Monday, December 26, 2016

JT Column Draft - Week 1: Book of Lamentations

Gut yor! I'm Evan Tucker. Before we were Tuckers, we were Ticockis, and before that, we were Charlaps, meaning that my family's descended from King David (riiiiiiiiiight...). The direct founder of our lineage is Yakhya Ibn Yakhya, whose name's an acronym for Khiya, Rosh L'Galut Portugal/Poleen (Khiya, Head of Exiles in Portugal/Poland, unclear which...), which means somewhere along the way, I had an ancestor who was a medival merchant who knew he could sell more goods by exaggerating his yichus. 

My story is the story of Pikesville, the story of modern America, the story of of modern Judaism - a dream 2000 years in making, an unmistakable disappointment in reality. After two millenia without land or prosperity, why, now of all eras, is every Jew screaming at each other like prosperity will disappear tomorrow? I don't need to tell you many of Pikesville's most promising kids moved to more prosperous cities for better educations and jobs and spouses. If you give anyone enough privilege, nobody but a goy would live among Jews. We're difficult people at the best times. At the worst times? I don't need to tell you...

The point of this column, in this era of misunderstanding, is to cull through those forgotten monuments of Jewish thought - TV, movies, music, theater, poetry, art, fiction, journalism, languages, law, history, philosophy, some Jewish geography if you're nice to me. Yes, we'll talk politics, and zol gotter pitten, we'll even talk religion. We'll show those nodes where Jewish creation intersects with Jewish life. 

So let's start with an obvious one. Eycha - The Book of Lamentations, composed by Jeremiah, the Bible's resident depressive; chanted on Tisha B'Av, a holiday so depressing Day Schools tell kids it's in the summer. If you're liberal, you've been thinking Eycha for two months. If conservative, you've been thinking Eycha for eight years. Five chapters, 22 verses in the outer four - representing the 22 letters of Hebrew's alphabet, and 3x22 verses in chapter three. A perfect book - even if there's TMI about Jeremiah's BM's, and a book asking aloud if God stopped caring. 

No matter what our beliefs, everyone wonders if Hashem's wroth with America these days. Could it be that we, great among the nations, have become tributary? Whatever our transgressions, we are afflicted for the multitude of them. Our cities, whether by crime or police, are c
ompassed with gall and travail. Seventeen intelligence agencies claim Russia builds against us. Half America thinks we're set in dark places, half thinks we're emerging. Every American wonders if they have become the ridicule of all their country, and never before now has America seemed like an old country of broken bones.  

You may or not recognize the quotes in there, but if you don't, read Eycha. You'll recognize your thoughts in a great text before you even think them. They read us much more than we read them. No matter what our opinions, reading the best words, whether divine or secular, give us more clarity, more wisdom, more strength. Jews and America need more of all three. 

In the excruciating Chapter 1, the destroyed Jerusalem becomes a weeping widow - "a menstruous woman... all that honored her despise her, because they have seen her nakedness... she hath seen that the heathen entered her sanctuary... her virgins are afflicted... her filthiness is in her skirts..."  Modern Social Justice Warriors will be tempted to think this writing an archetypal example of the patriarchy trivializing sexual assault by comparing it to the assault of a city. I'd advise them to be slower on the draw - The Bible cannot be The Bible unless all generations find all meanings in it. Remember, if one dares, the statistics (and just statistics because the accompanying stories will make you vomit) of mass rape in the Soviet occupation of Germany, or the Japanese of Manchuria, or the Pakistani of Bangladesh, to realize how easily rape becomes both tool and objective in war. In the 20th century, the widow of Eycha could be tens of millions of widows. For those the near-future terrifies, no literature could be more relevant. 

But what bonds particularly me to Eycha is the doubts of Chapter 3. What in the New Testament or the Quran ever allow for such agonizing doubts in the goodness of God? "Surely against me he is turned, he turneth his hand against me all the day... He was unto me as a bear lying in wait... Out of the mouth of the most High proceedeth evil and good..." 

We chant Eycha on Tisha B'Av, the day of the Hebrew calendar on which both Judean Temples were said to be destroyed. It is the book specifically written for time of historical catastrophe, a book which dares to ask God "Yes, we still believe in Your goodness, but if we interpreted the evidence as it seems, your goodness is anything but apparent." 

Friday, December 23, 2016

Evan's 12/24 Sermon - Near-Final Draft

Gut shabbos, chag sameach, and gut yor. My name's Evan Tucker and this is the end of my first year as a regular attendee at Beth Am. Like just every Jew of my generation around here, I'm from Pikesville. I'm a Schechter grad who went to Beth Tfiloh for part of high school. I'm a composer and a writer, I have a podcast called Tales From the Old New Land and am about to start a column in the Jewish Times. I'm a Pisces who was born on Purim, and I'm an unmarried bookworm who spends most of my time wondering if the books in my apartment are ever going to fall over and bury me for a couple days. I grew up learning both Hebrew and Yiddish, though I'm hardly good now at either, and I'm the violinist and lead singer in a rock band that sings exclusively in Yiddish called 'Schmear Campaign.' At some point in the next year it would seem that I'll be teaching classes at Beth Am and I hope to see you all there. 

Before my family was Tuckers, we were Ticockis, and before we were Ticockis, we were Charlaps. Apparently this means that we're direct descendents of King David, which strikes me as a little unlikely. It also means that the direct founder of our lineage is Yakhya Ibn Yakhya, whose name comes out to an acronym for Khiya, Rosh L'Galut Portugal or Poleen, or Khiya, Head of the Exiles in Portugal or Poland. What this probably means is that somewhere along the way, one of my ancestors was a medieval merchant who knew he could get people interested in his wears by claiming he had better yichus than he did. 


This is the first sermon I've ever given, and if you had told me that I'd be giving a sermon in shul two years ago, you could have knocked me over with a feather. So if you can, try to grade me on a steep curve. It was also very difficult to pick a topic for this sermon since there's absolutely nothing of note going on in the world right now... And the topic was further complicated by it being both Erev Hanukkah and Erev Christmas. I could spend this time giving you some drawn out intellectual interpretation of Jewish history or philosophy or politics or art and culture, since that's generally what occupies my headspace for most of the day. But I have a feeling that a sermon like that is second or third date material. For the first date, it's always good advice to stick to safe topics. So let's just stick to a regular Davar Torah on this week's parsha, and go from there. 

But I'm obviously no Rabbi, and while for a non-clerical reader I'd like to think I'm fairly knowledgable about our tradition and our writings, you will not hear the most reverent interpretations of the Bible from me.

So with that in mind, let's talk about a bit of Vayeshev. 

So there's this Yuppie workaholic, a quiet guy who never had many friends, was never very close to anyone except his mother, and took every insult from his father, from his brother, from his uncle, with extreme patience, having to trust that eventually he will get what's due to him for having taken so much of everybody else's meshugas. Anything he got out of life was not because his family loved him enough to give it to him, but because he was smart enough to figure out how to get it in spite of the fact that they never wanted him to have any of it. And for decades, he does what he can to slowly and steadily grow his bank account so he can leave something to his thirteen children. But around the age of a hundred-and-three, he has a midlife crisis. 

All that work, all that deception, all that family betrayal done by him and to him. And for what? He's finally able to be with the woman he loves, but they only get a few years together, and while giving birth to their second son, she dies.

Everybody has a midlife crisis in their own way. But his midlife crisis is in relation to his children. Ten or eleven of them are already out of the house, and no matter what their grades, he sent them all to a state school. Here's a son who's clearly worthy of his Dad, with a great interpretive mind, and with very good fashion sense. He decides to spend a little extra and send him to Brandeis or University of Pennsylvania, he increases his allowance seventy-seven fold, the kid starts shopping at Ralph Lauren and Brooks Brothers and buys himself a Mercedes. 

The other brothers, stuck in middle management with student loans do the only logical thing when you're jealous of a brother and sell him into slavery. 

Now Egypt is the great place of the time. When you cultivate your spirit, you might make Aliyah or move to one of those hipster neighborhoods of North Baltimore. But to make it in Egypt is exactly what so many of our most successful Pikesville kids are trying to in my generation - it's exactly like trying to make it in politics or journalism in DC, or make it in the arts or finance in New York. It's an amazing feat for those who do it, but what you have to do to become a great success is unbelievably difficult, with incredible hard labor and compromises to your values that you will never see coming when you begin the journey, and no guarantee that you'll ever achieve the desired result. Had Joseph not been sold into slavery, he was just the kind of clever and ambitious and attractive young person of means who might have ended up in Egypt anyway. On the way, he encounters sexual harassment, he encounters deception, and even as the most traditionally successful Jew in the Torah, he has, as all Jews do, to struggle at every point to find favor with people who are predisposed to hate him - even in prison, the warden likes him and gives him that job in the prison library which the Warden gave Tim Robbins in Shawshank Redemption. The Torah portion ends with him still in prison, and completely forgotten about by the cup-bearer whose future he predicted, and to whom Joseph explained the rudiments of his economic cow theory. 

I like to think that the story of Avraham is the story of a troubled individual. Perhaps he's an aging hippie who never liked being in business with his father, and he literally starts hearing a voice which tells him to move into the desert with his wife where he knows nobody, there are no prospects for long term financial growth, and the neighbors are immigrant hating jerks. To me, it's the story of a troubled man trying to find his place in the world. The story of Yaakov is the story of a troubled family, full of people who deceive each other and insult each other and cheat each other out of money. And by the time Yaakov realized how it all went wrong and tries to make it up to his children, it's much too late. Yaakov is a man struggling with the weight of his family's expectations of him, and because he can never reconcile himself to what he can do to make himself feel loved by his family, his wives and children can never figure out how to make themselves feel loved by him either. But the story of Yosef is the story of a Jew in a troubled world - a world which raises Jews up to pinnacle of success, only to cast us back down into a world of horror, only to arbitrarily raise us up again in manners that seem almost providential in how little control we have over them.


Christians like to talk about the greatness of the New Testament's mercy against the incitements to vengeance of the Old Testament. This tradition has a Latin name, the Adversus Judaeus, and you hear variations on this even in everyday conversation in 2016. The idea of it is that the New Testament gives us a new conception of God, full of mercy, while the Old Testament contains a wrathful, petulant God who freely incites genocide.

I'm not going to sugarcoat this, there are moments when Hashem gives the most terrible and bloodcurdling orders that do not trouble Judaism's conscience nearly as much as it should. But because we acknowledge that we are very much an imperfect religion, it has set ethical boundaries on what we've generally been capable of doing in our name. We do not prostletyze to non-believers, we do not believe in rule over those who are not ours, we do not believe that there is a final interpretive or intercessory authority on Earth to whom we must submit. And the few moments in history when we have violated those precepts, such as the events of the holiday we're about to celebrate, there is abundant critical commentary which is deeply troubled by those events. 

There is no hagiography in Judaism. It is precisely the fact that the forefathers are not saints but sinners, that grounds Judaism in the humility to not spread its message as something that should be adapted by the entire world. Islam means quite literally that one submits to God, Christianity, at least slightly figuratively, means that we are saved by God, Yisrael means that we are a people who wrestle with God, and therefore do not accept his message, whatever it be, with faith or submission, but by enactment, the tactile process of applying laws to life that are constantly discussed, reassessed, and reinterpreted for the needs of every time and every place under circumstances that could erase any other system of belief. 

I know this last point is particularly controversial, even at Beth Am, but whatever one believes about the origins of The Torah, if I can ask you for a moment to see it as a work of literature, then it is second to none in the entire history of storytelling - not even Homer or Shakespeare or Tolstoy can compete with this level of creation. And the reason is because the stories of The Bible, particularly the stories of the Torah, do not tell us tales about great warriors like in the Illiad, or royal courts as in the Shakespearean tragedies, or aristocrats as in War and Peace. The Tanakh is a book so democratic that the characters in it are low enough to not even count as ordinary. The Bible is about outcasts, weirdos, the people who don't fit with the expectations of the society around them. The stories are meant to be consumed at those moments when we feel most isolated from those around us, they read us far more than we read them and they are there for when we need them. 

Gut Shabbos, Gut Yor, and to both Jews and Christians here, chag sameach.

Thursday, December 22, 2016

Evan's 12/24 Sermon - The Too Long and Too Hot for Shul Version

Gut shabbos, gut voch. I'm Evan Tucker and this is the end of my first year as a regular attendee at Beth Am. Like just about every Jew of my generation around here, I'm from Pikesville. I'm a Schechter grad who went to Beth Tfiloh for part of high school. I'm a composer and a writer, I have a podcast and am about to start a column in the Jewish Times. I'm a Pisces who was born on Purim, and I'm an unmarried bookworm who spends most of my time wondering if the books in my apartment are ever going to fall over and bury me for a couple days. I grew up learning both Hebrew and Yiddish, though I'm hardly good now at either, and I'm the violinist and lead singer in a rock band that sings exclusively in Yiddish called 'Schmear Campaign.' At some point in the next year I'll be teaching classes at Beth Am and I hope to see you all there. 

Before my family was Tuckers, we were Ticoczkis, and before we were Ticoczkis, we were Charlaps. Apparently this means that we're direct descendents of King David, which strikes me as a little unlikely. It also means that the direct founder of our lineage is Yakhya Ibn Yakhya, whose name comes out to an acronym for Khiya, Rosh L'Galut Portugal or Poleen, or Khiya, Head of the Exiles in Portugal or Poland. What this probably means is that somewhere along the way, one of my ancestors was really smart, for a Polish guy... 


It was very difficult to pick a topic for this sermon since there's absolutely nothing of note going on in the world right now... And the topic was further complicated by it being both Erev Hanukkah and Erev Christmas. I could spend this time giving you some drawn out intellectual interpretation of Jewish history or philosophy or politics or art and culture, since that's generally what occupies my headspace for most of the day. But I have a feeling that a sermon like that is second or third date material. For the first date, it's always good advice to stick to safe topics. So let's tell a story in three acts which you all know, and after each act we'll pause for a bit of commentary. 

Act 1.

So there's this 75 year old aging hippie, a Columbia dropout who stood in the front row at both Woodstock and Altamont. A quiet guy who never fit in with his family and never liked being in business with his father, and he hears a voice which tells him to move into the desert with his wife where he knows nobody, there are no prospects for long term financial growth, and the neighbors are immigrant hating jerks. The voice told him that if he became a desert hippy, he would be the father of an entire nation, but the desert is so barren that they nearly lose everything and they have to move again to the nearest city.

The biggest macher in the new city, perhaps a real estate developer turned President, sees the hippie's attractive and sarcastic wife and is so taken with her that he sexually harasses her until she agrees to become the macher's mistress, and he's so powerful that the hippie has to pretend she's not even his wife so he doesn't get killed. 

They finally manage to get out of that nightmare together, they go back to the desert, the hippie and his nephew go into business together, only to not get along, so the hippie tells him to take the good parts of the land when they divide the assets. The good land then becomes caught up in a series of wars, and the hippie has to save his nephew repeatedly from death and violence from two once great cities that are destroyed, during the escape of which the nephew's wife died. 

The aging hippie then wonders what all this hardship is for if he never has the kids which the voice promised him, so his wife tells him to use a surrogate mother so that he can have kids, only for the wife to become jealous of the surrogate. When his wife finally has a son of her own, her son and the surrogate's son don't get along, and she finally convinces her husband to drive away the surrogate mother, with whom he's been fooling around on the side, and her son out from their home. 

The voice then tells the hippie to kill his son, and he almost does it before the voice tells him not to do it. The wife dies from grief that her husband would kill his son, and the hippie wastes no time taking another wife and having another six kids.

Avraham was the father of many nations, he also was clearly a deeply troubled man, and however generous he was at times, he caused everyone he loved a world of sorrows. We don't know if he suffered himself for his troubles - he doesn't ever express his suffering in the manner which Ya'akov or Moshe does, let alone Iyov or Yeremiahu. We don't ever go inside the head of Avraham, we only know that he followed the voice of God - he did what the Voice told him to do, and in the case of the Akedah (sacrifice), it's not even clear that he understood the instructions particularly well.  

But it's almost because of Avraham's lack of direct expression that makes him the ultimate individual. He was the perennial outcast who looked around his predictable life, and the monotony of it made him miserable. We are a religion of laws and customs and expectations which there will always be enormous pressure to uphold, but Avraham is Avraham because he rebelled. He looked around where he was from and said that none of the options available to him will give him a meaningful life. Who knows, if Avraham grew up in Pikesville, he might become a Beth Am member. 
Act II

There are these two brothers, and they really don't get along. Obviously they're nothing alike. One's a jock who's so good at hunting that he gets an NRA membership, and so good at barbecuing that his father lets him host parties at the house long as he leaves his dad some venison steaks. The other is a nerd who doesn't have many other friends than his mother, whom he always helps around the house. The nerd is also kind of religious, a quality which his father may not like about him quite as much as he would claim to, considering that religion nearly got him killed a while back...

Anyway, the jock is having too much fun to care about his future, he doesn't want to go into his father's business and he certainly doesn't want to get an MBA. He's so unconcerned about his future that he sells his college fund to his brother for a bowl of soup. 

When it came time to write the will, the nerd cheats both the jock and their father. The jock, rather understandably, says "I'm gonna kill'em." The father says "I don't blame you." 

The nerd, possibly misinterpreting what was intended as hyperbole, though probably not, went to stay with his uncle in the 'Old Country.' Maybe he gets an engineering degree at the Techniyon or a law degree from Bar-Ilan. Meanwhile, the jock doesn't go to college and marries a gentile, but then realizes his father disapproves, so he divorces the goyisher girl and marries a poorer girl from his own faith. They never have much money. 

Back in the old country, the nerd has some weird dreams, perhaps after experiencing nargilah for the first time, and then he sees the girl whom he instantly knows will become the love of his life. But her father's not just a canny businessman who drives a hard bargain, but an insider trader and a racketeer. Her father employs him in his business, and multiple times he cheats this nerdy employee of his who seems like he won't stand up for himself. Cheats him to the point that he ends up in a loveless marriage to the sister of the woman he truly loves, and every time he thrives in business, his boss takes what's rightfully his away from him.

After twenty years in the Old Country, he leaves to return to his family. While on the way, he's accosted by some strange homeless dude and has to wrestle him to the ground in order to keep moving and gets a lifelong injury in his thigh which gives him a limp. 

When the nerd comes home, he's a white collar professional yuppie with a thriving business while his brother never became more than a blue collar handyman. Before the reunion, the brothers are both very worried by how the other will treat them. But they're both older now and realize that the fights of the past are trivial. The yuppie even gives his brother a gross percentage of the business profits. He also gets back just in time to reunite with his sick father who never paid much attention to him, and the two brothers bury the father together. But once he returns to the desert, terrible problems begin anew. 

This yuppie's finally married the love of his life, but shortly after they return to his family, she dies too. His teenage daughter gets into an abusive relationship with a rich boy who assaults her, and her father, being as uncomprehending of the problems of daughters as too many fathers are, sees the advantages of marrying into a family with money, so he encourages them to get married. Her brothers, though, as neglected by their father as she is, are much closer to their sister and think of how trapped she might feel, so without a father who looks after his children properly, they decide to kill the rich boy while he's convalescing from surgery. Their father has to hire a lawyer to get them off the hook with the law and at the same time repair business relations with every other business in the desert, none of which will trust him ever again. This father, such a great success in business, but so neglectful of his children, curses them on his deathbed - leaving our world as so many parents do, with their resentments of their children unresolved.

Yaakov is a very different man than Avraham. If Avraham is a hippy who was probably too troubled and irresponsible enough to have too many children, then Yaakov was a yuppie workaholic who made lots of money. Like so many yuppies, he did what was expected of him and had a large family, but he cheated his father and brother, he neglected most of his kids, he neglected the women in his life, and he divided his family against itself.

If the story of Avraham is ultimately the story of a dysfunctional individual struggling with what might give him fulfillment, then the story of Yaakov is the story of a dysfunctional family that never treats each other properly. Everybody's lying to each other, stealing from each other, neglectful of each other, and that's just when they're not deliberately hurting each other. If Avraham deals with the wounds of a troubled psyche, then Yaakov deals with the wounds of a troubled family. Yaakov is a man struggling with the weight of his family's expectations of him, and because he can never reconcile himself to what he can do to make himself feel loved by his family, his wives and children can never figure out how to make themselves feel loved by him either. 

Every one of these acts deals with the larger unit than the last. The troubles of a Jewish psyche, the troubles of a Jewish family, and finally, Act III deals with the troubles of a lone Jew in a world of gentiles - the outsider in a world that still praising us to the skies for enabling their prosperity just days before they decide that we're a swamp that must be drained, only to decide we're great again as though nothing bad ever happened. There'll be an Act IV when we deal with the problems of a nation, but we don't have three-thousand years to talk about it. 

So this Yuppie has a son, it's his favorite son, and this son is a spoiled clotheshorse, a dandy, a Jewish American Prince who went to Park School. He clearly inherited his father's business competence, but his father spoiled him, and gave him a much larger allowance to spend than his brothers, which he used to buy clothes retail, and one day he comes home with a ridiculously expensive checkered jacket from Armani with a pinstriped shirt from Brooks Brothers and $400 dollar designer jeans from Ralph Lauren which he bought himself to celebrate getting into the University of Pennsylvania. And while dressed like this, he pulls up to his brothers in his Mercedes convertible, he has the gall to tell them that he'll always be more successful than they are. 

So his brothers do the only logical thing to do to a brother your parents love more, and sell him into slavery. He ends up in the same great country to the south that his great-grandparents did. He finds favor with the Vice-President of the country and being as talented as his father, ends up in a short time as the Vice-President's chief of staff. And just like his great grandmother, he's an immigrant who reluctantly comes to a new country only to encounter sexually harassment from his boss, or in this case his boss's wife. And as a coverup for her bad behavior, he gets thrown in jail. 

While he was in prison, he goes to the prison library and studies economics, and while in prison comes up with some radical economic notions he calls 'Cow Theory.' He explains his theory to a winemaker who's in jail for insider trading, and the Pharaoh. Eventually, there's a recession, none of the other economists with their tried and true theories can get the economy going again. The winemaker explains to the President the rudimentaries of cow theory, the President commutes Joseph's sentence, and...

I know this is a controversial point, even at Beth Am, but whatever one believes about the origins of The Bible, as a work of literature it is second to none - not even Shakespeare or Tolstoy can compete with this level of creation. And the reason is because the stories of The Bible, particularly the stories of the Torah in Bereshit (Genesis), Vayikra (Exodus), and BaMidbar (Numbers), tell us the stories we always need to hear. They read us far more than we read them. 

Saturday, December 10, 2016

When Facebook Becomes Blogging Becomes Facebook



Not that anybody has any reason to care at all what I think, but since various people over the years keep being kind enough to point it out to me, when it comes to politics, no I'm clearly not a progressive of the bleeding heart variety. I don't want a state that cares, I want a state that works, and if it works better by caring, as it clearly seems to, then that's the way to go. Politics is, thankfully, just one small part of the world, and certainly not the part that any more than a couple tens of thousands of people should find the most interesting - and certainly not the one I find most interesting. But when it comes to politics, I don't know how it wouldn't be clear by now to you faithful readers, but I will never have too much common cause with people who think that you can have multiculturalism without a pluralism of values in which debate is always necessary, that you can have nationalized industries without private options, any kind of socialist living without as much regulation from private companies as capitalist living requires regulation from government, or to any kind of society at all without stringent law enforcement. Liberals will have to try to make common cause with people to our left who feel the opposite way, and we'll probably give them 95% of what they want, potentially losing moderates along the way, and they'll reject it because we didn't give them 100.
But to me at least, having a state that works is what makes Trump so terrifying. Republicans, even Republicans in the Nixon and Reagan eras, wanted a government that was smaller, but they didn't want to destroy it. This is a cabinet designed to literally dismantle government's ability to function and replace it not with private enterprise, but with investors who court government's favor. The wealth disparities in Russia are staggering, but Putin went after every billionaire who ran afoul to him to the fullest extent of the law.
And if you think this was already happening, you haven't seen shit. Trump wants to improve our roads and bridges so he can sell them. He wants to ruin education to make the public even stupider. He wants to break organized labor into a million pieces. He wants small businesses bought up for bottom dollar, he wants urban development and housing ground to a halt, he wants banks in his pocket not so that the banks can run and pilfer the government, but so Trump can run and pilfer the banks. And if you have a problem with it and want to protest, you can be sent to jail without trial and perhaps even tortured without anyone knowing what's happening to you. There are more generals in this cabinet than any before in American history, and not just generals but hawkish generals, and not just hawkish generals, but hawkish generals who hate China. 
I don't think much of radical fanatics, particularly homegrown ones, who until now have had breathtaking freedom to tell you how horrible the USA is before they go home to their generally wonderful lives. Even now, the early morning of December 10th, America is the place you want to live, and will be for at least another 41 days. People can say all they want that America was no different from anywhere else - fuck them, they don't have the first idea what they're talking about and they're not interested in learning. Fanatics will always try to sell you on a bill of shit that sounds irrational from the moment you hear it, but you always have a choice to be skeptical of their crap.
But it's not that America was ever that great, it's that everywhere else was that bad. Even in these supposed non-capitalist utopias in Northern Europe, all you have to do is scratch the surface and you see that most of their national debts are even higher, most of their working class incomes are lower, and the moment immigrants start arriving on their shores they start talking about stripping their social welfare benefits squeaky clean. It may be pathetic, but no country has ever compromised through its tensions and contradictions as well as we have.
What we stand to lose is precisely the American greatness that Trump says we've lost, and if you think there isn't anything to lose, oh my, just you wait... There will be no rule of law in Trump's America. There will only be rule and anarchy, and seemingly nothing in between.

(Note from 2026: Oy, this post... was not very good. Trump is a horror show, but at least so far, nearly ten years in, not an apocalypse.) 

Friday, December 9, 2016

The Second Iraq War of 2003: A Lecture by Dr. Marvin Vitebsk Revised

AC Charlap: And now a glum lecture on the Second Iraq War of 2003 by Dr. Marvin Vitebsk, Director of the Yitzhak Shamir Foundation on Security Studies and editor-in-chief of the Shamir Foundation's journal - Middle East Defense Quarterly. He's also the Sheldon Adelson Senior Fellow in Media and Education Bias at the Jabotinsky Institute, the Director of International Anti-Israel Propaganda Rapid Response at the BenZion Netanyahu Foundation for Global Research, Second Executive Vice Chairman of the Kahane Committee on the Present Danger, Fourth Vice-Director of the Jesse Helms and Phyllis Schaffly Coalition for a Democratic Minority, Contributing Editor to magazines like Commentary, The Weekly Standard, The National Review, The New Criterion, Frontpage Magazine, The New American, The American Spectator, The American Conservative, The American Standard, and former fellow of the American Enterprise Institute before hitting Richard Perle over the head with a two-by-four. After getting an undergraduate degree in classics at the City College of New York which he paid for by becoming a janitor at the RAND Corporation and then leaking their documents to Maoist China, he then switched allegiances and got all charges dropped by producing visual film to Dean Rusk and Robert McNamara of hitting Zhou Enlai over the head with a two-by-four. Marvin then received two doctoral degrees at the University of Chicago. His first doctoral thesis, entitled Democracy: The American Weakness, was supervised by Allan Bloom. His second doctoral thesis - entitled The Benefits of Mutually Assured Destruction, was supervised by Albert Wohlfstetter. Both theses were published in abridged form as cover stories in Commentary Magazine. While at the University of Chicago, Dr. Vitebsk briefly gained national eminence in a case for which he was prosecuted for assaulting another University of Chicago student with what was misreported as a seven-by-sixteen. He assaulted this student because he advocated for peaceful resistance against capitalist oppression, the student's name was Bernard Sanders - after which he appeared in roundtable discussions on shows hosted by Mike Wallace, Edward R. Murrow, Keith McBee, David Brinkley, Walter Cronkite, and Dick Cavett. His period as a television personality ended however in 1978 when he hit the longtime AFL-CIO director George Meany on the air over the head with what was clearly a two-by-four. He then served as a distinguished congressional aide to Senator Scoop Jackson of Washington and briefly served as Deputy Chief of Staff to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, until a fight with Moynihan's then Chief of Staff, Timothy Russert, ended with Dr. Vitebsk hitting Mr. Russert over the head with a plywood of indeterminate length. After the Iranian Revolution he made the cover of TIME Magazine for having been the only man in CIA employ to hit both Ayatollah Khomeni and Saddam Hussein over the head - the implement with which he did so however is still classified. After the fall of Communism, Dr. Vitebsk revealed him, though some have disputed his account, as having been the covert CIA assassin of both the brief-tenured Soviet Premieres Andropov and Chernenko, whose deaths the Soviets pretended were due to natural causes as a way of saving face in the international arena, and which enabled the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev and a new generation of Soviet leaders who believed in Glastnost and Perestroika. Once again, the implement with which he assassinated them is classified. Dr. Vitebsk now divides his time between Silver Spring and French Hill in East Jerusalem. We are pleased to have him here in this studio. Dr. Vitebsk.

Dr. Vitebsk: Yes, I'm going to begin this lecture by objecting in the most strenuous possible terms to Mr. Charlap's reference to East Jerusalem when in fact Jerusalem is the undisputed and undivided capital of an Israeli state whose borders go from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River and include the entirety of the provinces of Judea and Samaria, which billions of antisemites still refer to as The West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

I have been told that my subject today is the Iraq War. How does one begin to talk of something of such existential importance to mankind? The Iraq War was, in fact, the still unresolved and ticking time bomb which is in effect holding the entire world hostage until we defeat it with unconditional victory. As my ex-friend Norman Podhoretz once said, it is prime battle front upon which World War IV was raged, twice in my opinion, the first being the Persian Gulf conflict which is properly called Operation Desert Storm in 1991, again in Operation Iraqi Freedom - which I will not dignify with the name that is generally used, and a third Iraqi conflict which will no doubt soon rage again.

You may notice that I say World War IV was raged, for there have not been two world wars, but four. The third was The Cold War, which the antisemitic media unfortunately sold to the United States as a war that could be waged without demanding millions of casualties from the American public at large. This is World War III and it is still ongoing. As a result, we now in 2016 have a still Communist China whose Communism should in fact have in fact been stopped by the President Truman in 1948. We had dozens of perfectly decent atomic bombs at our disposal and Stalin had just barely developed his. By my estimation we could have dropped three dozen atomic bombs on the Chinese mainland and Stalin's second strike capability was still such that he'd only have been able to retaliate by dropping three or four bombs on us. In fact, now that the Soviet Union is gone, the coming conflict with China which is long overdue should be referred to as World War V.

But World War IV is the war against Radical Islam; perhaps I should refer to it as World War VI, because we seem to have already lost World War IV. Actually, i would call it World War IX, but we will not get into the other three world wars. What is crucial is that the crisis of Islam's infiltration into the West cannot be more grave. It happens because 41% of Muslim countries experience civil war while only 27% of Christian countries experience it. Muslims have a 3.1 children birth rate per family while Christians have a 2.7 children birth rate per family. There are, in fact, 140,000 Islamic refugees from Syria coming to Germany alone this year, and Germany rejected only two thirds of their applicants for asylum. Once in Europe, the Muslims can take advantage of the handouts offered by the social welfare state. Muslims already make up 5.8% of the German population and 7.5% of the French population. By halfway through the millenium, they may constitute a majority of Europe's population.

Antisemitic western liberals like to explain away such things with condescending relativism, treating minorities like children and their differences as something to be celebrated and assimilated into our culture, whereas we are clearly the bastions of liberalism and tolerance, and therefore they must be forced to assimilate and adapt to our culture.

I have come up with a three point plan to strengthen liberal resolve. You can find elaboration upon it in a book entitled 'Spine: How to Close the Liberal Soul':

1. Antisemitic American and European liberals must be made to uphold the social order.  I have infinite faith that the disasters coming to cosmopolitan cities like New York and London and Paris will strengthen liberal resolve. I worry however that the far greater death tolls from the political restrictions of a President like Donald Trump will distract liberals from Islam, the true threat in their midst.

2. Government must be shrunk and an ethic of personal responsibility must be facilitated and encouraged to take its place - and I have outlined the proposal for a government department of personal responsibility on the cabinet level that will have offices in every town in America. My antisemitic grandson who protests at rallies to stop the Israeli Occupation tells me that this is a contradiction in terms. He would

3. Antisemitic liberals must stop the crude patronization of minorities by insisting that their problems have reasons. Liberals like my third antisemitic ex-wife are, in fact, the true racists, whose programs merely benefit and improve and enrich the lives of impoverished minorities when what they should be doing is forcing minorities to conform to the standards of how to behave that the country sets for them.

This of course, necessitates a second plan, which is six points long. You can find an elaboration for this in my book: "Submit: Destroying Democracy to Rebuild It"

1. Because of intolerant tolerance of liberals, America is in the direst of crises. Confidence in its authorities is undermined, and because of that, any talk of reforming our institutions must take a back seat to upholding them. Authority must be re-established. While I may disagree with particular policies of a Trump administration, particularly its use of antisemitic propaganda, I am in fact overjoyed that a President has finally come along who will use the office of the Presidency to its fullest capacity, particularly against the coming demographic threat from Islam. American Muslims are now more than a full one percent of American residents, and by 2150 might constitute a full 2.5% of the American population. It would be a disaster for National Security - we would have to register every Muslim in this country and follow all of their whereabouts; though this would actually be good practice for World War XII.

2. Only a morally corrupt society questions authority. What ails the United States is not a decline of an economic system, but a decline of values. The individual in contemporary America has too many rights, and therefore uses its rights to pursue happiness. Traditional means of enforcing authority like religion and nationalism have been completely eroded by the counterculture. Just last month I was at a conference in Maine, and I went out to dinner with Abe Foxman and Marty Peretz, and while we were waiting for our Lobster Rolls we all agreed that religion particularly was of paramount importance to enforcing societal norms. Without a God to tell us what to do, what is there to stop us from making our own choices?

3. God must drain the swamp of the counterculture, and we must be the gods. The biggest mistake this country ever made was the formation of the middle class - and the middle class is a spoiled class of children. Every subsection of the Middle Class is concerned with its own subsection of issues: their racial and sexual and gender and antisemitic identities and the rights that are due them rather than their responsibilities to their country. A much smaller and more respectable middle class will divert the attention of people back to the issues that truly matter - like the poverty to which the Trump Administration will soon acquaint them.

4. We must lower people's expectations of what government and life can do. The more they expect, the more they will protest, and protesting is the first and greatest sign of a decadent and antisemitic society that undermines confidence in its institutional authority. Institutional authority exists to be revered, not to be used. A government that doesn't do anything can never be criticized.

5. An intellectual is not an expert, and government should never be administered by experts on their subjects. Particularly by intellectual experts, whose knowledge of the subject is suspect in its select and subjective antisemitism. What is needed is government by a pliable head of state of subaverage intelligence, who can then be molded by a philosophical elite of intellectuals with sufficient morals.

6. In order to create this philosophical elite, we must rid ourselves of the pestilence of these antisemitic, fascist, authoritarian, totalitarian university professors who corrupt even our best minds with radical antisemitic theories of social change, and we must do so by firing them all immediately without so much as a hearing about their competence. They have, furthermore, banished conservatives like me and most of my enemies from campus life, and conservative intellectuals unfortunately have to content themselves with jobs in think tanks, corporate consultancies at three times the salary of traditional academics, articles for conservative magazines underwritten by spectacular endowments, paid international vacations to meet with right-wing leaders around the world, and astronomical speaking fees at conservative retreats. We conservative thinkers truly live in a tragic state of affairs.

And the way to drain this liberal countercultural swamp can be found in three points, elaborated in my book: "Filth: Why the Middle Class Must Die"

1. The reason being that once the antisemitic middle class is fully part again of the working class, their concerns will be no different from the working class. I am heartened to see that Donald Trump, for all his vulgar superficialities, seems to agree with me about the necessity of destroying the Middle Class, and even if I take issue with certain statements of his aide Steve Bannon, I must say that I find him to be a very sympathetic person on the whole, and not at all antisemitic.

2. Individual merit is the most precious thing in the world. Therefore, inherited wealth must be maintained at all costs. It would be a shame if wealthy mediocrities would stop running this country, because the antisemitic leaders of this country would be too intelligent to be molded by the virtuousness of the philosophical elite.

3. While the government should be perfectly docile in its management of domestic affairs, it must root out moral corruption abroad, lest their corruption contaminate us. The main purpose of government is destroy monsters abroad, because if we do not, their moral swamp will become ours, and we will have to rid ourselves of the antisemitic middle class and their antisemitic vices all over again.

4. In addition to Republican politicians of inherited privilege, the ranks of these philosophical elites must consist of traditional Democratic liberal hawks as the Democratic party was from the time of Franklin Roosevelt to Hubert Humphrey, and traditional union leaders like Leon Bates, George Meany, Walter Reuther, and Philip Randolph. All four of whom I've stabbed in bar fights.

All this is just a prelude to talking about the Iraq War of 2003, which I still believe is the most important battlefront in World War IV, or, in actuality, World War IX as there are three other world wars I have not yet even spoken of.

Charlap: Dr. Vitebsk I'm sorry to interrupt but we really have to...

Vitebsk: DIE YOU ANTISEMITIC FILTH!

(hits Charlap with two-by-four, two loud thunks, one from the blow, one from an unconscious Charlap hitting the floor)

Thursday, December 8, 2016

The Iraq War of 2003: A Lecture from Dr. Marvin Vitebsk

AC Charlap: And now a glum lecture on the Second Iraq War of 2003 by Dr. Marvin Vitebsk, Director of the Yitzhak Shamir Foundation on Security Studies and editor-in-chief of the Shamir Foundation's journal - Middle East Defense Quarterly. He's also the Sheldon Adelson Senior Fellow in Media and Education Bias at the Jabotinsky Institute, the Director of International Anti-Israel Propaganda Rapid Response at the BenZion Netanyahu Foundation for Global Research, Second Executive Vice Chairman of the Kahane Committee on the Present Danger, Fourth Vice-Director of the Jesse Helms and Phyllis Schaffly Coalition for a Democratic Minority, Contributing Editor to magazines like Commentary, The Weekly Standard, The National Review, The New Criterion, Frontpage Magazine, The New American, The American Spectator, The American Conservative, The American Standard, and former fellow of the American Enterprise Institute before hitting Richard Perle over the head with a two-by-four. After getting an undergraduate degree in classics at the City College of New York which he paid for by becoming a janitor at the RAND Corporation and then leaking their documents to Maoist China, he then switched allegiances and got all charges dropped by producing visual film to Dean Rusk and Robert McNamara of hitting Zhou Enlai over the head with a two-by-four. Marvin then received two doctoral degrees at the University of Chicago. His first doctoral thesis, entitled Democracy: The American Weakness, was supervised by Allan Bloom. His second doctoral thesis - entitled The Benefits of Mutually Assured Destruction, was supervised by Albert Wohlfstetter. Both theses were published in abridged form as cover stories in Commentary Magazine. While at the University of Chicago, Dr. Vitebsk briefly gained national eminence in a case for which he was prosecuted for assaulting another University of Chicago student with what was misreported as a seven-by-sixteen. He assaulted this student because he advocated for peaceful resistance against capitalist oppression, the student's name was Bernard Sanders - after which he appeared in roundtable discussions on shows hosted by Mike Wallace, Edward R. Murrow, Keith McBee, David Brinkley, Walter Cronkite, and Dick Cavett. His period as a television personality ended however in 1978 when he hit the longtime AFL-CIO director George Meany on the air over the head with what was clearly a two-by-four. He then served as a distinguished congressional aide to Senator Scoop Jackson of Washington and briefly served as Deputy Chief of Staff to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, until a fight with Moynihan's then Chief of Staff, Timothy Russert, ended with Dr. Vitebsk hitting Mr. Russert over the head with a plywood of indeterminate length. After the Iranian Revolution he made the cover of TIME Magazine for having been the only man in CIA employ to hit both Ayatollah Khomeni and Saddam Hussein over the head - the implement with which he did so however is still classified. After the fall of Communism, Dr. Vitebsk revealed him, though some have disputed his account, as having been the covert CIA assassin of both the brief-tenured Soviet Premieres Andropov and Chernenko, whose deaths the Soviets pretended were due to natural causes as a way of saving face in the international arena, and which enabled the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev and a new generation of Soviet leaders who believed in Glastnost and Perestroika. Once again, the implement with which he assassinated them is classified. Dr. Vitebsk now divides his time between Silver Spring and French Hill in East Jerusalem. We are pleased to have him here in this studio. Dr. Vitebsk.

Dr. Vitebsk: Yes, I'm going to begin this lecture by objecting in the most strenuous possible terms to Mr. Charlap's reference to East Jerusalem when in fact Jerusalem is the undisputed and undivided capital of an Israeli state whose borders go from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River and include the entirety of the provinces of Judea and Samaria, which billions of antisemites still refer to as The West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

I have been told that my subject today is the Iraq War. How does one begin to talk of something of such existential importance to mankind? The Iraq War was, in fact, the still unresolved and ticking time bomb which is in effect holding the entire world hostage until we defeat it with unconditional victory. As my ex-friend Norman Podhoretz once said, it is prime battle front upon which World War IV was raged, twice in my opinion, the first being the Persian Gulf conflict of 1991, and which will no doubt soon rage again.

You may notice that I say World War IV was raged, for there have not been two world wars, but four. The third was The Cold War, which the antisemitic media unfortunately sold to the United States as a war that could be waged without demanding casualties from the public at large. This is World War III and it is still ongoing. As a result, we now in 2016 have a still Communist China whose Communism should in fact have in fact been stopped by the President Truman in 1948. We had dozens of perfectly decent atomic bombs at our disposal and Stalin had just barely developed his. By my estimation we could have dropped three dozen atomic bombs on the Chinese mainland and Stalin's second strike capability was still such that he'd only have been able to retaliate by dropping three or four bombs on us. In fact, now that the Soviet Union is gone, the coming conflict with China which is long overdue should be referred to as World War V.

But World War IV is the war against Radical Islam; perhaps I should refer to it as World War VI, because we seem to have already lost World War IV. 41% of Muslim countries experience civil war while only 27% of Christian countries experience it. Muslims have a 3.1 children birth rate per family while Christians have a 2.7 children birth rate per family. There are, in fact, 140,000 Islamic refugees from Syria coming to Germany alone this year. Once in Europe, the Muslims can take advantage of the social welfare state to have still more children, until they have so many children that they can take over the state. Muslims already make up 5.8% of the German population and 7.5% of the French population. As you can see, the crisis of Islam's infiltration of the West cannot be more grave.

Antisemitic western liberals like to explain away such things with condescending relativism, treating minorities like children and their differences as something to be celebrated and assimilated into our culture, whereas we are clearly the bastions of liberalism and tolerance, and they must assimilate and adapt to our culture.

I have come up with a three point plan to strengthen liberal resolve. You can find elaboration upon it in a book entitled 'Spine: How to Close the Liberal Soul':

1. Antisemitic American and European liberals must be reasoned with and if that proves impossible, compelled to uphold the social order. They must feel as though they have no choice but to become our allies - I have infinite faith that the coming disasters which Islamism will bring to  cosmopolitan cities like New York and London and Paris will strengthen liberal resolve. I worry however that the far greater death tolls from the political restrictions of a President like Donald Trump will blind liberals to the true threat in their midst.
2. That antisemitic liberals must be made to realize that a massive inhuman government cannot provide solutions to problems that individuals create. Government must be shrunk and an ethic of personal responsibility must be facilitated and encouraged to take its place - and I have outlined the proposal for a government department of personal responsibility on the cabinet level that will have offices in every town in America. My antisemitic grandson who protests at rallies to stop the Israeli Occupation tells me that this is a contradiction in terms. He would.
3. Antisemitic liberals must stop the crude patronization of minorities by insisting that their problems have reasons. Liberals like my antisemitic ex-wife are, in fact, the true racists, whose programs merely benefit and improve and enrich the lives of impoverished minorities when what they should be doing is forcing minorities to conform to the standards of how to behave that the country sets for them, thereby making them part of the majority with no need for diversity.

This of course, necessitates a second plan, which is six points long. You can find an elaboration for this in my book: "Submit: Destroying Democracy to Rebuild It"

1. Because of intolerant tolerance of antisemtiic liberals, America is in the direst of crises. Confidence in its authorities is undermined, and because of that, any talk of reforming our institutions must take a back seat to upholding them. Authority must be re-established. And here is when I must issue a reason for hope in a Trump administration. While I may disagree with particular policies of a Trump administration, particularly its use of antisemitic propaganda, I am in fact overjoyed that a President has finally come along who will use the office of the Presidency to its fullest capacity, particularly against the coming demographic threat from Islam. American Muslims are now more than a full one percent of American residents, and by 2150 might constitute a full 2.5% of the American population. This must not be allowed to happen, and the consequences of such growth cannot be overestimated.
2. This is an issue of moral corruption. What ails the United States is not a decline of an economic system, but a decline of values and standards. The individual in contemporary America simply has too many rights, and therefore concentrates itself on the satiation of pleasure. Traditional means of enforcing community standards like religion and nationalism have been completely eroded by the counterculture. Just last month I was at a conference in Maine, and I went out to dinner with Abe Foxman and Marty Peretz, and while we were waiting for our Lobster Rolls we all agreed that religion particularly was of paramount importance to enforcing societal norms. Without a God to tell us what to do, what is there to stop us from making our own choices?
3. The swamp of counterculture must be utterly drained. Perhaps the worst mistake this country ever made was the GI Bill, which allowed for a large and antisemitic middle class. Rather than promote solidarity with the old trade union issues like wages and working conditions, every part of the middle class is concerned with its own subsection of issues: their racial and sexual and gender and antisemitic identities and the rights that are due them rather than their responsibilities to their community and country. These issues reflect a spoiled and antisemitic nation of children who never had to look after their own private property. Perhaps a much smaller, much more responsible and respectable middle class will divert the attention of people back to the issues that truly matter - like the poverty to which we will soon acquaint them.
4. We must lower people's expectations of what government and life can do. The more they expect, the more they will protest, and protesting is the first and greatest sign of a decadent and antisemitic society that undermines confidence in its institutional authority, which should aim not only be unquestioned in speech but also in thought. Institutional authority exists to be revered, but never used. A government that doesn't do anything can never be criticized.
5. Intellectuals must particularly comply with these codes of standards so that they do not corrupt the public with insufficient ethical standards. An intellectual is not an expert, and government should never be administered by experts on their subjects. Particularly by intellectual experts, whose knowledge of the subject is suspect in its select subjective antisemitism. What is needed is government by an absolutely ordinary, pliable head of state of subaverage intelligence, who can then be molded by a philosophical elite of intellectuals with sufficient morals.
6. In order to create this philosophical elite, we must rid ourselves of the pestilence of these antisemitic, fascist, authoritarian, totalitarian university professors who corrupt even our best minds with radical antisemitic theories of social change, and we must do so by firing them all immediately without so much as a hearing about their competence. They have, furthermore, banished conservatives like me from campus life, and conservative intellectuals unfortunately have to content themselves with jobs in think tanks, corporate consultancies at three times the salary of traditional academics, articles for conservative magazines underwritten by spectacular endowments, paid international vacations to meet with right-wing leaders around the world, and astronomical speaking fees at conservative retreats. We truly live in a tragic state of affairs.

And the way to drain this liberal countercultural swamp can be found in three points, elaborated in my book: "Filth: Why the Middle Class Must Die"

1. After consigning the antisemitic American Middle Class back to the Working Class, we can then remold them free of moral corruption as the salt of the Earth American working class still is and has always been. Once the antisemitic middle class is fully part again of the working class, their concerns will be no different from the working class. I am heartened to see that Donald Trump, for all his vulgar superficialities, seems to agree with me about the necessity of destroying the Middle Class, and even if I take issue with certain statements of his aide Steve Bannon, I must say that I find him to be a very sympathetic person on the whole, and not at all antisemitic.
2. Individual merit is the most precious thing in the world. Therefore, inherited wealth must be maintained at all costs. If inherited wealth is not maintained, the antisemitic leaders of this country will be too intelligent to be molded by the virtuousness of the philosophical elite. And therefore, the public will be unable to achieve any meaningful sort of individual merit.
3. While the government should be perfectly docile in its management of domestic affairs, it must root out moral corruption abroad, lest their corruption contaminate us. The main purpose of government is destroy monsters abroad, because if we do not, their moral swamp will become ours, and we will have to rid ourselves of the antisemitic middle class and their antisemitic vices all over again.
4. In addition to Republican politicians of inherited privilege, the ranks of these philosophical elites must consist of traditional Democratic liberal hawks as the Democratic party was from the time of Franklin Roosevelt to Hubert Humphrey, accompanied by neoconservative academics like myself and most of my enemies, and traditional union leaders like Leon Bates, George Meany, Walter Reuther, and Philip Randolph. All four of whom I've stabbed in bar fights.

All this is just a prelude to talking about the Iraq War of 2003, which I still believe is the most important battlefront in World War IV, or, in actuality, World War IX as there are three other world wars I have not yet even spoken of.

Charlap: Dr. Vitebsk I'm sorry to interrupt but we really have to...

(hits Charlap with two-by-four, two loud thunks, one from the blow, one from an unconscious Charlap hitting the floor)

Thursday, December 1, 2016

"How Did We Get Here": A Cultural History of the 21st Century Episode 0 - First Quarter Rewritten

I leant upon a coppice gate 
      When Frost was spectre-grey, 
And Winter's dregs made desolate 
      The weakening eye of day. 
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky 
      Like strings of broken lyres, 
And all mankind that haunted nigh 
      Had sought their household fires. 

The land's sharp features seemed to be 
      The Century's corpse outleant, 
His crypt the cloudy canopy, 
      The wind his death-lament. 
The ancient pulse of germ and birth 
      Was shrunken hard and dry, 
And every spirit upon earth 
      Seemed fervourless as I. 

At once a voice arose among 
      The bleak twigs overhead 
In a full-hearted evensong 
      Of joy illimited; 
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small, 
      In blast-beruffled plume, 
Had chosen thus to fling his soul 
      Upon the growing gloom. 

So little cause for carolings 
      Of such ecstatic sound 
Was written on terrestrial things 
      Afar or nigh around, 
That I could think there trembled through 
      His happy good-night air 
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew 

      And I was unaware. 

Thomas Hardy was born a little too late. He was a generation younger than the great Victorian intellectuals who represented Merry Old England at the optimistic zenith of its Victorian Era; writers and thinkers like Dickens and Thackeray and Tennyson and John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold and George Eliot and Cardinal Newman and Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin and Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone - men, and at least one woman who took a man's name - so influential that they defined a country and a century. The world has moved on from their overly proper and priggish optimism and their peculiar and pecuniary liberalism, but it was, for better or worse, probably the best the world was going to do in the 19th century, and a hell of a lot better than what lay in store at the start of the 20th. 
The only way that a still greater and more equitable liberalism than the Victorian liberalism that allowed for the vicissitudes of imperialism and would ever be born was to emerge from a meat grinder of death - a blood sacrifice which demanded more than two hundred million victims and made no distinction between the conservatives who held a more equitable world back, the progressives who aimed to create a greater world, and the already oppressed of both the European lower classes and the oppressed of imperial rule in Asia, Africa, and occasionally Latin America - the very people who could have benefited most had they survived the great harvest. Was it worth it?  

Hardy was one of nature's great pessimists. English Literature was ruled at the mid-19th century by Charles Dickens, the ultimate optimist and a poet of hope, who passed his characters through terrible tribulations so that they might emerge more triumphant in the end. Late century English lit was ruled, if by anyone at all, by Hardy. 
Two thirds of the way through his career, at roughly the Century's turn, he abandoned novels for poetry, perhaps because he had too much gloom in his outlook to render any longer his sour thoughts on life with the ambiguities that narrative demands. When he wrote those immortal sixteen couplets of The Darkling Thrush, was his foreboding for his own soul's future, was it foreboding for people he loved, was it for Englands, the world's? 

We are now 116 years after The Darkling Thrush, and there are three people alive in 2016 that were alive in 1900 - none of whom was born before 1899. No one is alive today who can tell us whether or not living in 2016 feels like living in 1900, but I would imagine that a certain kind of liberal felt a foreboding that could not be quenched. 

The historian Niall Ferguson, no liberal he, wrote of 1901 that an "inhabitant of London could, as he sipped his breakfast tea, have ordered a sack of coal from Cardiff, a pair of kid gloves from Paris or a box of cigars from Havana. He might also, if anticipating a visit to the grouse moors of Scotland, have purchased a 'Bradalbane Waterproof and self-ventilating Shooting Costume (cape and kilt); or he might, if his interests lay in a different direction, have ordered a copy of Maurice C. Hime's book entitled Schoolboy's Special Immorality. He could have invested his money in any one of nearly fifty US companies quoted in London - most of them railroads like the Denver and Rio Grande (whose latest results were reported that day) - or, if he preferred, in one of the seven other stock markets also covered regularly by The Times. He might, if he felt the urge to travel, have booked himself passage on the P&O liner Peninsular, which was due to sail for Bombay and Karachi the next day, or on one of the twenty-three other P&O ships scheduled to sale for Eastern destinations over the next ten weeks - to say nothing of the thirty-six other shipping lines ofering services from England to all the corners of the globe. Did New York seem to beckon? The Manitou sailed tomorrow, or he could wait for the Hamburg-America Line's more luxurious Furst Bismarck, which sailed him from Southampton on the 13th. Did Buenos Aires appeal to him more? Did he perhaps wish to see for himself how the city's Grand National Tramway Company was using - or rather, losing - his money? Very well, the Danube, departing for Argentina on Friday, still had some cabins free. The world, in short, was his oyster."

Where stand we in 2016? An inhabitant of the Washington DC metropolitan area, as he, or still depressingly seldom she, sips on their Sunday brunch mimosas, can whip out an I-phone and go on Amazon and there they can order five pounds of replica fat for $70, an old Asian man peel and stick wall decal for $30, a Nicholas Cage pillow case for $8, two ounces of weed for $5, a Kaylen's hand butt plug for $30, a fifty-five gallon drum of lube for $1350, a Roswell New Mexico soil sample for $16, a badonkadonk land cruiser for $20,000 and $500 shipping, an infant circumcision trainer for $192,1,500 lady bugs for $6.25,  a sexy inflatable sheep made to look like Dolly the first cloned sheep for $7.50, a stegosaurus dog costume for $28, 32 ounces of wolf urine for $100, an underpants dispenser for $11, a complete body unitard for $70, and uranium ore for $40. If they wanted to book a trip anywhere in the world, they could find literally hundreds of websites devoted not only to saving money on the trip, but earning money by taking a trip. They could find online classifieds houseswapping and housesitting and dozens of websites to advise them on how to get the most value out of it, they could be subsidized for years by a non-profit to volunteer and fundraise on a development project, they could look at online forums for hitchhiking and carpooling and many websites devoted exclusively how to do either/or of them safely, message boards for staffing yachts and advice on how to crew it, applications to crew a cruise on any major cruiseline's website, they can inquire onto car rental websites for people who've just moved and need vehicles driven from the place they live to a far off place, they can offer to work at a hostel rather than pay it, they can organize a group tour for which they act as both agent and guide.

Some people would say that this is the way that the world's true masters anesthetize us to the world's truest concerns by dangling consumerism and commodities in front of us and forcing us creative types to hustle our way into the lower middle class while the less imaginative and risky of us reap the world's true benefits. Many others, including me, would say that this is evidence that the world is particularly our oyster. The reason we focus on how to procure our own trivial delights not because we are slaves to the world, but because we are its masters, and once again, the world may demand remittance on our trivial concerns with a payment not in in dollars or coin of the realm, but in pounds of blood.  

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Greetings, salutations, welcome, and all due appropriate sentiments to this episode #0 of "How We Got Here: A Cultural History of the 21st Century." 

Let's start with the first thesis of this series, and then divert enormously from it. We have just emerged from the Television Era. I believe that in the past generation, it is not movies or music that has represented us most accurately, however well some in each field of the Arts do, and it's certainly not fiction or art. Far more than any other medium, TV gives its creators the freedom and diversity to show our lives accurately, and I aim to show that as best I can.

This podcaster was born at the cusp between Generation X and Millennials, we were not only born in the television era, but even our parents can't remember a time before television. But our parents grew up with three basic networks, we grew up with thirty, and by the time we became adults, we had 300. I would imagine that we are now in the Podcast Era - hence why I'm here. But in some ways there is as great a difference between TV and Television as there is between either of them and podcasts. TV is entertainment, Television is art. TV is escapist, Television is cathartic. TV exists to comfort us, Television exists to drive us mad. 

I would date the emergence of Television from TV to somewhere between the final episode of Seinfeld in May 1998 and the pilot episode of The Sopranos in January of 1999. Something in the American air changed sometime during the last seven months of 1998 much as they seemed to change again around the Fall of 2014. 

The thirties were the decade of fascism, the eighties were the decade when Communism fell. The nineties were the decade of the blowjob. The 'quote-unquote Great Event', the most famous of 1998, and indeed, of the whole decade, was the Lewinsky investigation and the Clinton impeachment, which everyone both Right and Left agreed, represented an absolute low in American discourse - during a period so seemingly prosperous and indolent that the country had nothing better to do for an entire year than talk about the President getting head underneath the desk of the Oval Office. Nevertheless, this roughly seven-month period between Seinfeld and The Sopranos set much of the stage for everything that would later come - no pun intended, honestly.

The great political development of that period was the emergence, and a word like 'emergence' hardly does justice to the effect it had on America, of the Drudge Report. Traditional news, even 24-hour TV news, even FOX News, could not possibly keep up with the proliferation of trivial but distracting political stories, or entirely made up stories, that cater to and inflame the prejudices of people who believe in the inherent bias of traditional respectable journalists who practice journalism through the same process since the founding of The Spectator in the 1720's - and if not that many millions of people believed that traditional news had no bias before the Drudge Report, then the Drudge Report alone convinced millions. No newspaper, not even the Wall Street Journal, no yellow journalism, not even the Daily Mail, no television network, not even FOX news, could ever shape hearts and minds with the ferocious prowess of an aggregating website that could send its audience down a rabbithole of information, often false but certainly not always, that was available to them at the click of a mouse.

But if you think Drudge Report isn't a substantial enough event to mark the passing of one era to another, then for this period that contributed to American life and history - one should remember was that this was the period when the bulk of debate was conducted over whether to repeal the Glass-Steagal act, a financial act passed barely more than three months into the Franklin Roosevelt administration. Glass-Steagal was the most important substance of the Banking Act of 1933 which established a wall between commercial banks and securities firms. What Glass-Steagall meant in laymen terms is that a commercial bank at which middle class people could store their money with expectations that the money would stay put, could not itself be invested in stocks and funds so that banks could potentially make more money for both the bank and for its customers. In theory, eliminating the separation can reap incredible financial benefits to both bankers and their customers, and in practice, that's exactly what happened until The Great Recession of 2008, just as it's exactly what happened until The Great Depression of 1929. Both times, it was shown pretty much definitively that commercial banks trying to increase their holdings through the stock market was spectacularly irresponsible.

I suppose I'm giving away my political bias right at the beginning of this series - are there really that many conservative podcasters anyway? You'll quickly see that compared to most progressive podcasters I'll seem downright conservative, but I am a liberal, through and through, clinging to it like a religion in insecure times precisely because liberalism is the most insecure of all philosophies, a coreless, constantly evolving and debated theology that ultimately seems to adapt itself from era to era for the specific needs of that particular historical moment. But regardless of whether one is liberal or conservative, moderate or progressive, alt-right or intersectional warrior for social justice, everyone seems to agree that something extremely dangerous happened in American life during this period - even if we all disagree about what the particular dangers were that we passed. Whatever the center of American life was, whatever America's basic expectations and routines were, it seemed to be hollowed out sometime around that infamous year of 1998.

Around the corner was the twenty-first century, and while America is still unquestionably the world's only superpower, we are all the more vulnerable because of our indispensability, and every American would seem to agree that the 21st century beset our country with an endless parade of hopelessness. Not hopelessness by the standards of history, but hopelessness by the standards of the most prosperous and wealthiest nation in the history of our planet. Nobody knows what 2017 will bring, but there is no question, even in 2016, even in December 2016 (!), that a person desiring to make a success of him or herself has the best possible chances right here, and right now, to rise and lift oneself from poverty.

Lifting oneself up from poverty does not mean alleviating one's hardships through social programs while still contenting oneself with little more than a minimum though living wage as progressives like to believe, and contrary to what conservatives believe, it can be done while still respecting the economic rights of communities and refraining from the exploitation of others to achieve one's goals. But to rise in financial security and status to a place of self-respect and pride, and to create an identity, a security, a future, a career, and a freedom for oneself, is still something that has happened in America tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions of times more often than any other place in the world.

Since I would imagine that it is mostly liberals, progressives, and socialists, who would listen to this, I would like to point out to them a certain quote. "The lessons of history, confirmed by the evidence immediately before me, show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fibre. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit. It is inimical to the dictates of sound policy. It is in violation of the traditions of America."  This quote was from the 1935 State of the Union address, it was given by Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

The human spirit,... spiritual and moral disintegration,... how old-fashioned, how out of touch, how quasi-religious and conservative, how bourgeois those terms sound to the enlightened modern ear which can't help but hear the echoes of Bill O'Reilly or Newt Gingrich or Margaret Thatcher talking about the corrosive effects of dependence on a citizen's ability to lift himself up by the bootstraps. But what other option has there ever been? What other motivator moves a society to prosperity? Socialists and Marxists, and sometimes even Progressives, would have us believe that a dream of self-respect is just something which we would all have innately if companies and their advertisers did not constantly deny them to us. According to such people, these are all part of the lies told from inside the whirlwind of the great neoliberal machine, which gives us feelings of security and freedom and achievement precisely by taking these feelings away from us, and always depriving us of any real version of all three.

The various substrata of leftist religions can never seem to agree upon a solution to this matter, the reason being as clear as day to its Doubting Thomases that there can be no solution to a problem that doesn't exist. Neither corporations or governments can deprive us of self-actualization when they are both extraordinary products of the human mind and its miraculous powers of organization. Both private and public organizations can be and are used for good and ill, and both are used for good and ill billions of times every day. The problem is neither corporations nor governments, the problem is the messy minds that thought of them both, organized them both, keep both running, use them both, exploit them both, and heal them both. Just as President Obama says that we are the one's we've been waiting for, we are also the ones keeping ourselves waiting. It is neither possible nor desirable to eradicate either or even shrink them significantly. But even if it were, it would be in the interests of every living being on the planet to keep both of these literally superhuman entities which simultaneously control us and are controlled by us to operate in good health and be as representative of our interests as any organization can possibly be by being so inflexible in how both are regulated that we endow both with the flexibility to check the most oppressive impulses of the other.