Things We Read Today (53)
“Diversity”: As Slippery as “Bias”
Today’s game of Spot the Subtheme in the Providence Journal includes this from far-left senior citizen columnist Bob Kerr:
There was news this week of young Republicans getting together. I’ve asked it before and I’ll ask it again: How can anyone be young and Republican? It seems so out of sync, so generationally out of alignment.
The fascinating, perplexing thing about people willing to publicly confess to being young and Republican at the same time is the implied admission that they want to spend a good part of their lives just getting in the way.
And that seems so youthfully wasteful.
That combines with this AP article a few pages later:
The Republican Party launched its latest effort Thursday to sell itself to a more diverse segment of the population, acknowledging a glaring weakness in the GOP’s ability to attract new voters in a country whose demographics are rapidly changing.
The “sell itself” language in his first sentence gives away the bias and intended message of former left-wing Providence Journal reporter Steve Peoples. In his view, obviously, the Republicans are cynically trying to manipulate public image to put a phony populist face on its old, white patriarchy. It’s The Man bringing his black butler to a political event to show that he has non-white friends.
Of course, one need only go to the first layer of across-the-spectrum online news gathering to come across this:
Buried within an article on Newark Mayor Cory Booker’s run for U.S. Senate, Edward-Isaac Dovere of Politico admits “the irony that in the age of Obama, Republicans have done a better job than Democrats of bringing diversity through their ranks.”
Story lines, story lines.
Hey, Mr. Kerr: You know who else is known for “getting in the way”? Every hero who stopped an evil plot in any story ever told. That’s true in the era of the Internet, and it was true back in the era of oral histories told around a communal fire, so age is no excuse for having missed the connection.
Who Is Jimmy Olsen?
There’s a danger of making too much of it, but it seems like there’s something significant about this, also in today’s Providence Journal:
Meanwhile, a fictitious figure hovers over the dispute. “John Galt” has inserted himself into the anti-toll side of the controversy, calling into a radio talk show and otherwise participating without appearing in person.
It’s not clear how many people in and around the toll dispute know that John Galt is not a real person, but rather a figure who fights the establishment in Ayn Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged.” Not everybody, apparently. Vitkevich said the talk show host called him to ask, “Do you know this guy John Galt?”
On top of that, Vitkevich said, “People have been calling me John Galt.”
Whether the significant thing is that Galtian appearances are happening even in Rhode Island or that state paper-of-record reporter Bruce Landis identified this tidbit as something worth one-third of his article, I don’t know. It certainly would be an appropriate use of newspaper space for the Providence Journal to explain to its readers what John Galt represents and why he might make an appearance in a local dispute over tolls. Maybe Bob Kerr could opine about whether Ayn Rand’s protagonist “got in the way” or not.
I suspect no such article will be forthcoming. Be that as it may, I made the mistake of wearing my “Who is John Galt?” t-shirt during my workout, this morning, so I’ll have to make sure it’s clean for Sunday.
Forced to Go Galt
I’ll have more on this when the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases official nationwide numbers on Monday, but not enough is being said, today, about how horrible the preliminary employment report that the state Dept. of Labor and Training for July is:
The number of unemployed RI residents—those residents classified as available for and actively seeking employment—was 49,200, down 200 from the previous month. Over the year, the number of unemployed dropped by 9,700.
The number of employed RI residents dropped 2,400 over the month, decreasing to 506,600 in July. Over the year, the number of employed RI residents increased 5,000 from July 2012.
The RI labor force totaled 555,900 in July 2013, down 2,500 from June 2013 and down 4,600 from July 2012.
That employment number — the number of people who say that they are employed (whether full or part time) — indicates that almost a full year of pitiful gains have been lost in one fell swoop.
One can’t help but notice that the fell swoop just happened to come after the close of the General Assembly’s 2013 session. So what do you think: Did they move the needle?
On the Bright Side (If You Really, Really Want a Bright Side)
At least Rhode Island isn’t alone in its despair.
This has been building, but today, I noticed a substantial shift in the attitude of the national commentators and bloggers on the political right whom I follow regularly. Maybe it has something to do with the news that the U.S. Treasury Department reported a $98 billion deficit for July, but its daily debt report has somehow remained at exactly the same number (coincidentally just $25 million below its legal limit) for that entire period. Or maybe it’s new evidence of domestic spying by the NSA over the past five years. Or maybe it’s the latest in the long series of revelations that overstatements, understatements, errors, and outright lies by the federal government in the run-up to the last election all seem to have made Obama Term 1 look better than it was. And then, of course, there’s the government’s continuing disregard for the rule of law, especially with respect to implementing ObamaCare.
Whatever the catalyst, George Will kicked the new wave off the other day:
Nixon’s claim, although constitutionally grotesque, was less so than the claim implicit in Obama’s actions regarding the ACA [i.e., ObamaCare]. Nixon’s claim was confined to matters of national security or (he said to Frost) “a threat to internal peace and order of significant magnitude.” Obama’s audacity is more spacious; it encompasses a right to disregard any portion of any law pertaining to any subject at any time when the political “environment” is difficult.
From there, Sarah Hoyt exchanges John Galt for Spartacus:
I am Spartacus writ small. I am Spartacus praying that I never need to stand physically facing the might of the largest power the world has ever known. I can tell who would lose. Because of that I am battling in the mind, to avoid the evil hour as long as I can yet. Maybe, if a miracle occurs, to avoid it altogether.
Don Sensing proclaims a new political reality:
No one, and I mean absolutely no one, in the Democrat party is in the slightest interested in reining in Obama’s expansion of executive diktat because they know what few of the rest of us are awakening to: the Democrats are never going to lose that executive authority again. Let me be clear, with a promise to elucidate another day: there is never going to be another Republican president. Ever.
And Bill Whittle closes another of his excellent videos with a pertinent question about the future:
I had a conversation with my friend Jonathan not too long ago. He’s a young man, just married, very quiet and serious and very deep, and he asked me how we’ll explain this to our children, in this world gone mad. How will we tell them, as we sit around burning tires, eating rats roasting on a spit, that we knew this was coming, and we didn’t do anything?
How will we tell them that we knew where police states always end up, where artists are kept in dungeons as a political fig leaf for the powerful? How will we tell them that we lived through years of laws’ being enforced or broken on a whim, where the biggest lies of the most powerful man in the world went unchallenged by a lickspittle press?
What will we say to them when they ask us how we just blithely went along with all of this madness and insanity? [Shrugs.]
As a conservative writer in a blue state, I’m very aware of what these quotations look like gathered together, like that. Ah, those crazy, paranoid right wingers. But that is merely a mocking way to rephrase the question, “How could it come to that?,” and human history is in many ways the recitation of society’s being unable to avoid getting to the question: “How did it come to this?”
I began this week lamenting that the popular culture no longer fortifies the pillars that Western civilization wove into its culture over millennia in order to preserve a necessary social structure against the constant pressure for easy fixes to temporary problems. I also noted that the establishment simply cannot afford to lose political ground now, because too much has been done that could be ruinous if exposed and seen for what it is. It cannot be otherwise than dangerous for our nation to have a government in that position.
So, I’ll close the week by offering an answer to the question about how, sometimes, it does indeed “come to that”: Because not enough people were willing to get in the way.
Postscript
If you’re interested in adding the center-right portion of the aforementioned first layer of across-the-spectrum online news gathering to your daily reading, Instapundit is still about the best place to start that I’ve found.