No, Women Have a Culture of Comformity

 There I was happily commenting on a piece at Quillette on women and the Mourner's Veto, in other words the right for emotion and tears to overrule calm and spirited discussion. So I commented with usual wit and brio thus:

The Mourner’s Veto is a Girl Thing. No man would ever tearfully say at a microphone that he is “literally shaking.”

This all began to come together for me when I read the German sociologist Georg Simmel, who wrote over a century ago that the public square had been created by men for men, and that as women came into the public square they would change it to “suit a more feminine sensibility.”

What did that mean, I wondered?

The answer, I realized, eventually, as the world got into full-on Snowfake and Micro-aggression territory, is that women don’t relate to the public square. Not at all, and they are presently in the process of destroying it. Women’s transactions are one-on-one where the two women present complain about other women, as in “I can’t believe she said that.” A variant is “Much as I hate to say it…”

Men have a Culture of Insult. Its civilized version is the public square.

Women have a Culture of Complaint. There is no civilized version.

But an intelligent woman, red.hybiscus, responded thusly.

I feel like I’m caught in a giant Mean Girls cafeteria, wherein a tiny group of very nasty rich girls hold everyone else in thrall and terror. If a dysfunctional male hierarchy involves physical violence and brutality, a dysfunctional female hierarchy involves vicious nasty rumor and unctuous tribal affiliation. My own hypothesis is that social media - a tool that makes social shaming, expulsion, groupthink enforcement etc vastly easier - intersects with women rising in economic and social power. So we have more powerful women conjoined with a tool that allows a handful to do their Mean Girl thing.

I don’t agree that woman have a Culture of Complaint. That is what men perceive, not what women experience. Men perceive it’s ‘complaint’ because they still think of women as dependent on them, so to them women’s form of power is whining and complaining to them. The actual culture is a Culture of Conformity. Negative tools are shame, guilt, threat of expulsion. The civilized version is rule of community ties and on-the-ground social ties, eg family.

She's right, you know. The whole point of women's complaining to each other about a third woman not present is to establish and enforce an agreed narrative to which every woman in the community must conform, or else. Or else she is a witch.

Of course, it's not just women that do this. It's true in religion, where you'd better toe the line on the orthodoxy, or you are a heretic and they are building the auto da fé right now. It's true in politics where you better toe the conventional wisdom line or you are a traitor and a rebel, and we are getting ready to shut you up for hate speech right now. It's true in science, where you better toe the line until the old guys retire or you won't get grants, as Thomas Kuhn wrote many moons ago in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

But back to red.hybiscus's Culture of Conformity.

The actual culture is a Culture of Conformity. Negative tools are shame, guilt, threat of expulsion. The civilized version is rule of community ties and on-the-ground social ties, eg family.

I think that the key with the women's Culture of Conformity is that resort to law-enforcement should be excluded. In other words, the whole point of the women's culture is that women sort it out among themselves. This woman is a good woman, that woman is a whore. Etc. But no whining to the police, like the two women university administrators in Britland that, doubtless, were "literally shaking" about the man that said, in a private conversation, that Jews are smart and Germans are good engineers. So they fired him.

Er, no, ladies. You get to talk to all your Mean Girls in the university administration and say to each other "I can't believe he said that," and "I'm so angry I am literally shaking." But not a firing offense. Get it?

I think in the male Culture of Insult and its civilized version, the public square, this is called "being a good sport."

Reducing Yarvin's Four Strata to Three Layers

Back in the day Curtis Yarvin had a nice sensible Three Layer theory of Gentry, Commoners, and Clients. But now he has revised it into four strata, as follows:

Across human history we see four different ways of living. Let’s label these varieties of social existence cosmopolitan, traditional, deracinated, and ancestral. For variety, we’ll pair these adjectives with synonymous nouns which almost no one knows: armigers, yeomen, lazzari, and autochthons.

Only, then he goes and adds another stratum on the bottom end: the "human rubble of the old regime’s failed experiments." For human rubble, you could also substitute "white trash," which, according to Nancy Isenberg in White Trash, has been a thing in the Anglo-American world for hundreds of years. Back in 1500, the Brits had a law to deal with "vagabonds and beggars." Nothing new on the human rubble front.

Now, by lazzari Yarvin refers to the "name for the Neapolitan underclass in the Bourbon era," and he includes the gang members in this classification. By saying that they are deracinated he means that they are uprooted -- uprooted yeoman that just need to be re-yeomanized. I don't think so. I agree that the lazzari are uprooted, but I don't agree that they were previously yeomen.

By autochthons Yarvin means pre-agricultural hunter-gatherers, the "original inhabitants" of a place. They really cannot fit in today's society because they never learned to be bored, boring farmers sitting in one place watching the corn grow. Various commentators have noted that these pre-agricultural people tend to extinction when confronted by the modern world, as in native Americans, Australians aboriginals, and Amazon tribes.

Now I think that Yarvin has muddied the waters with his new strata. I like his armigers, or, as I would prefer, armigeri, just to make it sophisticated and Italian. But I think that yeomen is not a good fit. This is because I feel that to make it in the city you cannot be a yeoman right off the farm. You have to transform yourself into a bourgeois, a burgher, a townie. That's why I like Yarvin's Commoner from his Three Layer theory and my Responsible from my reductive Three Peoples theory. If you look at the heroes of Thomas Hardy and George Eliot novels, these agricultural yeomen had to transform themselves to make it in the new world of the nineteenth century. And they did.

See, I look at the lazzari, the autochthons, and the human rubble as "misfits." They do not fit in the modern world of the city, the employment at will, the hegemony of the market, the need to upgrade skills to keep yourself employable in the city economy. Moreover, they are people that do not really "get" how life operates in the city. They are Subordinate people that expect to live as a subordinate to someone who will make all the decisions and tell them what to do.

There are a ton of people that inhabit this Subordinate realm. The whole arc of labor unions, wage-hour laws, government pension systems and government health care are really manifestations of the fact that a lot of people don't want to be free burghers. They want to be taken care of. The only problem is that, as Yarvin says above, they tend to become "human rubble," the detritus from the latest wizard wheeze dei armigeri. I call them Little Darlings, because their descent is usually assisted by the armigeri enlisting them as special people in their political army, for their votes, and then abandoning them by the side of the road when they are no longer politically useful. As in white working class.

Now we like, with our modern conceit, to sneer at the old world of serfs and slaves. But you tell me what a corporate employee with life-time employment is, other than a serf. You tell me what a welfare recipient is, who goes to the government for money to live on, other than a slave. Oh yes, back in the day you could apply to become a slave to your local feudal lord. Slaves weren't all conquest slaves, or sold to the highest bidder in West African slave ports.

But I think it is nicer to call the misfits, the serfs, the slaves, as Subordinates. They are people that don't have the spirit, the chops, the cultural preparation to be Commoners in the city: not yet, maybe not ever. And that's OK

But let us at least admit that the lazzari, the autochthons, the "human rubble" are all "misfits," people that have not found a place in today's rapidly post-industrializing society.

And, by the way, suppose they never do find a place in today's society. Do we put them all on "reservations" where they can drink themselves to death? Or do we let them molder away in the countryside blacking out with OxyContin, like the white working class that is "dying of despair?"

Or do we make everyone go through post-industrial boot-camp? I mean, if it was copacetic to put a whole generation of young men through boot camp in World War II and then the GI Bill to beat the Nazis and make the kids into good Fifties factory workers and suburbanites, why not do it again?

Only, of course, I wouldn't trust i nostri amati armigeri to do it right. With their record, they would probably create a whole new category of "human rubble."

Ch5: How to Protect the Yeomen

It's been two months, but now the next chapter in Curtis Yarvin's Gray Mirror of the Nihilist Prince is out. This time he is talking about what his nihilist prince is going to be doing about the various people in his new princedom: the land, its people and their dogs.

The physical security of the princedom is assured:

From the USG, [the new regime] inherits a complex and historical structure of foreign relationships for which it has no real need. No major power can molest it, or even shares a hemisphere with it. Domestically, there are areas of serious insecurity and informal organized violence, mostly in some parts of older cities, but they are localized and not difficult to avoid.

Instead let's talk economics.

When economics is solved, everyone has work that fits their talents and pays for a reasonably comfortable life. Most people feel secure. They find satisfying, stable professions. They fit well into a community that fits well into a civilization. They are taught and embrace values and ideas that guide them well for their whole lives. 

Yarvin proposes a new kind of economics: diseconomics for an illiberal regime. Why? Because the illiberal prince is interested in maximizing the human capital of his princedom, not the physical capital. Yarvin wants to prioritize "public well-being" as the supreme law instead of the current "public luxury" as the supreme law. The idea is to avoid the Venezuela trap.

Oil lets six people stick a pipe in the ground and light up all of Venezuela. Tech lets six people write a messaging app and connect all of Venezuela. If there are still more than twelve people in Venezuela—now no one needs the rest of them.

Yes, but, Curtis old chap. The way we figure capital these days, as per the World Bank's "Changing Wealth of Nations," is thisaway:

Country	Wealth in 2000 per-capita	Natural Wealth	Produced wealth	Intangible wealth
Venezuela	$45,196	60%	30%	10%
United States	$512,612	3%	16%	82%

 Yep. Venezuela has a lot of natural wealth, and so it has a dreadful government that lets the people starve, because the people don't matter. But in the US, the people matter because "intangible wealth" is the kind of wealth inside people's brains. In other words "human capital." The US is already nothing without its human capital.

But I get the idea of "public well-being." We humans need to be challenged, or we go all soft and corrupted in a hundred different ways like the scions of the aristocracy in Brideshead Revisited. The prince should be concerned not with improving the luxurious living of his people but is sending them to life boot-camp so they get to be flourishing human beings, not gubmint beneficiaries.

OK, so what kind of people are living in this princely land?

Across human history we see four different ways of living. Let’s label these varieties of social existence cosmopolitan, traditional, deracinated, and ancestral. For variety, we’ll pair these adjectives with synonymous nouns which almost no one knows: armigers, yeomen, lazzari, and autochthons. To dodge yet more landmines, these groups are strata.

Naughty boy! I thought we had the whole world figured out with Three Layers. However, Yarvin is mostly concerned with the armigers and the yeomen.

An armiger (rhymes with “integer”) is anyone entitled to a coat of arms. A little leap of metaphor turns medieval heraldry into modern education. The world of the armiger is the world of legitimate credentials. The armigerate, as a social stratum, is defined as everyone who holds an academic degree or would be socially expected to.

 Across eras we can define the purpose of the armiger as “self-actualization,” or Bildung as the Germans say. The armiger’s life is meant to be a self-crafted work of human art.

Or, as I would say, the armiger is my People of the Creative Self. "The old regime was an armigerous oligarchy. It aggravated the lazzari and repressed the yeomen." In the new regime we will rescue them "from their awful power addictions." Aren't we special!

But enough about the armigeri. Let's talk about the yeoman, "the normal civilized person."

A yeoman’s tradition shapes the course of his life, with ceremonies for every occasion. It can tell him what to think, what to say, what to read and watch and listen to, what to eat and drink, what to wear and whom to marry—even what technologies he may use. Since the yeoman does not design his life, someone else has to design it for him.

Now Yarvin puts together a complicated system to govern the yeomen. He wants their religions and sects overseen by foundations with the prince overseeing the foundations, and a three-level system of "indirect rule" over the yeomen, at the village level, the "section" level and the regime level. What is the "section" level of governance? Yarvin proposes the pre-1960 Catholic Church as an example.

"Indirect rule" is how the Brits governed their empire, leaving the native religion and culture and political structure in place as much as possible. Of course, the Brits also taught, e.g., the Indians, all about nationalism, indirectly, so there's that.

If Yarvin's system is really just about making sure that everything is copacetic with the yeomen, I'm all for it. But in the details I kinda feel he wants more than a little direct supervision, as in making sure that every yeoman has a good job as an "artisan." Although I understand the point about protectionism, about defending American jobs, there is the overall fact that the economy moves on, and people need to move with it, or molder away, dying of despair.

Plus, of course, the yeomen had a pretty good system back in the nineteenth century with their fraternal associations and their mutual-aid societies, that worked not just at the village level but in the city, where yeomen basically put together "virtual villages" and "imaginary brotherhoods" where brotherhood expanded beyond blood brotherhood to the brotherhood of people like me. That got destroyed by the administrative state in the 20th century.

Plus, there is the little problem of the clash with Mosca's The Ruling Class. Mosca imagines the state as a ruling clique presiding over a ruling class, and the ruling class as a whole presiding over the "masses." Yarvin's plan seems to propose to cut out the current ruling class, his armigeri, and replace it with the ruling clique of the new prince. And then there would be the new ruling class below the ruling clique. Hmm. But who would all those folks be?

Yes, I get that he is proposing a Gedankenexperiment in the good old German manner of the German Turn. But while it is important to imagine the future public policy, all that means nothing unless we have disposed of the current ruling clique, the swamp, and the lower level of the ruling class, the educated liberal gentry. And I don't see where that new ruling class is coming from. Certainly not from the yeomen, because the point about the yeomen and the bourgeoisie from back in the 19th century and before is that the yeomen are not that interested in power. Whereas the educated gentry, the People of the Creative Self, the armigeri, are interested in power.

And that is our national, and indeed our global problem. How do we neutralize the power hungry, status hungry, creativity hungry, credential hungry global educated ruling class and tell them that they have failed, they are fools and knaves, and they need to just go away and stop bothering us with their adolescent follies?

Because before we can imagine a new regime we have to discredit the old regime.

And Yarvin tells us to forget a rebellion against the regime, because it is a fantasy. Yes, but how do we get to regime change?

And beyond that there is the Breitbart proviso, that politics is downstream from culture, and which I have expanded to be 

politics is downstream from culture is downstream from religion is downstream from the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.

I don't see our current ruling class of educated gentry going anywhere, so the problem is to get them off their power trip. I guess that the only way to do that is repeated humiliation. Something like Trump followed by Trump followed by Trump.

But I'm all in favor of Curtis Yarvin letting his imagination soar. 

The Eternal Temptation of the Ruling Class Scions

Back in the day the world was simple for rough tough young scions of the ruling class. They were warriors! Saving their countries from the neighboring savages! Or from the Goths, or the Huns, or the Mongols!

But when you get to the absolute monarchs, you get Henry VIII pictured in extravagantly expensive be-jeweled garments. You get Louis XIV in extravagantly expensive be-jeweled garments plus showing a nice bit of leg.

When you get to the nineteenth century you get the politician that really knows how to carry the House of Commons with him. If you are a Disraeli you are a dab hand at stealing the Liberal Party agenda and extending the franchise further than the Libs had dare propose.

In the twentieth century you get Lords of Creation like President Wilson getting the US into WWI to help teach the Kaiser a lesson. What a hero! Then we had President Roosevelt going him one better. First he was the champion of the common man with a magnificent New Deal that fundamentally transformed America for the better. And then he topped it off by dispatching the Nazis to the trash-can of history.

In other words. No matter what, there are would-be political Saviors all over the place that desperately need something, anything, so that they can strut their stuff and prove that they are the best thing since sliced bread.

In our day, one ruling class grift is Activism, proving yourself to be a True Ally to all the oppressed peoples out there. And boy, are you going to teach those systemic racist white oppressors a lesson!

Another ruling class grift is using the courts and the legal system to advance political goals that cannot be won by conventional political means, such as through legislative action: often called Lawfare.

For instance, this morning I got an email from a Nick Cady, of Cascade Wildlands, "Missing lynx: Advocates challenge Feds’ refusal to prepare recovery plan." The advocates are suing in federal court  "challenging the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s (the Service’s) decision to forgo recovery planning for threatened Canada lynx." Every young scion is trying to think up a scam like this.

Then there are a couple of WattsUpWithThat pieces: one is about a swamp plan to implement the Green New Deal "with No Legislation, No Rulemaking Process, Just a Sweetheart Consent Decree." Another is about the Massachusetts Attorney General's plan to use its attorneys to enforce the Paris climate treaty (which isn't a treaty in the US).

I have been trying to think up a meme to describe this approach to politics. And I get it. This is no different than the warrior leaders of old puffing their courage before their tribesmen. Or the absolute monarch fluffing their ermine robes before the courtiers that can't afford be-jeweled ermine. Or the 20th century politicians saving the world from Nazis and Commies. Or the activist chappies heroically saving the "threatened" lynx. Or the Al Gores and WEF chappies saving the world from climate change.

I already have a blog label "lefts errors" and a blog label "lefts crimes." I was thinking about "lefts cunning" but I don't know that the left is particularly cunning. Hey, I know! How about "lefts conceits," the conceit that rather dull and unremarkable scions of the ruling class are in fact heroes of the age. This would fit into the Curtis Yarvin notion of the gentry class's lust for "ambition, honor, and vanity."

The thing is that ruling classes since time began have been fluffing their feathers in search of "ambition, honor, and vanity." It's just that the means have changed over the centuries.

But, I'd say, whatever the century we are still talking about rather average men trying to sell themselves to the world as world conquerors. For the real work of the world, as George Eliot reminded us at the end of Middlemarch, has a lot to do with ordinary decent people who "lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs." 

 

What is the Political Future?

Here's a piece at JewishWorldReview about a new generation gap and how the Kidz are all diverse and liberals and and we are all doomed. He quotes a demographer:

"This gap is reflected in negative attitudes among many older whites toward immigration, new minority growth, and big government programs that cater to the real economic and educational needs of America's younger, more diverse population," he said.

Well, yes. maybe. Or maybe the average kids of diverse background will just grow up to become middle-class patriotic Americans that want a job, a house, and a family. I know a family from Mexico where the kids are all the first to go to college. But they are all planning to be medical technicians and stuff.

Then there's a piece by the Z-man at Taki's. He's worried about gyno-fascism.

Patriarchal authoritarianism provides the firm slap of authority when it is needed. The point is to maintain order. Once it is applied, that’s it. The feminine version has no point other than to inflict endless torment in an effort to gain attention. Of course, it never ends. The ruling class is now a needy girlfriend with a personality disorder, demanding we drop everything to hear about her day.

I'd put the problem a little differently: in terms of the part-time 73-year-old teacher sacked from a Brit university. His boss and the boss of the university were both women. He said, in a private conversation with his female boss that “Jewish people are the cleverest in the world” and “Germans are good engineers.”

The 73-year-old’s remarks were then investigated by Solent University after Dr Bonar complained about his use of racial and national stereotypes.

Do you see the problem here? Normally in the community of women, after a man had said something like this, the women would all get together in their Kaffee Klatsches and tell each other "I can't believe he said that." "Everyone" would agree that he was a ugly man, that they were "literally shaking" and after a while things would get back to normal.

If this episode had just been men, the boss of the 73-year-old would have said to him, "I say old chap, I think you are a little bit off the deep-end on that one." The idea of firing the guy wouldn't have occurred to them. Unless some woman complained.

Hey ladies! I think there is a bit of a problem when a guy gets fired for something he said rather than for something he did. But I realize that in the women's world, everything is about stuff that people have said.

Then we have a general piece about how university students are liberal, but east-coast students at selective colleges are much more liberal. Well, yeah. And there is a reason for that. One: all their teachers are liberal; two: nearly all the jobs in the Gentry class are grift jobs, where you are paid to virtue-signal with gubmint money, and where you never subject yourself to the grueling possibilities of starting your own business. So it makes sense to be a virtue-signaling liberal with a degree in Activism.

Then we have good old Victor Davis Hanson opining about "Why Our Universities Have Failed." He asks

Where did Antifa youth rioting in the streets receive their intellectual and ethical bearings? Why are the First and Second Amendments no longer fully operative? How did the general population become nearly ignorant of their Constitution, history, and the hallmarks of their culture? Why do employers no longer equate a bachelor’s degree with competency in oral and written communications, basic computation, and reasoning? How in the 21st century did race and ethnicity come to define who we are rather than become incidental to our individual personas? In answering all these questions, we always seem to return to higher education—the font of much of our contemporary malaise.

But the point is that, from the point of view of the ruling class, the system is working. They want a gentry-proletariat of angry young people with gigantic student loans. They want a canting moral universe where they can play racial roulette to teach people to hate and to fear. They want a world where they get to name and shame. They need the Deplorables so they can sneer at them.

My point is that the university system has always been a place where the ruing class teaches the candidates for entry into the ruling class how to be a good ruling-class member in good standing and qualify for the top jobs in ruling-class-dom. Back in the day they taught the young sprigs the classics. Then they taught them philosophy, politics, and economics, because rulers needed that knowledge to preside over a modern representative industrial-age republic. 

Now they teach the Kidz critical race theory and the "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors" moral framework. Because the political formula of today's ruling class is that the rulers are battling valiantly against the dragons of systemic racism on behalf of poor helpless minorities and women and non-binaries everywhere, and that is what they want the future leaders to be carefully taught.

My judgement is that it won't work. But there is going to be an slight unpleasantness at the Bellona Club  and a significant butcher's bill before the smoke clears and we emerge into sunny green uplands in the Era After Woke.

What Will Happen to the Economy Post-COVID?

The three trillion dollar stimulus of the last year -- see my COVID-19 page for details -- carpet-bombed the economy during the spring lockdown. But now what?

The hard part of national economics is what to do after the war or the stock-market crash or the epidemic, and past history is not very encouraging.

Back in the days of the gold standard, governments would implement policy of "resumption," to cancel the inflation of the war years and return the value of the national currency to its pre-war level. The idea was to pay back holders of government debt for their losses during the war inflation. The results were not happy.

After the Napoleonic War the Brits were determined to get back to pre-war parity. The result was deflation and unhappy workers, like the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 and the Captain Swing riots of 1830. Of course it all ended happily ever after with the Great Reform Bill of 1832.

After the US Civil War which featured a ton of paper money and debt, the government determined to return to the pre-war parity of the dollar. This led to the Great Panic of 1873. Farmers that took out mortgages in the 1860s were screwed because their farm mortgages were underwater -- also debtors in general. What followed was the Long Depression. And then there was the Panic of 1893 with a depression that lasted until 1896. Remember William Jennings Bryan and the "Cross of Gold" speech, as in "You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold." He means the gold standard.

After World War I countries like Britain and the US went back on the gold standard at pre-war parities. And the workers and debtors hated it. Of course, Germany, dismembered by the Treaty of Versailles, was unable to service its war debts and keep paying all its social democratic benefit programs and so devalued the currency in hyper-inflation and wiped out the widows and orphans in the middle class that kept their savings in Reichmarks. Thanks, pal, said Adolf Hitler.

After the 1929 stock market crash the US Federal Reserve Board fluffed its first financial crisis by failing to act as lender of last resort. With the help of the New Dealers this gave the US a ten-year Great Depression that only ended when the US started spending (and releasing business from regulation) in the run-up to World War II.

After World War II there was not a depression. But the dollar was kept at its pre-war value. The US government ran surpluses for a couple years, but managed to get the federal debt down from over 100 percent GDP down to 35 percent of GDP. I still don't know how they did it.

Then we had the Crash of 2008, when Little Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, failed to act as lender of last resort when Lehman Brothers went south. Ben, oh Ben! Then with Barack Obama as president the federal government decided it was more important to do gubmint health care than to get the economy back on track. Thanks, Barack!

So here we are about to emerge from the tragedy of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the question is: how well will the federal government handle it, threading the needle between getting the economy back on track, avoiding inflation, and doing or not doing the massive agenda of the climate change religion?

How should the federal government thread the needle? Honestly, I don't have a clue. Except that I know that one thing to do is to put off the elimination of fossil fuels for now, and avoid new subsidies for "renewable energy." And I have a feeling that a President Trump, who knows a thing or two about debt, would do a better job than Joe Biden who, I suspect, literally knows nothing except how to play the game of politics, and will outsource economic policy to conventional-wisdom swamp creatures.

One thing from the post WWI German hyper-inflation. Stocks and gold did all right. Bitcoin? Wasn't invented yet.

An Immigrant's Thanks to America

As I get older I appreciate more and more that life is a process of lucky breaks and of successfully dodging bullets.

What a lucky break that my dad, who worked in export for the British electrical manufacturer AEI (now defunct), and got sent out to Denver in 1965 to assist in a wacky electric generation project. 

And so I got to fly out from my first term at the University of Leeds in England to Denver in December of 1965. And I still remember the glorious Colorado dawn viewed from my parent's apartment on 8th & Clarkson on my first morning in the good old USA.

Then we headed out on 6th Avenue in my dad's 1955 Olds 88 and up into the Rocky Mountains on US 40. And so, as soon as I graduated from engineering school in 1968 I immigrated to the United States of America and became a citizen as soon as possible in 1975.

What a lucky break that, with my parents living in India in 1947 the Indians were too busy killing each other in "communal" riots over partition to worry about killing the imperialist Brits, and that we all got out alive in 1948 and returned to Britain.

What a lucky break that my mother, born and raised in Japan, got out in 1940 to "help" her sister with her new baby in Calcutta, India, a comfortable year before Pearl Harbor.

What a lucky break that my father, born and raised in St. Petersburg, Russia, got out in 1918 before the full force of Leninism and civil war could suck him up and destroy him.

Of course, the fact is that we are all the result of lucky breaks and dodged bullets, because if any one of a dozen events had gone the other way none of us would be here.

And so I look on the lucky breaks of my life and my ancestors and marvel.

And now I have six grandchildren, thanks to my two whip-smart accomplished daughters, and now I know that the meaning of life, the universe and everything, is grandchildren.

It's easy to get discouraged by the stolen election, by the Woke Reign of Terror, by the stupidities of Democratic governors imagining that you control an epidemic by keeping people out of churches, by the deficit, by the looming horrors of unfunded entitlements, by the blindness of the Great Reset and Building Back Better. All these inanities will cost us, although I expect they will cost me personally less than ordinary American commoners, to say nothing of "women and minorities hardest hit." And we will not get past the inanities and injustices of today until our liberal friends see disaster and ruin staring them in the face and the American people turn away from them with disgust and scorn.

But meanwhile on this Thanksgiving Day we are still Americans, the best people in the world. We still live in the United States of America, the best country in the world. 

And we ain't seen nothing yet.