Removing Statues

I think the statues and monuments to Confederate generals and officials displayed in public areas around the south should be removed from places of honor on public land and put somewhere else. As well as I can tell most of them were erected during the Jim Crow years as objects of pro-Confederate defiance and symbols of the false rebel myth of the “glorious cause”. The politicians and societies who put them up were people who worked vigorously (and often successfully) to come as near they could  to erasing the results of reconstruction and  keeping black citizens in the former Confederacy in positions of servile inferiority. Besides, the men depicted in the statues committed treason against the United States.

I understand that Lee and some of the others were skilled military leaders and men of high personal character. I believe that should be recognized, but I also believe it is irrelevant in this context. As Grant wrote, the soldiers of the Confederacy served one of the worst causes for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse. I  would make an exception for the monuments at battlefields such as Shiloh and Gettysburg. Those do seem to honor the courage of the rebel soldiers rather than celebrate their despicable cause.

None of this means that the vandalism of Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and their hangers on should be excused or tolerated. The decisions on the statues should be made by the people and officials in the cities where the statues are.  It is interesting to note  that the vandals are  also going after statues and monuments honoring Union officers and officials, including even Lincoln. That is more evidence that these people’s interests and purpose are promoting general anti-Americanism with the talk about slavery as only a cover or excuse.

Help with Packaging

In  the last few days various companies have changed or announced plans to change the names of some of their products in response to demands from Black Lives Matter and other leftist groups. Clearly the products will need new names.  In the spirit of going along and avoiding divisiveness, I have some suggestions.

The first one is easy. Replace the picture of a black man on Uncle Ben’s rice packages with one  of Stalin and call it Uncle Joe’s rice.  Featuring one of their favorites  in that way should earn the rice company all sorts of praise from BLM, Antifa, and a good number of Democrats and media people.  Coming up with a replacement for Aunt Jemima is a little harder, but I think Auntie Eva, in honor of Eva Braun might work.  She is not that well known anymore, but she decidedly wasn’t a person of color, and she was the partner of a famous vegan activist and advocate for strong vigorous government  and the politics of direct physical action. That could be a good sop to the Antifa crowd.  For Eskimo Pie the company could replace the picture of the Eskimo on the ice cream bar  with one of a happy, re-educated inmate of the Gulag and call  it a Kolyma Freeze. Of course they would have to check and make sure Ben and Jerry hadn’t trademarked the name already.  

The Disney company is also making some changes. They need something to replace the Uncle Remus characters on  the splash mountain ride. I don’t have a good idea here. They could use the characters from Animal Farm, cuted up and slanted properly,  but I doubt that would really work. Somebody might have read the book. Orwell is so problematic.

Toughen Up, and Lighten Up

For the last few weeks gangs of leftist thugs have run pretty much wild in several cities.  We have seen looting, vandalism, arson, assaults, desecration or destruction of statues and monuments,  some murders, and in Seattle a declaration of a (very small) secessionist confederacy , all while local and state officials  allowed or even abetted it.  Politicians in Minneapolis have voted to abolish the city’s police department. Politicians in other cities have committed to “defunding” the police, which in practice can mean anything from following the example of Minneapolis to making a few cosmetic cuts in budgets to appease leftist voters. Cowardly shortsighted corporate weasels have announced their support for Black Lives Matter – one presumes in hopes of buying BLM off while being ignorant of or hoping their customers will be ignorant of BLM’s stated, official hard leftist agenda which has nothing to do with reigning in bad cops or getting better treatment from the police for black Americans.  In universities, government organizations, and corporations, people have lost jobs for criticizing BLM or Antifa, and some social media outfits have censored critics  or banned  them from their sites.  Fools and scoundrels (including some in the congress)  are lying about the history and basic principles of the country, and  often going unchallenged.  A lot of people are scared to speak up about what is going on – including apparently almost all Republican and non-leftist Democrat politicians.  The leftist  Dems are speaking up, but in favor of the hoodlums and rioters. It is a mess.

Enemies of liberal values, individual rights, and civilization itself are attacking them, and those of us who care about those things need to  stand up and resist.  The first thing one should do is to refuse to accept underserved guilt or blame and to make it emphatically clear that one is doing so.  If liars call you a “racist” and you are guilty of no bigotry,  call them on it. Creating feelings of guilt in  their intended victims is an important tactic  of the left, and all it takes to defeat it is to reject the charge as emphatically and  harshly as the context may require and not back down. No one alive today had anything to do with slavery in the United States. No one under the age of seventy nine could have voted before the  abolition of Jim Crow in 1964 for the southern (Democrat) politicians who created it and protected it until then. (Actually  the Marxists running  BLM and Antifa probably don’t give a hoot about slavery in American history. Marxists like slavery. Every Marxist state in history has been a slave state to the extent it stuck to its Marxist doctrine, starting with the Soviet Union and continuing to the present.  They just use the history of slavery as a means to try to discredit the idea of America, hoping that  thoughtless people will reject the principles on the basis of some people’s failures to live up to them.  The real reason for attacking  Jefferson, for example, is not revulsion at his personal failure of owning slaves and not, like Washington, freeing them, but rather hostility to his ideas of individual rights and limited government. )  If you weren’t there supporting Jim Crow, you are not guilty of what those who were did. The same thing goes for the death of George Floyd. If you were not the one with his knee on Floyd’s neck or one of the other cops watching as it happened, you are innocent of the crime, and you should make that plain to anyone who says otherwise.

The next thing to do is to go on the offensive. People should defend liberal values and individual rights when and where they can, and argue against, refute, and ridicule the false doctrines of the communists, fascists, and other authoritarians of the hard and now violent left.  Those  who are retired, self-employed, or otherwise independent of bosses  can be especially active with this.  People  should inform CEOs who are kowtowing to BLM  and gratuitously libeling customers based on their race that they will try not give their money to people who insult them. They should call out those in the traditional media for their bias and lying.  They can work to defund CNN the New York Times and the rest of the gang by not supporting them in any way.   They can work with local newspapers and TV stations to encourage fairness. They should support those who have lost jobs or careers for disagreeing with the leftists and encourage them to file lawsuits for wrongful termination (and vote big settlements if on a jury hearing such a case).  They should demand that the K12 schools  their kids attend not be leftists indoctrination camps and keep demanding it until the school boards and bureaucrats fix things.  In the meantime  they should work with their kids to help them resist indoctrination.  Those who are donors to colleges and universities should  tell administrators that donations will stop and pledges will be rescinded if dissent, diversity of opinion, and academic freedom continue to be suppressed. In my experience in both industries academicians are more obsessed with money than bankers, and this might be a good way to get their attention.  On college campuses where non-leftist speakers, students, and faculty or censored or silenced,  students who do not like hearing  leftist screeds from professors or invited speakers should demand the same safe spaces and protection  from being triggered that the campus officials give their leftist students and sue if they don’t get them.  People who have not done so already should buy firearms and ammunition as allowed by law and practice with the guns they buy.  An armed citizenry is a strong deterrent to would be tyrants, and firearms are also useful to deter or resist ordinary criminals.  As others have noted, the police are really second responders. When something happens to you, the actual first responder is you. Besides in some benighted places there may soon not be many or any policemen to respond at all.   People also should rarely or never miss a chance to lampoon and laugh at what the lefties are doing. It can have a disinfecting effect.

In summary it is time to toughen up.  There are real threats and dangerous places, and people need to behave accordingly. Freedom’s enemies are feeling a little too bold.  Many leftists who are not joining the thugs in the streets feel confident enough to drop the masks, throw in with them publicly, and endorse their agenda. However it is also time to lighten up. Some conservatives are saying the country is collapsing.  It isn’t.   It is not 1859 or the awful summer of 1940 or even 1968. It is worrisome that the Democrats and their public relation people in the traditional media have decided to support  gangs of  explicitly anti-American hoodlums  and play down their lies, false beliefs and vicious ideology, but most of the politicians and their flacks will pull back once they see it is expedient to do so.  BLM and Antifa themselves are pretty inept. Their putsch in Seattle likely will turn out to have been the most influential and successful Trump rally ever.  They have grossly overplayed their hands with the rioting, destruction of non-Confederate monuments, and other vandalism and violence. Their "cancel culture" stuff from the Indian woman on the butter package to Aunt Jemima to Eskimo Pie is becoming a national joke. The requests from the secessionists in Seattle for donations of vegan supplies and their leader’s shock that ambulance drivers would not enter their zone of occupation without protection from the police are the stuff of a Mel Brooks or a Monty Python movie. These are vile people who must be defeated, but  they are also bozos.  We are not up against the Sturmabteilung or the Petrograd Bolsheviks here. The larger threat is from the powerful people behind them and promoting them.  That threat is nothing new. It is just displaying itself differently.

Gone with the Wind and HBO

I am not as fond of the movie Gone with the Wind as some people are. It is surely an impressive production, and Gable and Leigh do a fine job with their characters, but there are a number of movies from the same year of 1939 that I enjoy more and think are better. Its pro-Confederacy propaganda is not the worst I’ve seen in movies from about that time, but it is bad enough.  (The worst I know about is Curtiz’s Santa Fe Trail with its thesis that things would have been fine if not for those busybody abolitionists. It was part of the political correctness of the day not to offend southerners by saying anything insensitive or divisive about the Confederacy.)  Its at least implied support of slavery is worse.

However it is wrong to judge art solely by political ideology. To cite a couple of extreme examples, Leni Riefenstahl and Sergei Eisenstein were talented film makers whose works promoted two of the worst regimes and ideologies in world history. One worked for the Nazis, and the other served the Soviets. That does not mean that one should not watch Olympia or Potemkin, and it certainly does not mean they should be banned.  It would take a Manichean dogmatist or at least an idealist in Mencken’s sense (a person who observing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, assumes it would make better soup) to think so.  

It was crude and stupid virtue signaling for HBO to pull Gone with the Wind  to return it only with a disclaimer which one presumes will alert those otherwise unable to figure it out that the movie slants things toward the viewpoint of the Johnny Rebs (which may say something about the opinion the bosses at HBO have about the intelligence of their customers).  It was also worrisome. The availability of movies or other works of art should not be  dictated by the  sensitivities and demands of pressure groups – whether Black Lives Matter, the National Legion of Decency, or anybody else.  We are not there yet, but there are people working to get us there.

 I have thought it was a good idea for a person to have his own copies of the books, movies and music he really likes, in his own possession, not in anybody’s cloud, or depending on anybody’s continuing to offer a given product.  I was less concerned about censorship or altering works than about the risk that vendors may just stop carrying some things one might want.  I still think that is the main reason for having one’s own libraries, but the risk of  censorship and/or bowdlerizing seems to be a little higher than it used to be.  

I have read that many vendors of DVDs and Blu-Rays sold out of Gone with the Wind after HBO pulled it. So lots of people may be starting to worry.   It is likely that to the extent that people do decide to buy their own media, their interest in HBO will decrease. That is okay. It would serve them right.

So Long, Eddie

Eddie Haskell died last week. My brother and I were not exactly Wally and the Beav, but we enjoyed the show and probably saw some of ourselves and the kids we knew in it.  We also liked Father Knows Best, though that family with its two girls  and one teenage boy was less similar to ours than the Cleavers. Many on the left seem to loathe and despise both shows. It seems pretty much de rigueur  to refer to them with patronizing sneers and reminders of the supposed profound observation that not everyone’s life or family is like that of the characters. It is worth wondering why. The way of life depicted in shows such as Leave It to Beaver or Father Knows Best is pretty good – a loving, self-supporting  husband and wife,  living decent and honest lives and caringly  raising their beloved children to be decent and honest human beings . A lot of people would trade for it. It certainly beats what far too many kids  and adults are getting today.  I think we should see the Cleavers and Andersons as representing an ideal – a partial one to be sure.  One would not want to be or live or have values  exactly like any of the characters, but there are aspects of their lives and especially how they functioned as families  that are worth emulating.

The other Eddie I thought about is a not a person but a corporation – Eddie Bauer.   We have been satisfied customers for decades, both online and at their local store. A few days ago, I received an email from the company’s CEO.  He first declared boldly that he  thought the lives of black people matter. It seemed a little odd for him to feel a need to reassure his customers on that point, but whatever.  Then, though, he announced that Eddie Bauer would discriminate in hiring in favor of BIPOC ( meaning black, indigenous, and other persons of color; I looked it up)  people, and that the company would struggle against this country’s pervasive, insidious  racism. He did not restrict his condemnation to actual bigots but rather tarred the non-BIPOC part of the country as a whole.  Of course discriminating in favor of members of a group requires discrimination against those not in the group. I thought of all the non-BIPOCs in my family, my circle of friends, and the country at large whom he has deciding to discriminate against, and could see no reason they should be so treated. I  thought of the same people, millions of them, whom he has decided to libel as racists indiscriminately without fact or evidence, but with only his dogmatic, unjust assertion of their collective guilt and evil, based on  the color of their skin. Then I decided that I do not care to give money to people who spit on me.  So we will not by buying anything from Eddie Bauer as long as that pompous, posturing  jerk and fool is running the organization.  I hope we are not alone.

They Don't Leave

In the 1930s, and particularly after the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, many people saw a threat and danger of persecution and worse from the Nazis and left Germany and other countries in central Europe for the United States or Great Britain. The emigres included famous people such as Albert Einstein as well as thousands of ordinary people who had decided it was time to get out.   From 1918 on many people saw what was happening in Russia and left the Soviet Union for other countries. Those emigres included famous people such as Sergei Rachmaninoff  as well as thousands of ordinary people who had decided to get out. After the Soviets occupied much of central Europe after World War II, thousands of people fled  the Soviet empire, even though the Soviets put up an iron curtain of walls, fences, and guard stations to keep people in and murdered thousands who tried to escape.  In the last seventy five years vast numbers of refugees have fled communist takeovers and governments in Asia and Latin America, and vast numbers of others have died trying.

The leftists of the Black Lives Matter organization claim that they live lives of oppression in a hated systemically and pervasively racist America whose white citizens believe their lives do not matter. America hating hard leftists of various sorts in this country attack  its government and society as morally  evil and operationally inferior and extol the superiority Marxist states. 

There are no barriers to a person leaving the United States. The exit door is open, and a person can walk through it any time he likes. There are dozens of countries in Africa and the Caribbean with governments completely controlled by black people where one can assume there would be no possibility of systemic anti-black racism or oppression of black people because of race. There are a few places left where the Marxist principles of the hard American left are put into practice – Cuba, North Korea, China partially. The opportunity is there.  Yet the leftists don’t leave.  It is a cosmopolitan world, and many Americans choose to live in foreign countries for various reasons, but one never hears of refugees from the United States. ( Given the prejudices of most of the people in the traditional media, one can assume such refugees would be treated as big news if there were even a good sized  handful of them.)

It is interesting and useful to think about why this is so and what it might tell us about our leftists.

CIty Risk

In investing country risk is the general risk from the political conditions of a country as distinct from the particular risk of a specific investment. It can come from present or expected internal conditions such as the rise of a maximum leader or generalissimo for life who might decide to expropriate foreign owned property or default on government bonds.  It can be part of the cultural background of a place such as a general lack of respect for property rights or the rule of law. It can be the result of an external threat such as the one now faced by Hong Kong.  Whatever the causes, country risk is something for prudent investors to consider in deciding whether to invest in a place and, if they decide to, what extra return or opportunity they would want to justify the risk.

The United States is usually considered to be one of the places with the lowest country risk, and is a place where foreign investors seeking safety often put their money.  However this country is not homogenous in terms of its government. Local governments have a lot of authority, and their polices and behavior vary significantly.  I think careful investors may  start considering city risk, particularly with regard to real estate.  In Minneapolis for example members of the city council have announced plans to abolish the city’s police department. Whether they go through with it or not, that is the political environment of the place. It is hard to see how a prudent person would want to build, invest in, or accept as collateral a building in that town, or how a corporate officer could do so without failing in his fiduciary duty to shareholders.  There are other cities where  leftist politicians, capricious regulation, corruption, and failure to maintain public safety and civil order create risk.  The greens have their ESG funds which brag self-righteously about not investing in energy, tobacco, defense, and other frowned on things (and presumably not going out with girls who do).  If there is not one already, someone probably could make some money creating a REIT that invested in real estate only in places with low city risk.   

Of course the considerations about investing in a place apply also to the question of whether one would want to move to it or to stay if he were already there.

Black Lives and BLM

At a time when politicians, corporate CEOs,  and just about everyone in the traditional are falling all over themselves pledging allegiance, loyalty, fealty, and money  to the Black Lives Matter organization, and when ostracism, firing, and fake forced apologies are demanded for or from people who deviate  even slightly from the approved line, we are told it is important to take a stand.  It probably is. The country is not falling apart, but there are bad things happening. 

I am opposed to BLM and think it is bad for the country. Its stated basic premise is wrong.  The fact that the lives of black people matter is not controversial.  Virtually everyone agrees that they do.  The claim that their organization and its actions are needed to drive that point home to the millions of simian white dullards and bigots who think black lives do not matter is dangerously false as a cynical political point  and downright paranoid in anyone who really believes it. The enemy they claim to be fighting does not exist in any meaningful way. 

That is not the only place in which BLM is  careless with the truth.  The police in this country are not running an extermination operation against black men.  Some cops abuse their authority and commit crimes, but claims of that being a general practice are contrary to the known facts and statistics.  A cabal or conspiracy of cops did not kill George Floyd. One man did.

Then there are the false charges of white privilege and systemic racism. It is not 1920 in the Jim Crow south.  The fact is that in law and government  this country had had explicit black privilege for a number of decades in the form of affirmative action quotas, lower admission standards, set asides, and so on.  As to systemic racism, one has to wonder what system they have in mind. Most people working for a government , a corporation, or anywhere else in the public eye for the last many years who may have had bigoted notions, must surely have known that they voice or display them at their own peril.  Racism and bigotry aside,  references to plain facts and data contradicting politically correct assumptions can get a person in serious trouble.  Blacks are a protected group, and that protection is enforced. There is a party line. Mild, totally non-bigoted dissent from that party line can lead  to big trouble, as poor, weak Drew Brees found out recently.

In many ways BLM is really just a  leftist advocacy and agitprop group masquerading as a civil rights organization  and trying to create a sense of racial guilt among white people - most of whom have nothing to feel guilty about -  and then leverage that guilt for political gain.  It is a centuries old tactic, and it has worked well at many times and in many places. If you can make a person feel guilty and worthless, particularly if he has done nothing to be guilty for, often you’ve got him.  It is a vile practice, which its targets should reject emphatically.  It  also makes up a big part of BLM’s whole act and tactical agenda. People in BLM have allied  themselves with the fascist thugs of Antifa   and done little or nothing serious about opposing  the looters and arsonists or even separating themselves from them. They are a bad bunch, and the corporate weasels who kowtow to them are being very short sighted.  Black lives matter, but BLM should not. Black Americans deserve better. The country deserves better.

Politics after the Death of George Floyd

As citizens of a free country, Americans have a responsibility to watch, “second guess”, and restrain and control the police. Police – local, state, and federal – have a lot of power, and some of them  abuse that power and commit crimes.  It is said that the case of George Floyd has led many people to realize this. If so, those people must not have been paying much attention. There was plenty of evidence and cases before. Regardless, the killing of Floyd has definitely put questions concerning police and policing in the news and on people’s minds.

Conservatives generally support the police and tend to give their behavior the benefit of the doubt.  However I know of no one among conservatives who is defending what the cop did  to  George Floyd. Given the desire of people in the traditional media to portray conservatives in a bad light, we probably would have heard about if they had been able to come up with one. 

Libertarians usually believe that all government power, including that of the police,  should be strictly limited and carefully controlled.  I would guess that most of them would see what happened to Floyd as another illustration of the validity of that belief. 

Leftists have an interesting problem.  People who last month were proclaiming that the police are the sole and sufficient guardians of life and property, and that everyone else should be disarmed, leaving only them with guns, are now declaring that cops are vicious, untrustworthy racial bigots who hassle, abuse, and murder people just for the hell of it. It will be amusing to see how leftist candidates square those  two opinions in the coming election.

Some on the left are calling for abolishing local police altogether. That won’t happen, even in cities completely controlled by  Democrats. There may be a few symbolic budget cuts in a few places  in the name of “defunding” to satisfy angry leftist voters, but  I doubt if even that will go very far. The fact is that while we would not need the police (or the rest of government)  in a world where almost everyone was decent and rational, that world does not exist, and police are needed.

There is a way for serious leftists to sort of defund the police in their own lives however. They can put two signs on the front door of their residences. One, which should already be there for those serious about taking guns away from people, would state that everyone on the property is unarmed and has no means of self defense. The  other would announce that the residents oppose the police and will not call them under any circumstance or for any reason.  That would be putting their money and their hides where their mouths are. 

Local Trouble

A policeman in our town has gotten in trouble for something he posted on Facebook about the riots and demonstrations going on around the country.  He is of course guilty of  first degree foolishness.  No one whose career depends on the whims of politicians, bureaucrats, or corporate weasels should post anything on Facebook   that can be interpreted as being about a black person or some black people  (or Muslims  and usually homosexuals and sometimes Hispanics) other than “They are  the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human beings  I’ve ever known in my life”, or the equivalent.

However, if the version of his post printed on the local newspaper’s website is accurate,  that seems to be all he is guilty of. He wrote that demonstrations across the country begin peacefully and lawfully and then are over run by trash “trying to start crap.”  The wording may be crude, but  rioters, looters, and arsonists have moved in with the demonstrations in many cities, and “trash” is a mild enough term for such vandals.  He then wrote that something similar happened at a local demonstration – saying that after a while “east side rabble” showed up, displaced some of the peaceful demonstrators,  and began chanting  “fuck the police”.   Well, a mob of people shouting such things can properly be called a  rabble, and if they came from the east side of town,  one could see how he could call them  what he did without intending any disparagement based on race. In fact he never mentioned any race or ethnic group in the post.

He’ll probably be fired anyway. Then he can  sue and get to share a big payoff with his lawyer. The citizens will foot the bill, but our sensitive, inclusive civil masters will have been able to signal all sorts of virtue, which should make us all feel better.