Following the Party Line at the Museum

 

Last week Debby and I went to an exhibit at the Kimbell museum of Dutch art from the great days of the Dutch republic, with most of the paintings and prints coming from a museum in Boston. It was magnificent. Anyone who can should take in the exhibit. We went twice.

However, the notes accompanying the paintings are better skipped if one is interested in art instead of dulling, repetitive, irrelevant, woke sermonizing. A beautiful painting of ships is attached to a note reminding readers that some sailing ships were used to transport slaves. A still life of luxury items has a note about slaves or exploited locals in some of the countries where the items originated, and so on and on and on.

What is appropriate in a history book or seminar is not at an art exhibit. In an art exhibit it is both jarring and distracting and an example of how pernicious and pervasive the critical race/DEI stuff is and of how hostile it is to Western civilization. I doubt that an exhibit of artifacts from ancient Egypt curated by the same writers would be accompanied repeatedly reminders that the pyramids were not built by skilled union labor or that notes accompanying an exhibit of Chinese art would dwell on the prevalence of slavery in China throughout its history or that an exhibit of Indian sculpture would feature commentary on the evils of the caste system.

So, go to the exhibit. Skip over the notes. And maybe drop the people at the museum a text or email saying what they are doing is wrong, because it is. And people should speak up. We and our civilization do not have to take this lying down.

Mandates

 

“The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism.” -

George Washington

Trump and his supporters are claiming their narrow victory has given them a mandate to do as they like. This is not a surprise. It is what our politicians do when they win. Biden and the Democrats treated his narrow victory as a mandate to do as they liked. The fact is that there are no mandates from the people for politicians to do as they like. Politicians just like to say there are. Politicians are and must be restrained by the laws and the Constitution regardless of how many votes they get. They also should remember that one election is just one election and that the nation does not speak in unison. Even in the landslides of FDR, LBJ, Nixon, and Reagan, around four of ten voters opposed the winner. LBJ’s and Nixon’s parties lost the presidency the next time around after their victories. A party has won three presidential elections in a row only once since World War II. Politicians should not assume that their victories mean “the people” love them or even are willing to tolerate them enough to stick with them over time.

Victorious politicians should go easy, respect the rights and opinions of those who opposed them, recognize their victories as the ephemeral things they are, and behave reasonably and moderately. In neither of the two major parties have they been doing that. They should pay attention to the words and warning of a better man than any of them and start.

Trouble Already

 

I have written very harsh things about Donald Trump. I still believe them. I wanted the senate to convict him after his second impeachment. I wanted Republicans to move on from him after he left office in disgrace. I wanted Haley or DeSantis to stop him in the primaries. I wanted the Democrats to replace Biden with a moderate opponents of the left could support. I still wish one of those things had happened, but none of them did.

Last week I voted for Trump. It was not because I thought Harris was a worse human being or a bigger fool. I did not think that. It was because I finally decided that, by my best guess, the country would be worse off and suffer more with four years of her and the Democrats than with four years of Trump and the Republicans.

So I voted for Trump, despite expecting him to do some very bad and foolish things. Well he has started. Matt Gaetz is a completely inappropriate choice for attorney general that the senate definitely should reject. Surely there will be four Republican senators to join with the Democrats and vote his nomination down. Of course I can hear my friends who voted against Trump saying maybe not and don’t call me Shirley. I hope they do not get the last laugh.

Post Election Follies

 

“I Haven’t Seen Democrats This Mad

Since Republicans Freed Their Slaves”

-post election internet meme

 A person does not have to be a fan of Donald Trump to be amused by the stuff coming from some Democrats since the election (not the ordinary Democrat voters who are disappointed and concerned but keeping their heads). We have shaved heads, sex strikes, people checking with Google to see how to get to Canada, tearful TV late night show hosts, Harris people blaming Biden, Biden people blaming Harris, somebody blaming almost everybody except Obama, various friends of democracy blaming the voters for being too stupid to appreciate them, all sorts of people blaming men, and colleges and law schools offering students cookies and coloring books to ease their suffering. It’s a show.

There is also the phoniness that has been revealed in the last few days. As Kat Tempf and others have noticed, all the people on leftist TV outfits who claimed they would be imprisoned if Trump won showed up for work after the election as if nothing had happened. One would think that if they believed what they had said, at least one of them would have gone into hiding or run for the border. Since none has or likely will, one may assume they were lying all along. The same thing goes all the more so for those who claimed Trump was another Hitler who would become a dictator and end the republic. If they really believed that, surely at least one of them would be getting out while the getting is good.

I think a special prize for phoniness should go to those such as some of the gang at the Bulwark who have spent the last few years proclaiming preserving democracy as the crucial issue of the age and their role in defending it as a high calling. That was before the election went the wrong way for them. Now they are declaring that the demoi are fools not to be trusted, that their stupid choice should not be respected, and that its implementation should be resisted and sabotaged starting immediately. A person half expects them to follow the Babylon Bee’s lead and come out for abolishing both the electoral college and the popular vote to save our democracy. It may become hard for them the get people to take their “we have no tribal loyalties; we’re just warriors in the sacred cause of democracy” pitch seriously.

I voted Republican against the left rather than for Trump, and I will oppose some of the stuff Trump plans to do. But you have to give the guy credit for both triggering some fine entertainment and highlighting some serious phoniness in the last week.

Getting too Worked Up

 

There are stories in the news about people breaking with friends or even relatives over displeasure with which candidate and party they favor in tomorrow’s election. This strikes me as being both wrong and a little nutty. Yet it seems to happen a lot. (I experienced a mild version of it in early 2017 after Trump became president. A relative ordered me out of his house, not for voting for Trump, which I had not, but for joking about Trump. Apparently to him Trump was so dark an evil as to make humor or levity on the subject too inappropriate or immoral to tolerate. That was strange and not profitable for any concerned.) It is not only that a person’s voting preferences are not the most important thing about him. It is that they usually are among the far less important things about him and a truly asinine criterion for judging him as a human being. It is a corrosive thing to see politics as more important than it is, to make it determinative of one’s opinions of others and even one’s outlook on life. It’s just politics after all. In this election we have two lousy candidates, one of whom will win and do some bad things. It matters, but we are lucky to live in a country where it does not matter that much. The country’s culture, principles, and people are far more important and far better than its politicians and government. Regardless of which of the two losers wins the election, the country and the republic will abide. People on both sides who are giving apocalyptic warnings about the other side should look around, calm down, and see that. They are not doing us any good.