Tag: race relations

Disorder

The Portly Politico11 Comments

It’s been a scary week in the United States as the nation’s cities engage in an orgy of violence and looting in reaction to the death of George Floyd.  From all accounts, it seems that Floyd’s death was unwarranted, but my experience with these situations is that more evidence quietly appears after the fact that breaks down the “gentle giant” narrative (see also: Ahmed Arbury, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, etc., etc., etc.).

Regardless, the reaction from blacks and white Leftists is completely reprehensible and evil.  One man’s (allegedly) unjustified death at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer does not justify a week of pillaging and death.

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Lazy Sunday LII: Democratic Candidates, Part I

The Portly Politico18 Comments

The last week saw some major momentum for Joe Biden, as he smashed through big chunks of the Super Tuesday primaries.  Then his most logical competitors, one by one, dropped out, no doubt after receiving some threatening phone calls from the DNC.  That’s narrowed the field, essentially, to Biden and Bernie, with Congressbabe Tulsi Gabbard out there with some Somoan delegates and a dream of a debate appearance.

What seemed so unlikely even ten days ago—but was the conventional wisdom last summer—now seems plausible:  Biden, possibly struggling with dementia, is on track to become the Democratic nominee for the presidency.  There’s still a chance for a brokered convention, which would no-doubt devolve into chaos as angry Bernie Bros watched their doddering hero stripped of any chance at the nomination, but the safe bet at this point seems to be a narrow Biden win.

It’s a good reminder that these primaries can be incredibly unpredictable, but also that the establishment choice usually wins.  I remember the 2012 Republican primaries, in which, week after week, one of the second-tier candidates would take the lead, only to fall behind or get knocked out of the race.  Romney was the presumed front-runner, even though he was second in most of the polls, but none of the other candidates could stay out in the lead for long.  It finally came down to Rick Santorum to offer some kind of alternative to Romney, and he, too, fell.

It’s why so many of us were dismayed when the media was trumpeting JEB! Bush as the Republican front-runner in early 2015.  I was Trump-skeptical in those days (how wrong I was), but the thought of another Bush, even a capable one (JEB! was a great governor in Florida), getting the nomination was disheartening.  Fortunately, Trump upended everything like a bull in a gold-plated hotel china shop.

Trump’s nomination now seems like an historical aberration—one for which I am extremely thankful.  I’m hoping it’s the start of a new trend of populist firebrands (at least on the Republican side), but the circling of the DNC wagons around Biden suggests that the elites are still running the show, at least on that side of the political spectrum.  Republicans do seem to listen to their base a bit more—sometimes.

Regardless, I thought it would be interesting to look back at some posts regarding the Democratic primaries to see some of the figures that rose and fell during the process.  I’ll continue this review of recent history next Sunday.

  • “Box Wine Aunties for Williamson” – a social media savvy, New Age-y guru, Marianne Williamson was all the talk in the early days of the Democratic debates.  That was during the point when the party, chastened by claims of a rigged primary season in 2016, was letting everyone and their brother get on television if they had enough small-ball donations.  Thus, Williamson became an Internet sensation.  In reading back through that post, my analysis relies a great deal on symbolism, which is increasingly important in an age in which memes and images convey complex meanings.  Buuuuut the moon-bat dropped out.
  • “The Collapse of the Obama Coalition?” – The identity-politics-obsessed Left now bemoans the fact that the Democratic primaries are down to two old white dudes.  It turns out there are many Democrats that don’t care about identity politics, but in 2019 the candidate I most feared was Senator Kamala Harris, the concubine-turned-prosecutor-turned-pandering-politico who seemed to check off all the intersectional boxes.  She was a woman, black(ish), exotic—like Obama.  If anyone could revive the frayed Obama coalition of the “marginalized,” it would be her.  Of course, her inauthentic pandering to blacks was so transparent, they rejected her out-of-hand.  Turns out black folks don’t like a half-Jamaican prosecutor who pretends to know about African-American culture and who spent her career locking them up.
  • “Iowa Caucuses: Disaster on the Prairie” – The Democrats love to sell themselves as do-gooding technocrats who “know how to get things done” (I’m pretty sure Elizabeth Warren has said that, with all the earnestness of every girl who cried over making a 98 on a quiz, constantly over the past year).  Yet they botched the much-watched Iowa caucuses in spectacular fashion, using suspect technology with close ties to some of the candidates to calculate the results.  Sometimes good old pencil and paper really are the way to go.  Of course, that muddying of the waters screwed up the momentum for both the Bernie and the Buttigieg camps, and may have had downstream effects on both campaigns.

That’s it for this (unintentionally long) Lazy Sunday.  Part II of this retrospective will be next week.

Happy Sunday!

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

MLK Day 2020

The Portly Politico9 Comments

Here’s to another Monday off from work (for those of us blessed to work in fields that give out random days off liberally).  Martin Luther King, Jr. Day is one of those holidays that feels like an excuse to have a little taste of the recently-departed Christmas holiday.  Everyone is still dragging in January, coming off the high of Christmas and New Year’s.  I find the cold intellectually stimulating, but most of us are spending our time comfortably indoors, basking in central heating.  It all makes for seasonal sluggishness.

Last year’s MLK Day post sought to take advantage of the day’s cozy laziness with some suggested reading.  Contra the whole “make it a day ON” virtue-signalers, it really is the perfect day to crank up the heat, brew some coffee, and enjoy reading with some fried eggs (over medium, please) and toast (and, for us Southerners, a hearty helping of grits).  It’s one of the last taste of the hygge before the warm weather creeps back in (which occurs sometime in late February or early March here in South Carolina).

That’s all by way of lengthy preamble to today’s post.  I thought this year it might be worth looking at the holiday itself, and the man behind it.  The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was, indeed, a remarkable man, and one who did a great deal to advance the cause of liberty, more equally enjoyed.  But while we’re not allowed to say so—MLK has been elevated to something like sainthood in the American Pantheon—he was an imperfect vessel in many ways.

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A Little Derb’ll Do Ya: Haydn’s “Derbyshire Marches”

The Portly Politico7 Comments

My Saturday morning ritual involves “sleeping in” until about 8:30 AM, brewing some coffee, and listening to Radio Derb, John Derbyshire’s weekly podcast for VDare.com.  Derb goes back for years—he used to write for National Review, before they kicked him out for writing “The Talk: Nonblack Version” for Taki’s Magazine.

I first found out about him and his controversial essay from NR, back when I was a devout print subscriber, amid the heady days when campus protests were novel enough to be terrifying.  NR ran a little blurb about Williams College cancelling a scheduled talk from Derb, and I’ve been listening to his podcast—an entertaining mix of news, science, political and cultural commentary, and updates on the president of Turkmenistan—ever since.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: The Tedium of (Teaching) Slavery

The Portly Politico1 Comment

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.

A major part of American history was, of course, slavery.  As I typed that sentence, I nearly wrote “the unfortunate legacy of slavery,” though we’re still living that, just not in the way the race-baiters and social justice warriors claim.

But phrases like “the unfortunate legacy of slavery” have become incredibly cliched.  It and similar phrases (“slavery is our great national sin”) act as magic talismans, incantations that, when invoked, protect the speaker (presumably) from the ultimate curse, the label of “racist.”

Of course, slavery was wrong, and slavery is immoral.  It was our great national sin (paid for, as Lincoln pointed out in his Second Inaugural Address, with the blood “drawn by the sword” in the American Civil War).  It continues to have an “unfortunate legacy,” in that race-baiting charlatans continue to blame it for virtually every pathology in black American culture.

Dang it… I screwed up the incantation with that last bit.  I’d better kiss my job goodbye right now.

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

Phone it in Friday IV: Conferencing

The Portly Politico5 Comments

It’s been a very busy week, and with a slew of lessons and some open mic nighting yesterday—plus an early start this morning—I was unable to get a post written last night to go live this morning.  Further, I attended a teachers’ conference in a city about 90 minutes from my school, so I was unable to sneak in any surreptitious blogging amid sessions.

For tomorrow’s SubscribeStar Saturday post, I’m going to write more about one of the conference sessions I attended, which was about the importance of faculty culture to the functioning of an independent school.  I think it holds within it some important lessons about culture more broadly, and is worth discussing in more detail.

For this evening, though, my time is quite limited, so I thought I would share some general reflections on today’s conference.  I’m scooting off to a very cold pressbox for the evening, from which I’ll be announcing a playoff football game, and getting some hastily-rehearsed singers out onto the field for a brief Veterans’ Day presentation.  When the head of your Board of Directors wants something, he gets it.

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Hump Day Hoax

The Portly Politico18 Comments

It’s that point in the semester where everything is coming to a head all at once, so today’s post is about 12-14 hours late to the party.  Indeed, it was only about fifteen minutes before writing this post that I stumbled upon an article with a local flavor.

It seems the mayor of my adopted hometown, Lamar, South Carolina, believes that a racial hate crime was committed against her.  Her vehicle was covered in a sticky yellow substance that resembled spray paint, she claimed.

After a brief investigation—it probably involved running a finger across the hood of the car—the Darlington County sheriff’s deputy determined the mystery substance was—GASP!—pollen.

You can read the full story here: http://www.gopusa.com/hate-crime-against-darnell-mcpherson-s-c-mayor-turns-out-to-be-pollen/

I’ve met Lamar’s mayor—my mayor—before, and Mayor McPherson is a pleasant and welcoming lady.  I met her when I went to town hall to setup garbage and sewage service at my home.

Lamar is a very small town—the population, according to the 2010 census, was slightly less than 1000—and it still functions on a timetable that is even slower than the rest of the South.  In true, old-school Southern tradition, local government offices shut down on Wednesday (as do some local businesses, if I’m not mistaken), and many folks get their mail at the Post Office, rather than a mailbox (my mail wasn’t delivered for about two weeks, until a neighbor told me I had to move the box across the street, otherwise our rural route carrier wasn’t going to stop).

Needless to say, it runs on a small staff, so Mayor McPherson was in there with the town’s two administrative assistants, processing water bills and the like.  I appreciated her dedication and friendliness, and she encouraged me to get involved in the community.

As such, it’s disappointing to see this kind of hysteria from her.  From the tone of the article, she sounds like she sincerely believes some misdeed was done against her—although I’m probably being overly generous.  The Jussie Smollett hoax was clearly too ludicrous to be true; maybe the Case of the Hooded Pollinator is the same situation.