When future generations are picking through the rubble of our civilization, they will wonder about stuff like this. National Review was a serious publication for intelligent ruling class people. Reagan was a regular reader and credited the publication with informing his views on a range of issues. Bill Buckley was a genius and a polymath. James Pethokoukis is supposed to be their economics guy, yet he displays a staggering ignorance of the subject, often just repeating what the jabbering numskulls on CNBC say every night.

This column is just bad reporting, but he often opines on economics in a way that suggests he could not run a lemonade stand. Dig a little into his bio and you learn that he was a journalism major in college. He has never held a job in business or finance. His adult life has been occupied with writing about a subject he knows nothing. He may be a bright guy and a quick study, but without training or experience, he is wholly unqualified to comment about these subjects. Yet, here he is casting himself as an expert.

This is something you see throughout the media. On television it is a parade of feckless airheads reading from a teleprompter. This now legendary video shows that these idiots will read anything that is put in front of them. Their guests are not much better. They are almost always washouts from some industry who can’t get jobs. Otherwise, they are people better at talking about their field than doing it. There are more retired generals on TV payrolls than on active duty in the military.

The hippies had one thing right. Getting wasted and listening to Led Zeppellin all day is not a great way to spend your life, but dropping out has a lot of merit.

One of the things that strikes me more and more as I get older is the lack of institutional memory from the chattering classes. Turn on TV news and you see two people screaming at one another seemingly unaware that their dispute was hashed out last month, last year or even twenty years ago. Politicians propose solutions that were tried a dozen times in the past, failed and were discarded. Hollywood, of course, is now recycling what was recycled last year.  America is a land of people with the memory of a goldfish.

The leaves of the tree are merely the manifestation of the roots. I think this piece I saw mentioned by Mark Steyn gets at the root of the issue. History is no longer a subject that American elites have much interest in these days. The national religion is liberalism and the liberal is by necessity at war with the past. All the leaning forward business we see from lefty nutters on TV is a dramatization of the struggle. For the liberal, the past is a nightmare from which they struggle to awake. It is the barrier to the glorious future.

The result is two phenomenon. One is the past is ignored. Vast amounts of the past has been erased from the record. The mere mention of them can get you banned from elite society. So much so they have been removed from the curriculum of our universities. If you dare bring any of it up, they run you out of the system. The other phenomenon is the rewriting of the past, even the near past, to fit the narrative of inevitable progress toward the glorious future. For instance, modern liberals all believe the Dixiecrats were right-wing Republicans. They are certain that Hitler was a conservative.

The religion of America is liberalism. The mandated stupidity we see everywhere is a direct result of the Left’s war on the past. It is one thing for the janitor to not remember what he had for breakfast. His role in life is to follow instructions. When the intellectuals deliberately close off their minds to the idea of history, the binding of the present to the past, we are going to have problems. Every one of history’s monsters promised to unshackle the people from the past. Our current monsters have the same plan.

In light of the Zimmerman acquittal, John Derbyshire’s concept of the cold civil war seems about right. The prosecution of this guy had nothing to do with race or racism. It had little to do this the facts of the case. This was about one group of white people taking a shot at another group of white people. John uses the labels Hutus and Tutsis, but that does not quite work. Those groups hate one another over blood and land, the time honored hatreds between tribes. In our war, one can pick sides. It’s the nature of a culture war.

I prefer to frame it as Whole Foods whites versus WalMart whites.  Whole Foods whites are mostly northern, mostly liberal and mostly college educated. Go to a Whole Foods and the creepy conformity is a little unnerving. The women dress the same, are roughly in the same age bracket, sound the same and do their hair the same. The men are mostly of the soft artsy variety. With a few exceptions everyone there is what David Brooks described as Bourgeois Bohemian. It’s an updated form of Puritan conformity.

WalMart whites have their own culture too. They are fat and wear clothes that displays their pop culture preferences. While Whole Foods whites will wear a plain t-shirt, the WalMart whites always have something scrawled on their shirts and it is never the name of a college. The parking lot will be full of domestic cars and pickup trucks, many with NASACAR bumbler stickers. That’s the thing with these folks. They like guns, car racing, country music and hearing fart jokes from guys like Larry the Cable Guy.

When George Zimmerman shot and killed Trayvon Martin, Whole Foods Whites saw nothing more than a WalMart white with a German last name and assumed he must be the heir of Bull Connor. Strangely, despite their educations, Whole Foods whites know little about the South and believe nothing much has changed since 1968. The case for them was just another chance to marginalize WalMart whites and their culture. In this regard it is reminiscent of the Snopes – Compson dynamic in the Faulkner novels

Testing out the new blog