Victor Davis Hanson is generally terrific, but this piece on intersectionality and the self-inflicted challenge it poses for the Democrats is particularly delightful.
https://amgreatness.com/2019/06/23/crack-ups-at-the-crossroads-of-intersectionality/
“Make America Great Again”
I never much cared for the slogan, mostly for the obvious reason that I think America remains great and has never not been great. I never much cared for the hat, either: I don’t wear hats, and I’m not a big fan of Trump the man, however much I like his performance in office.
But it seems to me that there’s a serious problem in need of a serious solution, and wearing the iconic orange red cap is, oddly enough, a useful tool for solving it.
The problem is that, in the real world (as opposed to here in the conservative blogosphere or on Fox News), conservatives are well-nigh invisible. The zeitgeist, as portrayed by the the news and entertainment media and most of our institutions, is progressive. Most normal people — people who aren’t political wonks of one sort or another — can go through the whole week without hearing a conservative opinion expressed; they can go a lot longer without hearing one expressed well.
I’ve taken to wearing the hat because it sticks out like a sore thumb, and it communicates, more quickly and effectively than anything else I could wear, that I’m a conservative. It doesn’t say what kind of conservative I am, nor does it reveal whether I’m a hard-core Trump fan (I’m not) or just a guy who is sick to death of conservatives being treated like they are a social disease (yes, that’s it). But everyone who sees it will be able to conclude a few things that I want them to know:
So I’ll be polite, thoughtful, happy to talk about it with anyone who’s interested, willing to concede the President’s many flaws while nonetheless defending his administration for the many things it’s done well, and an informed and respectful critic of socialism and progressivism and those who, through ignorance or poor judgment, continue to endorse them.
Some will see the hat and leap to the wrong conclusions, but those people were probably already leaping to wrong conclusions, assuming that I’m just like every other silent person who doesn’t rock the boat because he doesn’t think the boat needs rocking.
I’m not going to de-platform myself. I’m going to be counted.
While my night on the town began, as related here, at Starbucks, it didn’t end there — nor did it continue in precisely the same vein of tolerance and understanding.
A few hours after I left the iconic cafe with my bag of free coffee and attended a family dinner, I ended up in a local bar doing what I do in bars: acting as designated driver and herder of tipsy friends. I am widely valued for my public temperance, my modestly imposing physical presence, and my capacious vehicle. (I drink, but only moderately and always at home. )
As I sat at a table watching my friends and the other patrons and nursing my third Diet Coke, a youngish woman appeared at my elbow and began talking. She informed me that she was a nurse, that she saw a lot of early-onset dementia, and that she thought people didn’t appreciate how big a problem it is.
(No, I didn’t take it personally: whatever doubts I may occasionally have about my own grip on reality, I do a pretty good job of keeping my peccadilloes under wraps. She was obviously just making conversation with this rakishly good-looking fellow trying — unsuccessfully, apparently — to keep counsel with his own thoughts amidst the noise of a crowded bar.)
I didn’t say much in response, beyond periodic sympathetic noises and an occasional attempt to soften her more hard-edged observations. She thought people live too long and didn’t approve of that; I suggested that we die too long, but that it seemed understandable that we might cling tenaciously to life for ourselves and encourage our loved ones to do the same. But I agreed that senility and dementia were sad and difficult challenges, whether occurring in the geriatric crowd or among my own relatively youthful cohort.
Despite her incipient intoxication, she noticed that I seemed to have a hard time hearing her, and she commented on the volume in the bar. I told her that I have a slight hearing deficiency (true), the product, I believe, of too many years riding motorcycles, scuba-diving, and shooting guns (also true).
“Do you like guns?” she asked me.
“I love them.”
“Do you have a MAGA hat?” From her tone, I took the question to be intended humorously.
“I do. It’s in the car,” I answered. As, in fact, it was.
That’s when the ugliness of the passionately uninformed revealed itself.
“I wouldn’t have guessed,” she said, sounding sincerely perplexed. “You listened so politely while I was talking.”
What went through my head at that moment was almost precisely this:
“You little idiot. Sixty million people voted for Donald Trump. Do you think they’re all such mean-spirited intolerant wretches that they can’t listen to someone talk about the challenges of managing dementia in the hospitalized elderly without feeling compelled to give vent to their inherent misogyny and/or fascist tendencies? What kind of bubble do you live in?”
That’s what I thought. What I said was that I didn’t understand why that would surprise her.
I listened to her prattle on for another little bit. She wanted to educate me on the “truth” about abortion law, but I told her I was pretty knowledgeable about it already, and that she and I probably wouldn’t agree. Then she told me about her “ex-boyfriend” who was recently arrested for sexual misconduct, though she thinks he’s been falsely accused. Seriously. She couldn’t have teed it up better if she’d tried, but I let it go: don’t argue with foolish people, and particularly with drunk foolish people. (Friends who know of the incident later assured me that she’s mistaken, and that the fellow in question is pretty awful.)
I don’t know how many on the left share this silly woman’s bigoted assumptions about the half of America that voted for the Republican. I do know that, when I wear the hat, I make a special effort to be pleasant. I’d like to think that, by being unexpectedly nice, I’m responsible for a little painful cognitive dissonance, a little uncomfortable opening of smug little minds. Certainly, that’s my hope.
I ran out of coffee at home yesterday, so last night while I was in town I stopped at the local Starbucks to pick up a bag of dark roast. As I pulled into my parking spot I noticed an Obama-Biden sticker on the car next to me. I figured that meant overt displays of political affiliation were allowed, so I grabbed my Make America Great Again cap from the dash where it lives, popped it on my head, and went inside.
My favorite gay bartender/barista was on duty, so after nodding a quick hello to him I grabbed a bag of Verona and walked up to the counter, where a young fellow I didn’t recognize, a bearded college-age kid, was waiting to take my order.
I handed him the bag of beans, asked him to grind it for flat-bottom drip, and fished out a Starbucks gift card that, I figured, had enough left on it to complete the transaction. The young fellow rang up my order and turned away to grind my coffee. When he came back and I held out my card, he waved it away and said “we got it, you’re all set.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I have a ton of coffee credits. Employees get them. I put it on mine,” he told me.
I asked if he was serious, and if he really wanted to do that. He said he was, and wished me a nice day. So I thanked him, picked up my bag of ground coffee, and walked out.
I have yet to experience any negative feedback while wearing the Make America Great Again hat. I’ve had a few positive comments, a couple of unexpected but pleasant conversations with strangers during which politics was never mentioned — and, yes, maybe an odd look or two. But free coffee? That’s a first.
Let me offer a couple of factually incontrovertible statements, and then assert what seems to me an ineluctable conclusion based on those statements.
Only people born female are able to become pregnant and have babies.
Only people born male are able to impregnate females.
Given these simple truths, it follows that “women” who were born male are really not women in the same sense as women who were born female. They are, at best, women with an asterisk.
(Of course, I would argue that they’re simply transvestite men, albeit, in many cases, highly motivated overachievers in that regard.)
Today is Father’s Day. June is Pride month. Until a few years ago, I’d have found nothing particularly incongruous about that conjunction: there is nothing about the celebration of one’s sexual preference, however odd it may be to call that “pride,” that precludes, obfuscates, or undermines an appreciation of the role fathers play in the lives of their children and their value to society.
But times change, and not always for the better.
Today, the LGB community — those people who are, to varying degrees, attracted sexually to members of their own sex — has chosen to associate itself with a distinctly different group, those who embrace one or another form of gender-identity fantasy or delusion. That’s what the T in LGBT refers to.
I’m sympathetic to homosexuals, as we used to call people who experience strong same-sex attraction. (I think it’s no longer considered appropriate to use the term, but I’m nothing if not no slave to fashion. Parse that at your leisure.) Attraction, whether to members of one’s own sex or the more quotidian kind, is what it is, and I’m perfectly willing to believe that it isn’t something one can change even if one wishes one could. I’m glad that being gay or lesbian is legal, tolerated, and accepted.
I’m sympathetic as well to those who suffer one or another form of gender dysphoria, who imagine or wish themselves to be of a different sex, or who are so confused about the nature of sexuality as to imagine that there’s a meaningful category of human sexual identity that is neither male nor female. People suffer all kinds of emotional and psychological troubles, and their suffering is real.
But the so-called trans movement is nonsense — the self-righteous pouring of gasoline on to the sputtering psychoses of true gender confusion. That it has been elevated to the level of a fad, and given a patina of the same victimhood status to which the homosexual community could once lay legitimate claim, is a sign of the narcissistic unseriousness of our time.
The gender identity movement — the trans movement — is a self-contradictory celebration of inchoate and childish urges, of the desire to make it so by wishing it so. Pursuit of its confused fantasy of sexual mutability, of parallel universes of ever more contrived sexual identity, necessitates the abnegation of the simple truth of sexual reality: that there is male and female, man and woman, and — barring a handful of ambiguously and unfortunately malformed individuals — nothing else.
The world can not gracefully accommodate both physiological reality and gender-identity fantasy — and neither can the culture. Unfortunately, the levers of popular culture are in the hands of deeply unserious people, and so the tide of opinion favors the fantastic over the actual.
Which brings us to Father’s Day. The point of this holiday is the recognition that being a father matters — that men have something unique to offer, that masculinity is distinct from femininity, distinct and valuable. That claim is incompatible with the spiraling nonsense of the trans movement.
My favorite band will play at my favorite bar this week in celebration of Pride month. I’d go, if it were merely an LGB event. But the trans thing is stupid, is on the march, and has to be opposed by people who think Mother’s Day and Father’s Day are acknowledgements of something non-trivial.
In 1914, in his novel The World Set Free, H.G. Wells wrote of a future featuring “atomic bombs,” in which “it was a matter of common knowledge that a man could carry about in a handbag an amount of latent energy sufficient to wreck half a city.” That was thirty-one years before Trinity — before the detonation of the first atomic weapon in the sands of southern New Mexico.
Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel Fahrentheit 451, written in 1953, described ear-buds, those ubiquitous little earphones everyone wears today. He called them “seashells,” but we’d recognize them today — as we would the insular cocoon they created for the perpetually distracted wife of that novel’s protagonist.
Arthur C. Clarke predicted the geostationary orbit, that distance from the Earth — about 22,236 miles — at which a satellite will circle the planet precisely once each day, and so appear fixed in the sky above the same point on the Earth’s equator. He introduced this idea in 1945, more than a decade before the Russians shocked the world by placing the first artificial satellite, the short-lived Sputnik, in a far lower orbit. (In 1960, Clarke would feature the still-nonexistent geosynchronous communication satellite in his short story I Remember Babylon, which presaged, among other things, satellite television and broadband pornography.)
Science fiction writers predict the future. That’s their job. They get it wrong more often than right (a good thing, considering the prominent role of alien invasions and global catastrophes in the genre) but they do sometimes get it right — or get it wrong, but in ways that foreshadow our evolving reality.
H.G. Wells, Ray Bradbury, and Arthur C. Clarke are acknowledged giants of science fiction. Not so Albert Teichner, a World War II veteran who most likely passed away in 1989, though biographical information is scarce. But the handful of stories Teichner wrote includes Cerebrum, a fanciful account of Facebook and Snapchat which he penned in 1963.
No, of course it isn’t really about modern social media, nor even the internet. But it does imagine a future in which everyone is networked with everyone else, their instant messaging coordinated by a central switching authority called, prosaically enough, “Central Switching.” It’s a world in which people are constantly connected, are distracted from the world around them by their non-stop mental messaging, and, having instantaneous access to every fact, know less and less, and grow lazier with each passing year.
Most interestingly, it’s a world in which one can be cut off from the great switching center, isolated from the perpetual stream of information and communication, and, so disconnected, become a social outcast and pariah.
That, at least, is nonsense. After all, it’s unimaginable, isn’t it, that the powers behind the internet could ever flex their digital muscles to reward and punish the consumers of their virtual wares?
I mean, Google, for instance. They wouldn’t do something like that.