Here’s a surprising report: President Trump’s support is actually rising after his attack on “The Squad”.
The rise in support isn’t the surprising part. The surprising part is that the Media still find this surprising.
Not to toot my own horn too much here, but I’ve been writing about this since 2015 … “Make America Great Again” was the Trump campaign’s official slogan, but unofficially — and much, much more effectively — it was: “Fuck the Media”. The 2016 election is known far and wide as “The Great Fuck You”, but somehow, some way, almost everyone still fails to grasp that it wasn’t the Democrats who got told to fuck off. It wasn’t even the “Progressives”. It was The Media. The Great Fuck You was aimed entirely at the Media.
Severian, “Which Hand Holds the Whip?”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-07-17.
August 14, 2022
QotD: The 2016 US election was a rejection of the media
August 8, 2022
QotD: How houses have changed to fit the times
But today telephones have collapsed into our pocket magic mirrors, and TVs are going in two directions — flattening and expanding to fill entire walls of the living room, and simultaneously shrinking to mate with our phones. A not-uncommon aspect of modern luxury TV design is that they’re framed in wood or glass, made to look like a wall-hanging or a painting. The TV is becoming invisible: a visitor from the 1960s or 1970s might look around in bafflement for a while before realizing that the big print in middle of the living room wall is glowing and sometimes changes (when it’s in standby, running a screensaver). Meanwhile, microwave ovens and ready meals and fast food have reduced the need for the dining room and even the kitchen: to cook a family dinner and serve it in a formal dining room is an ostentatious display of temporal wealth, a signal that one has the leisure time (and the appliances, and the storage for ingredients) to practice and perfect the skills required. The middle classes still employ cooks: but we outsource them to timeshare facilities called restaurants. Similarly, without the daily battle to keep soot and dirt at bay, and equipped with tools like vacuum cleaners and detergents, the job of the housemaid has been shrunk to something that can be outsourced to a cleaning service or a couple of hours a day for the householder. So no more cramped servants’ bedrooms.
The very wealthy ostentatiously ape the behaviour of the even richer, who in turn continue the traditions they inherited from their ancestors: traditions rooted in the availability of cheap labour and the non-existence of labour-saving devices. Butlers, cooks, and live-in housemaids signal that one can afford the wage bill and the accommodations of the staff. But for those who can’t quite afford the servants, the watchword seems to be social insulation — like the dining room at the opposite end of the corridor from the kitchen.
The millionaire’s home cinema, in an auditorium of its own, is the middle class TV in the living room, bloated into an experience that insulates its owner from the necessity of rubbing shoulders with members of the public in the cinema. Likewise, the bedroom with en-suite bathroom insulates the occupants from the need to traipse down a corridor through their dwelling and possibly queue at the bathroom door in the middle of the night.
Types of domestic space come and go and sometimes change social and practical function.
The coal cellar is effectively dead in this era of decarbonization and clean energy, as is the chimney stack. Servants’ quarters are a fading memory to all but the 0.1% who focus on imitating the status-signaling behavior of royalty, although they may be repurposed as self-contained apartments for peripheral residents, granny flats or teenager basements. The dining room and the chef’s kitchen are becoming leisure pursuits — although, as humans are very attached to their eating habits, they may take far longer to fade or mutate than the telephone nook in the hallway or the out-house at the end of the back yard.
Likewise, outdoor climate change and indoor climate control are changing our relationship with the window. Windows used to be as large as possible, because daylight lighting was vastly superior to candlelight or oil-lamp. But windows as generally poor insulators, both of sound and heat, and indoor lighting has become vastly more energy efficient in recent years. Shrinking windows and improving insulation (while relying on designed-in ventilation and climate control) drive improvements in the energy efficiency of dwellings and seem to militate against the glass bay and big sash windows of yesteryear.
Charles Stross, “Social architecture and the house of tomorrow”, Charlie’s Diary, 2019-04-29.
July 3, 2022
QotD: The US media when Donald Trump “happened”
But then Donald Trump happened, as my students would’ve written. Though it’s only a few years in the past, we’ve already forgotten just how much The Media loved Bernie Sanders when the Republican nomination was still in doubt. Trump, of course, made The Media lose their shit so egregiously that what they did to W. looked like the happy ending to an Oriental massage, but virtually nobody was cheerleading for Hillary qua Hillary. It took the specter of The Donald as president to get them all on the same page.
Which brings us to now. The Democratic Party can read a poli-sci textbook. They know how difficult it is to beat an incumbent president in a good economy. Hell, it’s almost impossible to beat an incumbent president in a bad economy — see 2004 and 2012. It takes a major systemic shock to turf out an incumbent in the modern era — a catastrophe on the magnitude of a serious third party challenge (Ross Perot in ’92), or the incumbent being Jimmy Carter. The poli-sci textbooks say that the Dems’ only hope is to run the closest thing to the Antimatter Donald Trump they can find. That is to say: the blandest, SWPL-iest Goodwhite on their roster.
Alas for them, The Media will be having none of that. Trump somehow triggers them even more than he did in 2016 — don’t ask me how; it violates several important laws of thermodynamics — so they’re going all-in on goofballs like AOC and her “Squad.” The Media loves “the Squad,” and since The Media have convinced themselves that theirs is the whip hand, they’re ordering us to love “the Squad” too. To which Trump replies with a version of “lol get fucked,” and since “you’re free to leave this country if you hate it so much” seems forehead-slappingly obvious to anyone without a journalism degree, Trump’s poll numbers rise. Which prompts another stern lecture from The Media, which receives another “lol get fucked,” and around and around and around we go …
But here’s the thing: The battle for the whip is a battle royale. There are more than just two combatants. The Party still thinks it’s in charge. The Media, with 2008, 2012, and 2016 in its pocket, think they’re in charge. Nobody bothered to ask “the Squad,” though, and that’s the truly terrifying thing: “The Squad” thinks they’re in charge, and they might actually be right.
We’ve already got Congress voting to condemn Trump’s tweets. Set aside how brain-bogglingly infantile that is — and how petty and retarded it appears to the American public. Consider just how badly Nancy Pelosi et al, aka The Party, had to screw up to find themselves in this situation.
Severian, “Which Hand Holds the Whip?”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-07-17.
July 1, 2022
QotD: The CBC doesn’t want to do economic journalism
Stephen F. Gordon, Twitter, 2019-05-06.
June 18, 2022
QotD: Celebrities “came up out of the lagoon and helped themselves to all the culture they could find. They just ate everything.”
Well, actually, I’m asking.
Are celebrities one of the reasons our culture is now so chaotic and unstable?
There is a strong case for “yes”.
For starters, celebrities have many flaws.
They can be self centered, as when Madonna was asked to celebrate Aretha Franklin. She referenced herself more than 50 times, and Ms. Franklin 4 times.
They can be naive, as when Gal Gadot lead a sing-along with fellow celebrities from the comfort and protection of their beautiful homes. She now agrees this was “in poor taste”.
Celebrities are not durable. That’s our our fault. We raise them up and we strike them down. And because we have the attention span of a French monarch, their moment in the spot light is fleeting. But it means our relationship with them is often fleeting.
Celebrities are vulnerable. Being a celebrity is incredibly perilous. Living in the very thin air up there, no mortal should wish for this. So celebrities suffer. They have break downs. They slide into drug dependency and bad relationships. At this point it is hard for them to be exemplars. Unless of course we are struggling too.
But here’s the key reason to treat celebrities as a culture problem.
In the course of the 20th century, celebrities ate their way through Western society, consuming or discrediting any and every elite that dared compete with them.
In this period, people still cared about scientists and other experts. They saw editors, publishers, judges, and professors as figures of authority. They admired and sought to emulate people of exalted social standing. They looked to religious leaders to address the big issues of the day. Artists, a few of them, were consulted. Designers, some of them, were gods.
This is mostly gone. Celebrities brought them low. It’s not clear that they meant to. It’s more likely that the simply won the popularity contest of contemporary culture.
We could choose between (nearly) dead white males, cranky, pipe smoking, vest wearing, utterly pompous creatures who would occasionally stoop to correct us. Or we could go with the effortlessly charismatic, blindingly beautiful, funny, endearing, eager-to-please people. I mean just look at the people in the “selfie” above. You can’t help but be wowed. Game, set and match to the movie star.
Celebrities remind me of the Rem Koolhaas library in Seattle.
This never fails to make me think of a mechanical monster that’s just crawled out of Seattle’s Elliot Bay and climbed the hill looking for lunch.
That’s what celebrities did. They came up out of the lagoon and helped themselves to all the culture they could find. They just ate everything.
It started with children’s books. They had to write em. Then it was lines of perfume and clothing. They had to design em. Then of course it was politics. How could we possibly do without em? Most of the people running for office in the US are now strikingly attractive. Some of them could actually be part-time models. This is the celebrity effect.
But here’s the other reason that the celebrity influence might be a cause of our instability. It is that they have colonized our young. There are lots of ways of making this argument, but I think “exhibit A” is probably TikTok. This platform matters because it mints celebrity. And that matters because a fifteen year old typically believes he or she matters in exact proportion to his or her fame.
Grant McCracken, “Culture Problem: celebrities”, Future Watch: an anthropological pov, 2022-03-17.
June 3, 2022
Proof of how far public trust in legacy media has fallen
At The Last Ditch, Tom finds the social media coverage of the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard trial unimpressive, but notes that many people are consciously choosing to get their “news” this way rather than depend on the offerings of the legacy media:
Celebrity gossip is not my thing. This case has been particularly unedifying. In a rational world, people would now pay less attention to the opinions of play actors, having seen what shallow, narcissistic souls (and I speak as a devoted theatre person who admires their professional skills) they often are.
What has been interesting about the trial is the MSM vs Social Media aspect of it. Wounded journos bemoan the fact that people have followed the trial – not through the lens of their analysis and opinion – but via such odd channels as TikTok. I understand their point of view. They are professionals and would like people to trust them. However, they just don’t seem to understand the role they played in losing that trust. They would do better to work hard to win it back, rather than insult the customers they’ve so clearly lost. The intense social media interest in a defamation trial shows the demand for coverage is there. Perhaps they should begin to think about how best to meet it? No-one (as the Remain campaign has still not learned) was ever insulted or abused into agreement. It’s just bad advocacy.
I have watched a couple of the videos of which they complain out of curiosity. They consisted of people I had never heard of pointing fingers and raising eyebrows in the corner of a screen showing video from the court. Every so often they’d point downwards to a “subscribe” button. Having practised law myself, I was just as unimpressed as the journalists with this approach to court reporting. Unlike the journalists, I recognised that their customers’ preference for it is a profound critique of the MSM. Just how much trust have you lost, dear journalists, that people trust these clowns more?
May 28, 2022
Morality is Dead. Hollywood Killed It.
Foundation for Economic Education
Published 27 May 2022What’s with all the nihilistic, amoral, dark anti-hero leads in movies and shows? Are we supposed to treat horrible characters as pinnacles of human behavior now?
The bleak content that’s crept its way mainstream over the last 10 years should concern us all. The stories we tell matter, for they influence what we believe and what values we adopt.
Fortunately, a renewed appreciation for natural rights and individualism could be the antidote to the immense darkness that’s blanketed American culture as of late. That’s what we’ll get down to on this feature episode of Out of Frame.
______________________________
FOLLOW/SUPPORT US:Support Out of Frame on Patreon or SubscribeStar:
https://www.patreon.com/OutofFrameShow
https://www.subscribestar.com/outoffr…Join our Discord: https://discord.gg/RKc4AcGQ9k
Sign up for our mailing list and never miss an episode again:
https://fee.org/oof-newsletterCheck out our podcast, Out of Frame: Behind the Scenes: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiS5…
Follow us EVERYWHERE!
https://linktr.ee/outofframefee
______________________________
CREDITS:
Written by Sean W. Malone
Produced by Sean W. Malone
Edited by Michael Ozias
Asst. Edited by Abby Richardson
May 19, 2022
QotD: “Rules of engagement” for home intruder drills
Lying silently in wait in the dark for someone to shoot is practically a recipe for starring in a Claude Werner blog post. Your house is not a free-fire zone, and you are not laying ambushes for Charlie on the Ho Chi Minh trail.
Even if it is a bad guy and not a family member, pet, or drunk neighbor, ensconcing oneself in a safe position, dialing 911, and loudly announcing that you have a gun and have called the cops is likely to save money for carpet cleaning bills and legal fees.
A friend quipped “What, and no advice to drag the body inside?”, which was funny, but … y’know what? I got to thinking about that, and this is even worse advice than that.
“Jes’ drag ’em inna house” is something that most non-dumb people who have watched some TV police procedurals can suss out for themselves as bad advice. It trips the BS detectors of all but the most inept.
But this? This sounds like plausible advice because it sounds like how “bad guy in the house” scenarios play out in Hollywood. The bad guy is never a tweaker who’s after a watch and some jewelry and who bolts when they realize the homeowner is there and armed. (It’s also never the homeowner’s husband home a day early from a business trip.) It’s always some elite killer team or serial murderer who’s there specifically to get the homeowner. And why wouldn’t you want to hide and ambush those guys?
Tamara Keel, “Rules of Engagement”, View From The Porch, 2019-03-27.
May 17, 2022
Mary Whitehouse, “The avenging angel of Middle England”
At First Things, Jonathon Van Maren considers the legacy of Mary Whitehouse, the often mocked champion of public decency and crusader against pornography and blasphemy in the media from the mid-60s onwards:
I was surprised to find few public domain images of Mary Whitehouse available, so here is a selection of thumbnails (hopefully this won’t violate any copyright restrictions)
We have reached the point where our post-Christian elites, having safely enshrined the sexual revolution in law, can afford the luxury of occasionally admitting that their opponents were right. Exhibit A is the new BBC documentary Banned! The Mary Whitehouse Story, which details the life of Great Britain’s most infamous morality campaigner. Beginning with a crusade to keep smut and blasphemy off TV in 1964, Whitehouse rallied hundreds of thousands of women (and ordinary Britons) to her campaigns against “the permissive society”, culminating in her war against the porn industry. Alas, she lost most of her battles — but her warnings proved prophetic.
Mary Whitehouse was born in Warwickshire in 1910. She first started organizing in the 1960s because she — and millions of other mothers — did not like what her children were seeing on TV. A committed traditional Christian, she watched with dismay as the country she loved began to change around her. The metropolitan elites she faced off with thought she was “a provincial Birmingham housewife”. They didn’t underestimate her for long. She hosted her first mass meeting in 1964, and her organizing skills soon highlighted the subterranean power of Britain’s women. Whitehouse tapped into the gardening associations, the mothers’ unions, and other grassroots community organizations filled with folks who cared deeply about their children and the moral fabric of their nation. She brought them together, and when she spoke, it was with the voices of legions of little people. Her nickname summed it up: “The avenging angel of Middle England”.
Whitehouse’s first major campaign was to “Clean Up TV”, and her parliamentary petition to that end garnered around 500,000 signatures. In 1971, Whitehouse began organizing against sex ed in schools, triggered by an “educational” video she saw that was filled with pornographic scenes. Whitehouse was accused of hysteria — but Banned! features a pornographer admitting that, by using sex ed, “we gradually pushed back the barriers”, much as Whitehouse warned they would. Now that they’ve won, they can admit they were lying.
Whitehouse and others appalled by attempts to corrupt their children were accused of being “horrified by sex”. In reality, they were horrified by the version of sex presented by sex educators — in much the same way an art lover would be appalled to see vandals approaching a great masterpiece with cans of spray-paint and lewd laughter. Progressives never understood this, and consequently Whitehouse has been almost entirely defined by what she fought against rather than what she fought for.
Whitehouse’s lobbying resulted in several pieces of legislation, including the 1981 Indecent Displays Act, which sought to restrain sex shops and the display of porn, as well as the 1984 Video Recordings Act, intended to limit the sale of extreme video content. Unfortunately, these acts were rendered moot by the internet. But her greatest achievement was the 1978 Protection of Children Act, which criminalized child pornography. It seems remarkable that such a law did not already exist, but in the ’70s the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) was operating openly in Britain; it was supported by some British elites who believed that sex with children was the natural next step in sexual liberation.
May 14, 2022
Nostalgia for the Middle Ages?
In Wrong Side of History, Ed West considers the apparent rising interest in Europe’s Middle Ages and Renaissance in popular culture:
A social media heretic faces trial
The genre has been aided by developments in cinematic technology, allowing the sort of special effects that made such productions in the 1980s and 90s somewhat ridiculous. But there may be deeper cultural significance to this medieval revival, and it is one that evokes a strange discomfort in many people. Because, while the academic field of medieval studies has become a branch of progressive theology, medievalism as expressed through popular culture feels much more conservative, and to some minds, even fascistic. At the very least, it is “Right-coded”.
This discomfort often flares up whenever a new film or series attempts to capture our imagination, voiced in comment pieces warning us that they might be popular for the wrong reasons, among unsavoury elements.
This is what happened with Viking epic The Northman, despite director Robert Eggar’s impeccably progressive politics. “The Northman‘s 10th-century society appears to be uniformly white and firmly divided along patriarchal lines,” The Guardian warned: “Men do the ruling and killing; women do the scheming and baby-making. Its hero, played by Alexander Skarsgård, is not a million miles from the ‘macho stereotype’ Eggers complained of – a brawny warrior who settles most disputes with a sword and without a shirt. Skarsgård’s love interest, played by Anya Taylor-Joy, could be the far-right male’s dream woman: beautiful, fair-haired, loyal to her man and committed to bearing his offspring. Even before the film’s release, far-right voices were giving their approval on the anonymous message board site 4chan.”
Wow, expressing approval of a beautiful, fair-haired woman who wants to settle down and have your children? Better call Prevent!
According to a piece in the Economist, the new fixation with the Middle Ages dates to the September 11 attacks, when “the American far right … developed a fascination with the Middle Ages and the Renaissance — in particular, with the idea of the West as a united civilisation that was fending off a challenge from the East …
“The embrace of the medieval extends from the alt-right online forum culture that has exploded in the last few years to stodgier old-school racists. Helmeted crusaders cry out the Latin war-cry ‘Deus vult!’ from memes circulated on Reddit and 4Chan. Images of Donald Trump, clad in mail with a cross embroidered on his chest, abound. Anti-Islam journals and websites name themselves after the Frankish king Charles Martel, who fought Muslim armies in the 8th century, or the (slightly post-medieval) Ottoman defeat at Vienna.”
This concern is real enough that I’ve noticed a trend for medieval historians to introduce their books with what might be best described as health warnings, lest they be enjoyed in the wrong way. Neil Price’s The Children of Ash and Elm, for instance, comes with a declaration of values in the introduction:
Over the centuries, a great many people have eagerly pressed the Vikings into (im)moral service, and others continue to do so… I strongly believe that any meaningful twenty-first-century engagement with the Vikings must acknowledge the often deeply problematic ways in which their memory is activated in the present …
The Viking world this book explorers was a strongly multi-cultural and multi-ethnic place, with all this implies in terms of population movement, interaction (in every sense of the word, including the most intimate), and the relative tolerance required. This extended far back into Northern prehistory. There was never any such thing as a “pure Nordic” bloodline, and the people of the time would have been baffled by the very notion. We use “Vikings” as a consciously problematic label for the majority population of Scandinavia, but they also shared their immediate world with others – in particular, the semi-nomadic Sami people. Their respective settlement histories stretch so deeply into the Stone Age past as to make any modern discussion of “who came first” absurd. Scandinavia had also welcomed immigrants for millennia before the Viking Age, and there is no doubt that a stroll through the market centres and trading places of the time would have been a vibrantly cosmopolitan experience.
Well, I won’t be recommending Mr Price’s book to my friends at 4Chan, I can tell you that.
May 13, 2022
Womp-womp – “Probably you didn’t watch the debate. Probably you read that last paragraph and thought, well, Wells has finally lost his mind, it had to happen eventually.”
Paul Wells watched the most recent Conservative leadership debate so none of the rest of us had to. Let’s take a bit of time to appreciate the sacrifice Mr. Wells made on our undeserving behalf:
Well, that was a national disgrace.
What is it about the last two years that made the Conservative Party of Canada’s Leadership Election Organizing Committee decide Canadians are yearning for shorter conversations about sillier questions?
Who came out of last week’s thoughtful debate at the Canada Strong and Free conference — at least, the questions and the format permitted thoughtfulness, although candidates varied in their ability or willingness to deliver it — thinking there weren’t enough questions about TV viewing habits?
Who surveyed the issue landscape that will face Justin Trudeau on Thursday and would face his successor — war in Europe, inflation, labour shortages, stark conflict between climate targets and natural-resource export imperatives, long-cheated and still-difficult Indigenous reconciliation, exiting from COVID — and thought, “Keep the answers short. We want time to hear them out on what’s on their playlists”?
As a mechanism for allowing Canadians to weigh the judgment of six people, one of whom might, after all, be the next prime minister, the evening was a write-off. We learned that Leslyn Lewis likes “Coltrane” and was eager not to be asked to name a second musician, that Jean Charest likes Charles Aznavour and doesn’t know how to pronounce Pat Metheny, that moderator Tom Clark isn’t sure how to pronounce Roman Baber, and that Charest and Scott Aitchison were reckless enough to trigger the dreaded sad-trombone sound effect for the sin of mentioning the prime minister of Canada by name during a political debate.
Probably you didn’t watch the debate. Probably you read that last paragraph and thought, well, Wells has finally lost his mind, it had to happen eventually. But no, this is a faithful record of … of … of whatever that was that just happened in Edmonton. Sorry, I’m stuck with the material. There is no way I could make this stuff up. If I were making something up, it would be funnier.
Clearly the organizers fell prey to two of the most fashionable current temptations in debate design: “Keep it snappy” and “Let’s get to know these candidates as people.” As though the decline of modern government were caused by excessive reflection and insufficient attention to our leaders’ public image.
May 11, 2022
QotD: The TV treadmill
“All this beautiful stuff we’re seeing is shot in the highest definition known to mankind, right?”
“Right. Nothing else looks like this. But it sells TVs. What you really want, is …” and he led us over to some other TVs that looked just as good. I wondered aloud whether the entire 8K product line existed just to make us more likely to heed the wisdom of the salesman and lay out some money for the 4K.
James Lileks, The Bleat, 2022-02-07.
April 25, 2022
“We live in such a degraded information environment that we can’t get to discussions of principle”
Chris Bray on the increasing inability or deliberate choice of most legacy media outlets to avoid presenting basic facts in favour of pitching a scenario with the preferred outcome prepackaged and largely predigested for the consumer to accept uncritically:
Over and over again, journalism doesn’t begin to accurately describe; consuming it, we don’t get to the starting line of a functioning political discourse, which is just knowing what’s happening, more or less. We’re buried in fakery, in representations of reality that have no connection to reality. […]
I wrote last week about the disappearance of basic information on the criminal justice system in Los Angeles County, where I live. We have an ongoing debate over our Woke DA’s policy choices — but the more I look at the debate, the more I’m sure it’s a debate about nothing, because the slogans used to represent the DA’s policy choices really don’t seem to begin to reflect the reality of the DA’s actual policy choices. The slogans look from here like cover words, chaff fired as a rhetorical countermeasure to cloud the air. I’ve been trying to get clear information from people in Los Angeles County government, which has been … interesting, so stay tuned on that question. But what are we debating if we’re exchanging our thoughts on the empty fakery the DA is deploying to prevent us from noticing what he’s doing?
Back in 2016, the vapid mayor of a tiny city in Los Angeles County boldly announced that she had banned Donald Trump from her community, ordering city staff to burn the witch. Journalists reported it straight: TRUMP BANNED FROM LOCAL CITY.
It was left to lawyers with a media presence to seriously examine all of the problems with the remarkable claim that a part-time small-town mayor owns a personal fiefdom and can ban people from it. A not-especially-gifted politician with ambitions for higher office made up some nonsense to get herself in the news, and it worked. But the news was about nothing, because she had no authority to do the thing she announced in the press release.
This is more than half of the news: Noise with nothing it, a press release from an idiot typed up by idiots. What debate over questions of principle can proceed on the foundation of an informational void? (“I’m for empty hole!” “Oh yeah, well I’m against empty hole!”)
We’re beginning to solve some big pieces of that problem with alternative media, which is why you’re hearing so much complaining about misinformation. “Our democracy,” that hilarious phrase that doesn’t mean what it says, relies on the screen of fakery. Nothing happens until we punch enough holes in that screen.
April 15, 2022
Volodymyr Zelensky has become a “pop cultural admixture of Churchill and an ’80s action hero”
In The Line, Andrew Potter explains how Ukrainian President Zelensky has shamed all the western leaders — like Trudeau — who have been long on rhetoric and short on action to support their claimed values:
“Volodymyr Zelensky Official portrait” by http://www.president.gov.ua/ is licensed under CC BY 4.0
When asked by journalists to explain his refusal to head for safety, Zelensky has made it clear that he has no wish to die, and that he fears for the lives of his loved ones (his wife and kids have since been moved to relative safety.) But, he added: “As for my life: I am the president of the country, and I simply do not have the right to it.” Sure, he could flee to preserve his own life. But, he has said, how would he explain his actions to his kids? As Zelensky sees it, he has no choice in the matter. His duty requires that he remain and lead his country in the fight; to do anything less would be dishonourable.
But while his Last Action Hero schtick has proven enormously popular with European and North American audiences, Zelensky’s refusal to leave Kyiv, and Ukraine’s insistence on fighting off the Russians instead of capitulation, has put our so-called leaders in a bit of a bind.
To begin with, Ukraine’s refusal to capitulate to Russian aggression has forced many governments into taking steps they almost certainly would have preferred to avoid — economic and political sanctions against Russia, costly shipments of arms and other aid, diplomatic side-choosing, rethinking of trade agreements, and so on. Ukraine’s defence is coming at a pretty high cost, and the final bill is far from being tallied.
But beyond the economic and political price that is being paid to support Ukraine, there is the extraordinary amount of cognitive dissonance Zelensky’s behaviour has generated amongst the leadership of the West. Honour? Duty? Sacrifice? What century does he think he’s living in?
For centuries, honour reflected the sorts of qualities that gentlemen were expected to possess: dignity, integrity, courage. But it is hard to even talk about honour now with a straight face. It brings to mind 19th-century aristocrats in wigs and hose, demanding satisfaction and challenging one another to a meeting over some best-forgotten offence. The old honour codes couldn’t survive the triumph of the values of liberal democracy and the arrival of what Francis Fukuyama famously called the End of History, where the willingness to risk one’s life for abstract ideas or principles has been replaced by voting and economic calculation in the public sphere and “the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands” in the private.
Today, the old notion of honour survives only in small and isolated precincts of (mostly) male society, places like the military and some sports, places where how you behave in front of your peers matters more than comfort, more than money, more than health, maybe even more than life itself. The rest of us have become versions of what Nietszche derided as “the last man” — creatures of liberalism who have no pride, take no risks, and desire only comfort and security.
April 12, 2022
Mark Steyn on the first round of the French Presidential election
It must seem uncanny to Americans that the French can hold a vote, count all the votes, and announce the results all within the same 24-hour window …
Say what you will about la République française but, unlike America, its election operations are not a rusted malodorous sewer of brazenly corrupt practices. So the election was held, the votes were counted in hours, and the official result was known by 1am Paris time. There are no unmarked vans motoring the Dordogne or the Pas de Calais in the dead of night bearing additional votes sufficient to the need.
That speaks well for any nation. Alas, not much else about yesterday does. The Top Three is as follows:
Emmanuel Macron 27.6 per cent; Marine Le Pen 23.41 per cent;
Jean-Luc Mélenchon 21.95 per cent.Mme Le Pen is designated by the BBC “far right” and M Mélenchon “hard left”. I am unclear whether, in Beeb parlance, it is worse to be “hard” than “far. But, be that as it may, they could at least cease applying the label “mainstream” to candidates who can’t crack five per cent, which is the threshold below which your election expenses are not covered by the French state.
On Friday’s Clubland Q&A I mentioned en passant that I’m all about the urgency: The west will die unless we change what we’re doing very fast. Yesterday was yet another of those election nights when the people turn but passing slow. Especially after the buzz about a Le Pen surge and a looming Macron humiliation, last night she didn’t have a spectacular breakthrough and he survived.
There will now be a fortnight to the run-off in which the forty per cent of French voters who cast their ballots for “hard left”, soft left, Green left and nutso left will be told that a vote for other than Macron is a vote against democracy itself. Mme Le Pen ran the blandest, most inoffensive campaign she has ever run, leaving it to the “even farther right” Éric Zemmour to do all the heavy lifting on la fenêtre d’Overton. And in the end all that got her was a couple of extra points in the first round.
We will see how well that approach withstands the onslaught already under way. The one man who could make a difference is the soi-disant “hard leftie”, M Mélenchon. His own surge attracted less attention in the last week or two, but it’s likely that, had not M Zemmour bungled his response to the war, the even-more-far rightist would have drawn enough votes from Mme Le Pen to enable Mélenchon to come through the middle and give France a run-off between a bloodless globalist and a full-bore Marxist.
In pocketbook terms, the gap between “hard left” and “far right” is now barely detectable: Mme Le Pen is pledging that no one under thirty will pay tax. There is surely plenty of overlap between the Mélenchon and Le Pen voters. Yet his priority was plain at last night’s speech, because he said it four times:
Il ne faut pas donner une seule voix à Mme Le Pen.
Not a single vote for Marine!
So even the hardcore class-warrior shrugs: Better the globalist you know …
