Whatabout the Next Crash?

Now that we are First and Ten with the Biden administration and we learn that President Biden is at 50 percent mental capacity, let's talk about the real question.

What happens at the end of the current deficits and money printing?

There's a piece at American Spectator about this. Donald Devine quotes a bunch of experts that say there is nothing to worry about. Not yet. Then he makes his prediction:

My prediction is that Biden’s control of executive and legislative branches will produce a short economic boom in 2021, followed by a big bust in 2022 that takes down the whole progressive edifice with it.

One of the problems he sees is the modern "repo" market.

“In repo, broker-dealers, hedge funds and banks construct short-term transactions. You put up collateral — Treasury bills or sometimes less-pristine instruments — with an agreement to buy them back the next day or week for slightly more, and invest the proceeds in the interim.”

The question is: what happens when things turn South?

But eventually, iffy collateral sneaks into the system. That’s also fine, until markets hit an inevitable rough patch, like, say, March 2020. No one will take the junky stuff anymore, and everyone scrambles for good collateral. So there’s a mad dash, a brawl really, to buy Treasuries — like musical chairs with six to eight buyers eagerly eyeing one chair.

If this sounds too complicated, let me give you Walter Bagehot and his 1873 book Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market. 

As I understand Bagehot -- he was the founding editor of the London Economist -- the credit system needs the following to work:

All loans must be properly collateralized so that the borrowed money can be recovered if the borrower defaults.

All borrowers must be able to service their loans.

If either of these things breaks down, then you got trouble, right here in River City. If both things break down you got nuclear Armageddon.

For instance, in the runup to the Crash of 2008 we had the US government encouraging low down-payment mortgage loans. See the problem? If there is a downturn in home prices then some of those low-down payment loans can't be liquidated if the borrower defaults.

Then, in addition, the US government was encouraging, even mandating, that lenders lend to borrowers -- such as minority borrowers -- with low credit ratings, i.e., borrowers with a higher than normal risk of not making the payments.

So when the Fed tightened up on credit in 2006 many borrowers with adjustable-rate loans couldn't make their payments and because their homes came on the market the price of homes went down and banks could not recover the principal when liquidating defaulted loans.

And so you get a credit crisis where traders in the system don't want to trade in securities with "iffy collateral."

Then you get a credit meltdown which, according to Bagehot, can only be stopped by a central bank, a "lender of last resort" buying up distressed loans. It can do this because the assumption is that the central bank has, as capital, the whole wealth of the nation to back it up. You can see how the central bank acting as "lender of last resort" solves the crisis. It buys up dodgy debt, and pays for it with newly printed money that people trust more than the dodgy debt. So the panic subsides.

Usually, however, the guy in charge of the central bank, being a mere ruling-class courtier, partially flubs the "lender of last resort" bit. So, in the Great Depression of 1929-33 the Federal Reserve did not bail out the Bank of United States when it failed in 1931, probably because it was a Jewish bank. In the Crash of 2008, Little Ben Bernanke decided in September that he did not have the authority to bail out Lehman Brothers. 

The incompetence of the courtiers means that the credit crisis goes on longer and is deeper than necessary and ordinary people get wiped out.

The question you may ask is whether in the next credit crisis the market will believe that the central bank can in fact act as lender of last resort, or whether the problem is so big that it is beyond the ability of the Fed or the IMF to turn bad debt into good debt.

Here's an interesting factoid. In the 2008 crash the US government had an actual $700 billion TARP bailout program to bail out the banks where is borrowed and spent actual money. But it "guaranteed" about $16 trillion in money market mutual funds.

I wonder if the whole bailout could have been done with a "guarantee." It would have been a whole lot cheaper.

But there is something else to worry about. It is "MMT," or Modern Monetary Theory. It is Keynesianism on steroids and supported by lefties like Bernie Sanders and AOC and says that pedal-to-the-metal with debt and spending is OK for government. At least for now.

The real question is: what do you do when the balloon goes up? Gold? Bitcoin? And whatabout any asset that is held in a financial institution that you access over the Internet? How hard would it be in a great crisis for the government to seize 23.2 percent of all assets at Fidelity and Vanguard? When everything is just a record in a database.

The Future of Government: New and Exciting Enemies!

I've been cudgeling my brain over the past few weeks about the Biden administration's two big agenda items: Climate Change and Systemic Racism. What is really going on here?

And I now realize that it is quite simple.

Government has only two jobs: to protect us from enemies foreign and domestic. But today there really are no foreign enemies. And, really, there are no internal enemies. Not like in the old days of bandits and robbers.

So what is government to do? It doesn't have anything to do any more. It should go out of business.

But that would never do, so it has to make it up. It has to make up external enemies and internal enemies, and wind us up into a frenzy of fear and loathing.

That is what climate change is all about: a monstrous external threat. OMG! Not even a foreign enemy: a global enemy. And not even a human enemy but the very planetary climate itself: Gaia, if you like. Really, it is genius. Why, our ruling class does not even have to march into harm's way. It merely has to hand out highly paid jobs to its educated gentry supporters all across the land, and hand out subsidies to its gentry voters for electric cars and solar panels on the roof. And of course all the gentry supporters are down with that. They believe! Oh Gaia, do they believe!

That is what systemic racism is all about: a monstrous internal threat. Imagine: right here in River City there are dark hordes of white supremacists and white oppressors, just waiting for the chance to descend upon traditionally marginalized peoples with their assault rifles and their patriarchy. But government is up to the challenge! It will conduct critical race theory training sessions throughout the land! It will teach the systemic racists a lesson they will never forget. Gentry supporters will have jobs, maybe millions of jobs to be teaching the deplorables and the white supremacists and the systemic racists a lesson. And, when they feel like a rest, they can erect another Black Lives Matter sign in the front yard.

When you think about it, you have to admit: it's brilliant. Strictly speaking we don't really need much government, because in the modern era things are so safe that we don't need no stinkin' government plodding around saving us from enemies foreign and domestic.

But now we have enemies that make the old enemies of the world look like pikers. The global threat of climate change makes all the old enemies, the Nazis, the Commies, the Islamic terrorists, look like nothing. It's not just those human enemies but something far bigger, far more threatening: the end of life on this Earth. Unless we act now.

The threat of systemic racism is just as bad. There is no telling what those shadowy white supremacists and conspiracy theorists might get up to next week. So we must declare war on them, re-educate them, purge them from the public square.

But what do we do about it? Honestly, I don't know. The whole setup is so brilliant, and so tempting for our educated ruling class that I don't think they will give up on it short of utter political annihilation.

In other words, we Commoners have to teach our educated betters that, if they don't climb down from their war on climate and their war on bitter clingers, we will strip them of all their powers and credentials and honors and pensions and make them go out and get a job, like the rest of humanity.

And we may -- just for the fun of it, not from malice -- put them on one-day suspensions from Twitter just to remind them that what goes around comes around.

Where is the New Miguel Cervantes When You Need Him

You all know Miguel de Cervantes. He was the cheeky chappie that wrote Don Quixote in 1605, making fun of the whole medieval romance genre.

I agree. That was really meanie-jelly-beanie. You literary snobs are always trying to deep-six the latest genre. I mean, sci-fi, fantasy: who needs it, darling. How about a bit of plotless James Joyce for breakfast?

Anyway, Cervantes was pretty harmless. Despite his fun and games we are still having great fun reading about King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. Not to mention Frodo and Co. And, apart from Parsifal (as in Sir Percival) Richard Wagner spent his whole career unearthing Nordic and Teutonic myths. Although, according to the late Roger Scruton, Wagner recast the pagan myths in a post-Christian mold designed by German philosopher Feuerbach and then changed his mind and used the mold designed by Schopenhauer. Fun!

But, dear God. We need our modern Cervantes now. To write the uplifting story of Don Qui-wokey, and his heroic battle against the windmills, er, the pipelines, of Keystone XL.

See that's the way I experience the left's Activism Culture. It is like a medieval romance. Back then, the medieval romance enabled dumb scions of the barony to imagine themselves as noble knights saving helpless maidens from dragons and evil castellans, and searching for the Holy Grail. Now we have the mindless romances celebrating the delta-minus rich-kid morons bravely trying to stop capitalism in its tracks with Heroic Acts of Activism against the Polluters! Peaceful Protests against the Fossil Fuel Companies! Marches Against White Supremacy! And OMG, fracking is polluting the water supply! Not.

I fear, alas, that we are some years, maybe decades, before the American people will help us racist-sexist-homophobes send the systemic racist climate Don Qui-wokeys to where the sun don't shine. Because apart from us bitter-clinger deplorables, the rest of America is either embarrassed by populist nationalism, or enjoying their bennies as Little Darlings of the ruling class. Oh, and don't forget the Wokey Allies.

Only thing is that if I were to tell the story I would forget Soy Qui-wokey and make the story into a remake of the Parsifal legend, with Soy Parsifal -- the pure fool -- starting out as the child of an activist lesbian couple. The young lad naturally yearns, as xe plays mostly-peaceful-protest games with xis non-gendered pals, to get to activism school and take xis place in the glorious community of social justice activists bending the arc of history towards justice. Oh the glorious day when xe begins his first internship at the Climate Justice Matters NGO funded by tech billionaire George Porous! Oh, the joy of the day when xe has finishing xis "trained Marxist" training, and knelt before xer Marxist trainer and got xis Soyship in the Global Active-hood of Pajama-Persons and can lead xer first real Mostly Peaceful Protest.

One day, years later, he is driving his electric car in the forest on the way to a protest against an oil pipeline, reciting the chants he will lead, when he accidentally runs over a swan crossing the road. The local yokel Gurnie O'Mans curses him out for a fool. Having stopped his electric car -- whose battery is getting dangerously low -- he observes a number of bedraggled men by the side of the road. Who are these bums, he asks Gurnie? These men, Soy Parsifal, were once frackers, but they lost their jobs ten years ago in the first days of the Biden administration, and because of the shame of being fossil fuel workers, have been canceled and cannot get jobs in the soy economy.

Well, that's a start. We'd have to have a Kundry, Soy Parsifal's liberal activist mother who is now a sour and angry cat lady. Whatabout the Fisher King, Am-trump-as, wounded by the impeachment spear flung by the wicked witch Soya Nancy? A chorus of feminist flower maidens? And whatabout the evil magician Klingsor? What is he up to?

Of course, before the activist Soy Parsifal can heal the wounded Am-trump-as he must learn the error of his ways, and discover how activism is a path of cruelty, a Trail of Bloody Tears, that has killed more people in history than all the Genghis Khans and Hitlers -- put together. He must renounce activism forever, and bring his angry cat lady mom Kundry back into the light. That would be a story!

Then, and then only can Soy Parsifal eat his first meal of meat, and renounce his Soyish ways, and come to the castle of King Am-trump-as, and heal the king's wound, and light the light in the eyes of the MAGA faithful once more, and Make America Great Again. Once more.

"Ain't I a stinker!" ©1950 Bugs Bunny.

The Decline and Fall of the Progressive Empire

Today I am starting a new topic, the decline and fall of the present ruling class. But let's steal the words of Edward Gibbon, he of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Why did the Roman Empire decline and fall? According to academic Michael Mann in The Sources of Social Power, it began to decline when its modus operandi no longer worked. Up until the second century AD the Roman Empire fed on conquest and slavery. Its army would conquer a new province and the empire would feast on the plunder and the slaves. But then the Empire got too big, and the frontiers too far away from the center. And so the potential for conquest and plunder started to dry up.

But whatabout the empire in which we live? And what do we call it, anyway? Liberal Empire? Lefty Empire? White Supremacist Empire? Capitalist Empire? Empire of the Educated?  I think I will stick with Progressive Empire for the time being.

The reason I prophesy the decline and fall of the present regime is that its anthems, its agendas, are getting rather threadbare.

There seem to be two justifications for political power. The first is the promise of physical protection. This obviously goes back to the apes, that the males protect the band and its food-growing territory from invaders. I consider this a male thing. The second is the promise of protection from evildoers within society, the backstabbers and gossipers that are the bane of every woman's life. I consider this a female thing.

In the last century, the century of the educated ruling class, our rulers have heroically defended us -- or rather we have defended our rulers -- from the menace of Kaisers, of Hitlers, or Commies, of oil sheiks. Golly, where would we have been without them! But now our leaders are promising, at enormous expense, to protect us from climate change.

You know what I think? I think our rulers are running out of reasons to protect us. This climate change thingy depends on the predictive computer models of gubmint scientists -- which are completely different from the divinations of the temple priests and soothsayers of old, completely different. In other words, climate change looks and feels like a scam.

In the last century, the century of the educated ruling class, our rulers have heroically defended us -- or rather we have defended our rulers -- from the internal menace of monopolists, exploiters of labor, Southern racists, and now patriarchs, white supremacists and the menace of systemic racism.

You know what I think? I think our rulers are running out of moral menaces with which to terrify us. The proof is in the moral narrative of "allyism," that America is composed of "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors." What "white oppressors?" Educated white liberals in the schools, universities, and journalism? Heavens no, those are all allies. Evil corporate moguls? Heavens no, those all pay their indulgences to Black Lives Matter. Would they be Trump Car Paraders and crazed Qanon cultists wearing viking costumes in the US Capitol? Yep, that must be it.

But why? Why is our ruling class singing such ridiculous anthems to their rule? What is really going on? Is it a conspiracy?

I think it is because the basis of human social cooperation has been transformed.

I think the old system, of male defense of the border, and female defense of the hearth, made complete sense back in the days of the chimps: that's what Nicholas Wade says in Before the Dawn. And more or less sense in the days of the hunter-gatherers, and even down through the agricultural age. You needed brave warriors to defend the food-growing land, and you needed moral arbiters to sort out troublesome youths and quarreling women.

But not any more.

Loot and plunder of the neighbor's lands? But wealth today is in intangible capital, ideas and techniques.  Loot and plunder does not pay, except in the internal taxation and regulation systems by which today's rulers fleece their own sheep, not the neighbor's sheep.

Calling sinners to repentance? But today's market economy rewards trust and names and shames cheaters and defaulters in a hundred different ways. Oh yeah, we need a few cops to crack heads here and there; but the vast majority of people go with the program, because there is a huge benefit in doing so, and a huge penalty for being identified as untrustworthy.

Obviously this new situation is so brand new as to be breathtaking. It has really taken hold only in the last 200-300 years, whereas the agricultural age extended for, say, max, 50,000 years, and the hunter-gatherer age a million or so, and the chimps for tens of millions of years.

We cannot expect our rulers, our neighbors, and ourselves to have suddenly adapted to the new setup. We are programmed for another age.

Instead, we should expect everyone -- from noble lords to cathedral priests to young punks to the nice ladies next door -- to keep punching the old buttons, and being completely flummoxed when the old actions don't have the desired effect.

But, "scientists say," the future belongs to those that adapt. And the number of people adapting, "experts agree," will be a minority. This will mean, "ethicists believe," a profound change in human society.

Because, as I say, every story is a survivor story.

Good Luck, Joe. You'll Need It

So you, Mr President and your Democratic friends have got rid of the awful Trump. So what comes next?

I'd say that the most important thing for your administration to do is to avoid the mistakes of the early Obama administration. There were two big ones.

First, there was the decision to make the "stimulus" all about loot and plunder for Democratic Party constituencies like public-school teachers instead of restarting the wheels of commerce after a generational financial crisis.

Second, there was the push for Obamacare, all about making health care a totally centralized administrative system, instead of restarting the wheels of commerce after a generational financial crisis.

Incidentally the financial crisis was caused by the bursting of a housing bubble caused by gubmint subsidy of home mortgages that encouraged Americans to buy houses on low down payments and 30-year fixed mortgages. This housing subsidy is the big reason why housing prices, to this day, are sky-high and very difficult for ordinary young middle-class Americans trying to buy a house for the first time.

I noticed that President Trump, in his farewell address, catalogued all the wonderful things he had done for ordinary Americans. But you, President Biden, have emphasized, after restarting the economy, climate change and systemic racism. And the stimulus bill you have proposed so far sounds just like another loot and plunder operation for the Democratic Party supporters.

Frankly, I believe that climate change and systemic racism are both catnip for the educated Gentry, and provide nothing for the vast majority of Americans.

I don't have much to say about climate change, although I think it is an instance of the Left's Conceit that it knows what is good for the rest of us. 

The decarbonizing plan is an utter folly that will visit enormous hardship on ordinary Americans. Cheap energy is, and will continue to be, the basis of a healthy economy that extends prosperity to all walks of life. I maintain, according to the notion of Daniel Botkin in Discordant Harmonies, that there is only a climate problem if the climate changes too fast for plant and animal species to migrate with the climate. An example of dangerous climate change is cold weather on the farms of folks in the far North and the harvest fails and they all die -- as in Scotland in the 1690s at the depths of the Little Ice Age.

It's telling that the Scottish famine in 1690 was a tragedy while the Irish potato famine 150 years later was a scandal. The difference is that by 1840 we Westerners had the means to get food to a famine area. Today we have probably an order of magnitude more "means" to adapt to climate change.

Then there is systemic racism. One fine day, a brave politician is going to call an end to what I call the School of Hate. But I doubt if it will be you, Mr. President.

I get the liberal obsession with race. The civil rights movement was, for liberals, an ecstatic moment, a supernova of surpassing brightness that lighted up the moral universe. But once you have made discrimination by race illegal then, as my grandfather would have said, it's all over bar shouting. By placing the chains of race guilt upon ordinary white Americans for the last half century you have committed a moral crime that, to me, is morally equivalent to the Jim Crow laws that you fought to eliminate. But this moral crime is, to me, just one of the Left's Crimes.

It seems that our problems are insoluble. But, as Ike said, if you have a problem you can't solve, make it bigger.

I think that our Big Problem is that our educated ruling class operates according to a political formula that violates what I call the Four Laws of modern governance. I wonder if you have heard about them, Mr. President. I would recommend putting them on your desk, as President Truman had "The Buck Stops Here" on his desk. Here they are:

Socialism cannot work because it cannot compute prices (Mises). 

The administrative state cannot work because the Man in Washington does not have the bandwidth to run the economy (Hayek). 

Regulation does not work because “regulatory capture” (Stigler). 

Government programs cannot work because you can never reform them (Chantrill).

Really, everything that our educated ruling class has attempted since the turn of the 20th century attempts to violate these laws. But breaking these laws is catnip for the ruling clique and the larger ruling class, because they all provide for the satisfactions of ruling class members: ambition, honor, and vanity. 

Now I think that the present violations of the Four Laws have gone "about as furr as it can go." Any more ordure piled on top of the mountain of legislation and regulation of the past century is going to seriously break the United States. But your party, Mr. President, wants to double down with Medicare for All, which violates all four laws, and your Green New Deal which will probably be mostly a regulatory scam and only violate the last three laws.

But that is just nuts and bolts.

To make the problem even bigger, I think it stems from the insularity of our ruling elite, that cannot imagine the notion of people not like the educated elite, and that these other people would choose to live a different life than the educated, and worship different gods. If you read about my Three Peoples notion, Mr. President, you will see how understanding the people of today as belonging to different worlds -- the world of the Creative, the Responsible, and the Subordinate -- immediately raises the question of how to make it possible for these very different kinds of people to live in the same society. Notably, the "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors" doctrine of Allyism lacks such a world view. It only sees the world in the black and white of allies fighting for the oppressed peoples against the white oppressors.

Now I think that Allyism basically reduces to this: that the woke elite gets to buy the votes of the oppressed peoples with loot and plunder seized from the white oppressors. In other words it is a Viking world view masquerading as noble benevolence. It is the Big Problem with the left's Activism Culture. That is perhaps why my basic critique of your side, Mr. President, is called the Great Reaction, a lurch to the primitive:

Socialism is a return to slavery; the welfare state is a return to feudalism; identity politics is neo-tribalism; reparations is neo-vengeance; activism a return to revolution, rioting for the ruling class, part medieval knight-errantry, and part activisme, or gentry kids putting on a school play for their parents; helpless victims are a return to sacrifice; totalitarianism is a return to the scapegoat; social justice is good old loot and plunder.

My prediction, Mr. President, is that by the third year of your presidency we will be seeing serious economic problems, and that your supporters will be looking around desperately for a reason, some fault of the big corporations or the lack of a proper minimum wage or the rampaging evil of systemic racism. And you will find yourself called upon to take drastic economic and political action that will only make things worse. For that is the way of the world, that the rulers and their supporters are the last to know there is a problem.

My diagnosis of our national problem is that it issues from a wrong turn by our educated elite. You and your supporters, Mr. President, interpret your culture of creativity in terms of creating a new society. Run by people like you.

But I say that the correct agenda of a culture of creativity is creating a new Me, and leaving society alone. You create a new Me in the Hero's journey into the unconscious, and if you survive the journey, you will come back much sadder and wiser. Only then will you be qualified to help other people. And you will probably die on the border between Order and Chaos as a Sacrificial Hero. I have written about this, Mr. President, in my writing on "A Vision of the Good Life Better Than the Left."

The presidency of Donald Trump was a wake-up call to our present ruling class, that they are "not fit for purpose" as the Brits say. Unfortunately, it is clear that our ruling class has not gotten the message. Indeed, the only message it has had in the last four years was to deep six President Trump.

You will notice, Mr. President, that in the urge of your supporters to deep-six Donald Trump there is nothing that exhibits any concern for the American people, apart from the educated gentry of the ruling class and its clients the "oppressed peoples." This means that the American people are condemned to suffer in the next few years from the blindness and the myopia of your supporters.

It will not be a happy time.

Trump's Biggest Failure: The Race Issue

There are all kinds of articles around today mourning President Trump's out-of-control insults. There's Bush appointee J.T. Young warning us not to throw out the baby -- the populism that Trump fed and watered -- with the bath water -- Trump and his insults.

The Left’s legitimate fear is that conservative populism could be an even more potentially potent political force than the potent one Trump wielded. Instead of Trump suppressing its growth in suburbs and among women, another candidate — such as a woman like former UN Ambassador and South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley — could draw in millions more.

Well, OK. So the suburbs and the women don't feel threatened by the left yet. They still think themselves above the bitter clingers and the deplorables of the white working class, darling. So Ben Franklin's adage still applies, that experience keeps a dear school but they will learn in no other.

Or Breitbart's Joe Pollak on Trump's "will to win:"

His boldness made him an extraordinarily successful president — until his disastrous January 6 challenge, which has left the Republican Party divided and dispirited.

Well yeah. Because the Washington DC GOP has lived for decades in fear of being named and shamed and shunned. And January 6 proved that they still live in fear.

Look, I've been reading a bit about male insults and vaunting in Bernard Cornwell's novels on England's Alfred the Great. His hero, Uhtred, is half way between the nice literate Christian peacemaking of Alfred and the pagan insult and revenge culture of the Danes. But when it is time for battle, then the nicey-nicey goes out the window. It is all insults and vaunting and fighting. And the best man wins.

If you are going to have a guy fighting for you, then he is going to be showing that he is unafraid of the enemy. His insulting, his vaunting, are the way he tells his supporters that he has got their backs, and they can follow him, because he has the victory glint in his eyes.

But one thing Trump never did. He never took on the Race Issue, the number one rule in America today that you are a white racist if "we" say you are. And there is no defense, no recourse.

And in the years that Trump did nothing about the Race Issue, the left came up with a new race canard, the doctrine of "systemic racism" which means that whites are guilty forever.

The next leader of the conservative populist movement has to take the Race Issue, head on, and say to any race accusation: It Takes One to Know One.

Then he should have a stable of follow-on comments, such as: "the American people that fought a war to free the slaves? Those are your racists?" Or, "the American people that elected a Congress that passed the civil rights acts? Those are your racists?" And so on.

This is not that hard. So long as our liberal friends have the cowskin Race Whip in the back pocket we conservative populists are going to be slaves on the liberal estate, touching our forelocks to the liberal overseer and begging Massa not to bring out the whip for a flogging.

Obviously, that man is not Nikki Haley. It will be the politician that first rises out of the current funk and has the courage to tell his populist supporters that the January 6 Capitol riot and its aftermath of fences and riot troops shows that the ruling class is afraid of them, that it fears their strength, and rightly so. And so, On to Richmond!

And yes. No harm in a little Whataboutism. Whatabout BLM/AntiFa? When is our government going to protect us from them with fences and National Guardsmen? Like they jumped to protect themselves in Washington in a New York minute.

This is not that hard. Our liberal overseers will continue to insult us and abuse us and belittle us, and play their race cards and gender cards and now transgender cards. They will continue this until their abuse starts to cost them. And then it will be too late.

"Secret Garden" and Multiculti

For some reason yesterday I needed to re-read The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. But I couldn't find a copy in the house. So I looked online for the movies. There are many, including the 1993 version with Maggie Smith as the housekeeper Mrs. Medlock. There is a 2020 version with the Yorkshire lad Dickon played by a POC. And there is a "steampunk" 2017 version that turns the whole thing into a post environmental apocalypse.

But the original novel was about the tricky issue of the children of Brits in India. The girl heroine, Mary Lennox, is the child of Brits that died of cholera. Mary knew nothing of her parents, being raised by "native" servants. Mary ends up at her hunchback uncle's place, Misselthwaite Manor, on the Yorkshire moors.

Misselthwaite is a morgue, because the uncle, Mr. Craven (!), is still in a depression over the death of his wife, and ignores his bedridden son. Because. 

The story is about Mary's personal transformation from a spoiled, angry brat into a savior that saves not only herself, but her uncle and his bedridden son, with the help of the servant Martha and her younger brother Dickon, who is a dab hand at pet animals and anything to do with plants. It is, you may say, completely over the top.

In the 2017 steampunk version I watched, -- not mentioned on La Wik until I fix it -- the uncle owns a big factory that has completely run down after an environmental collapse and the death of the scientist mother, and the bedridden son turns out to be AI, invented by the dead scientist mom. It is a hot mess, but a rather charming hot mess.

The 2020 version features a young man of color as the Yorkshire lad, Dickon. And that got me to thinking.

The whole point of The Secret Garden, in my mind, is the cruel treatment of children by the upper class, whether it is powerful folks in the Empire dumping the kids on the servants, while they pursue their lives of power or self-pity.

Then there is the case of Rudyard Kipling, born in India, who was dropped off at a boarding house in Southsea, Sussex, with his sister Trix just before the parents returned India. Rudyard was five, and Trix was three. Kipling called this the "House of Desolation" writes Jad Adams in Kipling:

The children speculated miserably on why they had been abandoned, unable to understand what had led their parents to leave them to such horrors.

I wonder what Kipling meant in The Jungle Book about an abandoned child brought up by wolves.

So, you can see that children's books -- modern fairy tales, I suppose -- are often about the horrible neglect and cruelty often meted out to children, especially the children of the ruling class.

In The Secret Garden the secret ingredient to redeem Mary's humanity is Dickon, the child of nature. In The Jungle Book the redeemers are wolves!

Hey, isn't raciss to cast Dickon, the child of nature, as a child of color in the 2020 movie? Shouldn't the POC have been Mr. Craven the uncle? Oh no, because the POC can't be the villain.

But, to make the problem bigger, how do we, of western culture, invite the outsiders, which really means Africans, into our culture, without being insulting or patronizing?

For instance, was it insulting to have the black slave Mammy in Gone with the Wind? If the movie were reshot, should Mammy be played by a white bitter-clinger?

Was it patronizing to have the physicist astronomer in Interstellar played by a black? Or is it insulting to American-born blacks that the actor was born Ghanaian?

The point is that literature and the arts -- and especially children's stories -- are about stereotypes, recognizable stereotypes that leap out of ordinary life into the story. It must be so. And for the Jungians among us, we translate "stereotypes" into "archetypes."

If you muddy up the archetypes with ruling-class dictates and quotas and such I do not think you will achieve what you think.

And above all, no group will find its place in modern society as the Little Darlings in the petting zoo of the ruling class. Everyone of us, and every group, has to find their own way and their own niche that plays to their particular cultural heritage and acquired skills.

And here's the danger for America's blacks. The recent importation of millions of East and South Asians means that the old moral narrative of evil whites vs. innocent blacks is going to be replaced by a new narrative, probably along the lines of cultured Asians vs. jumped-up Europeans and primitive Africans.

Or it might be a fight between South Asian Brahmins vs. East Asian Mandarins, with blacks the clients of the Brahmins and whites the clients of the Mandarins.

Either way, our literature and our movies need to be peopled by real archetypes, not blurred and fake ones imposed by an unjust ruling class.