The Three Realities of the Three Peoples

I live under the notion that my reductive Three Peoples theory explains everything. 

OK, of course I don't believe that. Humans come in an infinite diversity of types. But I do think that it is helpful to divide people in these United States into three lumps, for the purpose of religious, cultural, and political analysis. Anything more complicated and you lose their attention.

In recent weeks, under the influence of Mircea Eliade in his book The Myth of Eternal Return, I have shined a new light on my theory, especially because of this pull quote:

The primitive... cannot conceive of an unprovoked suffering; it arises from a personal fault... or from his neighbor's malevolence... but there is always a fault at the bottom of it[.]

When you think about it, we all have a tendency to do this, and the reason is pretty obvious. Our brains and our five senses are in the business of noticing things out there in the world that might affect us, beneficially or otherwise. This means that we are inclined not to think of everything that happens in the world as completely random. Survival in this world means tying events together into something meaningful when appropriate.

It doesn't take too much to imagine that a tiger or a wolf that is stalking you is malevolent. Hey, the darn animal is treating you like dinner. And the worst thing in the world for you right now would be to end up as someone's dinner.

So I propose that the basic reality of the People of the Subordinate Self is that the world is out to get them. Malevolent. And you will note that our lefty friends are pretty strong on suggesting to the various People of the Subordinate Self that they wish to recruit into their political army that there are malevolent racist-sexist-homophobes in our society that are out to get them. The ongoing riots over the death of forgery suspect George Floyd is an example of this lefty approach to politics. Who really cares about a 40ish night-club bouncer that has a heart condition and, it seems, a drinking and/or drug problem? Why would the eevil white supremacists care a whit about him?

But, obviously, the malevolence gambit works. People of the Subordinate Self vote, overwhelmingly, for lefty parties that sell the malevolence schtick. So I propose that, for the People of the Subordinate Self, an assumption of malevolence, of evil powers ganging up on you, is front and central in their world view. And this aligns with my view that People of the Subordinate Self live in a world prior to the advent of the Axial Age religions.

Now we come to the People of the Responsible Self, and I propose that People of the Responsible Self believe that the world runs on rules. That, of course, is the logic of having a God that created the world and then created His divine law. In this reality it is up to humans to take the world that God has created and be fruitful and multiply. Only, watch it. You don't want to break God's laws; that way lies disaster.

Now, I am not saying that Responsibles are perfect beings that soldier on irregardless without suspicion that their neighbor might be up to no good. Of course not. There is a lot of subordination in all of us. Humans are hierarchical, and that means that we are all subordinate to someone, and very often we hate it -- and them.

Obviously this kind of clockwork world that operates according to rules takes us right up to the beginning of the modern era but no further. Because the whole point of the modern era, starting with Hume, is that we cannot prove cause and effect. Correlation is not causation. We can't reduce the world to a set of rules.

After a couple hundred years of philosophizing about the problem that Hume set forth the geniuses came up with quantum mechanics and the "state function" to explain how the world works.

At the fundamental level -- or at least at the current understanding of the fundamental level -- subatomic "particles" are not really particles, but a fuzz of possibilities that only condense into something definite when an event occurs. And even then:-- when a single quantum of light goes through a double slit it forms an interference pattern when it hits a receptor.

What this means is that, at the fundamental level, God plays dice. You never know what is going to happen: it might rain or it might shine.

Now, I propose that the People of the Creative Self understand this. They have to, because when an artist creates something new he knows that the creation does not come out of a deliberate process of 2+2=4, but in a contingent process, an inspiration. 

In my own life I tend to say that my ideas come to me from my unconscious. When I encounter a problem, in ideas or in my usgovernmentspending.com website, I do not grind away at the problem; I get up and walk away. And then I find that the solution to a problem comes to me, irrationally, in the middle of the night. Or, as with Puccini, you could say that your music comes directly to you from God.

Now this applies to creative people whether they are writers, artists, business start-ups, whatever. There is always an aspect of chance, or good luck, or an unanticipated inspiration. or just being in the right place at the right time.

Let us call this the "creative state function." All the pieces that might come together in a creative act are fuzzing around in a state of probabilities. And if they come together into a wonderful creation it is the result of unknown probabilities. We have various ways of describing the flash of creation, the condensation of probabilities.

The most obvious example is the creation of every human life at the moment of conception where a single egg is beset by a crowd of sperm. Which one will break through the walls of the egg to start a new life? It's all a matter of probability, a "state function."

Of course, People of the Creative Self also believe in malevolence, and Rules. There is a lot of the Subordinate and the Responsible in each of them. But each creative lives in the hope of being the Chosen One, the result of a condensation of probabilities into a miraculous creation never before seen on this Earth. 

Personally I prefer the idea of life as a "creative state function," so I must be a People of the Creative Self. But I also respect the need for rules, and regretfully, I realize there is a lot of malevolence in the world, particularly where lefties are concerned.

So there is reason for hope, and also reason to despair. As it ever was.

Critical Theory in Brief

Let's take Max Horkheimer's definition of critical theory.  He wrote that a theory is

critical insofar as it seeks "to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them."

The impulse to this idea came to Horkheimer in WWII as he experienced that fascism was already encoded in the notion of enlightenment and reason.  Thus he and Adorno wrote in The Dialectic of Enlightenment that "What man wants from nature is to dominate it and other men."

So you see that critical theory is all about liberation and enslavement and domination.

But where does critical theory come from?

Oddly, it has nothing to do with leftism. It goes back to Kant and his Critique of Pure Reason. 

Accepting Hume's argument that correlation isn't causation, Kant argued that there could not be absolute knowledge because we could not know "things-in-themselves" but only appearances. So all human knowledge is a story, a "narrative" about things observed in the world, that tries to make a connection between appearances and the unknowable "things-in-themselves." Notice that if we can't know "things-in-themselves" it means that we never know whether our last scientific theory is really the last word on reality. 

Then Fichte argued that "All our thought is founded on our impulses," a creative act of imagination, the first stirring of the idea of the unconscious mind.

If thinking is not the mechanical application of reason and logic, but impulsive narrative, it stands to reason that powerful people have the power to impose their impulses and "narratives" on the less powerful. Thus, it makes sense that the experience of marginalized peoples will be suppressed by the narrative of the ruling class. Thus Critical Race Theory.

Critical Race Theory is how most of us encounter critical theory, and CRT takes critical theory to the max. Here are the highlights of Wikipedia's breakdown:

• Critique of liberalism e.g., Enlightenment, rationalism, legal equality.
• Storytelling, "naming one's own reality" "The use of narrative (storytelling) to illuminate and explore lived experiences of racial oppression."
• Revisionist interpretations e.g., that civil rights laws were passed "in order to improve the image of the United States" abroad.
• Intersectional theory Intersection of "race, sex, class, national origin, and sexual orientation, and how their combination (i.e., their intersections) plays out in various settings."
• Empathetic fallacy "Empathy is not enough to change racism" because most people live in a bubble.
• Non-white cultural nationalism argument for racial "separation and reparations" for oppressed peoples.

What is interesting is how left-wing thinkers and activists take the notion of critical theory, that all knowledge is a narrative of power, and demand that we accept their critical theory as Holy Writ. Or else. Narrative of power, anyone?

Anyway, Critical Race Theory is based on the notion that only the powerful have a voice, but that the non-powerful have experience that is valid for them, and who is to say that their experiences are any less valid that the narrative of the powerful. 

But what if the powerful people are right about a few things? For instance what if capitalism creates prosperity for the marginalized worker while socialism creates killing fields? What if an education without a lefty in sight creates capable people while graduates in critical race theory turn out to be mind-numbed robots?

If we accept the ideas of Kant and Fichte then it is not hard to see how they license the impulsive ideas of relativity and quantum mechanics, that completely liberated us from enslavement to the bonds of the mechanical world of Newton.

Critical theory has been an astonishing success in science. But it is much easier to determine whether an impulsive idea in science works, and much harder to do that with ideas about human culture and politics.

Climate Change illustrates the operation of critical theory. How would we know that the scientific theory of climate change is correct? We won't, not for decades or centuries, not until critical discussions among scientists have understood climate much better than now. But meanwhile the rulers and the experts want us to act and they do not permit a critique of climate theory from people without power. How do we know if the critical race theorists are right? We don't, because you are not allowed a "revisionist interpretation" on race, so we either acquiesce to the dominatory ideas of the rulers or we oppose them, even unto death.

Lefty Jürgen Habermas tried to get beyond the opposition of Enlightenment vs. a liberated world free of hegemony and domination. He developed the idea that we are not just mechanical wind-up toys, cogs in a rational machine or helpless victims of the powerful, but communicators. So his Theory of Communicative Action proposes that the systems world of Enlightenment and instrumental reason should be balanced by a life-world of communication and negotiation.

Notice that the "life-world" of Habermas understands the critical race theory's notion of "lived experience." But in his world the differences in lived experiences are there to be communicated and negotiated not fought out in the streets with mostly peaceful protest or imposed in the classroom by government teachers.

The notions of critical theory have interesting ramifications in the work of Thomas Kuhn and his Structure of Scientific Revolutions. How does a new scientific theory gain a foothold? When the old generation of scientists dies off.

Strictly speaking, critical theory ought to be the standard of the truly marginalized in their battle against The Man. Yet in our day critical theory is the weapon of choice for our ruling class and its supporters in education, media, and politics against the ordinary middle class.

Go figure.

Critical Theory Table of Contents

The Problem with Our Gentry Experts

The biggest scandal coming out of the Wu Flu epidemic is the Nursing Home Scandal. It appears that many states set as policy that COVID patients released from hospital should be transferred to nursing homes.

Now everybody is saying that this was cruel and heartless of Govs Cuomo in New York, Tom Wolf in Pennsylvania, and Karen Whitmer in Michigan. But they are wrong.

Back at the beginning of the Wu Flu epidemic crisis "experts agreed" that the big problem was that hospitals would be overwhelmed with patients. Why did they think that? It was because "scientists agreed" from their reading of epidemic models that there would be millions of COVID cases. 

President Trump responded to this judgement of "experts agree." He sent two US Navy hospital ships to the two biggest US cities, New York, and Los Angeles to help avoid, or at least reduce, the demand on hospital beds.

Only, it turned out, the computer models on which the "scientists agreed" were wrong. The demand on hospitals was about ten percent of the forecast.

But nobody thought to change the policy with regard to nursing homes, not until thousands of nursing home patients had been infected with the virus. So, it turns out, the overwhelming majority of COVID deaths in blue states like New York, Pennsylvania, and Michigan have been elderly residents at nursing homes.

The problem is not that New York and Pennsylvania and Michigan had a cruel policy to send COVID patients to nursing homes to recuperate. The problem is that they failed to adapt their policy fast enough in light of the reality that hospitals were not going to be overwhelmed.

Now, I get the feeling, reading about the WuFlu thingy from day to day, that our lefty media seems to think that science and expertise is a "thing." Listen to the experts, they say, and wait to be told what to do.

But if you have read the books that I have read, you might think that knowledge and science and expertise are not Holy Writ, but a fudge. They are useful, but not divine.

See, what I have come to believe is that the Universe is way more complicated and hard to understand than we can imagine, or ever can imagine. Our knowledge and our science of which we moderns are do proud is but a paltry attempt to understand the daunting complexity of the reality. 

Moreover, we do not accumulate knowledge in a noble and sophisticated attempt to understand "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything." We create knowledge because we have a problem. Indeed, as F.S.C. Northrop wrote many moons ago, "knowledge begins with a problem." If there is no problem, there is no need for knowledge, and no need to leave off wiving and thriving and partying.

This means that the point of knowledge is simply that it is a way to take the data flooding in every moment and decide which data is important and which data should be a guide for action and what action is warranted, given the data and the interpretation based on knowledge and science.

The best understanding of this process is the OODA loop, a concept developed by a USAF pilot, Col, John Boyd.

When you are fighting a battle -- against another army or against a virus -- you are continuously going through a process of Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. And the faster and the better you can do it, the quicker you will defeat your foe -- or avoid defeat.

But our educated Gentry seems to think of knowledge and expertise as a static thing, a status thing -- better left to the experts. It is rather like the old days of computers. You would punch up your deck of cards and submit them to the computer operator, who would stick the deck in the card reader and return your results from the printer, all in good time, peasant.

And, of course, the folks in an expert bureaucracy are not in the game of action; they are in the game of status. They acquire their education and their degrees and their titles not because they want to solve problems but because they want status. We see this with the transgender Pennsylvania Health Secretary Dr. Rachel Levine taking time out from the vital task of fighting Wu Flu to reprimand a media person for "misgendering" her.

First things first!

Or whatabout the current riots and looting in Minneapolis, in response to the death of a suspect under arrest. How come the mayor of Minneapolis and the governor of Minnesota didn't act in minutes to fill the streets with policemen and, if necessary, the National Guard, or failing that the NRA, with a show of force to stop the rioters?

I will tell you. It is because modern progressive politics is not about protecting people or taking action, it is about moral posturing.

And we moderns know better. We know that the way to get things done is through the market and its price signaling and its rewards for the guy that solves a problem, any problem, before the next guy. The market doesn't care what college you went to, what degree you got, what your title is, or what your race is. It just cares about what you have done for the consumer lately.

You can see that many of the Democratic politicians are really at sea in the current epidemic. They did not go into politics to Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act, again and again, but to sit upon a golden throne, make pronouncements, and receive the adulation of their courtiers.

I suppose this is true of all mature political and religious and cultural regimes. Everyone is completely engaged in the proper practice of the ritual, and has completely forgotten the problem that the ritual was invented to solve.

With the virtue of hindsight we can say of the Nursing Home Scandal that someone in the health bureaucracy below the exalted rank of Governor or Health Secretary needed to have the responsibility and authority to act on nursing homes.

Guess what. The Germans figured that out a century ago in the carnage of World War I. Given the chaos of battle and the fact that everyone was hunkered down in the trenches hey realized that they needed to push responsibility down as far as possible and empower junior officers and NCOs with the responsibility to act, based on their individual knowledge of developing local events. Thus Gen. Hans von Seeckt proclaimed his intention

[To make] of each individual member of the army a soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility [verantwortungsfreudig] as a man and a soldier. 

How many of your modern experts are completely"verantwortungsfreudig?"

And then there is the advice of Lord Salisbury, Prime Minister of Britain at the turn of the 20th century, on the question of experts.

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.

Lord Salisbury was notable for conducting foreign policy out of his back pocket and completely ignoring the foreign policy experts at the British Foreign Office. 

Understanding the Power of "Fascism"

What exactly is fascism? It has been such a bugaboo for so long that a guy wants to know. Why should we be so terrified of it? Why should all good people want to cut it down the moment it appears? Why do the young lefty thugs of AntiFa choose anti-fascism as their escutcheon?

I read a piece about fascism at Quillette and I'm still not sure. Obviously, fascism as a monster was created by Stalin in the 1930s. Why, exactly? Because fascism was a rival to Communism? Because Stalin needed an enemy for his Bolsheviks and for other lefties to hate? No doubt, as Paul Gottfried has written, fascism is a

slur “hurled at anyone who holds what are now unpopular opinions.”

And, I suppose, anyone that wants to occupy the commanding heights of culture or politics tends to need a convenient lightning bolt to hurl at the despicables and the deplorables.

And, I suppose, after the glorious victory of 1945 both the ruling class of the US coalition and the Soviet Union found it convenient to have something "that must never happen again." Still, what exactly was it that we were supposed to fear?

Even in the 1940s, at a time when genuinely fascist dictatorships threatened to extinguish freedom over much of the world’s surface, George Orwell noted that misuse of the term had rendered it “entirely meaningless.” Decades later, American journalist Tom Wolfe would note the “morbid tendency” of his colleagues to apply the word to everything from Christian revivalist movements to hippies.

Maybe the meaning is just as Tom Wolfe described it in "The Land of the Rococo Marxists."

Anti-fascism, he wrote, “became a universal ray gun, good for zapping anybody, anywhere, from up here… on the intellectuals’ Everest of Indignation.”

Really, then, it is no different than the universal kill-shot, the accusation of racism. The whole point of calling someone a racist-sexist-homophobe is to shut them up, because there is no defense against it.

So the accusation of "fascism" or "Nazism" is just a ranging shot, because if you say a word in its favor then you are obviously in favor of killing Jews.

I suppose that is why I have developed my usual "across the grain" aphorism, where I say that

Trump is the idiot you get when the usual idiots have screwed up.

For you can also say that "fascism is the idiocy that people grab for when the usual idiots have screwed up."

But really, I think that fascism is much more cunning than socialism or communism. Because fascism and Nazism exploit the obvious power of nationalism, the identification that ordinary Commoners have with the nation state. It is a powerful combination of the ancient and the modern.

The power of socialism as an idea is its lurch to the primitive. We all have programmed within us the yearning for the community of the kindred, where people are as one and are perfect social animals. And we all have the other primitive instincts, that if something goes wrong there is a fault at the bottom of it, either our own fault of the malevolence of another. And the solution is vengeance or the scapegoat of Rene Girard's Violence and the Sacred.

But we humans have learned over the last 500 years to identify with the community of the nation. So when things go wrong we look to the leader of the nation to lead us back to safety. The lesson of World War I was that the workers of Germany, supporters of the Social Democratic Party, identified first as Germans before they identified as the class of proletarians.

And the lesson of World War II is that when Stalin wanted to rally the Russian people he did it by appealing to them as Russians and not as Communists. Hey, guess what: Stalin (and Bukharin) came up with the notion of "socialism in a single country" in 1924! According to La Wik.

So, when the rubber hits the road, even socialists need to rally the workers to the nation. Because that is what works.

Really "fascism" is just a pejorative that people with cultural power use to shut other people up. 

So, the only question is: how do we respond? And I would say that we should understand that all lefty 

heroes are really fascists, national socialists at heart.

So the way to respond is to say, if you are a man, "Whatabout Obama? Here was a progressive trying to bend the arc of history towards social justice in one country. Fascism, in all but name."

For "Obama" you can substitute any Democratic leader that seems appropriate, from FDR to Speaker Karen Pelosi (D-CA).

If you are a women, you say, "I can't believe you said that." And then you text your friend to complain.

Deep Sixing the Socialist Idiots

Today Dinesh D'Souza has an excerpt from his book The United States of Socialism. He asks why the economic failures of socialism haven't made socialism a dead letter all over the world. Why do the AOCs and Co. still believe?

They are on a grand quest, and they refuse to look back. The[y] insist that they are the champions of a moral ideal. The only way to refute them is to refute their moral ideal, to expose their dream as a nightmare, to capsize their utopia. 

But, he writes, there is a problem. How to persuade people that Socialism is a fantasy? The problem is that, for humans,

a fantasy continues to hold its appeal even when it is exposed as a fantasy. So we have to expose the socialist utopia not as an illusion but rather as a racket.  

This approach would have the advantage, of course, of tying into Eric Hoffer's notion that

Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.

So, with socialism we would say that it starts with St. Simon, Fourier, and Marx as an incandescent dream. It becomes with social democracy and the welfare state a business of votes for benefits. And it became with Communism and now Wokism, the dull thuggery of: "nice little job you got here, real shame if it got canceled for Wrong Think, James Damore."

Of course, my Great Reaction notion is designed to be an all-fronts attack on leftism. And my Four Laws notion is designed to show that a government-run economy cannot work.

And my study of Prophecy indicated that prophetic failure does not extinguish the prophetic cult, not right away. But, hey, you'd think that after all the prophetic failures of socialism it would be about time for Good Little Girls like AOC to reject socialism. But they don't.

Well, we know why. Because the education system teaches Good Little Girls that socialism is good. Nobody is teaching the Good Little Girls that socialism is a lurch back to the primitive, that it is always cruel and unjust and always will be, that is always leads to poverty and famine, and that it imagines a world that can never be, not in this world and not in the next world.

This is actually not surprising, because with a government-dominated education system of course the system is going to shill for the ruling class and teach little children the wonders of a government-dominated society.

I guess the attack on socialism needs to operate on several levels. Let' s call it Routing the Left.

1. We need a meaning of life, a religion that appeals to educated Gentry more than the current over-under ideology that makes the educated Gentry into a convocation of saints trying to bend the arc of history towards justice. My idea, in A Vision of the Good Life, that we should teach the educated Gentry to be Sacrificial Heroes rather the Egoist Heroes, is one such effort.
2. We need a new common-sense, set of aphorisms that marginalizes the socialist fantasy. My Four Laws is one such, saying that socialism cannot work, because this and that and the other.
3. We need an ideological offensive that cuts across the grain of socialism putting everything about the left in a bad light. That, I believe is the role of my Great Reaction notion.

Hey, this is not rocket science. We need to engage people at all levels: at the prophetic vision level, saying here is a vision of the good life better than socialism; at the logic and reason level, saying that socialism cannot work, because reasons; and at the gut level, saying that anyone that believes in socialism is an delta-minus moron.

Why Can't We Satirize Our Ruling Class?

I think that we Americans have a real problem: a problem that goes right to the heart of Who We Are. Do you know what it is? No, no. Not the deficit. Or the debt. Or Trump's tweeting. The problem is much more basic than that.

We Americans, or, if you prefer, we 'Muricans, are not allowed to satirize the sacred cows of the ruling class.

Hey! What's the matter with our ruling class? Are they so insecure that they can't abide jokerology? I mean, even Shakespeare said there was no harm in an allowed fool.

In the good old days, the ruling class seemed to be OK with satire. My favorite example is the laughs that Charles Dickens has at the expense of the Circumlocution Office in the Britological government in London, staffed by the Barnacles and the Stiltstockings.

Yes. Things haven't changed. The world is overrun with government employees hanging onto their jobs like grim death, er, barnacles, so that they can do their 30 years and get that gubmint pension. And as for the Stiltstockings! What are all the stuck up journalists and politicians and activists and aides and Deputy Assistant Program Directors but modern Stiltstockings? Find me another name that better describes them, if you can.

Even as recently as the 1980s the Brits put the interesting interface between the Civil Service and the politicians on TV in Yes, Minister. The joke was that the clueless Minister of Administrative Affairs, Jim Hacker, was totally bossed around by his suave and educated Permanent Secretary, Sir Humphrey Appleby. And we have seen that happen in real life as Prime Minister Theresa May was clearly bossed around by her Civil Service underlings in respect of Brexit. Note that the present Prime Minister Boris Johnson has a take no prisoners aide, Dominic Cummings to keep the civil servants down to a dull roar. Maybe Cumming is in charge of the removal of "handles" as they call orders and knighthoods ver in Britland.

Back in the stuffy old Victorian Age, Gilbert and Sullivan famously staged a whole string of comic operettas that satirized the upper class and the aristocracy. In H.M.S. Pinafore, the First Lord of the Admiralty, Sir Joseph Porter, KCB, had no experience in ships. He started out as a clerk in the bureaucracy. In The Mikado we have the Lord High Executioner who is a nobody, and the Lord High Everything Else, who runs the show. And so on. Maybe the stuffy Victorians weren't as stuffy as we are.

But in our day in the US we have had West Wing. But it wasn't a satire. It glorifies the president and his noble liberal effort to bend the arc of history towards justice. Yes, really. Can our liberal friends not see how such a putrid effort diminishes them and the noble art of bending arcs of history.

See, I think we should have comedies and tragedies on the stage and screen that slay all the sacred liberal cows. For instance, we could start with satirizing the unspoken requirement to have diverse casts, with blacks as wise advisers -- or computer whizzes -- and women as superheroes. Then we could make fun of, gasp, high-born feminist women and fake-victim LGBTs.

Hey, I know. Whatabout making fun of Medicare? Of the various follies in education? We could have a sitcom about education bureaucrats busy trying to make life hard for homeschoolers, assisted by monster Harvard professors.

Whatabout climate change? We could have a sitcom featuring a really weird Swedish girl on the spectrum acting out the women's Culture of Complaint and a rather nice and thoughtful German girl who is the soul of level-headedness advocating for the eevil science deniers.

Whatabout discrimination against Asian Americans at Harvard? And the millions of useless Karens in the bureaucracy and HR?

Yeah, and all the stereotypes that our liberal masters impose upon us, from race to sex to immigration. And #MeToo. And the amazing way that our news media are all over sex scandals when Republicans are involved but just give the guy a break when a Democrat is involved. We have seen that now at the presidential level with Bill Clinton, when a feminist offering to put on her knee pads to service him, and now with Joe Biden, where feminists are willing to be outraged by his hair sniffing, but still vote for him.

Remember when Candidate Trump's admission that women were more than willing for him to touch them intimately utterly outraged all proper suburban housewives?

What? You say that making fun of intersectional politics is not fun, and you don't see how anyone could seriously laugh at it? Oh really?

How about a skit about female software analysts at Google? The idea would be that the girls spend all their time being outraged by toxic masculinity and planning woke activism, except when the boss comes by and then they pretend to be deeply absorbed in their Big Data project.

Or how about the girls at Google reading an anodyne article about the profound differences between the sexes, footnoted and all, and conspiring together to get the author fired?

How about a skit about the censors at Facebook getting utterly outraged by some anodyne conservative post, but cheering on some lefty AntiFa post proposing to "peacefully protest" some right-wing gathering, and discussing what kind of Molotov cocktails and brass knuckles they will need?

How about a side-by-side skit on a group of Black Power Matters activists planning a noble black protest, intercut with some Proud Boys planning an eevil white supremacist protest?

This is not that hard. But somehow nobody dares to do it. Odd, don't you think? Could it be a conspir-i-cy?

Point is, if the ruling class and their bribed apologists in the media and the activism community don't have the cojones to be able to deal with actual criticism and people laughing and sneering at them in the time honored way of satire and cocking a snook at the pompous rulers, well then, really, they aren't ready for Prime Time, and they ought to go back to the nursery and play with their dollies until they get a clue.

The point is that politics is about power. If you use your power to stop other people from speaking, then what is wrong with your ideology and your politics and your culture that you can't take criticism? I mean, surely your ideas are so good that 97.2 percent of people agree with you, right?

And even more to the point, what is wrong with you, pal?

Or, if you are a woman, "I can't believe you can't take criticism."

But I wonder. Maybe the rule is that only the Gentry is allowed to do satire. Maybe God has forbidden satire by Commoners? Or maybe history demands that deplorable Commoners keep their traps shut.

You think?

A Memorial Day Without Memorials

In recent years I have visited my daughter on Memorial Day and attended the parade and observances in her small New England town.

This year the parade and the observance are canceled. Because Wu Flu.

And The New York Times, with staggering stupidity, has filled its front page with the names of Wu Flu victims.

Maybe that is good, that the Good Little Boys and Good Little Girls at The New York Times have No Clue. Because if they did have a clue they could do more damage to our nation than they do with their ignorant and conceited blundering.

Because I have come to appreciate in recent years the meaning of Memorial Day and Veterans Day. That it is all about telling the mothers of the Fallen that is was all worth it and that their sacrifice of their darling son is honored and appreciated for evermore.

It's all lies, of course. There can never be recompense to the mothers of the sons sent to fight the rulers' stupid wars. Because all wars are the result of the stupidity of the current rulers and the vauntings of the current ruling class. At least ever since, say, 1800, when the economic benefit of loot and plunder for the victors was canceled by the loss, to victor and loser, of the benefits of ordinary peacetime trading.

You can expand the notion, if you like, to the idea that the rulers should be honoring the fallen resulting from every government stupidity, from the lives blighted by stupid government education to the lives blighted by stupid government-caused recessions and depressions.

In that light, I suppose that you could excuse The New York Times and its list of the COVID fallen. Only not on Memorial Day, idiots!

Memorial Day originally began as Decoration Day, when the mothers of the fallen soldiers of the Confederate army decorated their sons' graves. I suppose, back in the day, the graves were decorated by mothers other than the actual mothers of the fallen, since in the late 19th century it was hardly possible for an ordinary Commoner mother to travel hundreds of miles to the battlefield where her dead son was buried. But then, since I expect more soldiers died of disease than wounds, maybe many of the dead sons were buried where they were being trained. Or maybe buried somewhere on the route of march, from a disease contracted from the usual unsanitary conditions of army life.

But I wonder whether we shouldn't start instituting various Idiots Days, to deeply ponder the mistakes and blunders of politicians and activists that got us into wars and depressions and hardships in which ordinary people suffered and died for no fault of their own, and ruling class idiots got celebrated as saviors of their nation.

But that is a thought for another day. Today is Memorial Day, when we remember the soldiers that died in the nation's wars. And we honor their sacrifice that can never be repaid, and the sacrifice of their mothers who can never be consoled.

For the truth is that all the Memorial Days and parades and flags and speeches can never be much more than a patronizing pat on the head of those whose loved ones suffered and died in consequence of various rulers and their conceited posturing and blundering.

And that, I believe, should be the real understanding of Memorial Day, even if it is too horrible to contemplate and to speak about in public.