Americans: Endangered Species

 

Today’s post is an excerpt from #TransformationTuesday: Tadpole Edition, Originally posted 4-10-18

Ever wonder what made America great? I think it was the fact the country was founded by people who possessed the three defining characteristics of the Age of Enlightenment.

Reason:

Skepticism:

Individualism:

Three characteristics that are pure anathema to oppressive authoritarian regimes.

Sadly, I note, these are three characteristics growing rarer and hence more valuable with each subsequent generation of frogs.

How to boil a frog:

Place in cool water and gradually turn up the heat.If you don’t believe me, ask the Australians.

A Labor Break

Sometimes I reach the point where I cannot do it anymore. This is one of those times. I’m starting the Labor Day weekend early and will remain on a mental break throughout.

Feel free to carry on discussions regarding the necessity of securing the border between Afghanistan and Tajikistan but not our southern border, devastation in the path of Ida, COVID/Delta/Lambda/Ivermectin, to vax or not to vax, or whatever else is on your mind. I shall be dabbling in food, art, music and nature. Join me if you will, or carry on the good fight, the choice is yours as we are all individuals.

Today I’m visiting Camille Pissarro.

Generally referred to as a Danish-French Impressionist, Jacob Abraham Camille Pissarro was born nearly 200 years ago in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands which was then a West Indies Danish colony. His father was a French citizen of Portuguese Jewish descent, and his mother was Creole, a native of Danish Antilles.

He was a classically trained artist, having been sent to a French boarding school at age 12. Somehow, after having seen Paree, his father expected him to return to work in his business in St. Thomas, which he did for 5 years. At that point he left to spend 2 years painting and sketching in Venezuela before returning to Paris in 1855 to take master classes at the École des Beaux-Arts and Académie Suisse.

While a fairly successful artist, Pissarro was eclipsed by Claude Monet, the emblematic practitioner of the Impressionist style at the time. Pissarro’s influence on the genre may be underestimated – he  offered substantial contributions to Impressionist theory and served somewhat as a mentor to Paul Cezanne, Edouard Manet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Paul Gauguin. (More on his life here)

A very small selection from his works:

A pre-impressionist painting from St. Thomas.

Antilian Landscape, St. Thomas, 1856

Cabbage Field Pontoise, 1873

   The fields are radiant; be more like the cabbage field.

Farm at Mount Foucoult, 1894

Pissarro considered himself an anarchist. Then again, at the fin de siècle anarchy didn’t mean what “anarchy” means today. Back then it meant a rejection of authority, not necessarily by trashing public buildings and burning down private businesses. It simply recognized the supremacy of the individual’s independence over that of any constructed government’s right to dictate to us. There were certainly worst politics at the time, and today.

“The Kids Want Their Own Water Fountains”

Here’s a little story of the passing times worthy of at least a note: UW-Madison to quietly host ‘Welcome BBQ’ intended only for students of color. And why not? People of Color are special too.

As Ed Driscoll noted: “SEGREGATION NOW, SEGREGATION TOMORROW, SEGREGATION FOREVER!” 

I suspect the vegetarian, vegan and gluten free offerings are black-eyed peas, watermelon and hushpuppies.

Doonesbury was way ahead of the curve:

“The kids want their own water fountains.”

Joey’s Great Reset

We need a reset for all that hateful American hegemony. I know! Let’s push the reset button and give it to China! It’s their turn, and they won’t abuse like we did.

If the Afghanistan withdrawal was “an extraordinary success” one wonders what failure looks like to Joe Biden.

Minimum success:

Crop circles, slightly miscalculated

moderate success:

No boxcars left behind

Extraordinary success:

Hang on real tight and we’ll get you out of here

Heck of a job Joey, go ahead and take your bow.

And may God have mercy on your miserable soul.

When Todaying Is Too-Muching To Do

Ah, who does my little friend, who does?

Unlike the rhetorical phrase popularized after 9/11 - “If we (fill-in-the-blank), the terrorists have won” – the terrorists actually have won. When your enemy was the one who spent their blood and treasure and they withdraw leaving you with the spoils of war is there any doubt who won?

So for now we live in an age of ambient anxiety. We can no longer trust anyone: not academics, nor scientists, media of all sorts, journalists or industry. And certainly not elite politicians. We can’t even truly trust our own research as every search engine uses algorithms which by their nature are untrustworthy; and when designed to be biased are even more so. If you think you know the truth I would venture you only know the half of it.

Therefore I am just going to rest awhile, regroup and wait for my gyroscope to re-calibrate.  Come, sit  with me awhile.

For summer is brief and we must remain strong enough to make it through another long winter.

Whitman’s Caution

Once known for it’s rugged individualism, the former penal colony of Australia  is now closer to tyranny than we are. Some are having none of it:

Truck drivers are reportedly planning to 'block every highway entering into every state'

It began today:

Australian truck drivers have blocked a major highway in the north-eastern state of Queensland in a protest against vaccine mandates and tough border restrictions, causing traffic to back up for several kilometers.

I don’t know how it will turn out for our brothers of another mother, so all I can do is wish them well and pass along Walt Whitman’s caution:

 

TO THE STATES.

To the States or any one of them, or any city of the States, Resist
much, obey little,

Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved,

Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth, ever after-
ward resumes its liberty.

 

I will also pass on another caution from one of our own nation’s old, white, paternalistic founders:

Of course we’d all rather live in peace but they seem hell-bent on not letting us.

 

Yesterday’s headlines continue relentlessly into today: continuing prayers for the victims in the path of Ida and everyone still in Afghanistan.

“The Army of the Emboldened and the Gleefully Ignorant Is Growing.”

 

Seeing the pictures of these dead service men in their late teens and early twenties is a powerful reminder of the price we’re paying for putting “the adults back in the room” last election.

— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) August 27, 2021

What is most telling about this is not Charlie’s tweet but rather the responses it garnered in the official tweet stream. Scanning them I’d say that approximately 95% of the replies are negative-name-calling-Trump-bashing slurs – a bit surprising since the Turning Point founder has a rather large number of conservative followers. Apparently he has likewise collected a fair number of liberal-weenie followers whose sole job is to leave what they consider clever and pertinent replies to what they consider his misguided tweets. Their major problem with Charlie, aside from the fact he’s conservative, is that he is a spreader of rightwing conspiracies such as the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory that describes universities as “islands of totalitarianism.” How crazy is that?

It’s not as if it’s a new concept.

“We can call it Cultural Marxism, but at the end of the day we experience it on a day to day basis, by that I mean a minute by minute, second by second basis. It’s political correctness and it’s multiculturalism.” – Andrew Breitbart 

I was able to glean from the Charlie-haters’ replies the following facts as they know them:

• It’s Trump’s fault!
• Trump started it!
• More troops died under Trump’s presidency! (?!)
• Covid is worse! And that’s Trump’s fault!
• But you don’t care if you go around infecting others and killing them!
• It’s Trump’s fault!

Which proves definitively that this country is close to being irreparably bifurcated. If we can’t even agree that Biden’s bungling of Trump’s agreement to withdraw from Afghanistan (which, if I might remind you, the left has been demanding since we went in 20 years ago) then we can’t agree on anything. If you think it’s clear as day to everyone that this Moron-in-Chief is a disaster than you are no longer listening to your liberal comrades who explain it away as being “Trump’s fault.”

Anyway, my original point was that I was surprised to see so little support for Charlie’s poignant tweet. That however was explained when I continued to the bottom of the tweet ‘scream’ and found this message from the Tweet-master:

Funny thing, when you click on the “show” button, most of those “offensive” tweets turned out to be supportive of Charlie’s comment. Honest, if you don’t believe me check for yourself. And now you know what’s truly offensive in liberal weenie-land.

Meanwhile, in flyover America the fallen are honored.

 

Beware: this is war, and

“The army of the emboldened and the gleefully ignorant is growing.” – Andrew Breitbart