Tuesday, May 28, 2019
Sex, Donald Trump, And The New/Old Sexuality - We Love The New White House
LBJ, his successor, never had the charm of the Kennedys but that never stopped his midnight carousing. Inside Secret Service sources shared the story of his not-so-secret nighttime trysts with, so the story goes, just about anyone.
Trysts and assignations are nothing new to the White House. Even the most proper presidents had affairs – Eisenhower and FDR with their secretaries, Thomas Jefferson with his slaves, and the likes of Martin Van Buren, Garfield, and Cleveland with a variety of women. Bill Clinton had alleged affairs with Gennifer Flowers and, if his wife Hillary is to be believed, with any number of other trailer trash lowlifes.
The Age of Donald Trump, however, is altogether different. For all intents and purposes, the 70+ President has had his fling and has no interest in bedding anyone other than his wife. Yet, if not the sexiest man in America, he has made sex popular once again. He, the squire of Hollywood divas, the patron of beauty contests, the chief showman of Las Vegas glitz and glamour, is the champion of men’s right to behave badly.
Yes, he fondled, pinched, leered, and groped. So what? Today's censorious, politically correct, Puritanical attitudes concerning men and women, is but a political flourish. For all the progressive cant and invective, men will always chase women, find them impossible to resist, and dream of them until the day they die. Savvy men will bed hundreds of women in their lifetime. These sexually aware men understand women. They know that despite the feminist rhetoric, the claims of misogyny and patriarchal white, sexual privilege, women still are drawn to attractive, virile, confident men.
Despite feminist demands for sexual liberty, disavowal of physical allure and seduction, and the derogation of the predatory male – nothing has changed. There are still one hundred female sexual followers for every rock star, high-flying politician, Wall Street wunderkind, and spiritual guru. Women still want, and are ineluctably attracted to the most desirable (successful) males. There are no posters of fey, sexually indeterminate men in teenage girls’ bedrooms.
Donald Trump has made sexual allure acceptable once more. Of course we are not talking about the cinq-a-sept liaisons, the sophisticated infidelities of former French President Mitterrand at whose funeral were present not only his wife but his lover and their illegitimate daughter, or the indelicacies of another former French President, Nicolas Sarkozy who lived in the Elysees with his mistress while his estranged wife loudly objected. We are talking about pure American cornflower, freckled, wholesome womanhood.
America is a middle-brow, if not low-brow country. We are not a nation of Bach, Breughel, or Bernini; but one of the Indy 500, The Grand Ol’ Opry, Las Vegas, Hollywood and the soapy melodramas of New York. We love gorgeous, former model, exotic-looking First Lady Melania; and even more, sexy, steamy, blonde-and-beautiful Ivanka.
The Camelot of earlier White House days, the days of Carl Sandburg, Pablo Casals, and Dmitri Rostropovich, are gone forever; and in fact they were nothing but an irregular cultural interlude. America never was the country of classicism, elegance, and good taste; but wholesome, country music values.
So when President Trump squires beauty queens and says “I don’t think Ivanka would do that [pose for Playboy], although she does have a very nice figure. I’ve said if Ivanka weren't my daughter, perhaps I'd be dating her’, we love him. We get it when he says, “I think the only difference between me and the other candidates is that I’m more honest and my women are more beautiful” or "Oftentimes when I was sleeping with one of the top women in the world, I would say to myself, 'Can you believe what I am getting?" He is one of us – bourgeois, sex-obsessed, anti-intellectual.
It is very hard for the Establishment to accept Donald Trump as President. Not only is he a misogynist, homophobic, racist; a liar and grotesque caricature of leadership, but he revels in the accusations. He refuses to give an inch to his hopelessly idealistic critics.
No one denies the sexual oppression of women of the past; but few in today’s culture of victimhood, acknowledge the strength, power, and even supremacy of women despite a patriarchal society. The women of Shakespeare, Ibsen, and O’Neill among others best men at every turn. Laura, the heroine of Strindberg’s ‘The Father’ uses women’s ultimate authority – knowledge of paternity – to emasculate and dismiss her husband. Tamora, Dionyza, Goneril, Regan, Volumnia and Margaret have no truck with men or their presumptuous authority and win at any cost. Rosalind and her Comedic sisters demonstrate women’s innate sexual savvy and dominance.
To celebrate women as Trump has done – to show their beauty in pageants and television appearances. and to acknowledge their allure and ineluctable attractiveness to men – he does no disservice to them, but rates them as equals to men. Is there some inequality in being the pursued if pursuance results in reward? Trump speaks what men know – sexual pursuit is our cloth and our fabric; and women wear it willingly.
There is no legitimacy to the clams of Trump misogyny. He, in classical progressive terms, has been feminist in respect for his wife, his promotion of his daughter, and his gender-neutral hiring; but he has been classically male in his love of women as women; and this is what America respects.
There are few American males who differ from the Trump sexual philosophy. Most men desire and pursue women until their dying day. The ultimate irony, to paraphrase Dostoevsky, is than men desire women until their death, but are able to perform for only a fraction of their lives. Most women want a virile, sexually and socially confident male to guide to satisfy their need for shelter and their desire for satisfaction.
Donald Trump is no misogynist or patriarchal authoritarian. He is unabashedly male, dismissive of neo-cultural progressive assumptions about sexuality and gender fluidity; but never judgmental or sexually ignorant. If accepting sexual polarity and endorsing Lawrentian dynamics is a sin, so be it. Human sexuality will never be subject to temporal, political definitions.
More than Kennedy, LBJ, or Clinton, Trump is a sexual Man of the People. For his unashamed, unabashed love of beautiful women, he is one of us. For his refusal to accept the gender spectrum as nothing more than progressive confabulation, for his denial of fungible sexuality, and for his uncompromising belief in man-woman sexuality, he is a popular hero.
Monday, May 27, 2019
Joe Biden, ‘Another Low IQ Individual’–Only The Morose Left Don’t Find Donald Trump Hilarious
No one but the aggrieved Left takes Donald Trump seriously. Ever since his 2016 victory, they have branded him a racist bigot, misogynist, and a corrupt, lying, manipulator. There seems to be no end to the ad hominem attacks – his small hands, his weight, his hair, his gestures, his lips. From a progressive movement whose activists call out even the slightest innuendo concerning race, gender, and ethnicity, the irony of these criticisms is not lost.
Ad hominem, scurrilous, nasty, gutter language is of course not new to American politics. In the Presidential campaign of 1796 Adams supporters claimed that Jefferson’s election would result in a civil war, that he would free the slaves, and that he was an atheist. As for Adams’ supporters, they were “cut-throats who walk in rags and sleep amid filth and vermin.”
The election of 1828 was no more civil. One of the handbills also accused Jackson of being a cannibal, that after massacring over 500 Indians one evening, “the blood thirsty Jackson began again to show his cannibal propensities, by ordering his Bowman to dress a dozen of these Indian bodies for his breakfast, which he devoured without leaving even a fragment.”
Furthermore, a supporter of Adams named Charles Hammond, in an editorial in the Cincinnati Gazette, wrote (and emphasis is his), “General Jackson’s mother was a COMMON PROSTITUTE brought to this country by British soldiers. She afterwards married a MULATTO MAN, with whom she had several children, of which General JACKSON IS ONE!!!”
The election of 1884 provided another example of delightful mudslinging, this time in the form of short rhymes. When it came to light that year that Grover Cleveland had sired an illegitimate child, the Republicans created a cheer, “Ma, Ma, Where’s My Pa? Gone to the White House, Ha Ha Ha!”; but Democrats answered back with a dope rhyme of their own. “Blaine, Blaine, James G. Blaine, The Continental Liar from the State of Maine.” [All the above references and quotes are from Philadelphia Magazine October 2012]
The nastiness did not end there.
* Whigs senselessly call 1848 presidential hopeful Lewis Cass a “pot-bellied, mutton-headed cucumber” in response to Democrats’ accusations that opposing candidate Zachary Taylor is, among other things, a crappy dresser.
* Whigs “prove” that James K. Polk was a slave trader in 1844—by quoting extensively a completely fake excerpt from a book.
* 1844 Democrats backing James K. Polk claim that Henry Clay had sex with whores and, furthermore, broke all 10 of the commandments; in lieu of evidence, they declare simply that the details are “too disgusting to appear in public print.”
* 1828, again: Jackson supporters accuse Adams of having premarital sex with his wife and being a pimp, claiming he arranged an American hooker for Czar Alexander I.
* Whigs portray incumbent (and son of a farmer) Martin Van Buren as an effete snob with a penchant for really nice perfume and strutting in front of $2,400 mirrors like a peacock [All the above bullets from Mother Jones].
Donald Trump is quintessentially American, and for better or worse, this means barfights, insults, lies, exaggerations, nasty innuendo, and braggadocio. Trump is a man of the streets of New York – an impolitic, rude, bare-knuckled place where niceties, gentility, and consideration are for losers. Threats, intimidation, and ridicule are stock in trade – anything to weaken, throw off balance, sow doubt and personal misgivings of the opponent is a time-proven weapon. George Dukakis lost his Presidential bid because he looked ridiculous sitting in a tank with a gunner’s helmet on and no one let him forget it. He was pilloried, ridiculed, laughed at, and demeaned not only because of the irony of a progressive Democrat from the most liberal state in the union touting a hard-line military stance; but because he was a wiry, short, gnarly-looking Greek in a Halloween costume. It was one thing for George W. Bush to strut down the runway of an aircraft carrier – his persona at least jibed with the image – but Dukakis? Forever the laughing stock of late-night television and political cartoons. Moreover George H.W Bush, Dukakis’s opponent was a legitimate WWII hero.
Dukakis was funny in that tank getup. Elizabeth Warren’s claim to American Indian heritage to burnish her reputation among her race-gender-ethnicity supporters was just as funny, and Trump’s ‘Pocahontas’ was one of the funniest lines in American presidential history. His one-liners are meant to bait his social justice critics. They claim that he is just an ignoramus who has no idea what will come out of his mouth; but they must never have heard Jackie Mason at Grossingers. Trump knows exactly what he is doing.
On his daughter: “I don’t think Ivanka would do that [pose for Playboy], although she does have a very nice figure. I’ve said if Ivanka weren't my daughter, perhaps I'd be dating her.”
On his opponents’ capability to beat ISIS: “Some of the candidates, they went in and didn’t know the air conditioner didn’t work and sweated like dogs, and they didn’t know the room was too big because they didn’t have anybody there. How are they going to beat ISIS?”
On haters: "“Sorry losers and haters, but my IQ is one of the highest – and you all know it! Please don’t feel so stupid or insecure, it’s not your fault.”
On his point of difference: “I think the only difference between me and the other candidates is that I’m more honest and my women are more beautiful.”
On his 'type': "Oftentimes when I was sleeping with one of the top women in the world, I would say to myself... 'Can you believe what I am getting?
On having it all: "The point is, you can never be too greedy."
On loving tacos and Hispanics: "Happy Cinco De Mayo! "The best taco bowls are made in Trump Tower Grill. I love Hispanics!" [All the above quotes from SBS]
The more Trump quips, the more the Left takes the bait, and the more his supporters love him. He not only knows his audience well, but he understands his opponents vulnerability. There is nothing more ridiculous than humorless self-righteousness. Americans grew up with no-holds-barred individualism, no safe spaces, no protective veneer, and in the joyful zeitgeist of bawdy, anything goes sexual, racial, and ethnic humor. All In The Family, a popular television program a few decades ago, was popular not because it promoted inclusivity, but because the main character joked about blacks, gays, handicapped, women, and Hispanics according to prevailing stereotypes. In other words he said what everyone was thinking but not saying. The show was a success because people could laugh at Archie Bunker’s crude comments before the arrival of the PC police state shut down free speech.
American society has always been survivalist– scrapping, scrambling, bullying, dirty fighting, and the use of every trick in the book come naturally; and the progressive insistence on ‘feelings’, ‘compassion’, and ‘inclusivity’ is nothing more than a wet blanket. We want more of Eddie Murphy ‘Raw’, D.h. Hughley, and Jackie Mason and less of gay-straight, black-white happy talk. This doesn’t mean that Americans are inveterately prejudiced; only that they want to be left alone as they always have been to sort out society and the human nature which determines it.
Trump understands this sentiment and plays to it. Enough already with self-righteousness and cant. Take the gloves off. Call a spade a spade and take the consequences. Those who demand safe spaces, safe speech, and perfect behavior and offer nostrums of ‘community’, ‘inclusivity’, and a welcome to all comers are missing the point. Only the secluded, sheltered, idealistic, and totally, irrevocably humorless naysayers refuse to find Trump funny; but in their penitential gloom, they not only miss the point but the boat. Trump’s supporters are not cardboard cutouts – backwoods, redneck ignoramuses– but serious Americans who don’t see progressivism as the end of history and the coming of a new, better age; but a corrosive, anti-democratic movement. It is a question of political philosophy, not politics.
So MSNBC, CNN, The Guardian, The Nation, and rarified social media this morning 5.27.19) have their knickers in a twist about Trump’s Biden remark. The rest of America is howling with delight.
Saturday, May 25, 2019
The Virus Of Race-Gender-Ethnicity–An Epidemic With Few Signs Of Abating
A new Facebook group whose members of a well-known university would post recipes, favorite restaurants, and ideas about cooking, cuisine, and eating well, got off to a good start. The posts from alumni all around the country highlighted top-flight, but often lesser-known restaurants in Los Angeles, Washington, and New York. Older foodies related their discovery of new American cuisine. Experienced travelers wrote comments about Senegalese Thieboudienne, Tunisian Salade Tunisoise, and Turkish Iskembe Corbasi and kokorec, and millennials added ideas to California fusion.
It was a great idea. The alumni of the university would all be well-off if not well-to-do, and all would have travelled, experimented with food and wine, would be familiar with the literary traditions of great cuisine, and would all provide lively inputs to the group. Not only that, but the site offered a rare opportunity to share a space untouched by politics, causes, and insistence. It would be the equivalent of the many art sites on social media which share works of well-known and surprisingly unknown artists in spaces designed for critical comment, appreciation, notation, and information. It would be an opportunity for those knowledgeable about food to share ideas and impressions without the caustic, often ad hominem criticism found everywhere else.
That idyll lasted for two weeks before infection set in. One post celebrated a new black chef in Kansas City, said little about the quality or innovativeness of his cooking, nothing about his sourcing, style, and presentation, and nothing at all about how and why his restaurant should be patronized – other than the fact that he was black. This post defied the principle of the new group – to celebrate cuisine and good food and wine and to share experiences about them – and brought to the group’s attention by now an old chestnut, the presence of a minority member on a previously exclusive stage.
All well and good, but of no concern or interest whatsoever to this demanding group. What did this black man cook? What were his originalist sources? Was he a Redzepi who foraged, a Jean-Pierre who reduced and combined, a Jose Andres who introduced American to tapas and the ingenuity of Spanish cuisine, an Alice Waters who was the prime mover of locally sourced, organic food, the South Carolina chef who brought low country boil to a Northern audience, or the Alabama cook who believed that chitlins, fatback, and greens could be haute cuisine? No, he was a black entrepreneur. Not an entrepreneur entering a highly competitive business – of marginal interest to foodies who know that restaurants come and go – but a black entrepreneur to be celebrated for his ‘courage’, ‘confidence’, and ‘ambition’.
The story may be of interest to social justice advocates and civil rights campaigners for whom it is indeed important to note the advancement of a member of a racial group which has had few successful forays into the privileged white world; but it has no place in a site devoted to food. Introducing it not only does an injustice to the black chef – shades of affirmative action, he is forevermore considered first for his race, second for his achievements – but is an insult to an educated audience which is more than well aware of issues of rights and responsibilities and which resents being hammered once again with race-gender-ethnicity.
The issue of multicultural inclusion goes far beyond considerations of race and cuisine. The most respected estimates of LGBTQ numbers in the US are less than three percent; and the number of transgender or ‘other’ sexualities is a fraction of one percent. While America is all about tolerance, inclusion, compassion, and respect, there is no mandate to promote such alternatives. Children in schools should be taught about responsible behavior within a majoritarian heterosexual community – how to develop a strong and confident female or male sexual character; how to understand the fundamental differences between the sexes and how the best sexual relationships are complementary partnerships between social equals but sexual opposites.
The attention paid to fractional sexuality is unwarranted, diversionary, and irresponsible. By suggesting to young children that they can and should choose their appropriate sexuality is tantamount to assuring sexual confusion where it would never have otherwise occurred. The gender spectrum is an intellectual farce.
The profusion of television programs, movies, music videos, and media coverage of this fractional population – overtly promoting tolerance and inclusivity – does nothing but sensationalize the very groups it intends to promote and sow confusion in young audiences already emerging with difficulty into an adult world.
Who watches ‘L Word Mississippi’? Those interested in social history, the fusion of sexual and racial evolution in a hyper-oppressive South? Or the prurient who are attracted by glimpses of lesbian sex? Or worse yet glimpses of stereotypical ‘dykes’ – butch, booted, flannel-shirted, and tough – in the land of hoop skirts, gentility, and Scarlett O’Hara?
The insistent focus on the black experience in the hands of Hollywood and New York producers is either a glorification of the very street culture which is keeping ambitious black families from joining the majority norm mainstream, or a transparent exaggeration of black success. By the looks of most television productions, black doctors and lawyers are everywhere. The audience is not so gullible; and while they may sincerely hope for greater racial integration, they know that it will take time, effort, and individual responsibility.
Anyone who understands women or who at least has read the plays of Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Strindberg, knows that women are quite able to take care of themselves. Tamora, Dionyza, Goneril, Regan, Cleopatra, Gertrude, Volumnia, and Hedda Gabler could more than hold their own in a male-dominant society. If fact they bested men at every turn. Of course not all women are as strong, determined and defiant as these heroines; but anyone paying attention understands that women need no help whatsoever.
Therefore the hysteria surrounding ‘sexual abuse’ and ‘toxic masculinity’ falls on deaf ears. No one paying the least bit of attention needs to be hectored about women’s character, intelligence, or wit. Which is why the rational intelligentsia is getting fed up with being hammered with charges of misogyny and sexual indifference.
Enough already! We get it. There is a tipping point in all things statistical. Once a movement goes overboard and lionizes those who have less and demonize those who deserve more, it is lost. Progressivism has already entered a Baroque period where it has turned inward on itself, has become self-satisfied and fat-happy, and is headed for the Rococo, a period of excessive excess.
A well-known premier private school in Washington, DC, known for its long history of civil and racial rights, did everything to promote black students. It engineered an affirmative action program that promoted lesser-qualified black DC students to compete in one of the most academically competitive schools in the region; and ensured that every graduation, academic ceremony, and social event gave prominence to them. Yet lunchrooms remained as segregated as the old Deep South – the school’s emphasis on black identity made racial integration impossible – and more importantly, there was no fooling the white students. The affirmative action recruits were simply not up to snuff and therefore ignored.
The reason why the liberal agenda of race-gender-ethnicity is characterized as an epidemic is because it has distorted market-based social evolution – i.e. the survival of the socially fittest. Progressives for decades have ignored the reasons why racial inequality persists, and have assumed that by making America seem harmoniously pluralistic it would become so. It has only smoke and mirrors.
The progressive agenda does little to promote the interests of minorities. Americans today as they have since the beginning of the Republic, know success when they see it – and it has nothing to do with race, gender, or ethnicity. As soon as minorities adopt and adhere to the principles of the Republic – enterprise, responsibility, courage, compassion, honesty, respect, and hard work – they will become fully American. Until that time, whether immigrants or citizens, they will be marginalized and ignored.
To make a long story short, leave food and cuisine alone. For that matter, leave most things American alone. Our culture will evolve, develop, even mature according to the principles of human nature and society, not political or government intent.
Wednesday, May 22, 2019
Racial ‘Justice’ In America–Totems, Rituals, And Sacrificial Offerings
Like most Mesoamerican religious systems, the Zapotec religion was polytheistic. Zapotecs tell that their ancestors emerged from the earth, from caves, or that they turned from trees or jaguars into people, while the elite that governed them believed that they descended from supernatural beings that lived among the clouds, and that upon death they would return to such status.
The Zapotecs lived in a world of natural, immanent power. Spiritual forces were in the lightning and thunder, the violent storms, predatory animals, and in the rising and setting of the moon and sun. They were brooding in the massive mountains or in the night sky. They were everywhere, frighteningly real. There was no distinction between human life, nature, and the gods.
This religion was not a tame animism like that still found in India where a tree trunk might be painted red and garlanded with marigolds to honor the spirit who lived there; a quiet presence to be revered and respected. In the Oaxaca valley under a powerful sun and surrounded by mountains, there was no escaping the temperamental and eruptive forces of Nature and the gods.
The Zapotecs also performed ritual human sacrifice; and as barbaric as the practice seems today, it was anything but in the early days of Mesoamerica. Human sacrifice was the only way to appease the gods and forestall the savagery of their storms, earthquakes, and floods. Life in the Oaxaca Valley, fertile and calm, was only borrowed from the gods who made their presence known every day. Sunrise, sunset and the dark silhouettes of northern mountains reminded them of the immanence of the gods. Even if they were not angry or retributive, their power was still felt. The forces of nature and the forces of deity were one.
By comparison today religious ceremonies seem tepid. The sacrifice of the Catholic Mass is evocative only of the physical torment and sacrifice of Jesus Christ. The transubstantiation – the changing of bread and wine into the body and blood of the Savior – is at best divine allegory; and at its most mundane, a respectful ritual of myth.
Even Pentecostal revivals and the ecstatic discoveries of a personal Jesus cannot possibly compare with a ritual human sacrifice performed on an altar in the middle of a broad valley surrounded by mountains with the presence of the gods real, imminent, and intimidating. The moment of sacrifice was more ecstatic for worshippers than for any Christian believer today. There is nothing to compare the absolute sacrifice of a human being to visible, magnificent, real and powerful gods.
Despite the taming of spiritual ecstasy and the very temperate nature of personal expression today, everyone needs to believe in something; and the more ecstatic or passionate the expression of that belief, the more satisfying it is. In fact, the expression of belief becomes more important than the belief itself.
Environmentalists profess a legitimate concern for the state of the world. If no action is taken, global warming will accelerate and the earth as we know it will be no more. Forests, jungles, and fertile plains will turn into deserts and Sahelian scrub. Lakes will dry up, streams will stop flowing, the ice caps will melt, and coastal cities will be inundated and destroyed. This vision is no a reasoned, secular one, but a profoundly spiritual one. No less than Armageddon is in the near future. The image of a fiery, charred, and blackened earth is an environmentalist icon. It is as potent a symbol as the Cross.
The environmental movement has both animistic and deeply Christian roots. Human destruction of rainforests, pollution of air and water, and the wholesale ransacking of forests, woods, and natural preserves is morally wrong, an insult to the immanent spiritual forces residing in them. The Gaia movement postulates that the Earth is not a collection of random elements and forces, but a living, organic whole. It is a sentient mega-being made up of network of interrelated bio-ecological neurons. No hurt or physical insult goes unnoticed, and damage on one part will be felt throughout. Although few environmentalists are true Gaia believer, the attachment they have to Nature is not simply practical. There is a pervasive spirituality behind the movement. The cutting down of a tree in Absaroka Mountains causes psychic hurt.
One environmentalist, a former Baptist preacher, warned against climate Armageddon as he did that of the Book of Revelations. He, like many fundamentalist orators, was fixated on hell and damnation, and used his state-of-the-art audio-visual system to show pictures of destruction, desolation, and waste. Crops burning under a fiery sun, plants reduced to stubble because of drought and blazing heat; rivers run dry, birds shaking and quivering on roadsides, deer fleeing raging forest fires. All this was a result of God’s vengeful wrath. His people had once again forsaken him, gone over to the Dark Side, consorted with the devil and followed his evil ways.
It is not enough for civil rights activists today to encourage legislative and judicial reform as their forbears did in the 60s. Theirs is a more inchoate protest, one focused on those who perpetrate racism not on the mechanisms of power that can mitigate it. ‘Racist!’, if yelled angrily enough, often, and inclusively enough will shame, marginalize, and neuter those who persist in their retrograde white supremacism. Of course it is not, and this universal reverse racism will inevitably create an equally angry counter-reaction. There is nothing that will drive moderate, temperate, reasonable middle-of-the-road white Americans into the radical conservative camp quicker than intemperate accusations of racism.
Yet without ‘Racist!’, the multiculturalist movement would have no rallying cry, no potent, loaded symbol of their struggle. ‘Racist!’ is a totem, shouted in unison an anthem and prosecuted as sacrificial as paganism in Mesoamerica. The white man must be sacrificed in order for the secular gods to be appeased. Nothing less than his blood and his spirit must be spilled.
Both environmentalists and ‘social justice warriors’ (SJW) share another pagan, prehistoric human trait – universal, collective belief. The special passion and ecstasy of Zapotec sacrifice was derived from the absolute belief of all worshippers. Each individual had no doubt that human sacrifice would appease the angry gods, and that only the power of collective worship could keep them at bay.
Today’s civil rights activists share much with the Zapotecs – sacrificial offering (the white man), collective identity, and totems. The Aztecs dressed up as wild animals to be invested with their savagery, and for the most committed SJW the possession of a black spirit – one of a black, oppressed, brutalized, demonized slave – is a vengeful enabler.
The SJW movement is in its Baroque, final phases. When it becomes prehistoric and pagan and relies only on anthems, totems, and sacrifice, it loses currency, saliency, and meaning. The movement becomes a caricature of itself. Periods of excess are always followed by simpler, more reasoned ones. Neoclassicists sought to revert to the simpler art of the Renaissance out of their distaste for the grandeur of Baroque and Rococo styles. The next period of social justice will focus on facts – the persistent, perennial, seemingly intractable problems of social dysfunction, ineducability, moral disarray, economic stagnation, and cultural disharmony – and will address them.