“Well, I don’t know what you’re talking about, but it sounds damn saucy, you lucky thing! I know some fairly liberal-minded girls, but I’ve never penultimated any of them in a solar sojourn, or for that matter, been given any Norman tongue.” – Blackadder The Third
If we have a boogaloo, let’s hope it’s a short one. I’ve got a dentist appointment next Thursday.
If you’re reading this on Monday, December 30, congratulations! It’s Penultimate Day! This is the holiday that the Wilder’s celebrate every December 30. Why Penultimate Day? Back on December 30, 2012, The Mrs. wanted a new cell phone. We drove an hour and a half south to a Best Buy® (the nearest place that sold cell phones) and then didn’t buy a cell phone. After that, we ate at Olive Garden® and drove home.
I think this was, perhaps, the disaster foretold by the Mayans that ended their calendar in 2012. As is inscribed in ancient Mayan on the calendar: “When the pale people from the north can communicate no more, and instead decided to eat a tasty pasta dish, perhaps with fresh-grated Parmesan cheese (say when!), that shall be the end of time.”
Or my translation may be off. Regardless, we are now celebrating our seventh straight Penultimate Day, and as you read this I might be not buying a cell phone, or perhaps having some sort of bottomless salad and breadstick combination at Olive Garden©. Olive Garden’s™ motto is “when you’re here, you’re family©,” so I borrowed $50 and decided I’d never pick up when they call and insult them behind their back.
Remember, when you’re here, you’re part of the Olivegarchy.
You can join in on Penultimate Day, too. Simply go to a place that cells cell phones that is south of your house. Then, don’t buy one. Finally: eat Italian food. Sure, that’s not the purist version and you might be burned at the stake later for heresy, but, you know, Italian food.
My Penultimate Day post is also the post that I use to look back on the year to talk about the biggest story of the year. In 2017, it was the verified UFO video from the military (Penultimate Day and The Biggest Story of 2017), in 2018, it was the loss of trust in our society (Happy Penultimate Day 2018, and the Biggest Story of 2018: Societal Trust). The 2017 link comes with a (very) short story that I wrote in a Marriott® bar.
In 2019, the main story is the unravelling of society.
The main stories in all of the news is about that unravelling this year. And it’s not just in the United States:
- Brexit/Boris Johnson in Great Britain.
- Yellow Vest Protests in France.
- Hong Kong Protests in Cleveland.
- Impeachment.
- Left and Right Polarity.
- Your family at Thanksgiving.
- AntiFa® violence in mom’s basement.
- Popularity of Stories About Impending Civil War in the United States.
We know trouble is coming. The topic I’ve written about that’s gotten more views than any other this year has been Civil War 2. How divisive is society today? In an example of whistling past the graveyard, a hypothetical future conflict has been referred to as Civil War 2: Electric Boogaloo. This has shortened over time to just Boogaloo. This is, of course, is a tribute to that classic of Western cinema Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, a 1984 film about breakdancing that I’m sure you all have seen.
Deciding that they’d like to prove my point about the unravelling of society and the Left being a bitter, humorless bunch of that make the people at the DMV look like a jovial group of partygoers, members of the Left have decided that even the term “Boogaloo” is nearly hate speech. Yeah, I’m not surprised, either.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
William Butler Yeats wrote the above as the opening of a song for the band Iron Maiden®. Sadly Bruce Dickenson rejected it on the grounds that all of the members of Iron Maiden© took a vote and decided that they would all be born sometime in the future when guitars were just a bit more electric but yet not too boogaloo.
Yes, Iron Maiden did an 18 minute metal song about a poem written in 1798. And it was glorious.
Instead, Yeats settled for using those lines for the opening of his poem The Second Coming a hundred years ago in 1919, and during this time he was writing about what he saw as an unravelling: an unravelling of science, an unravelling of governmental structures, and an unravelling of heterogeneous communities. He looked back at the deaths caused by the pointless World War I and its deformed stepchild – the Russian Revolution, and saw an ending of one world, and the birth of the next.
These destroyed structures were built on speed and modernity. What did Yeats see replacing the modern world?
Kardashians are planning on acknowledging their Wookie heritage in a new reality show.
Yeats continued with a vision as ugly as a Kardashian in a swimsuit:
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
What did Yeats see replacing the modern world? Mysticism. Power. Blood. He was right. 1919 was crappy, but the 20th Century was about to get a whole lot worse. He concluded:
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Yup. Creepy. And Iron Maiden definitely should have recorded this, whether they were born or not.
Yeats’ vision is what we are living through again right now – the ending of one age, and the beginning of another. This crisis cannot be driven by food shortages. There is more food now than at any time in history. It cannot be wealth – there is more individual wealth in the nations experiencing tumult than at any point in their histories. It cannot be my hair. My shiny scalp? Sure. Not my hair.
Certainly there are problems – I think that the people the Z-Man (LINK) calls the Dirt People (which almost certainly includes every reader of this blog as well as your constant writer, me) are experiencing an economy driven by and for the Cloud People (the Deep State, the Financial Elite). Regardless of who you voted for in 2012, you knew that Mittens Romney and Barry Obama were on the same team, and it wasn’t your team.
This might be where the Z-Man got that meme – at least it was the first thing I thought of. And it explains sky-high real estate costs . . . .
In the end the reactions we’re seeing in society in 2019 (Trump and Brexit) are just that – reactions to a society that has gone too far Left, too fast. Leftists never realize that all they have to do to enact their Socialist Utopia® is wait. Instead, they smell the blood of the Right in the water and decide that it’s time to end the waiting. Right now! Because after making the conscious decision to borrow $375,000 for a degree in cooking, they now know that college (and those vacations to Europe on spring break!) is a right and should be free.
What do Leftist want? Complete control. When do they want it? Now. Impeachment is a technique for power and control, not enforcing the law, since at no point has anyone been able to articulate a law broken by Trump. Nixon? Conspiracy to commit a break-in. Clinton? Perjury. Trump? I still haven’t heard about a law that he broke that isn’t some sort of fashion or etiquette rule.
Trump is not a savior. Trump is a symptom. The Leftist reaction to Trump is yet another symptom. And the inability to wait for an election that is less than a year out is yet another.
The Right is never the instigator of issues like this – there is a reason the Right is called reactionary – it reacts to the Left. The Right just wants history to stop. The Left wants change, and will look for any time to work for it – especially when society is functioning well. The Left is like a wife who sees a fully functioning family, home mortgage nearly paid off, 20 years until retirement and says, “You know what? Things are going well. Let’s burn it all down.”
As long as Stella gets her groove back, that’s all that’s important, am I right?
And the change the Left wants is never gradual – it is Revolution™. The Left wants to destroy the existing social orders and replace them with Leftism. As we’ve seen in the past (Robespierre, Stalin, Mao, Mangos and A Future That Must Not Be), Leftism always ends in a bloodbath, either as those on the Left kill everyone to the Right of them, or a cagey leader like Stalin kills all of the people to the Left of him.
This is the context we see ourselves in today. All time high on the stock market, and all time high (excepting 1859) on the polarity seen in the United States. We are splitting apart.
How does this end? I think, if past trends for America have been true, there will be freedom. America may not look like it does today – I think I’d actually bet money that it won’t. There will be significant changes, and I think it will be very difficult for Washington D.C. to impose its will on Michigan, Montana, or Missouri if the peoples of those states are unwilling.
This is the last post of the ‘teens – my next post will be in the Tumultuous, Turbulent Twenties. Remember folks, you heard that here first. But you won’t hear it here last – I’m pretty sure the centre cannot hold . . . but neither will my belt, not after all of those free breadsticks.
What better time than the threshold of 2020 to reflect in a series of classic 19th Century American paintings : Thomas Cole’s The Course Of Empires.
Savage State:
https://thevelvetrocket.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/thomas-cole-the-course-of-empire-the-savage-state-1836.jpg
Pastoral State:
https://thevelvetrocket.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/thomas-cole-the-course-of-empire-the-arcadian-state.jpg
Consummation:
https://thevelvetrocket.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/thomas-cole-the-course-of-empire-the-consummation.jpg
Destruction:
https://thevelvetrocket.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/thomas-cole-the-course-of-empire-the-destruction-of-empire.jpg
Desolation:
https://thevelvetrocket.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/thomas-cole-the-course_of_empire_desolation_18361.jpg
There’s more detail in these than you might think. A discussion:
https://thevelvetrocket.com/2010/04/21/paintings-of-the-day-the-course-of-empire-by-thomas-cole/
Other background:
http://www.explorethomascole.org/tour/items/63/series/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Course_of_Empire_(paintings)
And finally, in homage to John’s Yeats / Iron Maiden mashup, it’s worth noting that Cole also did a series of four movie posters for Michael Mann’s (of Miami Vice fame) biopic adaptation of Daniel Day-Lewis portraying James Fenimore Cooper as a Mohican. Or something like that. The paintings and especially the 1992 film are well worth seeing – the 1826 book, well, maybe not so much. All are a vivid depiction of a time long ago when, as today, the fate of America and all its inhabitants hung in the balance.
https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/scene-from-%E2%80%9Cthe-last-of-the-mohicans-%E2%80%9D-cora-kneeling-at-the-feet-of-tamenund-thomas-cole/GQHhXwu9QvzgQA?hl=en
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_of_the_Mohicans_(1992_film)
http://www.gasl.org/refbib/Cooper__Mohican.pdf
Happy New Year, everyone!
First, the paintings. The one I see again and again is just The Destruction. I wonder if that’s a sign of the times?
That linked painting (Kneeling) is nearly impossible, but beautiful.
Happy New Year!
“I no longer consent” is the most frightening thing we can say to the Left.
Well, that and “Stand up against the wall and wait for the flash.”
Come on, we aren’t complete savages. We’ll give them blindfolds.
“We”?
You got a mouse in your pocket?
“Blindfolds”?
I think they’ll be very lucky if they still have eyelids when they get lined up against a wall.
Let alone if the bullets impacting all go to center-mass, instead of the impacts being marched upwards slowly starting from their feet.
This isn’t just business. It’s going to be very, very personal.
This is what makes Civil Wars so uncivil; Family Wars are very, very dirty affairs
Not 1 in 100 will fight. That’ll make catching ’em that more difficult.
Shooting someone isn’t “personal” enough for you? I have spent my four dozen years on this earth holding to belief that taking the life of someone else is about the worst thing you might have to do. I have taught my 8 children the same thing. I recognize that we aren’t going to vote our way out of this so I will do what I have to do to protect my family, my people and my civilization. I won’t enjoy it.
They have been masters of creating a formula where compliance is easier than withdrawal of consent. I think they’ve forgotten that mastery.
That leads to your second solution . . . .
Why waste ammo when you can reuse a rope over and over again?
What I find most odd is that the bastions of liberalism (aka major metropolitan areas) thumb their noses at those that supply everything required to survive. Things can get real ugly, if those they despise refuse to supply them with the necessary items required to continue living.
Some might think such things couldn’t happen, but like Houston after hurricane Rita, a few days without new supplies guarantees all shelves will be almost empty, fuel isn’t available, and only polite citizens prevent total anarchy.
The aristocracy never gives much thought to the serfs. Our role is to provide their needs, pay our taxes and shut up. Those people live in such a sheltered bubble that they can’t even imagine us doing anything but obeying while they spit on us. I think they are about to learn the error of such thinking, if the diversity they claim to love doesn’t do them in first.
Jess, The Mrs. and I have talked long about this. They don’t realize the actual value of . . . food. They think it comes from a Panera or Whole Foods.
Add in fuel. Timber. Etc.
I know that much of what makes my life comfortable comes from cities. But it’s comfort rather than continuation (in most cases – I’ll need decongestants and antibiotics at some point).
I don’t need a TV or cable or the Internet to live.
Most of our food goes through cities to get distributed back to the farmer’s neighbors. If our cities go down, I would hope I live next to a farm, ranch, orchard, AND a dairy farm, or else grow it ALL myself. I wonder how long farms would last without a distribution system.
http://www.commanderzero.com/?p=6678
Around here? Not too bad. A few years, at least.
I wrote a post this morning before reading yours and I said a lot of the same thing, minus the humor and nuance and with an added dollop of anger. We have spent our lives doing what we were told to do and suddenly we are looking around and realizing that in spite of that, we have been declared the bad guys. Most of us would swallow the insults and follow the stupid rules if they would leave us alone but they clearly don’t want to do that. I think they may find out that if they bothered to read any history books they would discover that no one in the history of the world has been as good at war as my people. You can only be pushed so far.
“We have spent our lives doing what we were told to do and suddenly we are looking around and realizing that in spite of that, we have been declared the bad guys.”
Spot on, Arthur. I make this lament to family members on a regular basis. We grew up in an era that was still quite ‘decent’ and we did the things that were considered decent to do – went to school, graduated, got a job, paid our taxes, saved what we could after paying those taxes, fell in love, got married, had (small) families and tried to do right by our offspring. We never stuck our hands out and said, “Gimmee!” The wife and I have never been unemployed, even briefly, nor collected a nickel of ‘assistance’ from the goobermint – local, state or federal.
But now that our reproductive work is done, our careers are winding down and we are looking forward to a little peace and comfort in our twilight years, the wheels have come off the wagon and all of our hard work and sacrifice may very well come to nought. Economic collapse could swallow up everything we saved, and suffocating taxes could land us in the very same boat as those who never bothered to work at all. Is it any wonder that there is an alcohol/opioid crisis among White, middle-aged people, particularly men, when the rules we’ve played by all of our lives have suddenly been rewritten so that, by default, we lose?
I’d like to believe that there is a coming backlash and that we good guys will get to take our nation and our lives back from the freaks running the show today. But I just don’t think its going to happen. Not in my lifetime, anyway. The example of South Africa is instructive. Too many of us have too much to lose, so we grumble quietly, clean our firearms and only dream of using them in a meaningful way. Admit it – you are too ‘decent’ to point a gun at someone else and pull the trigger, without extreme, life-on-the-line provocation. If you do, your life as you know it will end as surely as his, and everything you worked for WILL be taken from you. Threats won’t work. And by the time the shooting starts, its too late to ‘save’ society.
Who will be first to take one for the team, lead the revolution and risk their freedom, family, livelihood? The other side has nothing to lose and everything to gain by tearing down the world you and I knew and loved. We had a good run, but the world does not belong to the ‘normies’ anymore. You can’t reason with ‘crazy’, and somehow we’ve let the inmates take over the asylum.
Sure wish I had John Wilder’s optimism and humor while discussing the spicy times ahead.
Wow by golly, you speak the words my heart wants to say. “It’s not our world anymore”, I say to my contemporaries. And “Who the hell is gonna take the first shot, and how in the hell will anyone recognize him as a savior, a leader – and not the terrorist he’ll be made out to be?”
Yeah, I’m an optimist with a wide streak of pessimism these days.
Christopher Jordan Dorner, but nobody had the intestinal fortitude to follow up.
It is going to be ugly, no doubt. I am late in my 40s and I recognize that there is a very good chance I don’t survive what is coming and even if I do, I won’t live long enough to see our people reborn and our civilization rebuilt. So I do what I do for the sake of my posterity, like the old saying about planting a tree that I will never sit in the shade of.
Playing by the rules my whole life pretty much makes me a sucker in the eyes of those who want me dead but I still do it anyway. Those days are quickly coming to an end and we are all going to have to take a stand and make our voices heard. As important as physical and material preparation is, it is the mental and emotional prep that is going to be of the most importance.
I’m optimistic mainly because I talk to my boys. The spirit isn’t dead.
I really, really hate to say this, since I believe we stand on the side of goodness and justice. Good boy points don’t exist. And?
Violence eventually solves everything. Just avoid those railcars.
When People of Color do rage cities burn.
When Whitey does rage continents burn.
They don’t have the good sense to fear the rage of quiet people.
When things get ugly in the Cesspools of Enlightenment the cockroaches will flee into the hinterlands.
B.L.O.A.T. and remember breathe, aim, sight, squeeze.
I have in fact watched ‘Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo.’ And if the coming Boogaloo is indeed as horrible as the original, we are in for dark days. My only hope is humanity. Yes, I know its old fashioned, but I still believe in humanity. Its always darkest before the dawn. (That being said, I’m still investing in lead. I’m not going out without taking some with me.)
If you’re talking about this one…. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rXS7q9zS90
I agree it was horrible. Happy New Year everyone!
That’s the one! Happy New Year!
I still think we win. Free men, fighting for freedom, are nearly undefeated in the history of mankind.
Also, I skipped ahead a few chapters. You won’t believe what happens on page 36!
Texas Church Shooting – Gunman kills parishioner before being shot and killed by another parishioner at Texas church
https://commoncts.blogspot.com/2019/12/texas-church-shooting-gunman-kills.html
ps. could u please add CC to your blogroll? Thanks!
Steve, thanks for the link. As of yet I’ve not contracted my tech support (The Boy) for getting that blogroll in place – I do want to do it, but need to get the theme right and not lose what I have. WHEN you see a blogroll – please email me (or comment) if you’re not on it. Don’t be shy about posting links, either.
Hey John, my long, full-of-links post on Thomas Cole is shown as being held up in moderation….
Fixed.
John – – I always enjoy seeing your references to our sage-of-these-days (daze ??), the ever prescient Zman.
My favorite wisdom stolen from him is:
“…Reality does not yield to wishful thinking.” thezman.com/Wordpress’s/?p=12929
This succinct wisdom seems the cover all the pogroms and silliness that the DemonicRats toss about.
I do well believe that Pugsley, the Boy, and others if their generation will look back on 2019 with fond memories and will rightly realize that…”Oh, I do remember 2019……..Those were the good old days….”
Reality sucks, but being stupid is much worse.
Best Wishes: Elvis May Have Shot JFK, But Epstein Certainly Didn’t Hang Himself !!
I like Z. He writes well and often, and has, what, 400 comments per post?
But I’m funnier.
I disagree, but in a friendly fashion. If I’ve done my job, they’ll pick each day as a challenge for them to surmount. And if many of the things we are surrounded by drop away but freedom remains?
I hope they are happier than 2019.
1968, those were the good old days, we thought it would end them. It did not. Your turn, do what you can. In the mean time never give in.
Joe X
Amen. And thank you.
Don’t ever be afraid to go where the Iron Crosses grow.
We’re in for an interesting journey . . . enjoy each day.
Yes! Saw that. Creepy.