Unca Darrell

JUNE 28, 2020 / Unca D's nomination for the Pulitzer Prize

LONG BEFORE BOXES OF POP SECRET lined grocery store shelves, corn began as a wild grass called teosinte in southwestern Mexico, according to research compiled by Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History. Corn was probably cultivated as a domesticated crop around 9,000 years ago, but it wasn’t until 2012 that archaeologists unearthed the first evidence of popcorn . . .

LONG BEFORE BOXES OF POP SECRET lined grocery store shelves, corn began as a wild grass called teosinte in southwestern Mexico, according to research compiled by Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History. Corn was probably cultivated as a domesticated crop around 9,000 years ago, but it wasn’t until 2012 that archaeologists unearthed the first evidence of popcorn . . .

JUNE 24, 2020 / Those who can, do. Those who can't . . .

. . . (Unca D among them) read books about it.

Barton Swaim, "The Charm of Novelty: Farnsworth's Classical English Style," The Wall Street Journal (wsj.com), May 22, 2020 (abridged, emphasis added)

Good writing is efficient writing. The ability to say a thing clearly and directly is rather to be chosen than great riches. All the books on English style say so, and they are right. But efficiency, Ward Farnsworth rightly insists, is only the beginning.

JUNE 16, 2020 / Matthew Continetti on why Rush Limbaugh matters

. . . .

No media figure since [William F. Buckley, Jr.] has had a more lasting influence on American conservatism than . . .

JUNE 12, 2020 / Driscoll on "The Lives of Others"

THE LIVES OF OTHERS is one of the finest movies ever made. It's an inside look at the East German Ministry for State Security -- the Stasi -- and its domestic spies and informants. Freedom of conscience, artistic freedom, religious freedom, simple freedom to live daily life as one chooses -- these were enemies of the state, to be identified quickly and rooted out mercilessly.

Ed Driscoll says the movie is remarkably timely. He is right. During the pandemic panic, a man who tossed a football to his kids in an otherwise empty park became an enemy of the people, subject to being identified and rooted out public shaming, even arrest.

Mr. Driscoll wrote before the recent protests and riots elevated Black Lives Matter to the new cause du jour. Now the game is to identify, scold, and hurt white people who show insufficient enthusiasm for confessing guilt for the death of a man they did not kill. "You criticized rioters for burning black-owned businesses! You cannot teach in our university!" 

You can read the whole thing here: Ed Driscoll, "Pandemic Paranoia Makes 'The Lives of Others' a Remark ably Timely Movie," pjmedia.com, May 25, 2020 (emphasis added, abridged).

The essay ends with speculation why Western intellectuals and artists failed to make movies about communism equal, in art or intelligence, to The Lives of Others.

The Lives of Others has remarkable tension all the way through its 137 minute running time, perhaps because we’ve seen all the elements before in a variety of movies ranging from the James Bond series to Richard Burton’s The Spy Who Came In From the Cold: The shadowy concrete buildings and pools of light from streetlamps illuminating otherwise menacing-looking streets, the spies and their tradecraft, the surveillance state, the attempts to flee the Berlin Wall, etc. So why aren’t there more films about life behind the Iron Curtain? In 2007, when The Lives of Others played America’s art-house circuit, John Podhoretz theorized in the Weekly Standard:

I think there may be another reason for the reluctance of the makers of pop culture worldwide to reckon with communism, and that is shame. The ideological struggle against leftist totalitarianism was something that did not arouse the interest or enthusiasm of cultural elites in the West during the Cold War. Far from it; from the 1960s onward, the default position of the doyens of popular culture was a presumption in favor of the Communist struggle, as personified by Mao, the Viet Cong, Castro, the Sandinistas, El Salvador’s guerrillas, and the so-called African liberation movements.

This was not a reasoned, or thought-through, view. It was little more than fashion. And rarely, if ever, has history rendered a more devastating verdict on the wrongheadedness of fashionable Western groupthink than it did when the walls and statues came down, and Lenin was removed from his unholy pedestal.

They got it wrong. And though they may not know it, they are ashamed of it and do not wish to be reminded of it. Perhaps that’s why it took a 33-year-old to make this masterpiece–a 33-year-old who was too young during the Cold War to have joined any camp in any meaningful way. [Director] Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck found a great story to tell with a great setting and he told it with peerless skill while bearing none of the scars of past ideological battles.

. . . .

In his Weekly Standard review, John Podhoretz wrote that as directorial debuts go, The Lives of Others is on par with Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, and while they’re obviously very different films in terms of content and style – he’s not wrong. No less than William F. Buckley, a year before his death at age 82, wrote in 2007 that von Donnersmarck’s film is "the best movie I ever saw . . . . The tension mounts to heart-stopping pitch and I felt the impulse to rush out into the street and drag passersby in to watch the story unfold.”

Freedom Versus Security

The Lives of Others is a remarkably timely movie right now, for multiple reasons. We’ve seen several blue enclaves in America, such as Los Angeles, Manhattan, and Houston attempt to set up snitch lines to turn in businesses reopening ahead of the Coronavirus lockdown schedule. . . .

The details of Obama’s spying on the incoming Trump administration (aka "Obamagate") are beginning to trickle out, likely accelerating in quantity as November approaches, an extension of Obama's spying on reporters. . . . 

Politics runs alongside two poles: freedom and security. For most of America’s history, the former was its government’s goal. Under FDR’s New Deal in the 1930s, “This shift from a government aimed at protecting Freedom to one designed to provide Security is the single most important thing that happened in 20th Century America,” conservative blogger and book reviewer Orrin Judd wrote in 2000. And more security means more laws – and the potential for more to be arrested.

. . . . Today's Germans are determined to seek security in socialism, not realizing they could be about to make the same mistakes as their 20th century predecessors.

In the last line of his essay, Mr. Driscoll speaks metaphorically. By today's Germans, he means radical American leftists who are using the pandemic shutdown and the BLM protests and riots as reasons to do more spying and informing.

I disagree with Mr. Driscoll's final point. Progressives, Democratic Socialists, and their military arm, Antifa, do know what they are doing. They intend to do it. They don't see spying, informing, and enforcing the diktats of the thought police as mistakes. They see them as necessary, and quite delightful, tools of revolution and power.

JUNE 12, 2020 / Seven out of ten Kingwood-area high school valedictorians . . .

. . . are girls.

Surprised?

Don't be.

JUNE 10, 2020 / Progressives really don't want to . . .

. . . abolish the police.

They want to . . .

JUNE 8, 2020 / Shock, recognition

A personal account of aging, memory, and loss

LAST JULY 24 -- it seems many years ago -- Robert Mueller testified before the House Judiciary Committee and House Intelligence Committee about possible Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

He entered the hearing room with a remarkable reputation. Former former FBI director (2001-2013). A straight arrow. A man of integrity. Competent. Fair. A man who could be trusted to investigate Russian interference and possible Russian collusion with President Trump or his campaign.

You can decide for yourself whether his report was accurate and whether his investigation was fair. What is beyond debate, however -- at least in my mind -- is that whatever his testimony proved or demonstrated about Russia and the president, it raised serious questions about him, as a fully functional human being. He struggled visibly to understand simple questions and to formulate halting answers. Kevin R. Brock, writing in The Hill, said Mr. Mueller's performance eroded his trust.

Mueller came across as hesitant, uncertain and ill-prepared. He seemed unfamiliar with his own report, which led to some gross inconsistencies in his testimony. Couple this with his unusual request to have his deputy counsel along for backup and suddenly there was a very real perception that Mueller was not fully in command and control of the special counsel effort.

This was amplified by his efforts to heavily redact himself. It’s one thing to stand by your report; it’s quite another to hide underneath it and swat away even innocuous questions. It’s not a good look and leads reasonable people to wonder what’s being concealed. Trust seemed to erode.

(Brock, "Mueller lost much of our trust -- and that's a shame, for him and for us," The Hill (thehill.com), July 29, 2019)

I was shocked. In appearance and demeanor, he looked the part of a government official from Central Casting. But this impressive-looking 73-year-old man clearly suffered from decay of memory and mental acuity. Could his competence still be trusted? Was his storied integrity any longer relevant?

I'm not qualified to diagnose his problem, but I am qualified to recognize that he has a problem. I'm 74 and suffer from what my doctor calls age-related cognitive decline. I suspect Mr. Mueller suffers the same condition. If not, he suffers something similar, potentially even worse.

You have better uses for your time than to hear about my symptoms, tests, diagnoses, and treatments. They are what they are.

The short version is that in the late spring of 2018, I confessed to myself and others that I could no longer do common (for me) cognitive tasks that had long defined my identity and made my living -- namely writing.

For example, I taught Christian Bible classes. I always spent many hours preparing. Now, however, I could not get the 40-minute lessons done by Saturday evening. Muscling through the project often took all night. Even then, the writing was neither crisp nor well-organized. It wobbled here and there.

So I stopped teaching Bible lessons, which I loved. I also resigned from serious outside writing projects for a client I loved.

Stepping away was painful, but stepping away was the right thing to it. It was my responsibility to do these things well or not at all. My customers were better off finding more competent teachers and writers.

(I did continue work on a third-party photography exhibition that I curated and mounted last January on the Rice University campus. I found it difficult to organize and write, but it was stall a success, I believe. Sadly, however, my speech, meant to crown the event with a serious look at the backstory of the photographs, was weak at best, embarrassing at worst.)

Robert Mueller should have stepped away too. If his condition at the beginning of the investigation was anywhere near his condition at the end, he should never have accepted the invitation to serve as special counsel for the Russia probe. 

My condition and Mr. Mueller's set me to thinking about the problem posed by our aging political class. How old is too old?

On election day 2020, Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., will be 77 and Donald John Trump, 74. Leaving aside all questions of party, policy, and character, I doubt either man is fully competent, cognitively, to serve as president of the United States.

If you disagree and believe former Vice President Biden is cognitively sound, God bless you. I hope you are right. My view is that the evidence suggests otherwise and that the evidence is that he cannot be expected to do the job.

President Trump is a tougher call. His sometimes bizarre words and deeds suggest a long-term disability, not recent decline. Whatever the case, do not look to me to defend his cognitive abilities, other than this: If he is indeed charting his course by intuition rather than facts or logic,  his intuitions are often right. 

Why can America not cannot produce better candidates than these two men? Our system of selecting candidates is in need of repair.

There being no practical alternative to these candidates, however, how does one choose one cognitively impaired candidate over the other?

I will vote for President Trump. He has done a better job as president than his vicious and sometimes deranged critics will admit -- far better -- and his policies are considerably more congenial to me than those of his adversary. (God willing, I will write more about the case for Mr. Trump in future posts.)

I also believe Mr. Biden, were he to win, could do little more than serve as caretaker president of a government staffed top-to-bottom, and run, by hardcore progressives bent on destroying the American experiment.

My condition has been bettered by diet and exercise, a CPAP machine to overcome sleep apnea, and a pharmaceutical regime designed to slow cognitive decline.tThough I must take far greater care in attending to my personal affairs, I I am still capable of doing so.

But what lies over the horizon? Is the day coming when my mind slips a gear and leaves me susceptible to the first thief who calls asking for my account numbers?

Driving and other practical tasks are not a problem, so far as I can tell, but how long will that be true?

Should I continue, even for my own amusement, posting Unca D -- even if I am now limited, mostly, to copying and posting useful essays by others, rarely speaking in my own voice?

Or should I toss my concerns to the wind and do what the leaders of our two major political parties have endorsed by the testimony of their deeds -- run for president of the United States?

Probably not.

All else being equal, I wouldn't vote for me.

 

SUNDAY, JUNE 7, 2020 / The moral admonition against plunder . . .

. . . and looting is more than 3,000 years old.

MY SON, If SINFUL MEN entice you, do not give in to them. If they say, “Come along with us; let’s lie in wait for innocent blood, let’s ambush some harmless soul; let’s swallow them alive, like the grave, and whole, like those who go down to the pit; we will get all sorts of valuable things and fill our houses with plunder; cast lots with us; we will all share the loot”—my son, do not go along with them, do not set foot on their paths; for their feet rush into evil, they are swift to shed blood.

JULY 4, 2020 / Kimball on how to destroy civilization

THE VIOLENCE . . . exploding across the country now has almost nothing to do with the killing of George Floyd, a black man, by Derek Chauvin, a white policeman. That was merely the catalyst for a process that has deep roots in American culture.

The moral is: ideas matter. For decades now, our colleges and universities (and increasingly our [grade] schools) have been preaching . . .

JUNE 4, 2020 / Mac Donald: "The Myth . . .

. . . of Systemic Police Racism," The Wall Street Journal (wsj.com), June 3, 2020 (emphasis added, abridged).

GEORGE FLOYD'S DEATH in Minneapolis has revived the Obama-era narrative that law enforcement is endemically racist. On Friday, Barack Obama tweeted that for millions of black Americans, being treated differently by the criminal justice system on account of race is “tragically, painfully, maddeningly ‘normal.’ ” Mr. Obama called on the police and the public to create a “new normal,” in which bigotry no longer “infects our institutions and our hearts.”

This charge of systemic police bias was wrong during the Obama years and . . .