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[Excerpted from the latest Radio Derb, now available exclusively through VDARE.com]
I greeted my July 11th issue of The Economist magazine with mixed feelings:
For a fleeting moment I thought the “new ideology” that The Economist was talking about might be honest race realism, and that what’s wrong with it from The Economist’s viewpoint, which is, of course, that THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS RACE! No such luck. The “new ideology” it’s writing about is not race realism but Wokeness and the cranky anti-white obsessions of the Wokesters as found in books like Robin DiAngelo’s current bestseller White Fragility.
And no, I didn’t bother to read all the article. I glanced at the text and saw what I expected to see. Poverty is the problem; police brutality is the problem; zoning rules are the problem:
The household income gap is the same as it was in 1968.
You don’t say! That’s more than fifty years. Is there anything we haven’t tried in those fifty years to make the races come out equal, up to and including stuffing our courts, schools, police departments and corporations with black authority figures and electing a black President?
Still and all, with race hysteria at its current fever pitch, there’s a sort of quaint charm in The Economist‘s old-fashioned liberal naivety. Fix the schools! Integrate our neighborhoods! Expand the Earned-Income Tax Credit! Everything will come right at last, black and white all equal!
Yes, say what you like about the old, Economist style of liberalism, it’s nothing like as barking crazy as this newer brand of race-racketeering.
Case in point: the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, opened just four years ago on Constitution Avenue in our nation’s capital. The Museum, via its online portal, has been educating us about whiteness.
White dominant culture, or whiteness, refers to the ways white people and their traditions, attitudes, and ways of life have been normalized over time and are now considered standard practices in the United States.
Byron York’s Daily Memo: ‘Whiteness’ and the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington Examiner, July 16, 2020
Scary, huh? What are these peculiar folkways that white people have imposed on our nation? Things like (actual quotes):
Rugged Individualism … self-reliance … the nuclear family … objective, rational linear thinking … history based on Northern European immigrants’ experience … the Protestant work ethic … hard work is the key to success …
Good grief! What a perverse, twisted set of values! How people of color must suffer under the oppression of such ideas!
Another sample:
Click to see the whole thing.
Well, it’s easy to laugh. A great many people did laugh after Byron York tweeted out the image mid-week. It seems to have since been taken down; at least, I couldn’t find it on the museum’s website at week’s end.
The people who made that web page weren’t laughing when they made it, though. They were in earnest. They believe this stuff. And the authorities at the Smithsonian—one of our nation’s most prestigious cultural and educational institutions—saw nothing wrong with it until the laughing and jeering broke out on Twitter.
That’s how far we’ve come; that’s how wide the rot has spread.
If you think that we should maybe just scrap all this obsessing about race and try pure color-blind meritocracy — well, if you think that you are really trying to swim against the current. The new fashion: arrogant, rent-seeking extortion.
Two cases in point here:
Case One: When California voters go to the polls this November, they will see on the ballot sheet a proposition to repeal Proposition 209.
What is that? Proposition 209, the one they will be invited to repeal, was passed in 1996. It prohibits the state from discriminating against, or granting preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.
In other words, it bans Affirmative Action. So California currently, over wide areas of employment, education, and commerce, is constitutionally colorblind.
A lot of people don’t like that. State Assemblywoman Shirley Weber, a large black lady, especially doesn’t like it.
She says:
Proposition 209 [that’s the one she wants to repeal] has cost women and minority-owned businesses $1.1 billion each year … and has allowed discriminatory hiring and contracting processes to continue unhindered.
Lawmakers Push to Repeal California’s Ban on Affirmative Action, TheIEvoice.com, March 16, 2020
Get that? A prohibition on discriminating by race or sex…discriminatory.
If you don’t understand the logic of that it’s probably because you’ve succumbed to objective, rational linear thinking, you White Supremacist, you!
Case Two: This one’s from the world of classical music. The headline explains itself: New York Times, July 16th, headline: To Make Orchestras More Diverse, End Blind Auditions. (By music critic Anthony Tomassini—Tweet him.)
The back story: Fifty years ago, after charges of discrimination from some black musicians, the New York Philharmonic, soon followed by other American orchestras, began to hold auditions behind a screen, so that judgment was strictly on musical quality, not influenced by the player’s race or sex—”Blind auditions.”
Alas, it’s not working very well. That is to say, it’s not producing a Politically Correct result:
In a 2014 study, only 1.8 percent of the players in top ensembles were Black; just 2.5 percent were Latino.
What to do? The NYT’s Tomassini of course knows:
If things are to change, ensembles must be able to take proactive steps to address the appalling racial imbalance that remains in their ranks. Blind auditions are no longer tenable.
See that? Color-blindness is racist!
Here’s a brief footnote to that second case, also from the world of classical music; and also from July 16th, although this story is from the Washington Post of that date. Headline: That Sound You’re Hearing Is Classical Music’s Long Overdue Reckoning With Racism. (By Michael Andor Brodeur—Tweet him.)
So we’re in the same territory here we were in with that New York Times piece: the appalling racism being practiced by orchestras and opera companies against blacks and Latinos.
This one, though, includes a curious little arithmetical oddity that a keen-eyed reader spotted and emailed in to me about. Thank you, Sir!
Here is the oddity. Listen carefully. WaPo reporter Brodeur tells us that from 2002 to 2014, the proportion of black musicians in American orchestras “languished at around 1.8 percent.” That’s the same proportion as given in the New York Times story: 1.8 percent. Probably both reporters read the same study—Racial/Ethnic and Gender Diversity in the Orchestra Field, by James Doeser, Ph. D. September 2016.
Hold that in your mind: black musicians in our orchestras, 1.8 percent.
Then, just two sentences later in the same paragraph we get this, quote:
Between 2010 and 2016, black conductors and music directors have accounted for just 2 to 6 percent of the field.
OK, let’s do arithmetic. Two divided by 1.8 is 1.11. Six divided by 1.8 is 3.33.
Since black musicians as a whole are languishing at 1.8 percent, if 2 to 6 percent of conductors and music directors are black, that means blacks are being promoted out of the orchestra pit into those more prestigious slots two or three times more than their overall representation would lead you to expect.
But wait. I did some math to reach that conclusion. And math is, as I’m sure the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture would be glad to confirm, white man’s ju-ju—a style of objective, rational linear thinking.
Down with white dominant culture! Black lives matter!
John Derbyshire [email him] writes an incredible amount on all sorts of subjects for all kinds of outlets. (This no longer includes National Review, whose editors had some kind of tantrum and fired him.) He is the author of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism and several other books. He has had two books published by VDARE.com com: FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT (also available in Kindle) and FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT II: ESSAYS 2013.
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There’s the problem right there. Smithson admired the United States, but had never been here. Otherwise, he would have established his institution in the real capital, Philadelphia.
So today, due to his misjudgment, millions of tourists visit the wrong city.
John,
Have you taken a recent look at this very End of History-esque piece of yours from March 2000?
https://newcriterion.com/issues/2000/3/rudyard-kipling-the-god-of-things-as-they-are
A book entitled “Curating Revolution” explored the relationship, in Mao’s China, between political movements, and cultural artifacts and activities. Although this book by Yale Prof. Denise Ho was was only recently published, a mere two years ago, at that time it was, I thought, essentially a fascinating historical study. Now it turns out to have also been quite relevant to current U.S. events. For example, a major NY museum recently deciding that Teddy Roosevelt’s statue must be removed because it is “hierarchical.” (Roosevelt is on horseback, whereas the other figures do not have horses.)
Where does this end? If the Chinese cultural revolution is to be the template, the implications for public art and culture are frightening. And, the “curating” might not be limited to public art. And, regarding the standard of cancelation, in The Cultural Revolution, a single denounced artifact would suffice as “proof of crime” or “ironclad evidence.” What kind of art is in your home, and how will it look when the new authorities place it on an exhibit table in front of your home as your proof of crime, and then what happens to you next? Nah, impossible, I read too much.
“…and the kids can’t get icecream – cause the market burned down…and the newspapaer sleeping bags blow down the lane…”
I’m a cultural anthropologist myself. I think that the Smithsonian description of White culture and mentality is rather correct – as correct as possible within the ranges of such a table. I also find it extremely flattering for Whites. Whites have no reason to poo-poo it.
The indignation about this description seems to ground in the fact that it is formulated in a “cultural relativistic” way, that is the values named here are descripted as particularly white values, not as “universal” or “necessary”. This is correct, too. They are not universal, and they are not strictly necessary – mankind would survive some way or other even without them.
We can argue with our Black and Brown brethren that these values are advantageous not only for us, but as well for them. But the beginning of such an open debate must be a purely descriptive summary without “universalist” presuppositions which would anticipate the result. (This is the methodological argument for cultural relativism.)
Shirley is the assemblywoman of my mother’s district, and I can assure you that she is just as much Jewish as she is black (a mulatta), and in fact distantly related to the Shapiros and Rooney Mara. It’s an increasingly small, intermarried world here.
The BLM movement is a direct product of the recognition by young black college students that math, linear thinking, real history and study are going to be necessary some day to prove that they have a college degree.
What a fine piece. Thank you, 39 Lashes.
I too am brainwashed by the white man’s juju of math and logic, so I have to tread lightly in these comments for fear of causing offense… we seem to be being subjected to a weird pantomime of our own culture being played back at us by minorities who are interpreting what we do as mainly being merely occupying a place. So, for example, there is no meaningful distinction in terms of the quality of output between a black violinist or a white violinist and therefore we should default to giving the spot to the black violinist. Once they occupy that spot, all of the good things that come from being a violinist are thereby possessed by the black person in virtue of having taken up the role. We see this logic being promoted in every space where a white person can excel, viz. just put a black person in that same space and they too will excel. Yet it very rarely actually plays out that way without everyone tacitly agreeing to never mention that the black person isn’t very good at what they are trying to do. Seeing this over and over in my adult life has led me to believe that black people do not see or hear the extra layer of meaning that we see and hear and that they tend to really just be seeing or understanding a fraction of what is happening. In short, just being in a space that was occupied by a white person seems to suffice as success for them. They don’t ever seem to “get it” when it comes to the deeper conversations about what we are actually trying to do. They mimic but don’t think.
I know that sounds awful but the cognitive dissonance of being forced to submit to these morons lately is starting to make me think that we need to more assertively explain what race realism is in mass media so that people understand why some people succeed and others fail in reality. Being more assertive about that topic will of course hurt a lot of young people’s feelings because they have never been exposed to it, which is unfortunate, but we cannot allow ourselves to be governed in this way forever.
Which means that we’ve lifted a host of black folk to a higher standard of living on the backs of a larger host of blacks we’ve allowed to be trampled into deeper poverty and despair.
The Smithsonian thing is hilarious, as good as any parody, and yet it’s hard to laugh as much as feel depressed.
I guess Ted Dalrymple’s formulation about the purpose of communist propaganda – to demoralize rather than to persuade – comes to mind.
On the one hand, if our enemies really are this stupid, how can we possibly lose?
On the other hand, if our enemies have already won, being this stupid is just rubbing our noses in it: “Look what we can get away with! Enjoy your future as second class citizens in the dumbest civilization in history.”
The thing about classical music is, of course, that East Asians are taking over. The Seattle Symphony has tons of them. And they are fun, with crazy hair styles and clothes. Plus Russians.
For many years, the Seattle Symphony had a black tympanist. No longer. But now there is a black woman cellist.
So maybe that is another thing that might turn East Asians into Republicans. Might.
If blacks are allowed equal representation in fields of life where they typically do not cluster, such as classical music, while being allowed over-representation in fields that they gravitate towards and excel in, such as basketball, we will have a situation where blacks are presented to the world as being superior than whites.
When I was in high school, the cool thing for the black kids to do was to insist that the black race is superior. None of the teachers could stop it. They had the cultural upper hand, so it was quite humiliating for me and probably many other white students.
I’d prefer to just not live around them.
@Christopher Chantrill:
‘And they are fun, with crazy hair styles and clothes.’
Something we obviously need more of! We all know that dressing like an adult is BAAAAD!
To at least two generations of Americans, blacks are indeed special, imbued with almost magical powers of righteousness.
John C. Calhoun and other Southerners warned against accepting the Smithson grant as foreign interference and a beggardly accepting of charity. How prophetic those fellows were.
See that? Color-blindness is racist!
Liberals said the same thing about mandatory minimum sentences.
The outcomes are unequal so they can’t be allowed even if they are technically color blind.
There is a website that I use called APM Research Lab. They have state by state data on covid cases by race, mortality and its even age adjusted. Explaining why negroes are suffering disproportionately from this disease they cite ‘greater use of public transit’ more diabetes and asthma among blacks but conclude its really all systemic racism. Not personal conduct or negro social pathologies. Of course they don’t point out that 25 out of 351 NBA players who were tested in early July managed to be infected. I doubt NBA players use public transit, are not obese or diabetic but they probably weren’t too good at social distancing, using masks or washing their hands frequently.
I’m a cultural anthropologist myself.
Cool I’m a classic alchemist.
We probably use a similar methodology.
Ehh – this is as self-contradictory as it can possibly get. Nobody in modern societies urges somebody to behave in a certain way. But that is the premise needed to make your argument work.
What a liberal society does though is: It values the outcome of different kinds of behavior differently. – people are free to choose. That was fine up until a few weeks back, it seems at times… – as long as people were willing to accept, that their free choice implies, that they are willing to take the consequences. That is what was called responsibility, wasn’t it.
Now, I’d still say, that this way of living is exactly part of the West’s success. Not least materially. But also spiritually and seen from a humanitarian perspective. Because the material wealth secured personal liberties. That’s how it has been, at least, until recently. I dunno how we could progress from a standpoints like yours, Stognumber – unless somebody declares the former Soviet Union as a reasonable goal.
Ill go out on a limb to confirm that Rooney Mara is neither Jewish, nor black.
Just on schedule, https://www.infowars.com/profs-demand-university-police-chief-resign-over-blue-lives-matter-flag-in-his-home/. The Chief of University Police at West Virginia University is dealing with calls for his resignation after people noticed a Thin Blue Line artwork in his office during a Zoom call on how to foster “a safe, diverse, and inclusive culture” on campus.
I agree that it’s flattering to whites and largely accurate, or at least it once was. I find it too funny that the Smithsonian educators, who I am sure are very concerned with the feelings and prospects of BIPOCs, didn’t realize how badly it reflects on American black culture from the standpoint of ordinary Americans of all races.*
Are Americans ready to embrace doctors and engineers who don’t value rational thinking? Do they want coworkers who are self-liberated from rigid schedules? We can debate whether these cultural traits of “whiteness” lead to happiness and fulfillment, but the burning question from a public policy standpoint is whether a technologically advanced civilization like ours can survive long without them. What if the answer is no, and the Smithsonian has inadvertently made a case for the suppression on black culture on public interest grounds?
*perhaps they have liberated themselves from the white concept of cause-and-effect.
I’m sort of starting to like Antifa…
Why should conzos defend capitalists who fund BLM and piss on nationalism?
Go Antifa!
When I read the poster I thought it was flattering except for the part about eating bland food, which seemed like a pointless dig. What really struck me though was the fact that we can define our culture completely, describe and discuss and live it, without any reference whatsoever to black people. They certainly cannot do that relative to our culture. I don’t think the Smithsonian people thought through the implications of that. They like to promote these ideas like “black people built america” and suchlike but in reality we would be perfectly fine culturally without them at all if we were allowed to simply live the lives we wanted. They are constantly forced on us though and we are constantly having to accommodate them in situations where they don’t really fit in at all but we get absolutely nothing but grief for doing so every time. If anything at all can be learned from the 1619 project it is that if a group of black people show up unexpectedly for whatever reason you are well advised to do everything you can to get them to leave or else you are probably just going to repeat this sordid history of being hassled by them they way we are.
…”a larger host of blacks we’ve allowed to be trampled into deeper poverty and despair”.
Who TF is “we”?
Exactly what did this supposed “we” do to “allow” this “trampling”? Did the kneegarows have no agency in their own lives?
The Economist should just switch to racial realism.
People might actually read it.
Kanye West could do a lot of good talking about the Bell Curve in public.
Now if they had only listened to the Colonization Society…
So blacks can become members of classical music orchestras that play music invented by whites in Europe, but whites can’t play in reggae bands or play African music or play Asian music or play didgeridoos or play shamisens or sitars or….
In other words, if whites can’t “culturally appropriate,” then blacks/Asians/Aboriginees etc. can’t either! Being sarcastic, but the only reason whites put up with this crap is because whites either choose to or are too snowflake to challenge it.
While rock music was invented by whites, it is based on the rhythm and blues and jazz and soul of blacks in the south…it was “culturally appropriated” then, right? The hypocrisy of snowflakes is amazing….thank God for Jimi Hendrix! Bwahahahahahahahahahahahahahahah.
You mean switch back:
In a debate with Taylor Swift, perhaps?
The Economist is a Rothschild publication, now jointly owned 50% by an Italian media outlet
Its previous editor was Lynn Forrester de Rothschild, and currently its Zanny Minton Beddoes.
“Now if they had only listened to the Colonization Society…”
That’s just Paul Craig Roberts (Chris Mallory) exposing his cognitive dissonance.
He hates Lincoln the very person who wanted negroes sent back to Africa. Foreign interference might also have saved his beloved south and he wouldn’t be having pity parties on Unz Review.
So one moron debating another moron? Millions of moronic Americans would be riveted to their flatscreens!
Derb… Did you miss the irony? The Smithsonian’s little attempt at bitch slapping white Americans blew up in their woke faces, because it reveals a fully descriptive synopsis of the template by which the most formally successful nation in the history of man kind was built. It puts African blacks in a very bad light! Priceless!
Mr Mallory labeled me a troll because I pointed out that all those runaway slave posters offering exorbitant rewards must have been about sex. But what else? They sure weren’t about work.
He certainly didn’t have an answer ready.
“In short, just being in a space that was occupied by a white person seems to suffice as success for them.”
Indeed it does, as long as the pay is the same as the white person received for that position, regardless of the quality and quantity of the work produced by the black person. Any criticism of the quality and quantity of their work is condemned as racism at first, then any undeniable shortcomings are excused as “the residual effects of slavery,” etc., along with demands for special consideration, additional training or lower standards. Their success lies in getting what the white person has even though they know full well they haven’t earned it — those are the rules they play by.
.
Burning man is culturally appropriated but then it was done by the right sort of people.
Only the incredibly stupid could seriously believe blacks are equal to whites. Anyone with even the most casual observation of anything from chess championships, maths competitions, world history, world country rankings, inventions, etc, knows that blacks are an inferior race.
Those liberals that virtue signal all time are mostly aware of this, which is why the keep treating blacks as special needs children, because they are.
It’s all a sort of cargo cult. If you have all the things surrounding The Thing, it must produce The Thing.
Wasn’t Lynn the Rothschild who was the previous owner of Epstein’s NYC whorehouse?
I’m sure that’s what brings the Statler and Waldorf crowd to the symphony; crazy hair styles and clothes.
Paywall:fuck RIGHT off!
Trampled shmampled — lose the Marxist oppressor/victim goggles!!
They lost me when they signed on to CLIMATE DOOM
It’s quite appropriate for a black Yank or Australian Aborigine to speak English, wear European clothes, sing in the European scale, play European sports etc. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. When anybody comes up with something good, copy them.
Everybody who claims anything a Black comes up with shouldn’t be copied is only saying that Blacks invent so little that it must be left to them. I’m not convinced; people in the Middle East, India and China were once much more advanced than Europeans. Sub-Saharan Africans weren’t but that doesn’t prove much. I pay no heed to ridiculous claims they invented plaiting hair or poetry but the future is hard to predict. They should be treated the same as all others. If they can manage to do well in competition, just accept it. When they fail at education, invention and business as US Blacks have always done as a group, that’s their problem.
Whites don’t have to be racial baby-sitters. They certainly don’t need to babysit Nigerian Ibos or Indian Tamils in the USA and they’re generally blacker than the historical US Blacks. Kamala Harris needed no help except from her professor mother and Kamala is half Indian Hindu. At least Tamils claim to be Hindus but I suspect they really worship education. On the other hand, I’m possibly just presuming she’s half Tamil.
Black Yanks have no responsibility to ensure other Yanks do well at sport. Not that they have ever done or will ever do any baby-sitting of Whites. If they cry for help, that’s the responsibility of their mummies and daddies. When they grow up, even their parents don’t have to help.
A social welfare net should apply on the basis of need, not the color of one’s skin. The extent of such a net is a real matter for political debate and crazy black racism and crazy white pandering isn’t. [email protected]
Would be tantalizing if true.
Wouldn’t surprise me in the least. She and Killary are best buddy pals.
Cheers!
The ‘melting pot’ idea has always been promoted to us as one of the great benefits of ‘freedom and democracy’, and how we treasure all the cultures that form our society, but that’s rubbish propaganda.
My ancestors emigrated to Canada from Eastern Europe in the early 1900s. My parents still tried to maintain their cultural background, the language, the traditions, our festivals and so on, but for the next generation that was almost impossible. There was great pressure on us to conform to Western (Canadian or American) cultural standards, which is to say, to a lack of a culture of any kind.
As youngsters, we had no easy way of dealing with that except to renounce our heritage and try to become like everyone else. That pressure was was inescapable, the schools a major part of this assimilation pressure as was the government itself. And the pressure was precisely to renounce your ‘foreign’ cultural heritage and become true WASPs.
However much Canada or the US preach about respecting minorities, the real life experience is that you can succeed only by escaping your minority and becoming, if you can, part of the majority. And you can do that only by renouncing your heritage, your culture and traditions. And that really constitutes a cultural genocide. The fabric of North American society will not permit anyone to be very different. To enter this ‘melting pot’ is to emerge as some kind of homogenised nothingness.
Europe is different and it has always impressed me that so many geographically small countries could be so close to each other and yet maintain 100% of their individual cultures. The countries in Europe do not ‘melt’ into each other. You will see a bit of fuzziness near the borders, but when you’re 5 kms. inside Italy, you know absolutely you are no longer in France or Switzerland.
Europe does it better. And so does China. With 56 ethnic groups, you’d think there would be great pressure to assimilate, but China jealously protects and defends these small groups with different cultures precisely to prevent their being assimilated.
My conclusion is that immigration works only if immigrants are in sufficiently small numbers so as to be a novelty and a curiosity. If foreign cultures reach around 30% of a nation, which has already happened in the US and is close to happening in Europe, the indigenous society will disintegrate. And, I believe that is the intention. Preparation for our NWO.
It was indeed the Cabal’s purpose of multiculturalism to destroy any sense of national identity and to allow each and every ethnic minority within a nation to be played off against each other – at any time of the Cabal’s choosing.
On the settled resident population it also adds to the effect of demoralization. The Cabal is saying ‘see what we can do to your locality, your state, your nation – and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it’.
Added to the above point and as has been remarked by another, that both the Dems and the Reps have allowed ~1,000,000 illegal immigrants to cross US borders for completely different reasons:
– the Dems allow it as they see future voters for their party, and
– the Reps turn a blind eye, as their donors (large corporations) know that a huge pool of what Marx called “a reserve army of labor” drives down real (as adjusted for inflation) wages.
NOTE: Demoralization makes a nation ripe for takeover .
There are lots of American and Canadian cultural standards.
Don’t be envious of China – they have two young men for every young woman. It is a degrading scenario. You would not want to be a young man there.
True, here in the USA, we have a similar problem – we have at least two young men for every non-obese young woman. But at least those young men have the opportunity of dating an obese young woman and encouraging her to lose a few pounds before the wedding day – due to decades of vast and unrecoverable slaughters of baby girls in the womb, young Chinese men very very often do not have even that opportunity.
Culture is always a difficult fight. There is too little land in the world, the New World or the Old World, for all of us to live the life of entitled land-owners that we all feel we were born to, and very few of us (I am an exception, but I choose not to get personal about this) have the personal charisma to not only enjoy being part of the culture we were born in, but to also rejoice in making that culture better (Homer discussed the phenomenon of a society where the younger men were ashamed of themselves if they did not prove they were better than their ancestors – in the Iliad, not the Odyssey, which was sort of a belated and decadent failure from the point of view of those of us who admire the desire to be, well, better than our ancestors) —- also, there are many passages in the Old Testament and in the works of the more talented among the patristic theologians – “it is nothing to be a descendant of Jacob, what matters is to be to future generations what Jacob would have been to us if he had been the man God wanted him to be” ….. one could go on.
For the record, when you say America or Canada “had a lack of culture of any kind”, you are going to be disagreed with and criticized. Or ignored. (I am not ignoring you, but that is just a random sort of thing – I could easily have ignored you). Maybe you are just unhappy about the fact that you (or your bitter immigrant parents) were not invited a second time to the clambakes and the dances, or that you weren’t good enough to be asked back to play with the local band or to go hunting and fishing a second time with the people who got tired of you bragging about the old country. Nobody likes an ungrateful immigrant.
you know, I had BIG hopes for UNZ when I found it recently. I eagerly read a few of the articles but my excitement has been mostly killed now.
UNZ appears to be yet another right center web site focusing on the fake left: the fathom “liberals” and proving how wrong they are so they have to write about the real problems of society:
1 rampant poverty,
2 extreme corporatism,
3 the Military-Industrial complex getting trillions of corporate welfare money,
4 the FED giving trillions of free credit to the banks,
5 the imperialist USA invading, attacking sovereign countrues and so on.
Where are THOSE articles on UNZ? Nowhere.
Oh well, back to Fort Russ and southfront. NO more time to waste with this BS.
wwebd said —- Nicolas Davila once said “If we are ignorant of an epoch’s art, it’s history is a colorless narrative” …
I could regale you for hours with anecdotes about the jazz of New Orleans and Staten Island, the clambakes of Long Island and the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake, the triumphant admiration Europeans of all classes had for the wonderful young American women at the turn of the century, the endless and cosmic variations on beauty beauty human beauty that can be found in Appalachian music from my childhood and before, the nuances of language of Faulkner and Stevens and Twain that befuddled all but the best of the European writers of their day, the cold clean philosophical traditions of the post-Puritan universities of New England, the amazing Shakespearean, almost Falstaffian, camaraderie in old Gotham between the populace and the more popular local politicians, the better-then-Cicero- by far jurisprudence of the Second Circuit in its glory days, the amazing storytelling of the men who were old when I was young, whether the stories were cowboy and Indian stories or war stories or just plain stories, or the never before equalled pictorial arts from John Singer Sargent to Ignatz and Krazy Kat to Snoopy and Fabian the Cat and back to Winslow Homer, but why should I bother?
You said my country has no cultural standards. I disagree —- hundreds of years from now, the best men of my generation and the generations before my generation will be looked on with hushed respect as the greatest, most generous-hearted, and most enviable men who had ever lived.
Obviously we are targetted by the envious and the jealous, but it has ever been so.
YMMV.
wwebd said —- Nicolas Davila once said “If we are ignorant of an epoch’s art, it’s history is a colorless narrative” …
I could regale you for hours with anecdotes about the jazz of New Orleans and Staten Island, the clambakes of Long Island and the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake, the triumphant admiration Europeans of all classes had for the wonderful young American women at the turn of the century, the endless and cosmic variations on beauty beauty human beauty that can be found in Appalachian music from my childhood and before, the nuances of language of Faulkner and Stevens and Twain that befuddled all but the best of the European writers of their day, the cold clean philosophical traditions of the post-Puritan universities of New England, the amazing Shakespearean, almost Falstaffian, camaraderie in old Gotham between the populace and the more popular local politicians, the better-than-Cicero- by far jurisprudence of the Second Circuit in its glory days (when Learned Hand and his brother Augustus were still fairly young), the amazing storytelling of the men who were old when I was young, whether the stories were cowboy and Indian stories or war stories or just plain stories, or the never before equalled (outside of what we now call Italy, natch) pictorial arts from John Singer Sargent to Ignatz and Krazy Kat to Snoopy and Fabian the Cat (or was it Faron?) and back to Winslow Homer, but why should I bother?
You said my country has no cultural standards. I disagree —- hundreds of years from now, the best men of my generation and the generations before my generation will be looked on with hushed respect as the greatest, most generous-hearted, and most enviable men who had ever lived.
Obviously we are targetted by the envious and the jealous, but it has ever been so.
YMMV. Well, to be fair, maybe I misunderstood the part of your comment where you insulted my country.
This site is mostly for an American audience Hoyeru, with their shocking ignorance about their own country – most of them being trapped in the matrix of Democrats and Republicans – having fallen for the illusion that they actually have a choice – which they call “democracy”. Quaint, huh?
I’m pretty sure we’re not talking IQ levels – so it must be the American ‘education’ system and the incessant propaganda from the 24/7 newscycle which prevents any real critical thinking.
Having said that, one can still stumble upon a serious columnist on UR, who’s a real gem.
Cheers.
Rock music is actually based on the Celtic music brought to America mostly by the Scots-Irish immigrants in the South. Rhythm and Blues, jazz and soul music are byproducts of slaves mimicking the music of Whites in the South.
“Time viewed as a commodity” is wrong. Time can’t be bought and sold–or traded.
Time is a wasting asset–when it’s gone it’s gone. You can never acquire more of it, as you can any commodity.
The term melting pot was coined in 1908 by (((Israel Zangwill.)))
No surprise there then.
You are wrong about that (you are wrong to say, in your profound foolishness, that when time is gone it is gone).
My best guess is you are not a poet, you have not spent much time in prayer (real prayer, not the phony stuff you hear about from your liberal friends), and you were trained from youth to be a materialist helot.
I have other guesses, but that is my best guess.
To be exact – of course Time cannot be bought or sold or traded.
But I pity the fool who thinks that when it is gone it is gone. That is slavish thought, that is what the losers in life think.
Nothing of value does not persist forever.
Nothing at all.
Look, you can disagree with me or agree with me, but trust me, you want to be on my side when – not if, when —– it becomes important to understand these things.
Time is a servant of any good-hearted creature of God, not the other way around.
Why do I bother? After all, there are other things to discuss.
I bother because I care.
Don’t ever again mock Americans for a lack of culture. I know what America looked like and I know what it will look like a thousand years from now. Disagree with me or agree with me. It is important to imagine whether I am right or not. Trust me (I am right, by the way).
I have finally figured out what I did that was so unfair to black people.
Since I had no desire to be abused, attacked, assaulted, insulted etc by black people, I stayed as far away from them as possible.
Now this was very unfair of me because they never had the opportunity to learn from my brilliance.
I should have offered to take the abuse, attacks, assaults, insults and tried to teach them about the arts, sciences, humanities to the best of my ability–since I was put on this planet to be their slave.
So sayeth our new rulers–and I now understand that I must obey our great leaders….
Not!
Thaaaas sooo rayciss! You are such an incredibly awful person that I just need to spend as much time around you as possible. You and everyone who looks like you. As a matter of fact, I need to move in next door to you just so I can marvel at what a monster you are.
Queue up the song… “Let my people go…” over to your back yard for a Barbecue.
LOL.