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folly ideological culture

Obama’s Bonkers Beacon

Barack Obama, president, monument, Klingon, Obama Presidential Center, Chicago

We had the idea of a beacon,” said the architect who designed the Obama Presidential Center.

It looks like . . . a triumph of brutalist . . . whimsy? (Is that even possible?) A science-fictional housing for our ET overlords, maybe. Or something worse. 

Perhaps Baphomet poses inside.

You’ve probably seen the outside of the monstrosity by now. If you’re like me, you’ve marveled at this triumph of bad taste. It surely symbolizes something, but what?

It may serve as an icon for the 44th president’s monumental pretentiousness. 

Or his oblivious ideological bravado.

But it could stand for Political Hubris more generally.

“The Egyptians had their pyramids,” muses Oliver Wainwright in The Guardian. “The Anglo-Saxons had their barrows. And the Americans have their presidential libraries — the chief difference being that the leaders the U.S. venerates are usually still alive at the opening.” Wainwright notes that Americans lack “a royal family or a state religion,” and this has allowed an Imperial Presidency to bloom — filling “the void, transforming over the decades into a national personality cult, complete with its own secular temples to these powerful men.”

He’s not wrong.

But as politics has gotten more extreme, even bizarre, and America’s ideologues and beleaguered voters find themselves anointing a series of increasingly unfit pharaohs (hat-tip to The Guardian’s “pharaonic edifice”), this . . . oddly shaped (“like a Klingon prison”) eyesore . . . serves as a monument, perhaps, for the whole age.

Just don’t blame the architect. “The president was very, very hands on with the design,” Wainwright quotes the genius behind this laid egg. “He talked a lot about his love of Brâncuși.” 

No. 44 being hands-on in the design explains a lot.

The Center hasn’t opened yet; the Grand Opening ceremonies are scheduled for the 18th.

Please let me know how it goes, if you attend. I live near Washington, D.C., and lost my genuflecting and awestruck wonder at that city’s much less ridiculous monuments years and years ago.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Note: Chicago, a city with beautiful architecture, will survive.

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Categories
Thought

Jung

Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health.

Carl Gustav Jung, “The Transcendent Function” (1916).
Categories
Today

Nineteen Eighty-Four

On June 8, 1949, George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four was published.

Categories
Update

Chinese Censorship

tiananmen, protest, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan,

“On June 4, the 37th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, internet users across China reported intensified online censorship, including tighter controls by social media platforms and messaging groups on content related — directly or indirectly — to the date.”

Thus begins a June 6 article from The Epoch Times. Quoted here apropos of Paul Jacob’s June 5 article, “The Nerve of Some People.”

The Epoch Times based its reporting on tips from “netiziens” (which is a not-so-common term for “citizens of the Internet”) who told the paper of “not only explicit references to the 1989 massacre, but also indirect expressions, numbers, images, and even routine daily posts appeared to be caught in automated filters or subject to account restrictions. Some described the moderation as unusually strict; one user said the surveillance felt “‘almost frenzied.’”

This shows how important public opinion is for even a tyrannical government. It’s not that the government aims to follow public opinion, but that the communists suppress public discussion to tamp down on opinions that might destabilize citizen acquiescence to the regime. “More than three decades after the Tiananmen Square protests,” the report concludes, “in which the communist regime deployed troops to massacre thousands of pro-democracy protesters, discussion of the event remains heavily restricted within China’s online ecosystem.”

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Common Sense

Lucian of Samosata

φημὶ τοίνυν τὸν ἄριστα ἱστορίαν συγγράφοντα δύο μὲν ταῦτα κορυφαιότατα οἴκοθεν ἔχοντα ἥκειν, σύνεσίν τε πολιτικὴν καὶ
δύναμιν ἑρμηνευτικήν, τὴν μὲν ἀδίδακτόν τι τῆς φύσεως δῶρον,
ἡ δύναμις δὲ πολλῇ τῇ ἀσκήσει καὶ συνεχεῖ τῷ πόνῳ
καὶ ζήλῳ τῶν ἀρχαίων προσγεγενημένη ἔστω.

I say, therefore, that he who would write history well must be possessed of these two principal qualifications, a fine understanding and a good style: one is the gift of nature, and cannot be taught; the other may be acquired by frequent exercise, perpetual labour and an emulation of the ancients.

Lucian, “How to Write History,” 59.34 (tr. T. Francklin, 1780).
Categories
Today

Founders, Fathers

On June 7, 1776, Richard Henry Lee presented the “Lee Resolution” to the Continental Congress. The motion was seconded by John Adams, but was tabled for several weeks. The motion was finally passed on July 2, 1776.

During the 1916 Republican National Convention (June 7 – 10), Senator Warren G. Harding used the phrase “Founding Fathers” in his keynote address . . . and would go on using it in speeches thereafter. It caught on as a eulogistic way to refer to figures such as Thomas Jefferson and, yes, Richard Henry Lee, who orchestrated the American colonies’ break from England’s imperial monarchy.

Categories
Update

Who Lost in L.A.?

On Tuesday, Paul Jacob wrote of the Los Angeles mayoral race, focusing on the top three candidates, incumbent Mayor Karen Bass, Councilwoman Nithya Raman, and the challenger from outside the city machine, Spencer Pratt.

So why is the Babylon Bee making this joke?

While most cities and states seem to be able to figure out who won and who lost by the end of the day of the election, Los Angeles can take days, weeks, or maybe even months to allow for all the mail-in ballots to trickle in, resulting in a spectacular come-from-behind victory for Biden.

Yes, the votes are still coming in, showing Mayor Bass ahead, and Spencer Pratt in second place, as in this from ABC7 Eyewitness News:

But from the same source, we see this headline: “CA primary election results: Bass maintains lead as Raman closes gap in LA mayor’s race with Pratt.” The full graph:

But it is Saturday, and votes in California’s primary elections (with all U.S. House seats and the governor position and more in the balance) are still being counted.

Regardless of who wins, anyone expecting competence in running elections has lost.

Already, rumors of election tampering in the L.A. race are rife on the Internet.

Categories
Thought

John Wilmot

We have a pretty witty king,
Whose word no man relies on.
He never said a foolish thing,
And never did a wise one.

John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, Epigram about Charles II of England.
Categories
Today

A Bolide

On June 6, 2002, a high-energy upper atmosphere explosion over the Mediterranean Sea (c. 34°N 21°E) occurred. Similar in power to a small atomic bomb, the cause of the fireball has been determined to be a small, undetected asteroid entering the Earth’s atmosphere and burning out without hitting the surface, though no meteorite fragments were recovered. One of the several meanings of the word “bolide” is this, an atmospheric explosion of a meteor.

General Simon Worden of the U.S. Air Force opined that, had the explosion occurred closer to Pakistan or India — which were at war at the time — it could have sparked a nuclear exchange.*

* “Near-Earth Objects Pose Threat, General Says,” Space Daily (2002-09-17).

Categories
defense & war ideological culture international affairs state terrorism too much government

The Nerve of Some People

China, Falun Gong, Taiwan, Hong Kong, cemetary, tiananmen square, tiananmen crackdown, June 4

“Police warn families of Tiananmen crackdown dead not to visit graves on 37th anniversary,” reads the headline of yesterday’s story in New York’s Newsday.

How rude of those families! 

How dare they show such utter disregard for the right of the Chinese Communist Party to “grind you up and crush your bones”! Or to have your “heads bashed bloody,” as CCP top Pooh Bear Xi Jinping has more recently been fond of saying.

Especially after all the trouble Xi and Chinese authorities have gone to easing all this unnecessary tension by facilitating a thoughtful and therapeutic four-decade “campaign to erase what happened from public memory.”

For 30 years, they allowed the thousands of teary-eyed Tiananmen Mothers to visit the gravesites, but come on, stop monopolizing the cemetery. I mean, there are millions of Uyghurs waiting to mourn, for heaven’s sake. And don’t forget the Falun Gong religious genocide. Organ harvesting political prisoners sure does quickly fill a cemetery.

Be a team player for the CCP. 

Sans sarcasm, I note that at The Gate of Heavenly Peace no one really knows how many died on June 4, 1989. The Chinese students and workers killed by soldiers who shot into crowds and rolled over them with tanks have never, even to this day, been accounted for by the Chinese government. 

It has only lied about the massacre, continuing to cover the horrors up — the government now even bullying grieving parents away from visiting their loved ones’ graves.

To think that President Bush, père, was so ready to usher in trade for the big boys of business that he sold out, 37 years ago, the protesters on Tiananmen Square!

Having snuffed out freedom in Hong Kong, inserted their hands into virtually everything we consume, and built up the world’s second largest military, what will be next for the Butchers of Beijing? Small cases of Chinese aggression — water cannons, ships sunk, a couple soldiers injured, even killed — have not halted. Asia is under threat.

Americans are not invulnerable. 

We have a serious problem. 

Which I’ll keep talking about in Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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