The Crucible

There is no question we are in the middle of unhinged times ... another mania like the Salem witch trials ... the analogy that playwright Arthur Miller used for the McCarthy HUAC hearings ... which became a run-away tracking down of Communists inside our government. His analog play was called “The Crucible” (a white-hot container in which to melt metals) ... an attempt to show America how “cures” often go to excess and threaten to destroy the patient.

Another parallel to our current woke mania is the post-French Revolution when much of its nobles were beheaded in a popular blood-list. Here is a better recital of those crazy times than I could write ... see: Splendid Isolation post.

So now we have four instances of societies spinning out of control ... McCarthy’s HUAC, Salem witch trials, the French guillotine blood lust and our current “cancel culture” ... led by an amorphous band of millennials and West-coast techies ... and threatening to defund the police and turn over our cities to the anarchists.

Must be a periodic societal trope ... kinda like lemmings leaping into the sea. I’m doing my best to sit this one out ... if  the Committee of Public Safety will let me.

 Afterward: Another analog ... the Chinese Cultural Revolution ... see: Mao Lives Here

Even later: The Spanish Inquisition.

Bernie’s Bros

When Monty Python conducted this quiz, Bernie was still on a commune ... where he was thrown out for refusing to do his share of the labor ...

Useless Idiots

Stalin had a term for the fifth-column Communists around the world.  He called them "useful idiots." President Trump has a different set of issues ... "useless idiots" ...  a large set of detractors who bend over backwards to undermine his efforts to keep America safe. I know it is early-on, but here are my nominations for the Useless Idiots of the Year ... those stentorian radical-Islam apologists who apear to care more for their own ideologies and election ambitions. I'm sure that some of my liberal readers might have some other names to put forward:

Bill "Big Bird" DeBlasio

Justin "Timber" Trudeau

Elizabeth "Lieawatha" Warren

Barack "Bathhouse Barry" Obama

Chuck "Tiny Tears" Schumer

Hillary "Sir Edmund" Clinton

Rahm "Godfather" Emanuel

Nancy "Botox" Pelosi

Keith "I CAIR" Ellison

Discrimination

Discrimination has become a dirty word. Once, if one had discriminating tastes, it was a good thing. Now, no more. If one favors something over another ... no matter what ... one is ironically discriminated against. Our founding fathers recognized religion and creed as discrimination no-nos. (Add race, color and gender later by Constitutional amendment.) Now, these taboo categories are inflated and virtually endless. If I paid attention to all these strictures, I could not shun convicted felons, lewd-lyric rappers, new Black Panthers, Scientologists, pedophiles, radical Islamists, Communists, those with "fluid genders," satanists, and Lena Dunham (whatever she is).

Hellery Clinton recently twisted things with a short list of those whom I am now allowed to hate ... the deplorables ... sexists, racists, homophobes, xenophobes and Islamophobes. And all of the myriad of the discriminated-against groups I was required not just to tolerate, but to embrace.

But now that Hellery is relegated to walking the woods, can I go back to not discriminating against just race, color, religion, gender and creed? No?