep. Schiff (D-CA) to be a House manager of the president's impeachment trial in the Senate?

Would he arrange the epic fail (or maybe corruption) of the Democrats' Iowa caucus?

Would he arrange the State of the Union Speech and the Iowa caucus fumble and the aquittal of the president all in the same week?

I tell you, that chap Bismarck had a point that "There is a special providence for drunkards, fools, and the United States of America." Only it's not certain he ever said it.

But then there is Rush Limbaugh's announcement of stage four lung cancer. Years ago I read a critic who sneered at Rush's "jaunty optimism." But that is exactly the point of Rush, to get up every day and face the world with optimism. And, of course, despite all the sneers, it turns out, according to Mark Steyn, that Rush is a kind man. Who knew?

I tell you what I think is going on. I think that the the existing ruling class and its supporting Gentry is panicking. You see this in losing gamblers, and corporations that suddenly get in financial trouble.

They start to cheat.

People don't usually cheat when they are doing well; they don't need to. But when they are looking at not being able to make payroll, or facing bankruptcy, or losing everything at Vegas: That's when they start to cheat, to double down on their bets, to falsify records and steal money out of the till.

And that's what the Democrats have been doing ever since Donald Trump rode down the escalator back in 2015.

We had the Obama administration cooking up an excuse to spy on the Trump campaign.

We had the late hit on Trump with the Access Hollywood tape.

We had the entrapment of Gen. Flynn.

We had the Comey game with Trump that set up the Special Prosecutor probe.

We had the game to get Attorney General Sessions to recuse himself so that Rod Rosenstein could run the Special Prosecutor process.

Then we had the swamp creatures setting up the Ukraine caper, various chappies in the "interagency process."

Then we had the cooked up impeachment process rushed through the House and dumped in the US Senate.

Then we had the frou-frah about witnesses.

It's easy to assume that this is a deep dark conspiracy from deep in the Deep State.

But suppose it's just a Keystone Kops farce, a bunch of people running around in circles that couldn't believe that the interloper Trump was crashing into their cosy little stitch-up like the proverbial bull in a china shop.

Then the list of anti-Trump actions above is not the mark of a cunning conspiracy but of desperate people that couldn't believe that their whole comfortable world was crashing down in ruin. And so, month after month, they tried to stave off the horror. With stupid spying on the Trump campaign, with the attempt to trap the Trump people after the election, with the laughable Russia Collusion narrative, and ending up with the Keystone Kops impeachment farce.

Maybe there is no there there. Just a bunch of late dynasty mandarins running around in circles.

Could it really be that simple?

But let's all pray for Rush. He is an American original.

The Intersection of "Groundhog Day" with Nietzsche and Religion

A while back I purchased a copy of Groundhog Day at HalfPrice Books intending to watch it religiously every February 2. I credit Jonah Goldberg with putting me onto Groundhog Day and I see that he gets a lot of credit at La Wik.

Oh, and by the way, don't miss the Jeep Groundhog Day commercial from yesterday's Super Bowl.

And then there is the real Groudhog Day life of screenwriter Danny Rubin.

But when I watched the movie last night, February 2, 2020, which, from its numbers 02/02/2020 should be the groundhoggiest Groundhog Day for millennia to come, I realized that the whole thing echoes Nietzsche's notion of Eternal Recurrence. And, of course, when I Googled "groundhog day nietzsche" I found that thousands had already tumbled to this. Even La Wik gets into the action.

OK, so I only read Nietzsche over the last year or two. So I have an excuse.

But let us be clear what Nietzsche was on about, before the "Nietzsche was the Nazis' favorite intellectual" chorus starts up. I notice that most of the quotes on the Internet come from The Gay Science but I take my text from The Will to Power.

It is all about the sequence of morality, decadence, nihilism, eternal recurrence, will to power. You can get my long form in "Nietzsche in 900 Words -- If You Can Take It."

First, there is morality, as in a stable religious tradition. It "protect[s] life against despair and the leap into nothing." But when God is Dead, then you get decadence. Nothing to be ashamed of, it's part of the rhythm of life, growth and increase are followed by "waste, decay, elimination." Obviously, when people lose the faith that protected them against despair then they start to lose their bounce and joi de vivre. So we get to nihilism:

Nihilism is a symptom that the underprivileged have no comfort left; that they destroy in order to be destroyed; that without morality they no longer have any reason to "resign themselves"[.]

And so when you have descended into nihilism, you are reduced to "existence as it is, without meaning or aim, yet recurring inevitably without any finale of nothingness: 'the eternal recurrence'."

And that, pretty clearly, is what is happening to Bill Murray's character Phil Connors in Groundhog Day. But is that all there is? Not at all. The next step is the Will to Power. In other words, to break out of the descent into decadence and nihilism and the eternal round of Groundhog Day, the same-old same-old day after day you have to break out. And you don't have to be a Homeric hero.

Who will prove to be the strongest in the course of this? The most moderate; those who do not demand extreme articles of faith; those who not only concede but love a fair amount of accidents and nonsense; those who can think of man with a considerable reduction of his value without becoming small and weak on that account: those richest in health who are equal to most misfortunes and therefore not so afraid of misfortunes -- human beings who are sure of their power and represent the attained strength of humanity with conscious pride. (§55)

In Groundhog Day we can see that the key is for Phil Connors to stop being a cunning rascal, figuring out how to flatter the babes to get them into bed, using knowledge about people to manipulate them, but just going ahead to serve others -- even if they don't thank him -- and also becoming the man that the girl of his dreams would like him to be.

The interesting thing is that, in the Special Features of the DVD, in "The Weight of Time," the director Harold Ramis, who is part lapsed Jew and part Buddhist, related that he got calls from just about every religion thanking him for being one of them:

The first inkling I got of what is was going to mean to me was [that] someone called and said the Buddhists love this movie. And I meet a yogi that said this is the yoga movie; this totally expresses our philosophy. Then I started getting letters from Jesuits, from fundamentalist Christians, all saying the same thing... you must be one of us because this movie perfectly expresses our philosophy of life.

 So. There's something that Nietzsche gets and just about every religious believer gets that gets expressed in an ordinary -- OK, not so ordinary -- Hollywood movie about a jerk of a weatherman and how he got to be unjerked.

Maybe there is hope for us and for America and for the world after all.

Three Peoples: What Happens When It All Goes Wrong?

Suppose you are a Responsible, an ordinary Commoner, that lives by following the rules, going to work, and obeying the law? What happens if the world changes and the rules don't work any more? That's what a reader proposed to me, and he is right.

Because the "life styles" of the Three Peoples are not immutable answers to the problem of "meaning of life, the universe, and everything." They work for people living in this world. Until they don't.

I've already discussed this problem as it applies to the People of the Subordinate Self, the Clients of the ruling class under the concept of "Little Darlings."

If you are the Little Darling of the ruling class then everything is copacetic until the day comes when you are no longer any use to the power program of the ruling class. To me the classic case is the French soldier abandoned on Napoleon's retreat from Moscow in 1812. Sorry Pierre. "So long, and thanks for all the fish." At least, that was "the message left by the dolphins when they departed Planet Earth just before it was demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass", in the words of La Wik.

Yeah. I know. Dolphins? Who knew?

But whatabout the Responsibles? We responsibles follow the rules in the same way as the Subordinates follow the leader. So what happens on the day when the rules don't work, because the universe changed?

Actually, we know what happens. When the rules weren't working for the Germans after World War I they eventually chose to follow a leader. Today, of course, all right minds deplore their embrace of Nazism, but really, what are they supposed to do when the whole place is falling apart? I read of a German woman in a train during the hyperinflation, asking how this could be happening, given that Germany was the most advanced country in the world? Ay, lassie. How indeed?

Actually, there are two choices for the Responsible when things fall apart. The responsible can follow a leader; that is one choice. The other choice is to get creative and find new rules to go by. The point is, of course, that there is no One Way that always answers. That's not the way the world works, however much we yearn for it to be so.

OK. Now let's get to the fun stuff. What about our friends the Creatives? What do they do when things go wrong?

I must confess that I haven't really thought about this very much. My friend says:

I think of how Dr. Peterson always insists that for all the corruption and so on, our hierarchies are essentially competence-based. I sometimes think he underestimates the insidious levels of corruption that we live under...

All the elites deplore the loss of faith in experts yet it seems entirely justified these days. They are less paragons of competence than bubble-dwelling gentry/creative parasites - in the main. It seems something - many things - are quite contaminated with incompetence and bad faith.

So what he seems to be saying that that we are cursed to live under a ruling class, a Gentry that thinks of themselves as high-flying creatives, when in fact they are bottom-dwelleing parasites.

Yes. I think that answers the question. As Jordan B. Peterson divines from Jung, the true creative is a Sacrificial Hero, exploring the border between Order and Chaos. Such a person understands they are doomed, that they give their life that others may live. In fact, you may say, this true Creative follows the Hegelian principle that the thing is the same as its opposite. Thus the Creative surrenders to his fate on the border of Order and Chaos just as the Subordinate must surrender to the will of his Master.

But then there is the fake Creative. Who thinks he is just special, and not subject to the vicissitudes of life like ordinary deplorables. Who thinks that being Creative is the same as drinking the Kool-Aid of ruling-class bromides. Who recites what he has been carefully taught without reading the actual texts.

And another thing: my Great Reaction notion. I am saying that our glorious educated elite, that thinks of itself as so Progressive, is in fact a nostalgic movement that is lurching back to the past.

I say that socialism is a return to slavery, that the welfare state is a return to feudalism. And here we are with Bernie Sanders and his youngster Bernie Bros going for full-on socialism. Only not with any of your nasty secret police, oh no. So don't listen to the Bernie Bros interviewed by Project Veritas. What do young people find so attractive in socialism? That is takes care of them as they wobble on the border between Order and Chaos at the start of adult life? That it seems to resolve all uncertainty in return for loyalty to the Master state? That it seems to promise a cosy community instead of the cold hard life of the citizen in the cold rational world of the market and the labor force?

Does the Great Reaction start with the Romantic movement of the 19th century that said that reason and logic can't be the last word about the meaning of life, the universe and everything. And indeed, everything since then has confirmed that, whatever life is all about, it is not just about reason and logic and mechanics.

As I like to say, the whole arc of the German Turn -- from Kant to Nietzsche, to psychology and relativity and quantum mechanics, and yes, to Adolf Hitler -- is saying that whatever life is all about, it is not just about reason and logic and science.

And that is also to say that life is not just about following the rules, going to work, and obeying the law.

But then, what is "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything?" Good question.

Perhaps we will find the answer next week.

Canceling People for Racist Tweets

Oh dear oh dear! Oh No! A couple days ago Alistair Stewart, a newsreader on ITN in Britain, issued a  Shakespeare quote that included the word "ape."  Now he has been fired for racism.

Let me say here that I am a profound racist. I believe that race is real, and I believe that everyone must live with that reality.

And, as they say, we are all descended from the apes. Bless their hearts.

But in the United States and in the United Kingdom racial discriminaton is illegal.

That means that government actors and corporate actors are not allowed to discriminate against minorities and women on the basis of race or sex.

Although in practice, governments and corporations the world over are encouraged to discriminate against white men on behalf of women and minorities, and are named and shamed if they don't. Yeah. You tell me.

But here I want to say. What does it matter what people say? On Twitter, or anywhere else? If racial discrimination is illegal, that is final. (As President Coolidge said in a different context.)

And if, 50 years after the Civil Rights Act blacks are paid less than whites then, if they are actually being paid less than they are worth there is an opportunity for what the speculators call arbitrage. An opportunity to make money. And since people that hire minorities acquire status in today's society...

Yeah. Imagine the kudos to be obtained by creating a company that exploits the arbitrage between what minorities and women are paid and what they are worth. There must be billions, trillions of dollars to be made in that market!

Here's another thing. Black men in the arts and on the streets these days are notorious for their testosterone culture of "rap" which celebrates the rough tough hombre that is fearless and projects masculine power.

So why do blacks need protection from the ruling class? Aren't they already rough and tough enough to take care of themselves?

I mean, do blacks need the cultural protection of ruling class apparatchiks to go about their daily business safely? In addittion to the protection of the Civil Rights laws? Are they sissies? I mean, if they are to be free and equal then they surely must ache to demonstrate it by dispensing with the clammy grip of ruling-class hangers-on and bravely going about in the world without that ruling-class security detail.

And anyway, getting on Twitter and complaining that "Johnny looked at me" is girl stuff. Are all lefty activists really girly boys? (Don't answer that!)

Let me say here that I am a profound sexist. I believe that sex is real. Also gender. Also the next twist that girly lefty activists come up with.

I mean. All you girls are superheroes, right? You can get on movies and TV and kick and overwhelm men twice your size with your amazing martial-arts superhero skills, Right?

So why do you girly girls and girly men not use your amazing superhero skills and instead do the Community of Women's Culture of Complaint thing that appeals to the nearest man to protect you? Which presumes that you are not in fact the superheroes you claim to be but are in fact, despite the legal protections of the Civil Rights laws and the actual political and cultural power of the ruling class, weak helpless girly girls and girly boys that really aren't ready for prime time.

When black artists strut their stuff they are saying that they are ready to defend themselves in the public square without the assistance of a security detail from the ruling class.

When women twitter on about Girl Power they are saying that they do not need the protection of a father or a husband from the patriarchy of which you've heard tell. Right, girls?

But when some poor chap gets canceled for racism because of a tweet, then we are saying that blacks are helpless forever more.

Which means that we may as well cancel the Civil Rights laws and all the cultural apparatus that protects and inflates blacks. Because they can never be equal, not without the guns and truncheons of the ruling class. They are second-class citizens forever. Because reasons.

See, the point of good old Worcester saying in Henry IV Part One, that

It was myself, my brother and his son,
That brought you home and boldly did outdare
The dangers of the time.

is to declare that the essence of male honor, which is courage, is to boldly outdare whatever might happen to be the dangers of the time.

But to be a man of color, already protected by the Civil Right laws of every clime, and whine that "Johnny looked at me" is to say that "I am a helpless subordinate slave and nothing will ever change that, not laws, not cultural support from the ruling class, not principalities, not powers: nothing."

I don't think that was the idea back in the day. I don't think that civil rights activists imagined that 50 years later, with the protection of the laws and the cultural support of the ruling class, there would be a need to cancel TV anchormen for a Shakespeare quote.

And if they did, they shoulda told us.

Actually, of course, equality is a lie and always will be. There always was a hierarchy, an order of rank, and always will be. That is the point that Jordan B. Peterson is trying to make to girly girls in the media with his reference to lobsters. Hierarchy is coded into lobsters, honey. You think that we humans can un-code something that is so deeply coded within us that it got expressed in primitive creatures like lobsters?

And the point of hierarchy is to reduce violence, so that animals need not contest every incident in their lives, but can live in peace.

The point is: how shall hierarchy be determined, who shall regulate it, and what kind of escape from hierarchy is beneficial and allowable?

Got any ideas on that, precious?

Right now, we have a pitiless hierarchy based on whether you can get Mommy at Twitter to cancel your rivals. Conservatives need not apply.

What does that mean? Does it mean that conservatives are brutes? Or does it mean that the Little Darlings of the ruling class are pathetic sissies?

And what does it mean if you are the kind to run to Mommy and are not willing to establish your position in the status hierarchy without adult assistance?

It must not escape the notice of every sentient human that it was the most extreme advocates of equality that gave us the slave states of the 20th century and the most severe political and economic hierarchies.

So it might be that an excessive concern for equality might be a problem.

This would not suprise us Hegel scholars, who understand that the thing is pretty well the reflection of its opposite. But some of you naïve others might not be so well prepared to boldly outdare the dangers of the time where opposites are concerned.

Here's the fact of the matter. If you are a Little Darling, in the special care of the ruling class, then you are advertising to the world that you are not yet ready for prime time. You need a safe space, and you are less than you should be.

But if you want to tread the world as a citizen, as an equal to any other, then you must accept the challenge of making your own space and defending it without the power and might of the ruling class.

Or, to put it another way, there is no way out of getting out there and fighting for your status in the hierarchy.

Otherwise you are just the Little Darling, the subordinate serf of the ruling class, protected so long as you discharge you duties as its loyal subject, and not a moment longer.

Appreciating Life's Blessings

For everything there is a season.

As I return from visting my daughter in Britain, I am reminded of this.

When I was a boy in Britain in the 1950s in the northwest London suburbs my parents would drop me and my sister off down the street at the house of a pair of maiden sisters and drive to Stratford-on-Avon for a Shakespeare play.

Then the day came when my sister and I got to go. We saw Much Ado About Nothing in 1958 with Christopher Plummer as Benedick. I still have a visual recollection of Plummer on the Stratford stage.

Twenty years later we were driving with two daughters to Ashland, Oregon to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival for a week of Shakespearing and getting together with my parents.

Then the next year we took our daughters to Seattle Opera for a performance of Don Giovanni. The orchestra was on strike so there were two grand pianos in the orchestra pit. But who cares!

Twenty years later I was driving to Ashland for the Shakespeare festival because my daughter was organizing a week of Shakespeare for her husband and two sons. For some reason her sons were really energized by the fight scenes. Unlike my daughters twenty years before.

Last summer I visited my daughter in Britain and she took me to Stratford-on-Avon to see a couple of Shakespeare plays and visit the schoolroom where William Shakespeare went to school and learned all about the classical figures he featured in his plays. And then on to Bath to check out the Jane Austen scene.

Last night my daughter took me to the Royal Opera in Covent Garden, right next to the flower girls of which you've heard tell, and we saw a fine performance of La Traviata. Earlier in the day we had a cream tea in the cafe at the British Museum where it seemed that everyone was outnumbered by the East Asians.

And so the whirligig of time brings on her revenges. Or the old'uns merely hand off the future to their posterity, in the realization of Burke's dictum that human society is a "contract… between those who are dead, those who are living, and those who are to be born." A contract never originally planned, or carefully carried out, or monitored or, at the last, reviewed and judged, but just an unrolling phenomenon from a disappearing past striding forth into an unknown future. And a blessing when you discover that life is giving you much mure than you deserve.