This Week’s Show

Contents

• 00m54s Movies: the long farewell
• 07m05s Spellbound and swallowed
• 15m28s Trump’s address to Congress
• 24m55s Trump-Zelensky style clash
• 26m49s Help the Brunswick Three!
• 28m21s The Brits catch “disparate impact”
• 31m03s Romania should know
• 33m41s Signoff: It ain’t Joan

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Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee 

Transcript

01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! Welcome, listeners. That was Haydn’s Derbyshire March No. 2 and this is your briefly genial host John Derbyshire.

I say “briefly” because I am currently oppressed by tasks demanding my time, and so must borrow time from the podcast. I shall not borrow much, but I apologize anyway, and shall proceed direct to this week’s commentary.

02 — Movies: the long farewell.     Last Saturday evening, March 1st, Mrs Derbyshire and I went to the movies. Yes: we left the house, drove down to the village, parked in the supermarket parking lot, and crossed over to the movie theater.

I note the event because it was our first movie night for … well, longer than I can remember. Oh sure, we watch movies. Like most people today, though, we watch them at home via a streaming service. Going out to the movies is nowadays a luxury choice. At eighteen dollars a ticket, sixteen for seniors, it’s not a very extravagant one; but hey, you can’t stay at home all the time.

That there are still movie theaters seems to violate the laws of economics. Our local establishment has eight studios, eight movies playing simultaneously in the one building. All that space, all that equipment; are there really enough customers to justify it?

It didn’t look like it on Saturday evening. This was the 9:15 showing in Studio 8, which has 150 seats. We shared it with about a dozen other people — ten percent occupancy at prime viewing time on a weekend evening.

There are allowances to be made. Our movie was the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown: a nostalgiafest for Boomers, and also for Silents like Dylan himself and your genial host here, but I guess of limited interest to anyone much under sixty. Our companions in Studio 8 were all geezers and geezerettes.

It’s possible that Studios 1 through 7 were packed. We didn’t see any evidence of that on our way to Studio 8, though. Mrs Derbyshire was the only customer at the popcorn stand in the main lobby.

For those of us who remember the Picture Palaces of the mid-20th century, this didn’t seem like movie-going at all. Where were the lines of people buying tickets? (We bought ours online beforehand. So apparently did everyone else.) Where were the usherettes to escort us to our seats; and then, in the interval, to come out and progress slowly up the aisles selling ice cream from the trays strapped to their waists? (My brother married a movie usherette.) Where were the upstairs balconies for the overflow crowds? Where were the ashtrays on the seat backs, so that the person seated behind you could smoke as he viewed?

Even with streaming services, the whole movie business has dwindled somehow. Sunday evening we watched the Oscars on TV at home, curious to see whether A Complete Unknown won any. It didn’t; and what we saw of those that did left us wondering how many people would bother to watch them. Anora, which won Best Picture, cost only six million dollars to make — the lowest budget for any top Oscar winner, ever.

The Oscar ceremony itself gave off an unmistakable vibe of trying too hard. It was way too long, the audience of movie people too doggedly cheerful, the song’n’dance intervals too plainly pointless. We were watching people trying real hard to keep something propped up.

Movies just aren’t big any more. They are drifting off to the fringes of our common culture.

You can tell that from the catch-phrases they no longer generate. For decades you could be sure that if you uttered one of those catch-phrases in conversation, everyone would get the reference.

• “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”
• “I coulda been a contender.”
• “Make my day.”
• “You talkin’ to me?”
• “I’ll be back.”
• “I want what she’s having.”

That last one is from a 1989 movie. It was the latest catch-phrase I can recall hearing in everyday socializing. You may be able to come up with something later; but not, I’m pretty sure, much later, probably not from this century.

Do we even have a common culture any more?

03 — Spellbound and swallowed.     What about the movie itself, though, Derb? Is it any good?

Sure, we both enjoyed it. For me, as I said, it was a great nostaglia feed. For my lady it was a lesson in recent American cultural history, seasoned with some complex romantic interest of the kind that always holds the female attention.

And I should say, having somewhat slighted the local movie theater, that I greatly appreciated the big, comfortable recliner seats; and also that it’s a great civilizational improvement to not have a forest of upward-drifting cigarette smoke between oneself and the movie screen.

And there are of course much grander movie theaters than our suburban AMC. There’s the Parisian Art Deco in downtown New York City, for example. Quote from a New York Post story about the place, quote:

Tickets, which go up to $215 (tax and gratuity not included), grant access to a formerly private theater, where attendees lounge artfully in gold velvet loveseats and plush chairs beneath an exquisitely apropos gold-leaf ceiling.

End quote.

Back to Saturday night’s movie: Timothée Chalamet is a very good Dylan, both in appearance and scratchy personality. He had obviously worked hard at being Dylan the musician: voice, guitar, and harmonica. Edward Norton is a credible Pete Seeger.

I thought it a bit odd that Suze Rotolo was renamed Sylvia Russo for the movie’s purposes, but that was apparently at Dylan’s request. Elle Fanning was anyway good in the role, although we get very little of the issues Dylan had with Suze’s family, those issues he later so regretted having musicalized as Ballad in Plain D. Monica Barbaro does as good a Joan Baez as anyone could do that is not actually Joan Baez.

That’s as much movie criticism as I am capable of. The main satisfaction for me in watching A Complete Unknown was, as I have said, nostalgic.

I clearly recall my first encounter with Dylan’s music. This was my second year at university in London, late 1964 to early 1965. I was living in Crouch End. No, that’s not some painful disorder of the lower bowel or a fielding position in the game of cricket; it’s a district of North London. In the 1960s Crouch End was lower-middle-class residential, a bit shabby and with a lot of bedsitters — rented rooms in private houses, sharing a bathroom with the other inhabitants of the house.

Wikipedia tells me that Crouch End has since become much more tony, artsy, and expensive. Quote: “In 2023, it was voted the best place to live in London.” End quote. That would have astounded the young Derb. I come too early to every party, darn it.

My bedsit was in a house belonging to a middle-aged lady whose husband had left for some reason. Her son and her daughter were also in residence, both about my age — late teens or early twenties. The daughter had a job and a busy social life, so she was rarely at home. The son was a student at a local art college.

Art students were the cultural avant-garde, always first to pick up on new fads and trends. Bob Dylan’s music had been known to these British art-school pioneers for a year or more at that point, but his name was not in general circulation.

I first heard both name and music from my landlady’s son when he had just bought the fourth album, Another Side of Bob Dylan. In his room one night he played me one of the tracks, “Chimes of Freedom.” I was bowled over.

[Brief clip from “Chimes of Freedom.”]

Sorry that’s a short clip. Dylan’s people are notoriously vigilant about unauthorized broadcasting of his voice recordings, and I don’t need a lawsuit.

The song just wasn’t like any other I’d heard. It was sui generis. It — words and music together, a unity — got and held my attention. I learned on Saturday night that it still holds my attention sixty years later.

I caught the lefty vibes in Dylan’s lyrics, of course, but I didn’t mind them. I was a nineteen-year-old undergraduate, a member of my college Socialist Society. Of course I didn’t mind them. To judge from his later career, Dylan’s interest in political and social issues did not in any case run very deep — nothing like deep enough to invalidate his songwriting genius.

As you can probably tell, I’m a major Dylan fan to this day. The man is still with us, coming up to 84 years old, living mostly in Malibu. I hope his property didn’t take a hit from these recent fires. Long life to you, Sir, and thanks for some beautiful songs.

04 — Trump’s address to Congress.     Domestic political news this week was dominated by President Trump’s address to Congress on Tuesday evening.

I didn’t watch it. For reasons why I didn’t watch it I refer you to Chapter Three of my momentous 2009 political testimony We Are Doomed, where I gave a long and detailed lashing to the State of the Union address, as it had developed in recent decades.

I’m not clear on whether Trump’s Tuesday evening effusion counts as a State of the Union speech, but it might as well: the format and staging are identical. There was even an array of Lenny Skutniks for our admiration and applause.

To spare you the effort of reaching for your copy of We Are Doomed, let me summarize my critique.

In my book I blasted the State of the Union spectacle, as it has developed, as too grandiose and imperial for a modest commercial republic. I called it a “Stalinesque extravaganza,” and urged that the President’s annual message should be delivered in writing to Congress, as it was for most of our nation’s history and as late as Richard Nixon’s fourth address.

My opinions haven’t changed since I wrote that book, so of course I didn’t watch the Tuesday evening show.

A young friend with opinions much like mine did watch it. Quote from his email:

I have never, ever watched a State of the Union type speech all the way through, because they are boring. Not this time. Trump was masterful. Patriotic and light hearted. So many good lines. My dad used to have us listen to Reagan on the family radio, and I enjoyed Reagan. But Trump was even better than I remember Reagan was. A speech that should go down in history.

End quote.

Coming from a friend I trust, that moved me to guilt somehow, so I pulled down the YouTube video of the speech and sat down to watch it. A little over an hour in, I got bored and annoyed by all the breaks for applause, so I just scanned the New York Times transcript for the remainder of the speech.

All right, not bad. Trump gave a clear picture of his intentions, and spoke with conviction and force. There were lots of good lines, right on target, like, quote:

The nation founded by pioneers and risk-takers now drowns under millions and millions of pages of regulations and debt.

End quote.

Still, though, like the Oscars it was much too long: one hour, 39 minutes and 33 seconds, according to YouTube — 99½ minutes plus three seconds.

That’s more than twice the limit they teach you on public-speaking courses. On mine, at any rate, the instructor repeatedly hammered the point that no-one can sit and listen with uninterrupted attention to another person speaking for more than forty-five minutes. Forty-five minutes was, he told us, a universal constant, like the speed of light, independent of circumstances — of speaker, audience, topic, anything.

To be fair to my President, some of those 99½ minutes was not him speaking, it was his supporters applauding or Representative Al Green being escorted out.

How much was Trump speaking? To get some kind of handle on that I fed the transcript into Microsoft Word for a word count, after pruning out anything not Trump. Answer: 9,836 words.

That’s still a mighty lot of words. By way of comparison, last week’s Radio Derb had a spoken portion of 3,879 words. That lasted 41 minutes and ten seconds. At that speed, to speak the 9,836 words the President spoke would take me one hour, 44 minutes, and 23 seconds.

All right: Trump’s busy American diction is faster than my laid-back Old World style. I’m none the less going to assert that in those 99½ minutes on Tuesday evening, even if you subtract out applause and interruptions, Trump was actually speaking for a lot more than forty-five minutes. Too long!

My advice to our President, and to all his successors, is as follows.

• To fulfill the Article II constitutional requirement that you, quote, “shall from time to time give to Congress information of the State of the Union and recommend to their Consideration such measures as [you] shall judge necessary and expedient,” end quote:  mail it in.
• If you want to directly address not just Congress but us citizens at large, do so in sound clips on TV, radio, or social media, no sound clip exceeding forty-five minutes. In fact I think bite-size pieces just ten or fifteen minutes long would have more punch.

Beginning his second term as president of the Massachusetts State Senate in January 1915, Calvin Coolidge delivered the following address to the assembled senators. Quote:

Honorable Senators: My sincerest thanks I offer you. Conserve the firm foundations of our institutions. Do your work with the spirit of a soldier in the public service. Be loyal to the Commonwealth and to yourselves and be brief; above all be brief.

End quote.

That’s 44 words: less than half a percent as long as Trump’s Tuesday evening oration, but in it own small-“r” republican way, just as potent.

05 — Miscellany.     Pressed by circumstances temporarily beyond my control and with President Coolidge’s injunction ringing in my ears, I shall proceed to our closing miscellany of brief items.

Imprimis:  Last Friday’s fiasco at the White House with Ukraine’s President Zelensky holding a public meeting with our own President and Vice President generated much commentary. It seems to me to have been a clash of fundamental outlooks.

I persist in seeing the Russia-Ukraine War as I saw it seven weeks into the hostilities, as a war between the world’s two most corrupt white nations.

President Zelensky was, and is, a characteristic product of one of those nations. He is steeped in the style, the thinking, the manners, of a political establishment ruled by cynicism and corruption. So, of course, is Putin.

Trump’s style is entirely different. Trump has spent his life in the transactional world of business dealing, where interpersonal trust and judgment play key roles. There is some cheating and dishonesty, of course, just as there is occasional truth and sincerity in Zelensky’s world; it’s a matter of proportions, of everyday assumptions.

The two outlooks may be fundamentally incompatible. I think Trump understands this; I don’t think Zelensky does.

Item:  I have many, many times expressed my belief that the arrest and sentencing of the Brunswick Three in the death of Ahmaud Arbery five years ago was an outrageous miscarriage of justice.

If you are still not convinced, or don’t know the appalling details of the case, I strongly recommend you read Jack Cashill’s very full account in the February 15th American Spectator. I hope the Spectator won’t mind my having downloaded a PDF of Cashill’s article to my personal account where you can read it for free.

The oldest of the Brunswick Three is Gregory McMichael, currently held at the state medical prison in Augusta, Georgia. His wife Leigh runs a website where you can get on her mailing list for updates about the appeals and instructions on how to donate to the defense fund.

This is a terrible story of gross injustice. Please do anything you can for the Brunswick Three.

Item:  Even if I were not unusually pressed for time I would not be able to give you a full account of the latest development in Britain’s decline to a Third World slum. I remember too well what a lovely country she used to be, and the pain of speaking about what she has become is too great.

So here is the latest, in very brief. Within the British justice department is an outfit called the Sentencing Council, independent of the rest of the government. The council’s rulings on correct sentencing can’t be over-ruled without legislation in Parliament.

Their most recent ruling is that when pondering a sentence for someone convicted of a crime, the courts must, quote “avoid disparity of outcomes for different groups,” end quote.

For what different groups? Among some obvious ones — pregnant, first offender, addict, primary care-giver for dependent relative — the Council specifies defendants, quote: “from an ethnic minority, cultural minority, and/or faith minority community.” End quote.

Yes: the stupid and evil doctrine of “disparate impact” is being written into the British judicial process. The proportions of blacks and Muslims in the country’s prisons are higher than in the general population. Sentences must be reduced for them, or increased for whites and non-Muslims, to make the proportions equal.

Those currently higher proportions must, after all, be the result of racial or religious prejudice lurking in the courts. What else could possibly be causing them?

Item:  A couple of weeks ago I mentioned the annulling of December’s presidential election in Romania. The ruling class in that country got the election annulled because it had been won by Călin Georgescu, a populist-nationalist candidate.

February 26th Georgescu was sort-of arrested. He wasn’t actually dragged off to jail, but he was barred from leaving Romania and from using social media. There seems to be an element of house arrest, too: the New York Times told us on the 27th that, quote:

Police officers on Thursday visited his home near Bucharest, Romania’s capital, to check on his whereabouts and activities.

End quote.

This week we’ve been getting reports of huge crowds out in the streets protesting the treatment of Georgescu.

I have no idea how this will end up. Those scenes of demonstrating crowds did, though stir happy memories of Christmas 1989.

Four days before Christmas the communist dictator of Romania, Nicolae Ceauşescu, had been giving a routine dictator speech from his balcony to a big crowd of citizens in the square below when the crowd suddenly turned against him.

Ceauşescu scurried back indoors. Next day he and his wife fled from the capital by helicopter. They were soon arrested, though. On Christmas Day they were tried and shot, and the Ceauşescu dictatorship ended.

The rulers of Romania should surely know, if anyone should, that the voice of the people will sooner or later be heard.

06 — Signoff.     That’s all, ladies and gents. Thank you for your time and attention.

Peter Brimelow tweeted on Wednesday that, tweet:

VDARE just paid legal bills for February: nearly $15k. After nearly 3 years, we’ve still not been charged with ANYTHING: we’re just fighting to keep writers’ and donors’ names out of NYAG Letitia James’ hands.

End tweet.

If you can help. please do: by subscribing to Peter Brimelow’s Substack account, or with a check to the VDARE Foundation itself at P.O. Box 211, Litchfield-with-a-“t”, CT 06759. You can support me personally by earmarking that check with my name, or by any of the other options spelled out on my personal website. You can also support me indirectly by subscribing to that splendid monthly magazine Chronicles, to which I am now a regular contributor. Thank you!

For signoff music … you guessed it: I’m going to give you some Dylan. As I’ve mentioned, though, the Dylan people are ever watchful, so I shall cheat a little. I’m going to give you the lovely voice of Joan Baez singing Dylan’s lyrics.

Here was the lady sixty years ago — just at the time, or shortly after it, when her affair with Dylan had ended, breaking her heart.

There will be more from Radio Derb next week.