Category: TBT

TBT^16: Back to School with Richard Weaver

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The 2023-2024 school year commenced yesterday, which brings to mind this annual tradition of mine:  re-reading the introduction to Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences.

Unfortunately, I don’t always manage to dip back into this classic work every year, but I find that when I do, it helps to crystallize why it is I do what I do, and what is at stake.  I’m under no illusion—as some teachers are!—that I can “save the world” or any such messianic nonsense.  The crusading impulse that I possessed as a naïve young teacher is no longer there, beyond some vestigial bits of self-righteous fury that peak from behind the clouds of well-worn cynicism.

Still, we have much to be thankful for, even as the empire burns around us and the elites fiddle.  Life is sweet; the opportunity for an education is a privilege and joy.  I’m thankful to be a small part of that process.

With that, here is 25 August 2022’s “TBT^4: Back to School with Richard Weaver“:

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TBT^2: Preserving Old Varieties

The Portly Politico6 Comments

Recently, I had the opportunity to catch up with an old friend of mine from college.  He has turned the backyard of his cookie-cutter suburban house into a veritable Garden of Eden—or, at least, an impressive little homestead.  He’s managed to grow everything from blueberries to squash to melons and more, to the point that he can substantially impact his grocery bill—and that’s with three energetic sons!  The boys have already stripped the blueberry bushes clean.

He takes great joy in being able to feed his sons and his wife from his garden.  Sure, they still have to buy groceries, but they enjoy delicious, fresh fruits and vegetables throughout the year.  My friend also takes particular care to save seeds for future plantings, and has an impressive compost pile in a dark corner of the yard.  He tells me that about once a year he’ll dig to the bottom of the pile and find pure, black, nutrient-rich soil.

He even raises his own worms!  He tells me it’s incredibly easy to do, a “low effort, high reward” project that helps to keep his garden’s soil rich and aerated.  His young sons also love helping out in the garden, and the worms are a fun, crawly project for them all.  They even have a dill plant with monarch butterfly caterpillars, which he has had to cover with netting so the birds don’t gobble up the beautiful larvae.

It’s truly inspiring seeing this kind of backyard agriculture first-hand, and my friend’s dedication to preserving heirloom varieties while also feeding his family is impressive.  He gave me some corn kernels for planting, which I’ll save for next spring.

I did not arrive empty-handed, though.  The broccoli plants that I so disgracefully let wither managed to survive!  I had one, impressive, beautiful plant return.  Rather than gobbling it up, I let it flower.  The little buds we see on supermarket broccoli will, if left to grow, blossom into gorgeous yellow flowers.  Over time, seed pods will develop after the petals fall; those pods and their stems turn brittle, and eventually fall to the earth.  Either the second broccoli I planted made a comeback, too, or I have had a new plant rise up from fallen seeds.

Regardless, broccoli produce tons of seeds, and I was able to take my friend a bag full of them.  As for my plant, I’m going to let nature take its course and see what happens next.

Here’s to letting a thousand broccoli flowers bloom!

With that, here is 11 August 2022’s “TBT: Preserving Old Varieties“:

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TBT^4: Back to the Grind 202[3]

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All things must come to an end.  That includes sleeping in, taking naps, and being well-rested.

Yes, it’s sad, but true:  the endless freedom and fun of summer is over, at least for yours portly.  Today, I am back at work.

I’ve noted before how the return date for teachers seems to inch earlier and earlier into August.  Last year, we went back on 5 August 2022—a Friday.  That seemed almost intentionally spiteful on the part of my administration:  “nope, you’re not going to have one full week left with fun weekend plans; you need to sit through the employee handbook again.”

Now it’s 3 August 2023, a Thursday.  That seems even more spiteful.  Why not give us one last, full week?

Readers might say, “Hey, you’ve been off for eight weeks; why are you complaining?”  Or, alternatively, “Well, if the start of school is imminent, maybe you need to go back today.”

Wrong—wrong!  Classes do not resume until Wednesday, 16 August 2023, almost two weeks from today.  Four days next week are tied up with student registration.  So we’ll have three days of mind-numbingly bureaucratic meetings—during which I’m sure we’ll learn of some new, onerous burden that we teachers are to bear—followed by a bunch of kids buying textbooks.

But I must adopt a positive attitude.  While I am not thrilled to be going back to work, the routine will certainly do me some good.  I am beginning to understand why people die six months after retirement.  Sometimes, the free time can be overwhelming.

I mean, not for me, but I can see how it could be for some people.  We get so used to working nonstop, it’s hard to slow down.  Fortunately, yours portly enjoys his afternoon naptime as much as the next octogenarian.

I digress.  The school year does bring with a pleasant rhythm—and more music lessons.  July is the leanest month of the year for those, and while teaching twenty-ish lessons a week in addition to my normal course load is grueling, it brings in the bacon.

Of course, my skin flint readers (that’s you!) could also pitch in a few bucks each month (thanks to those of you who do!), but I know budgets are tight.  Why send $5 a month to a cool dude you know and love when you can spend it at some soulless corporation that wants to use your corpse for dog food?

Goodness!  That escalated quickly.  Can you tell I’m a tad irate?

With that, here is “TBT^2: Back to the Grind 2020“:

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TBT^2: Modern Art and Influence

The Portly Politico6 Comments

Doing these retrospective TBT posts reminds me of the cyclical nature of life.  Just like least year, we’re in the slow, lazy days of high summer, when the heat is so intense, a permanent haze hangs over the land.  There is something surreal about it being blindingly bright and languidly hazy at the same time.

I don’t have much more to write about modern art, although I got an eyeful of it at the Art Institute of Chicago.  Some modern art is quite striking and challenging, to be sure, but when I saw a canvas that was literally painted black, I groaned internally.  A former colleague of mine, an art teacher, always said of modern art, “well, somebody had the idea to do something, and did it, so it’s art” (I’m paraphrasing rather loosely there).

It’s one of those things that’s so stupid, it sounds profound.  Her argument was essentially that if you did something—even something asinine—first, you were creating art; you just weren’t born early enough to be the guy to paint a canvas solid black and offer up some lame justification for why it’s a study in how we perceive color.

I’m fairly certain that if I painted a canvas a solid color and donated it to the Art Institute of Chicago, they would not put it on display.  I understand that modern art seeks to “shock” viewers, but the only thing shocking about a black canvas is that it’s presented to the public in one of the finest of fine arts institutions in the country.

But I digress.  It’s all just wealthy idiots smelling their own farts.

With that, here is “TBT: Modern Art and Influence“:

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TBT^4: Phone it in Friday XI: Coronavirus Conundrum, Part IV: Liberty in the Age of The Virus

The Portly Politico2 Comments

Don’t be alarmed:  it’s Thursday.  I’ve “thrown back” to this classic edition of Phone it in Friday twice before, and even though The Age of The Virus is now over, it’s worth remembering the massive social and economic costs that came from the years of lockdowns.

The line from the Left now is, “oops, sorry, we overreacted, but we can let bygones be bygones, yeah?”  Forgiveness is important, but it’s also important to realize how self-righteous busybodies with an untrusting faith in “science” berated all of us into wearing diapers over our faces and putting kids in online classes for two years.

Masks don’t work.  If you can smell a tangy fart through an N95 mask, viruses can get through.  About the only sensible advice anyone received during The Age of The Virus was to wash our hands regularly.

Yet we turned our civil and medical liberties over to a handful of unelected “public health” bureaucrats based on the flimsiest of information.  Granted, those first “two weeks to flatten the curve” were scary, because we knew so little, but in hindsight, it looks like an attempt to see how much the American people would put up with before we revolted.  The answer, sadly, was quite a lot.

One other note:  I appreciate doctors for their training, though my faith in them has always been equivocal at best.  But the real problem seems to be nurses and public health officials.  The former is a profession that seems to attract its fair share of self-important nut jobs, and who hasn’t known a nurse who insists she knows better than the doctor?

The latter are people who couldn’t hack it as either a doctor or a nurse, so they got a relatively new degree (I first heard of people majoring in public health only about fifteen years ago) that somehow grants them enormous power to curtail individual liberties in the name of “public” health.

That’s a scary Pandora’s Box:  where do we draw the line?  I imagine there are all sorts of personally harmful but socially benign health choices that deviously creative public health officials could spin into activity that must be stopped in the name of “public health.”  Even when we knew that masks did nothing—I remember folks saying, “Well, the mask doesn’t protect you, but it protects other people,” which makes no sense at all—it was always couched in terms of helping other people.  It was the same way with The Vaccine—“if you don’t get this shot, you’re endangering others!”  Malarkey.

With that, here is “TBT^2: Phone it in Friday XI: Coronavirus Conundrum, Part IV: Liberty in the Age of The Virus“:

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TBT^2: Big News: TPP is Going to the Dogs

The Portly Politico8 Comments

It’s hard to believe, but I got my old dog, Murphy, about two years ago.  She was eight at the time, and now is ten.

She’s a stubborn old girl, but I love her.  She is a chunky lady, and enjoys spending her time gnawing on a rawhide and hanging out with me.

Murphy’s recent bloodwork shows that she is in good health, although she and I both need to lose a few pounds.  Otherwise, she is my sweet chocolate chunklet (as I call her), and she’s been a good first dog.

With that, here is 21 July 2022’s “TBT: Big News: TPP is Going to the Dogs“:

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TBT^65,536: Happy Birthday, America!

The Portly Politico8 Comments

On Tuesday, American celebrated its 247th birthday.  We’re now just three years away from the “Bisesquicentennial,” or whatever the word is for “250th.”  That’s going to be a big one, for sure.

Since last year’s Independence Day post, things seem about the same.  The culture war rages on, but everything feels like it’s in a weird sort of stasis.  Yes, Trump has been indicted on (pardon the expression) trumped up charges.  Yes, Tucker got the boot from Fox News.  But even those events—which are major turning points—don’t feel all that consequential.  I mean, they are, but in a world where we’re constantly passing through one looking glass after another, crossing one Rubicon after the other, even the momentous has become mundane.

It probably doesn’t help that we all know the Trump indictments are a political witch hunt and are utterly meaningless in any legal sense, and that we all knew Fox News was going to defenestrate The Tuck sooner or later.  That doesn’t diminish the importance of those events, but they’re not exactly shocking, either.  Persecution of popular and effective figures on the Right is now just part of the new normal.

Such is the danger of the banality of evil—we come to suffer them, while still sufferable, because the alternative could be worse.  Jefferson wrote as much in the Declaration of Independence (emphasis added):

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

Of course, these evils are far less sufferable than the tyranny the American colonists faced in 1776—and which they were already fighting against, starting with Lexington and Concord in April 1775.  Indeed, the colonists were pushing back as early as 1765 and the Stamp Act Crisis; Lexington and Concord were just when Americans were shooting at the British (they started shooting at us in 1770 at the Boston Massacre).

Today, we have hundreds of Americans held indefinitely without trial because they moseyed through the Capitol Building with a police escort serving as tour guides.  Never mind that Leftists and myriad other groups have “stormed” the Capitol Building on multiple occasions, also disrupting the government’s business; they’re the beautiful people, right?

Perhaps it would do us well to reflect upon the Spirit of 1776.

With that, here is “TBT^256: Happy Birthday, America!“:

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TBT^2: Fighting Back Against Critical Race Theory

The Portly Politico6 Comments

Apologies for the delay, folks; I had this post scheduled for PM instead of AM. Oops! —TPP

For all the insufferableness of “Pride” and its gyrating acolytes, America’s original pagan deity was, and will always be, race.  There will come a time—and it’s already manifesting—when Americans will turn on LGBTQIA2+etc. movements with a vengeance.  At a certain point, there’s only so much pederasty a people can take.

But race is a far more intractable problem.  It is the dark (no pun intended) elder god come back to wreak havoc on Americans.  In exchange for cheap cotton and cloth in the 1800s, we now pay a thousand invisible taxes in tribute to appease this insatiable monster.

Gavin McInnes argues that we’re living in a “black theocracy,” at least in a cultural sense.  The gatekeepers of popular culture can’t seem to resist recasting traditionally European characters—like Anne Boleyn!—as ebony goddesses who somehow held twenty-first-century sensibilities in Tudor England.  We’ve all seen the endless television commercials that seem suspiciously absent of anyone with a drop of European ancestry.

Contrast that with Night of the Living Dead (1968).  The main character in that film, Ben, is played by Duane Jones, a black actor and university professor.  George Romero cast Jones for the part not because he was trying to “make history” (although in 1968 it actually was rare and controversial to cast a black man as the lead in a film), but because Jones was simply the best man for the job.  Jones himself backs up this assertion—it was never about race; he’s just a great actor.

I remember seeing Night of the Living Dead sometime in high school.  It was one of the most powerful films I’d seen up to that point in my life—terrifying, yes, but also dramatic, with such a disastrous (in a good way) ending.  I was on the edge of my seat.  Not once did I think, “oh, man, they cast a black dude for diversity points.”  I’m sure I recognized that Jones was black, but it did nothing to enhance or detract from the story—he simply was; in this case, he was Ben  He was perfect for that role.

Interesting and original black characters are great.  Black Panther (2018) was way overrated, but it wasn’t terrible; the late Chadwick Boseman was impressive in the title role.  Miles Morales in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse (2018) was a clever way to introduce an “ethnic” variant on Spider-Man that didn’t simply steal an existing intellectual property.  Who else but Sidney Poitier could pull off Mark Thackeray in To Sir, with Love (1967)?

The examples are endless.  It’s possible to write compelling black characters without turning (to use the most recent outrage) Ariel into a washed-out black girl with eyes on either side of her head.

But who am I?  I’m an evil, white, cisgender man.  Let this articulate black gentleman explain it:

I’ll stop here before I end up in the breadline.

With that, here is 23 June 2022’s “TBT: Fighting Back Against Critical Race Theory“:

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TBT^2: Reclaim the Rainbow

The Portly Politico4 Comments

In our age of identity politics, where every individual’s personal peccadilloes are deemed a political statement and therefore there is, ironically, no division between the individual and the state, we are forced to celebrate “pride,” one of the Seven Deadly Sins.  Apparently, partaking in casual buggery with one’s demiqueer otherkin is cause for public celebrations and live sex acts performed before children.

That said, all the “Pride Month” foolishness seems more toned down this year.  There’s no doubt it’s still there, sashaying its glittery sinfulness through corporate America, but the rainbow is more muted.  Readers have probably heard how Target shuffled its Pride displays in Southern locations away from the fronts of stores after backlash from kid’s clothing with wiener-tucking abilities.  Anecdotally, while strolling through PetSmart, I saw one tiny display of “Pride” dog toys in the far back portion of the store.  Modern dog owners are already kind of weirdos (gulp!) who seem like they’d be into any alternative lifestyle, so even here in the South, it seems like PetSmart could get away with more flamboyant displays.  Instead, they’re sticking to what they do best—selling overpriced pet supplies.

The backlash seems to be from the increasingly overt efforts to force “Pride” onto children.  When it was just adults being forced to watch two men make out on television, or vague proclamations that “love is love,” we might wince, but it was hard to get over the (disingenuous and flawed) argument that “it’s just consenting adults; we’re just raising awareness.”

Now that there’s the clear grooming of children going on—an active effort to indoctrinate and seduce children into highly inappropriate and unnatural sexual relationships with adults—people are finally waking up.  The quest for homosexual “rights” was nothing but a Trojan condom horse to prey upon the vulnerable and the innocent.

Thirty years ago, it was, “we just want to come out of the shadows.”

Twenty years ago, it was, “we just want to get married, too.”

Ten years ago, it was, “we want to become another gender.”

Now it’s “we want to force your child to become a gender, then we want to have sex with it.”

Sin surely sends us down a slippery slope.

With that, here is “TBT: Reclaim the Rainbow“:

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TBT: Happy Birthday, Murphy!

The Portly Politico7 Comments

My sweet, bossy, chunky, lazy dog, Murphy, turns ten today!  She is a bull terrier, a notoriously stubborn yet loyal breed.  Here’s a picture of her from a few days ago:

Murphy 2023

I adopted Murphy in 2021 from the Bull Terrier Rescue Mission after her original owner turned her over to a North Carolina animal shelter.  What a terrible thing to be abandoned after eight years!

But his callous decision was Murph’s gain—I hope!—and mine.  We immediately took to each other, and while she loves many people, she’s always most excited when she sees me.

She is a good dog, and I consider myself fortunate to have her as my first.  Other than her innate orneriness, extreme stubbornness, and tireless neediness, she’s perfect.  Those might all sounds like criticisms, but they’re just part of what make her so special.

I love you, Murphy!

With that, here is 15 June 2022’s “Happy Birthday, Murphy!“:

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