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SubscribeStar Saturday: Washington, D.C. Trip Part VI: Arlington, Holocaust Museum, Home

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After a hairy night of elevator-related shenanigans, everyone was pretty ready to hit the road.  That said, we still had a long hike through Arlington National Cemetery, followed by a trip to the Holocaust Museum, before heading home to South Carolina.

Sadly, it appears I lost the photographs I took at Arlington National Cemetery, as well as the powerful World War II Memorial from the previous night.  It’s a shame, because it’s a humbling and breathtaking place.  The cemetery is massive, with graves everywhere; even so, it is running out of space.

We chanced upon the changing of the guard ceremony, where the guards stand vigil over the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.  Our tour group was a bit late hiking up the hill to the Tomb, but our students managed to position themselves in such a way as to witness the guards perform the ceremony.

Even with our typically rambunctious group and dozens of other school groups, it was very quiet.  After two long days of trying to explain to them why these places were sacred, the awe and reverence of Arlington did more to quiet their ever-running mouths more than any of my self-righteous jeremiads ever could.

Following the quiet, contemplative morning at Arlington, we had a quick lunch at a mall food court, then headed to the Holocaust Museum—a sobering final coda to our trip.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Chicago

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Here at The Portly Politico, I like to roleplay as some kind of Jeffersonian country squire, overseeing my little homestead while contemplating the grape harvest.  As much as I love living in a small, country town, yours portly is not immune to the allure of the big city.

Naturally, I have little desire to live in one, and most certainly not the one that is the topic of today’s post.  However, there is a vibrancy and energy to large cities that is intoxicating, especially for those of an artistic bent.  Cities can be cesspools of crime, homelessness, and progressive politics, but they also pulse with an electric creativity and a sense of hustle—everyone is working hard to survive and create in a sea of humanity.

Granted, I don’t want to live in an overpriced shoebox, isolated by the sheer size of that very sea.  Some people thrive in that environment, while others should probably live on forty acres in the woods somewhere.  The rest of us are somewhere in the middle.  Most Americans don’t want to live like lab rats in an urban playground.

All that aside, cities are cool—the seats of civilization, as Milo once argued.  Despite its crime-ridden reputation, I think Chicago, Illinois makes for a good illustration of cities as the centers of art and architecture—of civilization.  After all, what is a civilization but the expression of its cultural achievements?  Few cities exemplify achievements in architecture more than that great epicenter of nineteenth-century America, Chicago.

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Lazy Sunday CCX: MAGAWeek2023 Posts

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Well, another MAGAWeek is in the books.  It was a star-spangled affair, with biographies of four important historical figures (one of recent vintage, the others from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries).  $5 and up subscribers also got three bonus editions of Sunday Doodles (here, here, and here).

Of course, to get access to my four detailed biographies—as well as all past MAGAWeek posts—it’s just $1 a month.  One measly buck!  As of the time of this writing, there are 429 posts on my SubscribeStar page, over half of which are available for just $1 a month.  At $5 a month, it comes out to one cent per post as of right now, and I’m adding new content every single week (with rare exceptions).

Even at just $1 a month, and assume (conservatively) that you only get access to half of the posts (about 215 posts), it works out to just $0.0047 per post—less than a half-cent per post!

At $12 a year—the price of a single, one-topping large pizza—you can a.) support your favorite chubby content creator and b.) gain access to an ever-growing library of long-form essays.  For $60 a year—what most of us pay for Internet access for one month—you get everything—doodles (which often contain additional commentary), bonus doodles, bonus posts, exclusive election coverage posts, etc., etc.

Thanks to those who have donated and subscribed in the past.  Please help spread the word!

Happy Sunday!

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

SubscribeStar Saturday: Reject a Dictator’s Peace

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Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s State of the Union Address for 1941 has come down to us as “The Four Freedoms” speech.  In it, Roosevelt envisioned a world in which all people would enjoy freedom of worship, freedom of speech, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.

In the context of the Second World War, which had already been raging in Europe for two years (and much longer in Asia), these freedoms may have seemed like a distant dream for anyone outside of the United States.  Indeed, many Americans took the attitude (one with which I am broadly sympathetic) that Europe’s problems were for Europeans to handle, not Americans.  After all, we’d gotten embroiled in the First World War—ostensibly because “the world must be made safe for democracy,” as President Woodrow Wilson put it in his address to Congress requesting war with Germany in 1917—only to see authoritarian regimes rise throughout Europe and Asia.  Why should we get involved in another mess on a continent an ocean away?

Even with Hitler and Stalin sweeping through Poland, and with the former on the cusp of invading France, Americans were reluctant to get involved in another of Europe’s conflicts.  Roosevelt knew that Americans had little appetite for war, but he made a compelling point in his speech:

No realistic American can expect from a dictator’s peace international generosity, or return of true independence, or world disarmament, or freedom of expression, or freedom of religion–or even good business.

Such a peace would bring no security for us or for our neighbors. “Those, who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

As a nation, we may take pride in the fact that we are softhearted; but we cannot afford to be soft-headed.

We must always be wary of those who with sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal preach the “ism” of appeasement.

In other words, a Europe—not to mention Africa and Asia—in which Hitler reigned supreme would provide no real peace for Americans.  It would be “a dictator’s peace,” one in which Americans, while ostensibly independent, would constantly have to negotiate—and even bend the knee—to a powerful Old World hegemon.  Our own peace and liberties would be forever contingent on Hitler’s mercurial whims.

So it is that the United States today once again faces those who yearn for “a dictator’s peace.”  The enemy is not abroad—not North Korea, not Russia, not even China (although the Chinese are certainly a threat)—but at home.  Our national government, many of our State governments, our universities, our museums, our most important cultural and economic institutions:  all have been infiltrated and co-opted by an enemy within our gates, the enemy of Cultural Marxism, or “progressivism.”

A regular, albeit whispered, refrain in 2020 was, “maybe if Biden wins, we’ll finally have peace.”  These were words uttered by conservatives as much as progressives.  The relentless attacks on President Trump—easily the best President of the twenty-first century so far—were wearying.  Apparently, many of his supporters grew “tired of winning,” as candidate Trump cheekily predicted.  Even when people knew they were shams—like the two ludicrous impeachments—they secretly wished for some return to normalcy, which presented itself in the form of a geriatric octogenarian with a penchant for sniffing little girls’ hair.

Mind you, most of the people wanting “peace”—no more cities burned down by Antifa and BLM, they hoped—weren’t enduring even a fraction of what President Trump endured—still endures!—on a daily basis.  Mostly, their feathers were ruffled by a few cheeky Tweets and a great deal of hostile press coverage.  Oh, my, what a hardship—we have to hear Rachel Maddow squawk boyishly about how bad we Republicans are!  The terror!  Never mind that as their feathers ruffled, they feathered their retirement accounts with 20%-plus annual returns for their 401(k)s.

Now, here we are facing down 2024.  Markets are frothy at best.  Inflation is still through the roof, albeit it cooling slightly.  Grown men are increasingly emboldened—in no small part by our institutions and our own “President”—to espouse sexual relationships with minors.  Young people are mutilating themselves permanently in a vain quest for meaning.

Yet, the same voices yearning for “peace” are back at it, cooing over anyone but the one man who is equipped—and hardened—to take on the system.  Indeed, I was distraught to read this analysis from one of this site’s major contributors:

I don’t think I could vote for [Trump] were he to win the nomination. Another four years of the crap we endured in his first term? Count me out. “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” (Matt 6:34) 2025 will have its own evils and I want those evils to be faced with a singular determination and not as an item amongst many items that are causing charges to be brought against a sitting president. You know they’ll never stop – they will hound him to the grave and then put up a neon hate sign where a headstone should be.

It is precisely because “they’ll never stop” that we must support President Trump.  Anything else is a dictator’s peace, which we must reject.

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MAGAWeek2023: James Madison

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This week is MAGAWeek2023, my celebration of the people and ideas that MADE AMERICA GREAT!  Starting Monday, 3 July 2023, this year’s MAGAWeek2023 posts will be SubscribeStar exclusives.  If you want to read the full posts, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for as little as $1 a month.  You’ll also get access to exclusive content every Saturday.

Another shamefully neglected figure in the annals of MAGAWeek is that of James Madison, the fourth President of the United States and the so-called “Father of the Constitution.”  While Madison has graced the digital pages of this blog a number of times, he has yet to receive the biographical treatment—until today.

James Madison is one of the most fascinating of our Founding Fathers.  He was among the youngest of the major Founders—Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, et. al.—but his contributions to political and constitutional theory were profound.  Indeed, his contributions to the Constitution were so significant, some political writers refer to our constitutional order as the “Madisonian order” or the “Madisonian system.”

It was Madison, for example, who argued that the sheer, physical size of the United States (which, at that time, extended to the Mississippi River) would preserve national unity, rather than undermine it.  That insight was completely contrary to all of the wisdom of the ancient and early modern worlds, both of which argued—with a great deal of evidence—that a republican form of government could only exist on a very small scale.  Eventually, the theory went, the rise of factions would rend a republic of any substantial size apart.

Madison argued the opposite:  because of the nation’s massive size, it would dilute factions, preventing regional parties from forming.  Through a system of federalism, in which each State would maintain significant local rights while enjoying representation in the national government, the States could make important, State-or-locality-specific decisions locally, while sharing the strength of a unified nation in foreign affairs and national defense.

Well, he was half right, anyway.  National parties did emerge, and they enjoyed broad support across all regions.  But regionalism set in regardless:  the High Federalists in New England during the War of 1812 (which they derisively called “Mr. Madison’s War”); the Democrats in the South from the 1850s until at least the 1970s; the rural-urban divide between the modern Republican and Democratic Parties today; etc.  That regionalism tended to be strongest, though, when the national government was overstepping its boundaries, or acting to the detriment of one region for the benefit of others (a key complaint of Southerners leading up to the American Civil War, for example, was that the Whig regime of extremely high tariffs was explicitly a national policy that benefited one region [New England and the Upper Midwest] at the expense of another [the South]).

But who was James Madison, this short (at 5′ 4″, Madison is our shortest president), shy nerd living in his parents’ home when he wrote the Virginia Plan for the Constitutional Convention?

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MAGAWeek2023: Benjamin Franklin

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This week is MAGAWeek2023, my celebration of the people and ideas that MADE AMERICA GREAT!  Starting Monday, 3 July 2023, this year’s MAGAWeek2023 posts will be SubscribeStar exclusives.  If you want to read the full posts, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for as little as $1 a month.  You’ll also get access to exclusive content every Saturday.

In looking through the extensive TPP archives, I’ve apparently only written the name “Benjamin Franklin” in a single post—9 May 2020’s SubscribeStar Saturday: Liberty and Safety.  Much like Franklin’s classic canard about trading liberty for safety and losing both, the lack of Franklin’s presence on this website is shameful.

That’s especially true considering that Benjamin Franklin is one of my personal heroes.  He was a skilled writer, editor, printer, inventor, politician, diplomat, wit, international playboy (seriously), statesman, and citizen.  He was the king of the nerds, at a time when nerds were celebrated not because of their weird Japanese body pillow fetishes, but because they were strong, smart, witty, and curious.

No single man’s life better exemplifies eighteenth-century colonial America.  Born in 1706 and passing in 1790, Franklin’s long life extended nearly the full breadth of that eventful century—eventful in large part because of him!

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MAGAWeek2023: George Whitefield

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This week is MAGAWeek2023, my celebration of the men, women, and ideas that MADE AMERICA GREAT!  Starting Monday, 3 July 2023, this year’s MAGAWeek2023 posts will be SubscribeStar exclusives.  If you want to read the full posts, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for as little as $1 a month.  You’ll also get access to exclusive content every Saturday.

America is a Christian nation.  At least, it was.  The Christian roots of the nation run deep, not just to the Founding (if we take “The Founding” to be in or around 1776), but far back into the colonial period.  Most readers will know the well-worn story of the Pilgrims—a group of Puritan Separatists who, while not seeking religious freedom for others, at least sought it for their own peculiar version of Christianity—and their arrival in Massachusetts in 1620 (the Southerner in me will be quick to note that, despite the Yankee supremacist narrative, permanent English settlement began in 1607 with the founding of Jamestown in Virginia—the South; the earlier, albeit failed, attempt to settle Roanoke was also in the South, in what is now North Carolina, in 1585).

But there is more to the history of Christianity in America than the Puritans—much more.  The colonies of British North America struggled through some fairly irreligious times (colonial Americans were much heavier drinkers than we are), and while denominations abounded—Tidewater Anglicans, Scotch-Irish Presbyterians and Catholics, New England Puritans, and Mid-Atlantic sects of various stripes—the fervor of American religiosity was at a low ebb in the late 1600s.  Economic prosperity following difficult years in the 1670s—King Philip’s War in New England, Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia—led many to move away from the church.  In Puritan New England, where voting rights and citizenship required church membership (and church membership was not as easy to obtain as it is today; it required proof of one’s “election”), the Puritan-descended Congregationalist churches began offering “half-elect” membership, as there were so few citizens who could prove their “election.”

Into this void stepped the revivalists of the First Great Awakening.  In the 1730s and 1740s (give or take a decade or two), a series of religious revivals swept throughout England and British North America (the colonies).  These men—Charles Wesley, John Wesley, Jonathan Edwards, and George Whitefield, among others) took difficult, strenuous tours throughout England and the colonies to deliver the Gospel in a powerful, compelling way.

Their impact was immense:  preaching salvation and a personal relationship with Christ, these men united the profusion of denominations and theologies in the colonies with the universal message of Christ’s Gospel.  Granted, denominational and theological differences persisted—indeed, they proliferated, with John Wesley’s Methodism among the plethora of new denominations—but the grand paradox of the First Great Awakening is that, even with that denominational diversity, Americans across the colonies developed a unified identity as Christians.  Protestant Christians, to be sure, and of many stripes.  But that tolerance of denominational diversity, coupled with the near-uniformity of belief in Christ’s Saving Grace, forged a quintessentially American religious identity.

Most readers will be quite familiar with the Wesley Brothers, especially John, and we probably all read Jonathan Edwards’s powerful sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” in high school.  But most Americans know precious little about the revivalist George Whitefield, whose prowess as a speaker and evangelist brought untold thousands to the Lord.

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MAGAWeek2023: John Taylor Gatto

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This week is MAGAWeek2023, my celebration of the men, women, and ideas that MADE AMERICA GREAT!  Starting Monday, 3 July 2023, this year’s MAGAWeek2023 posts will be SubscribeStar exclusives.  If you want to read the full posts, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for as little as $1 a month.  You’ll also get access to exclusive content every Saturday.

It’s no secret that education in the United States—at least, formalized, factory-style education—is broken, and quite badly.  No one, however, quite understands why.  State politicians, federal Department of Education bureaucrats, and local schoolboards all pass more and more regulations and requirements, few of which actually address the root causes of this brokenness.  Instead, they merely treat the symptoms, symptoms they themselves have created, and the treatments usually just breed more symptoms, to be treated once again with another dose of “education reform.”

Naturally, these “reforms” and “treatments” fall squarely on teachers to administer.  Politicians and school administrators are like aloof doctors who are so disconnected from their patient, and so motivated by their own agendas, they don’t really care about the patient’s health, so long as they can say, “we did something.”  Parents—forced into long working hours and with little free time—foist their students into a system that is supposed to work, but ultimately is just government-funded daycare.  How else is mom supposed to work sixty hours a week alongside dad?  That’s progress, after all!

So students and teachers are caught in the middle.  Teachers become nurses in this sick system.  Like real nurses, most of them think they know everything, and know better than the doctors.  Typically, teachers are correct in assuming they know more than the doctors; the problem, however, is that most of the most strident nurse-teachers go on to become the doctors, and then proceed to prescribe the same medicines, only this time they think they know better.

The other teachers labor on with some quiet grumbling, making the best of an increasingly impossible situation.  Caught between parents who are by turns indifferent and meddling and administrators and politicians who are inflexible and demanding, teachers administer whatever prescriptions they are forced to deliver, and try to do some actual teaching in the process.

The results are clear:  the worst become whiney thorns that are absorbed into the administrative ranks.  The best labor on, looking forward to summer.  The rest burnout quickly, leaving the profession early.

Students, meanwhile, are alternatively coddled and hyper-micromanaged.  They spew obscenities in the hallways and locker rooms with abandon; they vandalize bathroom stalls; they vape (the gayest form of nicotine consumption) between classes; they show up late every day.  At the same time, their every movement is tracked—by cameras, by sign-in and sign-out sheets, by teachers roaming the halls.  It’s a bizarre form of anarcho-tyranny in which all the poor behaviors are allowed to run rampant like kudzu, a weed the administration timidly trims from time to time while blaming the teachers for not realizing Johnny was at the vending machine instead of in the bathroom.

Is it any wonder we live in a world with rampant cheating and arbitrary rules, which are just arbitrarily waived the moment anyone offers up a sob story?  We’ve bred generations of students who are paradoxically rebellious and conformist—as long as Johnny takes his shot and is a good little office worker, he can indulge in whatever lame vices he wishes, so long as he shows up mostly on time the next day.  Did Johnny sleep with the secretary or steal money from the till?  Well, he must have had a good reason—he had a rough home life, you know.

None of these problems are particularly new or novel.  We’ve all come to accept them as the price for modern living:  send the kids off to indoctrination daycare, because God forbid both parents aren’t working.  After all, that’s feminism—women are liberated when they can slave for some strange man eight hours every day.  That’s way better than staying home with her kids and maintaining a good home for her husband and children… right?

Into this Orwellian nightmare stepped the great John Taylor Gatto.  Gatto taught in New York City public schools for thirty years, and was a renowned teacher, author, and public speaker.  He was one of the pioneers and major proponents of the “unschooling” movement, a variation on homeschooling that emphasizes activities chosen by the learner.  He was also a major critic of the kind of factory-style public education we have today (itself an innovation from socialist German intellectuals that, unfortunately, glommed its way onto the minds of American education “reformers” in the late nineteenth century).  Gatto argued forcefully that modern education is not only broken, but actively destroys real learning.  Instead, it merely creates conformist worker drones who are educated simpletons.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: The Portly Politico Summer Reading List 2023

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It’s that time of year again:  summer!  That means we’re due for The Portly Politico Summer Reading List 2023!

For new readers, my criteria is pretty straightforward.  To quote myself from the 2016 list:

The books listed here are among some of my favorites.  I’m not necessarily reading them at the moment, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t!

Pretty vague, I know.  Additionally, I usually feature three books, plus an “Honorable Mention” that’s usually worth a read, too.

For those interested, here are the prior installments:

With that, here’s The Portly Politico Summer Reading List 2023:

1.) “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and Other Stories from The Sketch Book, Washington Irving – There are dozens of compilations of Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.  The book has been in continuous print since its first publication in 1819-1820, which is remarkable:  at the time, American literature was in its infancy, struggling to differentiate itself from the flood of European novels, poetry, and short stories coming out of the Old World at the time.  Irving, along with his contemporary James Fenimore Cooper, launched American literature beyond our own hardscrabble frontiers into the wider world, and both authors became the first Americans whose works were read widely in Europe.

I picked up this Signet Classics edition (ISBN: 0-451-5301-8) approximately fifteen years ago, largely on the strength of its two most famous short stories:  “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle.”  These tales account for the vast popularity of the collection, but aside from a few other essays on American life, the vast majority of the collection takes place in England.

One of the most memorable essays from my first reading was “Westminster Abbey,” about the impressive abbey near London.  Here’s the first very first paragraph:

On one of those sober and rather melancholy days in the latter part of autumn when the shadows of morning and evening almost mingle together, and throw a gloom over the decline of the year, I passed several hours in rambling about Westminster Abbey. There was something congenial to the season in the mournful magnificence of the old pile, and as I passed its threshold it seemed like stepping back into the regions of antiquity and losing myself among the shades of former ages.

How’s that for setting the scene and the mood?  There is something mystical about that period in late autumn that is “rather melancholy,” and everything seems to have a certain shadowy gloominess cast over it.  I’ve always thought that the best time to learn about colonial American history—especially the history of New England—is in late autumn, when that damp crispness enters the air.  It feels like Plymouth Rock, or Salem Town, or the backwoods of New Hampshire.

This summer, I hope to reread this collection for the first time in fifteen years.  The essays on Christmas—“Christmas Eve,” “Christmas Day,” and “Christmas Dinner“—are instantly charming, and explain much of the more ancient English traditions of celebrating Christmas, including ghost stories around the fire (which became more popular in the Victorian era).

Needless to say, The Sketch Book has had an immense influence on my own writing, particular my travel writing.  I’m no Washington Irving (or Geoffrey Crayon), but my second book Arizonan Sojourn, South Carolinian Dreams: And Other Adventures clearly illustrates Irving’s influence upon my writing style.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Zero Trust Society

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Even the most casual of observers will have recognized that social trust is at an all-time low.  Our faith in our political institutions has long been rocky at best, but we increasingly have no faith in any of our institutions—cultural, academic, social, religious, etc.  Beyond that noticeable decline in institutional trust, we’ve increasingly stopped trusting each other.

That erosion did not occur in a vacuum, nor is it surprising that as trusts in institutions—which are made up of people, after all—erodes, so does our trust in our fellow citizens.  The same people debasing our institutions are the same people failing to fulfill the duties of those institutions to protect and guide us.

Sure, the conservative will say, “I don’t need some intellectual telling me how to live my life,” and that’s true.  But that intellectual’s ideas and proposals are making your life much worse, whether you realize it or not.  In a time of high social cohesion and trust, that boogeyman intellectual would be making decisions or proposing policies that would help or support his fellow citizens, or at least would seek to do no harm to them.

A major hat-tip goes to the blog The Most Revolutionary Act, which reblogged an excellent piece from American Thinker entitled “The GOP is Losing the Vote Fraud War” by Steve McCann.  To quote liberally from McCann’s piece:

A Rasmussen poll taken in October of 2021 found that 56% of all likely voters believed that cheating affected the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.  Another Rasmussen poll dated April of 2023 revealed that 60% of all likely voters believed that cheating affected the outcomes of many 2022 midterm elections.  Unsurprisingly in a Rasmussen poll published on June 14, 2023, 54% of all likely voters believe that cheating will determine the outcome of the 2024 presidential election.

Those are shocking numbers; that a whopping 60% of all likely voters (not just Republicans) believed that cheating affected the midterm elections is massive.

I would number myself among those 60%.  But even if we’re all wrong, and the 2020 and 2022 elections were totally above board (and, come now, who can honestly say that with a straight face?), the fact that we believe rampant cheating is taking place is an indication of an extreme distrust of our political institutions.

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