Connexion
Plus: space travel and liberalism.
This much must be said for politicians who like to be seen as ornery SOBS: They want us to think they are loyal only to their own high moral principles and sometimes, just maybe, answerable to the voters. That being the case, they once in a while say something worth saying. The Republican Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana, the ornery SOB in this case, has apologized for our bombing of a girls’ school in Iran and thinks it’s high time the Trump administration figures out how to end this war and get on with it.
Mostly, though, Kennedy’s act is increasingly hard to watch without wincing. A former Democrat—he endorsed John Kerry over George W. Bush in 2004—Kennedy now affects an embarrassingly over-the-top yokel routine that invites comparison to Foghorn Leghorn of Looney Tunes fame and other cartoon characters from the 73-year-old’s boyhood. It’s like he’s not sure whether he represents the good people of Louisiana or those of Dogpatch—the “menfolk,” anyway.
This act might mislead the uninformed to think Kennedy really did wander off the set of Petticoat Junction, if not Hee-Haw” What this performative nonsense attempts to conceal is the fact that Kennedy is by no means the country bumpkin he portrays. He has an undergraduate degree in philosophy from Vanderbilt and a law degree from the University of Virginia, and he did postgraduate work at Oxford. Whether, like Jethroe Bodine, he ever had ambitions to be a “double-nought spy,” is not known, though he might well have gussied up his resume in hopes of securing a position at the State Department.
It doesn’t take three minutes to find clips of the way Kennedy spoke back when he was a Democrat. Then he sounded like what he was and is—an educated man whose hundreds of acres of farmland has been passed down through his family since before the Civil War. His family was once among the richest in Louisiana. If Kennedy operates a still behind the Russell Office Building and carries a flintlock blunderbuss to keep the “infernal revenooers” away, that would be as much a shock as the self-circulated rumor that he finds indoor plumbing a wonderment and a challenge.
Why this act seems to work, with some of our fellow citizens, is a subject unto itself. Fewer and fewer Americans live and work on farms—especially small farms—but more and more of us seem to fantasize about it. Millions of college-educated office workers who’ve never gotten anywhere near a tractor sit in their cubes at the office or before their laptops in their subdivision homes and listen to “country music.” The songs invariably mention dirt roads, pickup trucks, swimmin’ holes and long-legged gals in cut-off jeans.
There’s even a number in which two of these singers, Alex Miller and Emily Ann Roberts, argue about which one is “more country.” What makes it so revealing is that one way these two make the case for their superiority is by dropping brand names. Alex “can stack bales of hay in a barn loft all day” but, better still, he wears a Bass Pro hat and likes a Copenhagen chew.
Emily Ann, not to be outdone, knows how to boot-scoot in her Lucchese footwear. Alex and Emily Ann, put differently, are dependable consumers of just the right products, and if that doesn’t make them “authentic,” it’s hard to imagine, in the America of our day, what would. The more I see of Alex Miller’s schtick, I’m beginning to wonder if he is not a product too, AI-generated like the soulful R&B singer Eddie Dalton, whose music topped the charts this spring.
Something else that has topped the charts this spring is Kennedy’s book, How to Test Negative for Stupid: And Why Washington Never Will, which has become a New York Times best-seller. Chockablock with the senator’s “zany turns of phrase,” as a Times news story about the book puts it, it has sold half a million copies, which isn’t bad for a work he “dictated using a hand-held recorder at his kitchen table.” Not in his Capitol Hill office, his home office or even his dining room table, mind you: his kitchen table. You know, the one with the Formica top, where he carves up his chitlins.
Here too, his studied candor is on display. He seems to adore his fellow cracker Lindsey Graham. “If you want to stump Lindsey, just ask him to name a country he wouldn’t bomb,” Kennedy writes. Invite him to dinner, “and you don’t know if he’ll sit down for an intelligent conversation or get drunk and vomit in the fishbowl. But that’s why I like him.”
President Donald Trump “can be cruel,” Kennedy writes, “sometimes he is wrong, and he and I are unalike in many ways. I’ve acknowledged that. But we are alike in our appreciation of candor.” Well, maybe not. Trump seems to have no idea what will come out of his mouth at any moment. Kennedy’s candor, if it can be called that, always sounds so calculated that you begin to wonder if he is not an AI concoction himself.
Further questions can be directed to Kennedy’s chief of staff, Claude Hopper.
The Artemis II moon shot was hard enough to fathom without NASA confusing us with jargon that none of us outside the Mission Control Center probably understand. Acronyms, too. ICPS, apparently, refers to interim cryogenic propulsion stage—whatever the means. When the thing takes off and power cables are disconnected, that’s umbilical separation. Until this, most of us would have guessed that would have something to do with childbirth.
Even weather reports are hard enough to understand, now that the people who tell us whether it will rain or not call themselves meteorologists. Rain they call “precipitation,” and when they want to tell us to expect it or not, it’s “probability of precipitation.”
But they aren’t all stuffed shirts, these meteorologists. When they want to be informal or cute, they call snow “that white stuff.” At least we won’t have to hear that for months to come.
How could this happen? Why all this support for the MAGA movement? Why this recent explosion of right-wing populism? John Gray, late of the London School of Economics, had something to say about the subject in an Institute for Arts and Ideas presentation in December.
Populism, Gray explained, “is a word liberals use to describe the political backlash against the social disruption produced by their own policies. They don’t understand that what they have done or failed to do has produced or helped to produce [these] morbid phenomena that we now see. It has nothing to do with them. The only things that they will admit to is they weren’t liberal enough.”
The post The Capitol Hillbillies appeared first on The American Conservative.
Plus: filibusters and fired generals.
The Kennedy Center will be closed for renovations in July, and all of Washington’s culture vultures are in a tizzy. Thousands of self-styled sophisticates will be deprived of artistic offerings for two years, at least, and there’s no telling what the place will look like once President Donald Trump, whose name has been affixed to the marquee, is done.
Enjoy it while you can—the performances and the venue itself. “The Center for the Performing Arts named for Kennedy, an arts-loving statesman assassinated in 1963, opened in 1971,” Tom Sellar, the editor of Yale’s Theater magazine, wrote earlier this year. He continued,
A white marble building with seven theaters perched along the Potomac River, it possesses sweeping views of the U.S. capital city. With striking crystal chandeliers and a regal red carpet leading visitors into the building, the land held a stateliness and glamor that memorialized the slain president while also honoring the performing arts. The institutional architecture might be dated, but when you walk into the building, you feel a little bit of Jackie Onassis glamour, the dignity of a bygone era.
It’s remarkable how much the place has improved in the past half century, considering that no significant improvements have been made. The Kennedy Center has been expanded, of course. Americans tend to make things bigger but not better, and that’s the case here as everywhere.
We also like to exaggerate the virtues of our heroes—especially ones no one can really remember—which is why JFK these days is regarded as not only as a great statesman, but a wit to rival Oscar Wilde and a connoisseur of the arts.
Mentions of Kennedy’s supposed love of literature, it has long since been revealed, was little more than a campaign ploy. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. urged JFK to position himself as a champion of “artistic and cultural achievement.” Even his “supposed addiction to James Bond,” Schlesinger said, was a “publicity gag.” Kennedy “seemed to enjoy the cool and the sex and the brutality” of Ian Fleming’s spy novels, Ben Bradlee said, but that was about it.
It’s remarkable, too, how the performance space named in JFK’s honor has, since Trump took office for the second time, become a beloved monument to high culture. That was never the case before. For decades, the Kennedy Center has been regarded as hopelessly middlebrow, if not actually embarrassing to the city’s true sophisticates.
It was certainly viewed as such when it opened. “The style of the Kennedy Center is Washington superscale, but just a little bit bigger,” Ada Louise Huxtable reported in the New York Times, when its doors first opened. “Albert Speer would have approved.”
Its 600-foot-long, 60-foot-high foyer—“the length of three New York City blockfronts,” made it “one of the biggest rooms in the world, into which the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles could be cozily nestled.” The Hall of States and Hall of Nations are “disquietingly reminiscent of the overscaled vacuity of Soviet places of culture. They would be great for drag racing.” The building itself “is a superbunker, 100 feet high, 630 feet long and 300 feet wide, on the Potomac. One more like this and the city will sink.”
The whole thing aimed for what its designers called “timelessness” and “produced meaninglessness.” What it has in size, “it lacks in distinction. Its character is aggrandized posh. It is an embarrassment to have it stand as a symbol of American artistic achievement before the nation and the world.”
With its “stupefying size” it’s “a familiar blend of theatrical glamor and showroom Castro Convertible.” It’s a “cross between a concrete candy box and a marble sarcophagus in which the art of architecture lies buried.”
What Trump will do can never be predicted with any kind of confidence and what he has in mind for the Kennedy Center, for his own ballroom and for the rest of the capital—considering the gold leaf he has plastered all around the White House—is not encouraging, of course. Jackie’s tastes were no doubt more refined than Melania’s, though it’s unlikely that our current First Lady will have much say in the plans, whatever that’s worth.
This is the edifice that establishment Washington now defends with such devotion, and echoes something else going on in political circles. This is from the same crowd, after all, that for decades has been telling us that the United States is a corrupt and racist plutocracy operating only for the benefit of rich people. Now they pledge to “save our democracy.” Go figure.
If you think health care is expensive now, just wait till you see what it costs when it’s free.
P.J. O’Rourke
Michael Tomasky of the New Republic wants to terminate the filibuster. Here he agrees with President Donald Trump, but for different reasons, of course. Trump wants to end the filibuster so he can get the SAVE America Act passed. Tomasky hates the SAVE Act but seems to think its passage would be a small price to pay for all the wonderful programs his likeminded liberals could enact once the filibuster was abolished.
The Democrats, “the party of government,” could “do a lot of things.” Good things, at that. They could “do what they came to Washington to do and pass laws that make people’s lives better.” Passing “bill after bill,” they could raise the minimum wage, make “vocational schools and community colleges free,” offer “subsidized childcare to working parents,” build “affordable housing units,” etc., etc., etc.—“done, done, done, done, and done.”
Americans would love it. “For the first time in ages,” Tomasky writes, they’d see their elected representatives, not wasting everyone’s time in “bickering and dysfunction.” Instead, they’d see “one party actually passing laws that make their lives a little better! They could, if they wished to, make FDR’s first 100 days look lackadaisical by comparison.”
But why stop there? The sky’s the limit. The agenda just laid out seems kind of miserly, if not mean-spirited, come to think of it.
C’mon, Michael. Loosen up, buddy! Use your imagination.
A study of the rise of rightwing populism in Europe and elsewhere by academics from universities in Salerno, Paris and Barcelona explores it as, in part, a backlash against globalization. Bankrolled by the National Research Fund of Luxembourg and the Brussels-based National Fund for Scientific Research, the report is generously decorated with the abstruse arithmetic equations now required of any and all serious contributions to political thought.
Left- as well as right-wing populism tends to spike after economic crises, the researchers find, and right-wing populism reached an “all-time high” during the decade ending 2019. Globalization is a factor, but immigration pressures play a role, too, and these can be expected to contribute to populist sentiments. Protectionist policies of trading partners, including the Trump administration’s tariffs, will also be a factor.
How impartial the researchers are might be inferred from how they frame the whole project. “Taken together,” they conclude, “our findings suggest that the blame for the rise of populism cannot be laid to globalization as a whole.”
Blame? Did you catch that?
Pete Hegseth’s firing of Army Chief of Staff Randy George—“the latest in a series of clashes between the Pentagon chief and the service’s leadership,” the Washington Post reports—calls to mind that great line from Stanley Kubrick’s Doctor Strangelove: “Gentlemen! Gentlemen! You can’t fight here. This is the war room!”
The post Edifice Complex Afflicts DC’s Aesthetes appeared first on The American Conservative.
Lateo.net - Flux RSS en pagaille (pour en ajouter : @ moi) 