Month: May 2020

TBT: Bologna

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When you’ve been blogging daily for over 500 days, you sometimes get writer’s block—or just don’t have anything interesting to say.  It’s rare, as there’s almost always something happening that ticks me off.  But as I’ve noted, in The Age of The Virus, it’s a more common occurrence.

Think about it:  politics right now boils down to the media misreporting President Trump’s statements about The Virus, and to the question “should we reopen or stay closed” (the correct answer:  reopen)?  There are no major cultural events.  In general, it’s a bit of a blogging malaise.

A wise woman, fellow blogger Bette Cox, once advised me to write when I had something to say, not just merely for the purpose of churning out content or to meet an arbitrary daily counter.  She probably has a point, but in my youthful impudence, I’ve ignored her and have slammed out post after post, some good, some terrible, and a few truly great.

This week’s TBT is one of those posts that grew out of a need to publish something to keep my WordPress daily streak counter going (there are days where I feel enslaved to that arbitrary computer counter, which is really just me being enslaved to my own expectations).  It’s a test of a writer, though, to see if one can turn straw into gold—or, in this case, bologna into filet mignon.

You be the judge—did my ode to America’s lunch meat rise to the level of blog-worthiness (keeping in mind that the bar for blogging is pretty low)?  Or is it just cold cuts twisting in the wind?

Regardless, here is December 2019’s “Bologna“:

The long national nightmare is over.  No, not the impeachment farce; it’s the end of the semester!  Grades are in the books, work is done, and teachers and students are heading out for two weeks of glorious Christmas Break.

It’s been an eventful week.  As the House was fulminating about Trump’s alleged “crimes,” I was playing a gig with our community jazz band.  I play second alto sax with the group, but I asked to sing a song on this concert.

It’s long been a dream of mine to sing with a full jazz swing band behind me, and that dream came true Wednesday evening.  I sang Andy Williams’s “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” and was a nervous wreck (if you’ve seen the lyrics to that tune, you’ll understand why—what a mouthful!).  But I got through it admirably enough, even with a low-grade sinus infection.

The gig was during the dinner hour at a large church in town.  The first alto player indicated how hungry he was, and wondered if he could get a plate.  I told him (unhelpfully) that I’d eaten a bologna sandwich in my car before coming in (which sounds like a joke and/or the most mundane, pathetic detail in the world, but it was true).  All the old guys in the band—it’s a swing band, so there are a lot of them—expressed their enthusiasm for bologna sandwiches, and asked how it was prepared:  did I use mustard?  “Nope, Duke’s mayonnaise, with cheese.”  Murmurs of approval followed.

I am a great lover of bologna.  My brothers still express frustration that, as a child, I would often opine that on Sunday nights, I would rather go home and eat a bologna sandwich than go out to eat (eating out was a rarity in those days)—thus undermining their cause to eat a deliciously fatty meal at, say, Shoney’s (rest in peace).  It’s probably terrible for you—all the reject parts of the Big Three sandwich meat animals (beef, pork, and chicken) rolled into one beautiful, red plastic-lined disc of processed flavor (one of my students called it a “hot dog pancake”)—but with a slice of American cheese and some mustard or mayonnaise, it’s delicious.

My students hate bologna, and tend to express disgust if they discover I’ve been eating it.  I can only assume that, living in more prosperous times, they’re used to eating lunches full of kale and couscous, and deli-cut meat from a high-end grocer’s counter.  Material wealth has robbed them of the opportunity to enjoy an American staple.

My older bandmates’ reactions were telling.  They were all quite wistful about their childhood bologna sandwiches, probably back in those high-trust times when children who looked and talked like each other and lived near their extended families ran around barefoot in fields and neighborhoods until the sun went down.  Most of them look to be in better shape than me, and they grew up eating processed reject meat.

Being on a tight budget, bologna is a godsend.  It’s cheap (around $1.50 for twelve slices of Gwaltney at the local Piggly Wiggly) and filling.  It’s great fried with an egg for breakfast, or slathered in Duke’s on white bread at lunch.

All quite different from the congressional bologna served up earlier this week.  Talk about a bunch of overstuffed, fake trash.  I bet Nancy Pelosi would faint if someone asked her to eat a bologna sandwich.  GEOTUS Trump—a lover of fast food, and fit as a fiddle—would chow down with workmen on a construction site, no questions asked.

America should be for the bologna eaters, God bless ’em.  It’s the meat of the workingman.  Kale only ever brought anyone misery.

Big Deal

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A big story in media this week is Joe Rogan, host of the popular podcast The Joe Rogan Experience, has signed an exclusive deal with Spotify that could be worth over $100 million.

Joe Rogan’s podcast has been around since 2009, and features long (two hours or more) interviews with personalities from every background and occupation.  The long-ranging, free-flowing conversations (really, they’re more conversations than traditional interviews) make for great listening, and I suspect part of the key to Rogan’s success is that he offers something for everyone.  For example, I ignore most of Rogan’s content, but I’ll never miss an interview he does with any of the various figures on the Right, from Ben Shapiro to Gavin McInnes (persona non grata from Rogan’s show these days, unfortunately).

McInnes describes Rogan as a man with a “blue-collar brain,” but who is generally open to learning.  That is, he’s rather meat-headed and unsophisticated in his analysis, but he’s willing to discuss anything with anyone (Flat Earthers, for example, are regulars on his show).  His only real sticking point, until the SJWs targeted him, was marijuana.  He lost it on Steven Crowder for merely suggesting that copious consumption of marijuana isn’t completely benign.  Yikes!

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Nintendo Labo Piano

The Portly Politico6 Comments

Apologies for the late post today.  I spent the day with my niece and nephews (all under five) playing—and working on this piano:

My family was and is a Nintendo Family.  Kids today don’t appreciate the Console Wars, but in the late 80s/early 90s, you pretty much had to pick a side—Nintendo or Sega.  You had to make the choice because, outside of some rare exceptions, your family couldn’t afford both.  Even if you could, it wasn’t cost-effective:  a Nintendo cartridge alone would run maybe $40 or $50 in 1990.

So we fell on the Nintendo side (our cool next door neighbors, from Wisconsin, were Team Nintendo, too).  Our nerdier-but-still-cool-to-us neighbors across the street were a Sega family.  Crossing Ridgemont Drive was like visiting another country that was sort of like your own, but different enough to be noticeable, and to stir up fond feelings for your own tribe—like visiting Canada.

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Thalassocracy

The Portly Politico4 Comments

The Internet is a funny thing.  Anyone that’s ever gone down a Wikipedia hole realizes that, pretty soon, that one thing you needed to look up can turn into a two-hour deep dive into barely-related topics.

It’s also weird.  There’s so much content—so much that we can’t really quantify it—you’re bound to stumble upon something interesting.  It is, perhaps, a sad commentary of the human condition that, given unlimited access to information and knowledge, we use the Internet primarily for mundane purposes, and frequent the same dozen websites everyday.

Of course, that’s also the problem of abundance.  People can’t handle that many choices, and there are only so many spare hours to cram in unorganized knowledge.

That’s how I came to stumble upon the topic of today’s post, thalassocracy, or “rule by the sea.”  I recently purchased a very nerdy space exploration strategy game called Stellaris (itself a recommendation from a member of Milo’s Telegram chat).  Stellaris has a steep learning curve, so it’s a game that basically requires the player to do homework to figure out what they’re doing (my race of peaceful, space-faring platypus people has surely suffered from my ignorance).

That homework assignment (no, seriously, it’s a fun game!) sent me down a rabbit hole on the game’s wiki, and one of the in-game events involves a group called the Bemat Thalassocracy.  I’d never heard the term before, and searched out its meaning.  That brought me to a website called Friesian, which is apparently a site promoting the philosophy of Jakob Friederich Fries, an eighteenth-century philosopher opposed to that ponderous windbag Hegel.  The website dates back to 1996, when it began as a community college website.

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Lazy Sunday LXII: The South

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Poet Archibald MacLeish wrote that the American “West is a country in the mind, and so eternal.”  The American South may be the same, but it’s more—it’s a country in the soul.  It’s the culture, the faith, the land, the people—these elements truly make the South “the South.”

The South has been changing for a long time, but those old virtues are still present here, even if they are fading.  The wickedness of modernity probes its tentacles into every crevice of every society, and the South is no different.  We’ve managed to capitalize on the material benefits of modernity without sacrificing our souls entirely—yet—but the unrealized dream of the Reconstruction Era Radical Republicans to remake Southern society into the image of the North is rapidly becoming reality.

That said, the South and its more adventurous cousin, the West, have managed to hold onto the important things in life, namely faith, family, and work.  In the United States, the vast belt from my native South Carolina in the east, driving westward to Texas, and up through at least Nebraska (that’s for you, NEO), still maintain sanity in a nation that is increasingly unhinged with an addiction to postmodern progressivism.

Not to say that Northerners don’t love their families or God, but the governing ethos of Yankeedom is materialist efficiency über alles.  Even the terse attitudes and abrupt styles of conversation suggest little room for even the most cursory pleasantries.  The propensity with which Northerners sling around f-bombs is one of the more dramatic reminders of what cultural differences exist between America’s two great regions even to this day (although, alas, I hear more and more Southerners engaging in sloppy manners and foul language).

But I digress.  I’ve made enough sweeping generalizations for one Lazy Sunday.  You can read more of my sweeping generalizations about vast swaths of the country in these essays, all about fair Dixie:

  • “Southern Conservatism: John Randolph of Roanoke” – I somehow had never learned about John Randolph of Roanoke (outside of a reference in Richard Weaver’s Southern Essays) until teaching History of Conservative Thought during Summer 2019.  This post was all about the feisty—some might say ornery—Virginia statesmen who constantly strove to keep Virginia strong and the federal government weak.
  • “Reblog: Conan the Southern?” – This post looked at a better post from The Abbeville Institute about Texan Robert E. Howard, the creator of Conan the Barbarian.  Howard’s tough Texas upbringing and Jacksonian derring-do inspired the ferocious barbarian hero, a self-made man in a world of evil wizards and sinister forces.
  • “The Hispanicization of Rural America” – After driving through some parts of western South Carolina and noticing there were only Hispanics, I wrote this post, lamenting the replacement of white and black Southerners.  Here’s the key paragraph:

    I don’t like seeing my people—the people of South Carolina—being displaced in their communities by foreign invaders who speak a different language, who don’t care about our Constitution, and who don’t want to adopt our hard-won culture of liberty.  It took from 1215 to 1776 to get from the Magna Carta to the Declaration of Independence; do we really want to throw away 561 years of Anglo-Saxon common law and careful cultural-political development in the name of multiculturalism?

  • “The Invasion and Alienation of the South” – The Abbeville Institute is the gift that keeps on giving.  This post discussed an essay called “A Stranger in a Strange Land,” about a young Louisiana woman’s sense of total alienation in an ostensibly Southern city, Dallas.  She also details the leftward shift, politically, of Southern cities, which I have observed in nearby Charlotte, North Carolina—increasingly a colony of Ohio.
  • “The Cultural Consequences of the American Civil War” – An instant-classic in the TPP archives, this post originated as a LONG comment on “What Do You Think?,” a post on NEO’s Anglophilic blog Nebraska Energy Observer.  I make some bold claims about the good that was lost following the Civil War—like liberty.

Bless your heart,

TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

SubscribeStar Saturday: The Conservative Revolution

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Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.  For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.  NEW TIER: $3 a month gets one edition of Sunday Doodles every month!

Friday’s post, “The Cultural Consequences of the American Civil War,” has enjoyed more traffic than my usual posts thanks to a.) the controversial topic of the American Civil War (gasp!—someone’s not denouncing the South!) and b.) and Dr. Rachel Fulton Brown graciously sharing the post far and wide.  Thanks, Doc!

It’s put me in a bit of a historical mood.  In history, the important points—the Truth—is often in the details, but I’ve always appreciated the contemplation of the philosophical implications of historical events.  Thus, my mini-essay on the American Civil War focused more on the cultural and political costs of the war than the nitty-gritty details.

The costs were, of course, considerable.  Historians of a conservative bent will sometimes refer to “reconstitutions” in United States history, with the Progressive Era and its immediate offspring, the New Deal, often cited as a major “reconstitution.”  The 1964 Civil Rights Act, which elevated anti-racism and social justice above the freedom of association, was another such reconstitution.

Similarly, the American Civil War, as I detailed yesterday, resulted in a reconstitution of the Constitution, as it served to centralize more power in the hands of the federal government, curtailing States’ rights in the process.

An observant reader will note that each of these “reconstitutions” reflected some revolutionary fervor or upheaval:  the horror of war, the agitation of Progressive reformers, the privations of the Depression, and the struggle for equal rights.  They almost all resulted in an increase in federal power, too, often to intrusive degrees.  In each instance, the ratchet turned towards more centralization and fewer liberties overall.

But the American Revolution—which made the Constitution possible—is nearly unique in the annals of modern history—much less American history—in that it was a conservative revolution.  That is, it was a revolution that sought to conserve—or, perhaps more accurately, to preserve—a set of traditions and privileges, rather than to tear them up, root and branch.

To read the rest of this post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.

The Cultural Consequences of the American Civil War

The Portly Politico11 Comments

On Wednesday, 13 May 2020, blogger Audre Myers posted a piece at Nebraska Energy Observer entitled “What Do You Think?”  The piece prompted readers to answer the question “Would we be the America we are if the Civil War had never been fought?”

Below is my response, which you can also view here.  The TL;DR summary of my answer is that, while it was good that the Union was preserved and that slavery was abolished, it came with some heavy fees—the expansion of federal power (and the loss of liberty inverse to federal expansion), the erosion of States’ rights, and—most importantly—the triumph of Yankee progressivism over Southern traditionalism.

The temptation is always to reduce the American Civil War to being ONLY about slavery.  Slavery was, obviously, a huge part of the Southern economy and culture, and motivated a great deal of Southern politics at the national level.  But slavery was not the be-all, end-all of the “Lost Cause.”  There were legitimate constitutional questions at play.  Indeed, an open question—one the American Civil War closed by force of arms—was that, having opted into the Constitution, could States later opt out?  John Randolph of Roanoke, among others, seemed to believe this question was legitimate, and such an exit was allowed—even acknowledged.

Of course, the slavery narrative serves modern progressive ends.  It allows for throwing the baby—States’ rights—out with the bathwater.  Suddenly, States’ rights becomes “code,” in the progressive mind, for justifying slavery or segregation.  Yes, States’ rights was invoked to support wicked things.  Nevertheless, it is fully constitutional—just ask the Tenth Amendment.

Nullification and secession were dangerous doctrines, but the loss of them also meant that the federal government could expand with far fewer limits on its power.  The States lost the nuclear option, so to speak, of bucking unconstitutional acts (although, to be fair, States can challenge such acts more peacefully through lawsuits against the federal government—even if those cases are heard in federal courts).  Seeing as we’re living in times when a peaceful separation between fundamentally opposed ideologies may be the most attractive option for the future of our nation, it’s worth reviewing the history of these ideas.

Well, that’s enough preamble.  After two days of self-indulgent, girly navel-gazing, it’s time for some substance:

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TBT: 250th Day Update

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Yesterday marked the 500th consecutive post on The Portly Politico—a substantial milestone, I will argue, at the risk of tooting my own proverbial horn.  Making it to that mark—when I only intended to write for the thirty-one days of January 2019—has me looking back at the course the blog has taken in those 500 days.

As such, today I wanted to look back at the now-halfway mark—to the “250th Day Update“—for TBT.  It’s another exercise in girly self-indulgence.  I promise, the blog will have some more manly substance for you tomorrow.

One reward of blogging is that it’s interesting to look back and see what has changed—and what has stayed the same.  This post came near the beginning of the academic year, that point where teachers (and most students) are still full of optimism and vigor.  Appropriately, this look back is coming at the end of that long, unusually arduous academic year.

It is interesting to note that it’s been 251 days since an Internet outage from my incredibly unreliable ISP.  Let’s hope I didn’t just jinx it.

Well, enough of that navel-gazing.  Let’s look back to the navel-gazing of days passed with “250th Day Update“:

Today’s post marks 250 days of consecutive posting.  That’s a major milestone in my ongoing project to blog daily, which I last commemorated in a substantial way at Day 101.  With this post, I’m a mere 115 days away from reaching a year of daily posts.  So close, and yet—so far.

I tried to find a word that meant “250 days” in the way that bicentennial means “200 years,” or sesquicentennial means “150 years” (from those words, I reason that 250 years would be a “sesquibicentennial”).  My search proved fruitless, though I did learn that 250 is the number of men that rebelled against Moses in Numbers 26:10 (thank you, Wikipedia).

It’s a slow season with politics; outside of the trade war and the Democratic clown show, there’s not a great deal happening.  That’s why I wrote about Saturn on Wednesday: it was the most interesting topic I could find.  Now that Labor Day has come and gone, and with the first of the primaries mere months away, the political news should start heating up.

It’s partially my own fault.  Rather than listening to talk radio and keeping up with the news, I’ve been reading for pleasure, and listening to a book on tape.  I’ll be writing a couple of reviews soon based on that reading, one of Spotted Toad’s book on education, the other on Milo’s book Middle Rages, which is a collection of essays about the SJWs’ struggle to control Medieval Studies (and, thereby, the heart and soul of our interpretation of Western Civilization).

Eastern South and North Carolina endured Hurricane Dorian yesterday, which largely—and thankfully—brushed the coast with some buffeting winds and persistent rains, but it was no worse than a blustery, rain-swept day any other time of the year, perhaps with a bit more melodrama.  The Bahamas weren’t so lucky; here, the worst was a day out of school.  With my Internet down—yet again—I was somewhat stymied in my quest to avoid grading, but I eventually got around to grading a large stack of AP United States History quizzes that I’d been delaying—just in time for a new stack of forty-nine fresh quizzes to come in today.  Yikes!

This weekend my real hometown (not my adopted one) hosts Aiken’s Makin’, a large craft fair.  After a late night of prep school football action—I’ll be debuting behind the “golden mic” (we spray-painted a microphone gold in homage to Rush Limbaugh) as announcer for the varsity team tonight, moving up from, though continuing with, my duties as the junior varsity announcer—I’ll be heading to Aiken to enjoy the quaint woodworking and funnel cakes.

So, all in all, life is going well—an important reminder as we opine about civil war and social instability.  I’m finally—finally—over my lengthy respiratory malady, and seem capable of both singing and teaching properly again.  If I can ever escape the ever-multiplying football schedule, I’ll book some gigs soon.

That’s enough navel-gazing for now.  Thank you for all of your support these last 250 days; here’s to (at least!) another 115!

—TPP

500

The Portly Politico11 Comments

Well, here we are:  500 days of consecutive posts.  What a whirlwind—the laughter, the tears, the celebrity guest appearances.  We’ve sure had some fun.

500 is one of those beautiful, fat, round numbers that everyone loves—it’s got charisma, gravitas.  Five (5) is a strong number, not like the effeminate four (4), or that weaselly three (3), always so mischievous and ubiquitous.  Nor is five a rotund country preacher—that’s eight (8)—or a couple of street toughs, leaning wolf-like at the corner, eyes peeled for their next mark (7 and 9).  Five isn’t a child, like two (2), and while he’s proud, he’s not haughty like that diva, one (1)—always standing alone.

Couple Five with two juicy goose eggs, and you’ve got a number with some real heft, some real authority.  It’s an auspicious number, one that suggest great longevity and antiquity, yet with some spring left in its step.  500 years is a long time, but, historically speaking, it’s just the beginning (well, maybe—we’ll see if America makes it to 500; we’re not even halfway there and we’re struggling).

When you do an image search for the number 500, you come up with a lot of crummy Italian cars—“Fix It Again, Tony.”  While searching, I also recalled that nonlinear romantic comedy, 500 Days of Summer, which spawned a decade of movies about “quirky” hipster chicks, thus ruining the dating landscape forever (suddenly, being flighty and unreliable became virtues, and none of the would-be hipsters looked like Zooey Deschanel).  Curiously, the Indianapolis, Daytona, or even my local Darlington 500s didn’t show up, at least not in the image search.

So here we are.  But where is here?  Let’s take a look at the State of the Blog:

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To the Moon! Part III: Moon Mining

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In this blog’s long and storied history, I’ve been a consistent advocate of space exploration, with a particular interest in lunar colonization.  An enduring frustration of this blog is that the United States has satiated its thirst for exploration with the numbing effects of consumer technologies.  Yes, we can FaceTime one another from halfway around the globe and can set our thermostats remotely so the house is cooled down before we arrive—all wonderful conveniences—but is that truly the apex of human endeavor?  Is being comfortable really the point of it all?

There was a time when we dreamed of exploring the stars, or at least of visiting our nearest celestial neighbors.  But that drive for adventure dissipated—or, perhaps, exploded—sometime in the 1980s.  The Age of The Virus further highlights our society’s obsession with safety, an obsession anathema to the derring-do necessary to explore the stars.

To paraphrase Bill Whittle, we’ll know we’re serious about space exploration when our graveyards are filled with astronauts.

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