It’s about time I posted some thoughts on the monumental and (to me, at least) unexpected election outcome of last week. I don’t flatter myself to think anyone has been waiting breathlessly on my analysis, but it’s an event that bears marking, and there are things that ought to be said about it in this record I’ve been keeping. (I’ve written almost nothing about this election cycle here on the blog, due partly to favoring my Twitter feed.)
Trump wasn’t my pick, and I have plenty of concerns about him — from the basic observation that he’s no small-government, free-market conservative (and has furthermore reversed his positions and schmoozed with and donated to so many office-holders of both parties in the past that his set of beliefs is clearly fungible), to his often coarse demeanor, to creepily fascist-ic remarks he’s made at campaign stops, to his overly cozy rapport with Vladimir Putin and clueless retweeting of support from the alt-right. He’s no exemplar of how to treat and talk about women, nor do I find the cronyism that’s characterized his business dealings admirable. I felt betrayed and crestfallen to learn that the GOP had crowned him its nominee.
All of that said, our choice this time around was (pardon my bluntly apt metaphor) between a shit sandwich and a crap sandwich. It’s taken a truly terrible alternative to make Trump’s candidacy even possible, and we found that in Hillary Clinton. Her role in our becoming a country that leaves its people to die in hostile territory, her knowingly lying to the American people and families of the dead about the cause of the Jihadist attack on the U.S compound in Benghazi (promising to punish, and jailing, a scapegoat filmmaker in the process), her gross negligence, at best, with matters of national security (it appears to me that she is clearly guilty of felonies, and owes her escape from prosecution to a cowardly, politically compromised FBI) — these should all have been (and evidently proved to be) deal-breakers for her candidacy, or for any other candidate’s, from whichever party. All this sits atop the fact that she clearly intended to continue pushing us down the road of incrementalist collectivization via nationalized healthcare, inflexible state-run education, and increased taxation, for she is a Progressive cut from the same loom of cloth as Barack Obama.
Trump’s rise is ultimately an unpleasant and worrisome but predictable result of people laboring for decades to chisel away at this Civilization of ours, with the ultimate goal of undermining our cultural and governmental institutions and “fundamentally transforming” us into something we were never meant to be: a collective society, built on the ruins of a former outpost of individual liberty that was tricked into giving up on itself and committing suicide. Barack Obama’s presidency was the latest chapter in that “long march”, and Trump’s ascent was propelled by eight years of an administration that belittled, berated, and condescended to half the country, that demagogued and divided to the best of its ability. It was fueled the cramming down our throats of Obamacare, and by scandals at the IRS, NSA, DOJ, and EPA. By the shameless cheerleading of a lapdog press for its anointed Lightbringer, while demonizing and vilifying the liberty-minded Tea Party movement and anyone else who dared oppose his agenda. There is plenty to dislike and distrust about Trump, but the fact is in the end it wouldn’t have mattered who the GOP’s nominee was. Said nominee — whether Cruz or Carson, Romney or other — would have been painted by the press as a villain in the extreme. So while there are plenty of valid concerns about Trump, we can be forgiven for finding it difficult to discern objections to him that sincerely target said concerns from others that we’d be hearing regardless — had, say, Ted Cruz won the nomination and the presidency. My years of experience observing the vilification of Republicans from Reagan to the present has made me quite confident of that.
I had strong reasons for wanting to vote against Hillary Clinton. Trump’s flaws were worrisome enough that I could not bring myself to vote for him, despite knowing that any other course of action would be effectively futile. It was not lightly that I cast a write-in vote for Ted Cruz, the only decision that I could feel right about in this craptacular election season. I maintain respect for others who concluded that despite Trump’s flaws he was the necessary lesser of two evils. Among them are Bill Whittle and Victor Davis Hanson, both of whom articulated ample cause for concern about Trump in the past. I fully acknowledge that whatever good a President Trump ends up doing, I cannot claim any credit for as a voter. But I am not sanguine about where we seem to be headed. This is in the best case a temporary reprieve — a chance to “stop the bleeding” as Bill Whittle put it — and, sadly, I expect it to turn out to be a wasted opportunity, at best. A popular revolt was warranted, but it seems to have been squandered on a very poor choice. As with Barack Obama’s presidency, I hope to be proven wrong, and I’ll give President Trump the same chance, but I fear I’ll be proven right.
The way ahead from here is treacherous, and seems bound to be full of missteps and disappointments, at the very least. Both the Republican and Democrat parties bear their share of responsibility for putting forth such awful nominees. But the ultimate blame for this mess rests with the perpetrators of a Culture War who have been relentless in their aim of dismantling our essential cultural foundations. Without their vain and bitterly determined attempts to steer us away from the course of individual liberty and the tightly constrained form of government needed to enable it to thrive, we would not be in such dire straits.
The week since the election has seen insanity that rivals the already insane campaign season to date: ongoing “protests”-turned-riots; claims of Trump-inspired discrimination, some proven to be fabrications (see also this); people identified as Trump voters or supporters being beaten, including this motorist, and this one, and this student, and this one; breathless comparisons of the election outcome to the 9/11 Jihadist attacks; numerous tweeted assassination threats, including threats from at least one journalist and CEO; other CEOs including Pepsi’s and GrubHub’s disparaging or threatening employees who supported Trump; celebrities who threatened pre-election to leave the country if Trump was elected apparently having second thoughts (echoes of 2004, to be sure). Meanwhile, the press has made some public displays of repentance and introspection regarding its insular bias — including the New York Times, which has vowed to rededicate itself to honest reporting after a stunningly candid confirmation that it has tailored its reporting to fit a preconceived narrative — but I expect all of that will be short-lived. (Oh, by the way: the electoral college is suddenly a sinister threat to democracy again!)
One of the more disheartening things I’m seeing is parents scaring the daylights out of their children — including children who are too young to have the historical context and skepticism to properly assess what they’re being told. The amount and extent of awfulness and unhinged ridiculousness I’ve seen in response to Trump’s election has, astonishingly, been enough to make me start feeling sympathetic to a guy I never liked to begin with. I predict it will backfire in a big way if it continues.
So, one way or another, here we are. If there’s a bright side, maybe it’s that long last the press can be expected to do its job again (sort of), dissent has surely become the highest form of patriotism again (an assertion I remember being made frequently during the Bush years), people are finding renewed skepticism and concern about the wisdom of having a powerful federal government (sadly, I expect that will last only until the next electoral reversal of the tables) … in short, the world is once more inverted, and I expect there’s going to be a lot more along those lines to keep up with in the coming years.
Some wry and apt observations from the Twitterverse:
Love trumping hate involves a lot more assault and arson than I anticipated.
Calling for rape of woman because you hate her husband. Tell me again how our election set feminism back 50 years but that doesn't? #Melaniapic.twitter.com/jwf7YfupCz
MSM Lost Its Moral Compass, Integrity, Culpable, Participated, Condoned Corruption, Dishonest, Could Not Be Trusted. FAILED GLORIOUSLY. pic.twitter.com/2kLwc4QYp6
Of them all, this very aptly captures the seeming lack of self-reflection that’s going on:
Indeed, epithets of that sort have come to be used so frequently, routinely, and loosely, they’ve lost much of their gravity, and furthermore produced an understandable backlash from the wrongly accused.
This gem from a parody account echoes the same sentiment:
If we are to win the House and Senate in 2018, we MUST strive to call every white voter an uneducated racist homophobe for the next 2 years.
Apropos our burning need for a way out to a new frontier: This is exactly the kind of thing we need to be working toward.
For the gist of why, the first “Interstellar” trailer articulated the answer in a beautifully profound two minutes:
For the logistical nuts and bolts of how, see Elon Musk’s milestone talk at the 2016 International Astronautical Congress last Tuesday:
According to the plan Musk outlined, SpaceX proposes to deliver an unmanned cargo shipment to Mars in 2018, more to follow in subsequent years, and a first wave of settlers — not a mere handful of astronauts, but a colonizing force of 100 — a mere eight years from now.
center cluster gimbals for steering capability; most on periphery will be fixed orientation
7% of propellant needed for boostback & landing
up to 450T cargo to Mars
at least 100 passengers per ship, eventually up to 200 or 300
The key thing to emphasize is that this is not just some back-of-the-envelope daydreaming and a few artist sketches. Musk and SpaceX have concrete plans to build and do all of this, very soon now. Nothing in space endeavors is easy or guaranteed to stay on schedule, but with persistence it can be done, and thanks to Musk’s and SpaceX’s persistence and vision to date, we are now much closer than we have ever been to achieving the long dream of “humans as a multi-planetary species.”
Fifteen years after the scum of the Earth brought their degraded malevolence to American soil, my perspective from last year’s post essentially holds the same. I am far less concerned about the brutal barbarians at the gates than I am about those within the gates who’ve labored to render us weak and defenseless, and continue to do so without end in sight. The wake-up call I thought such an attack would be turned out to be too inconvenient for some among us, whose ambition to chisel away at and dismantle this culture of ours was too dear to be put aside. Come what may, The Narrative must go on! Islamic Jihadist violence and Progressive Multiculturalism are BFFs in a mutual suicide pact — except that only the latter truly means to go down in self-loathing flames of submission, relieved at last of the burden of its perpetual shame, while for the former the true goal is domination through however much homicide, torture, and taqiyya proves necessary.
The majority of Europe is committing cultural suicide, to be sure, and our beloved U.S.A. isn’t far behind. Multiculturalism is an understandable response to the horrors that ravaged the Continent through the first half of the twentieth century, but the cowardice in judgment it’s produced now seems poised to be Europe’s undoing. Maybe I’m old, and maybe my French vocabulary is lacking, but I seem to remember a time before “Frenchman shouts ‘Allahu Akbar’ as he stabs woman to death” was a routine headline.
Our worry now should not be ISIS, for all its sick brutality, but whether we have the will to stand up and declare ISIS and its Jihadist fellow travelers an enemy to be utterly and unconditionally destroyed because we genuinely and deeply care about who we are and what our Civilization stands for. It is not their predictable pipeline of recruits from fanatical branches of the Islamic world that should alarm us, so much as their success at recruiting useful idiots from our own populations. What exactly does that tell us about the state we’re in?
I’m done with a lot, at this point. Done expecting a miracle turnaround from a culture addicted to managed decline. Done having any confidence in our deeply compromised leadership and institutions. Done seeing things I can’t bear come to pass, done with a cowardly press, and, lately, done with the news cycle entirely. Those of us who see the writing on the wall and are weary of it are essentially on our own, in a future governed by absurdities and nonsense.
Maybe, in the end, disillusioned self-reliance is a good place to be. But this is not the future that should have been.
Andrew Klavan is brilliantly hilarious with unnerving consistency, but he’s really outdone himself this time. His opening monologue to “How Are You Spending the Apocalypse?” is spot-on genius (and the rest of the episode is chock full of disconcertingly apt observations too).
This Saturday, we held a memorial service and reception in honor of my mother, Gabrielle Stephens (née Stransky), who passed in her sleep early in the morning on July 18th, as the final act in a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease. My father, the most loyal companion anyone could have, cared for her at home for as long as he could, then remained by her side in assisted living until the very end. My sister and I had been traveling to visit them monthly, and I’m grateful that we had enough advance warning to spend her last two days together with her.
My Mom was born and raised in the small rural town of Bogros-Messeix, in the Auvergne region of central France, and I remember her as a generously happy person. She found joy in the world, and seemed to want more than anything to share it with us — which she managed to do the moment you saw her. She always had a smile to greet you with, and it was impossible to be or remain gloomy in her presence. Her laugh, that I know all who knew and loved her can still hear, and her delight in little things, were absolutely contagious.
Being gracious and hospitable was tremendously important to my Mom, and came to her naturally, as it did to our dear aunt, her sister Marie, and her restauranteur husband Raymond. Growing up alongside their daughters, Raphie and Zizi, we enjoyed the extraordinary circumstance of our families living near one another in West Los Angeles, and making a point of getting together often — a situation whose rare preciousness I can only now truly appreciate. Marie and Gaby took turns hosting Thanksgivings, Christmases, and Easters, bringing together not just our two families, but also longtime friends from the French community, who became a true part of that family. Those lively gatherings were full of a kind of warmth and gracious delight in one another’s company that I wish everyone would get to experience in some form in their lives. Those times seem far away now, but they will always be with us. And we are reminded to strive to carry on what these sisters and their husbands so skillfully and lovingly began.
Gaby’s parents had emigrated to France from Czechoslovakia, and I don’t know whether many French ever considered her and her family truly French, but to the adoring parents she effortlessly charmed at our elementary school, her credentials as a sophisticated, delightful Frenchwoman were beyond question. My Mom briefly taught a French language class in the library for some of the children. In going through things, I found we still have her extensive notebooks and handwritten flash cards from that project, where she jotted down phrases and translations and details of grammar that she must have had to research well beyond what she’d had the chance to learn in her short schooling. She did it all with great joy. And those lucky kids got to taste the world’s best homemade crêpes, too.
Though timid about some things, my Mom could have a surprising sense of adventure and willingness to try, or be talked into, new things. I remember one particular afternoon, spent with Dad’s family on Deer Creek reservoir in northern Utah. We somehow managed to get my Mom on a Jet Ski, without explaining that gripping the handles for dear life also squeezes the throttle full open. Fortunately, the time for her to leave us was not yet.
Mom arrived in the United States by boat in 1952 — sailing into New York Harbor on the Ile de France to join Marie and Raymond in Chicago. The three worked there as house servants for a time, before moving to Palm Springs, where she met and married her first husband. When his his postwar Army service as a chef to Allied officers took them to Paris, Mom enrolled in esthéticienne training.
On their return to the U.S., Mom put her new skills to use in a successful career at the Beverly Hills salon of Aida Grey. After they divorced, she opened her own salon, which as luck would have it led to being introduced to my Dad by one of her adoring clients. They met and married in 1968.
I’m the second of Mom and Dad’s three children. Veronique, the big sister we never had the chance to know, was born two months premature and never managed to take a breath. Dad is working on reuniting her remains with theirs.
I remember Mom’s occasional need to renew her status with the French consulate when I was a kid. When she decided to earn her U.S. citizenship, she studied hard for it. It must have been one of the bigger challenges my mother undertook. But she saw it through, and we were as proud to be there in support of her at the swearing-in ceremony in 1990 as she very clearly was to have achieved it, and to have formalized the affectionate ties she already felt toward her adopted country.
Mom worked hard for us, diligently and without ever slowing down or giving up. She toiled and sacrificed, so that we could live well. She kept an impeccable home. She made sure we got to go places. She had our friends over. (Nobody ever left our house hungry.) She took us to the park, to the beach. She and Dad took us to Disneyland, Knotts Berry Farm, and the Sequoias. My Mom braved a terrifyingly short 3-lane change on the 10 highway in L.A., to get me to Saturday science camp at Exposition Park. I know that part of the drive terrified her and she dreaded it. But she overcame that fear. For us. She made sure we had a full and happy childhood.
The joy my Mom experienced in life, and her glowingly positive attitude, somehow survived the difficult years she grew up in. Her family lived through some lean and fearful times that are hard for us to fully appreciate today.
Mom’s family were of modest means. Her father, brother Emil, and brother-in-law Leon worked in “La Mine” — deep underground, in the town’s coal mine. Their father proudly and stubbornly endured work in waist-deep water, for attending the wrong church. For part of Mom’s childhood, their town in France was under Nazi occupation. She told us stories of living life under the watchful eye of German soldiers — men who gassed people in churches, men whose belt buckles read, “God is with us”, leading her to wonder: “If God is with you, then who will help us?” She remembered darting furtively through their garden in winter to dig up buried cabbages in the snow and bring them back to the house, worrying all the while that she was being watched. She remembered her mom carrying grenades in her apron, to bury them in that same garden. They belonged to her brother Emil, who was part of the Maquis — the French resistance — and she was worried they hadn’t been well hidden. You can imagine the family’s constant concern that they would be found out.
The war wasn’t the only hardship the family endured. Their mother, Bozena, an educated midwife who delivered most of the town’s babies, passed on September 1st, 1947, when Gaby was only sixteen — leaving her and her siblings, Marie, Elise, and Emil, to care for their father and one another. Bozena suffered from a heart ailment that ended up being made worse by her treatment, and as a result she was taken from her family too soon.
My Mom had sweet memories of growing up in Bogros too. The hills and woods where they played. Her father fishing, sitting on a boulder in the middle of the Dordogne. (That, more than anywhere, must have been his “happy place”.) “Chercher champignons” — Hunting for wild mushrooms in the woods. Gathering water at the fountain with her dear lifelong friend Emma Pavlovsky. The sweet smell of tangerines her mother had hidden under the stairs (a rare treat then), which my Mom always said was how they knew Christmas was coming.
Mom remembered her sister Marie sneaking sweet treats from the sugar bowl now and then. Her brother Emil famously helped with dental and electrical chores. (When one of them had a loose baby tooth that needed tending to, he’d dutifully tie a string to it, tie the other end to a doorknob, and … you can imagine step 3. When Emil needed to check whether the electrical outlets were working, a sister’s well-placed finger would do the job just fine.)
My Mom surviving all of that and making her way to the United States, and eventually to Los Angeles where she met my Dad, was a big stroke of luck for all of us. We lived many years there, in a life we were lucky to have.
I remember where I was, coming up our old back steps to the kitchen from playing outside, when Mom told me she’d had a phone call from France, and learned that her father had died after a battle with cancer. She said she had known it before she received the call.
In 2004, we lost my Mom’s sister Marie, who was brutally taken from us all far too soon. We all felt the loss deeply; Mom most of all.
With my mother’s passing last week, their sister, Elise — who lives in an assisted living home in France, attended by her daughter Dany — is now the last of the Stransky children. The world will never again be as bright, when they all are gone.
Alzheimer’s takes a person from you piece by piece, with heart-rending cruelty. By the time my Mom passed, I was already well down the road to missing her tremendously. But I’ll be eternally grateful for the beautiful life she got to live, for all the love and care that she gave us so generously, and for my father’s steadfast devotion and the undying love that kept them together to the last.
“You’re my sweetheart, and I’ll love you forever,” he said at the very end. I can’t think of a more beautiful way to say such a difficult goodbye.
Freedom is a tremendous and precious inheritance. To develop our potential, thrive in it, and pass it along to each successive generation is our highest calling. I write here to give my thanks, and to seek ways we can cultivate the resilience, independence, courage, and indomitable spirit necessary to sustain a culture that cherishes liberty.
