Shellac seems to have entered English from India in the 1600s. The noun was derived from “shell” + “lac” — a resin secreted by the lac insect of South Asia, scraped from trees, refined into flakes and dissolved in alcohol to make varnish.
It was ubiquitous in the 19th and early 20th centuries for furniture finishing, phonograph records, and sealing things.
In American slang, “shellac” came to refer to cheap alcohol and the adjective “shellacked” to being drunk. Shellac joined other slang terms for hooch like “varnish.”
From this latter meaning, “shellacked” morphed into “beaten up” or “trounced” — someone staggering after a fight looked much like someone staggering out of a saloon. By the 1930s, sportswriters were using “shellacking” freely to describe lopsided defeats. You’ll find it ubiquitous in boxing and baseball coverage of that era; political writers followed suit, saying a defeated candidate had “taken a shellacking.”
Yesterday, Donald Trump and the Republicans took the proverbial shellacking.
We’ve seen this sort of thing before. It’s not unheard of. Americans repudiate failed programs, and Trump, who promised to keep the American people out of war did the precise opposite of what got him elected in the first place. Only by grace extended from the American people could the application of the varnish be withheld.
Boy, that grace was so not extended! Overwhelmingly electing members of a party that includes actual “seize the means of production” communists was . . . graceless?
A kind of justice, maybe.
This could be a warning to all: the awfulness of your opponents will not stay the hand of shellac . . . er, citizen correction.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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One reply on “What Was Applied”
President Trump will rule by Executive Order and Veto, as did Presidents Obama and Biden when their parties lost control of Congress. And most of the same people who insisted that a democratically elected Democrat could rule democratically in this way will insist that a democratically elected Republican doing so is undemocratic.
Of course, the Democrats will also almost surely move again to impeach Trump. But, had they succeeded in convicting on their first attempt, they would merely have elevated Pence; this time, they would elevate Vance, a creature of conservatism in its truest, nastiest, post-liberal form. Going on to impeach Vance would be obvious chicanery, and likely to cost them control of Congress and the Presidency in the next General Election — since the US is not yet as degenerate as is la República Federativa do Brasil.
Trump and his movement will be a gross obstruction to any reform of the Republican Party — he chased-out Amash and had Massie effectively expelled. And other illiberal factions will be trying to replace his movement. But perhaps the libercons and paleocons can pull together and do something significant in the next two years.