Right now I’m simply not in a mood to write anything substantive. I’m just notating fleeting thoughts, for the record. Maybe I’ll return to them later, maybe not.
Joan Baez was born on January 9, 1941 in Staten Island, NY. Happy Birthday.
It’s impossible to overstate the effect Baez had on a generation of girls. Along with Mary Travers, she single-handedly put hair spray (temporarily) out of business.
Although I later grew away from her singing and her style, I fell under the “Joanie” enchantment for a few short but crucial adolescent years.
Many years later, I experienced an odd return of the repressed when I first read about Caitlin Clark. The context was Caitlin being drafted to the WNBA; I wondered why such an inconsequential event was being held in the cavernous, grand BAM. I schooled myself and learned why. A thousand tickets were made available to the public. They sold out in record time. And I became a fan myself. More about this later.
It occurred to me that Caitlin has the same appeal that Joanie had: she was a darkly beautiful vestal virgin, a consecrated guardian of the culture’s hearth.
I still don’t care about Renee Good (yeah, say her name) the graduate of Vibes U who died in an unfortunate incident with ICE two days ago.
Two things about the incident struck me: one, that her very large SUV was blocking the road, and that her “wife” was recording the incident. Because I thought they were both consequential, I looked at videos and read accounts to verify what happened.
Yep, her 16.5 foot SUV was blocking the road. That’s a misdemeanor right there. The video shows another SUV skidding past the front of her vehicle, a potentially dangerous situation, although in this case nothing happened. I will not link to any videos here; they’re all over X. But Good had ample opportunity to comply. Granted, the ICE-man could have been more civil and less menacing - but how was he to know who was in that SUV? Was he supposed to ask permission?
That “wife” who was recording the whole thing… why? She was clearly anticipating something. What? A confrontation.
It’s a bad idea to confront a heavily armed man in the middle of a fraught environment.
All of this nagged at me even before I learned that Good is part of an organized group of ICE activists.
She was clearly there to impede.
At this point I’m supposed to start moaning about “tragedy” and being so sorry about all of it but I’m not going to. It wasn’t a tragedy, it was an unfortunate incident. I feel sorrier for Jordan Neely or Freddy Gray, whose lives were catastrophic. She had no reason to be there. By the left’s own definitions, Renee was “privileged” and she abused her privilege. She thought she could get away with taunting officers. She thought wrong.
Which brings me to the Freedom Riders.
A former reader1 left this comment yesterday. Perhaps it doesn’t come out well in the screenshot, but he was ridiculing me with sarcasm-by-analogy, trying to attribute to me a moral position I don’t hold by constructing a deliberately extreme parallel and saying, in effect, “This is what you sound like.”
I was disgusted and hurt, but I left it up because he brought up a subject that I’ve been putting off (the Freedom Riders) and because his shoddy logic was easily refuted.
I responded: “The Freedom Riders went down South to uphold federal law, and not break laws” and then banned him. He removed the comment; don’t care, his right.
“Freedom Summer” is often misunderstood. It’s constantly invoked as the prime example the grand American tradition of civil disobedience. In fact, the Freedom Riders broke no federal laws. Starting in 1946 (better late than never) the US Supreme Court sought to undo a century or more of bad precedent with respect to race.
Morgan v. Virginia, 328 U.S. 373 (1946), is a major United States Supreme Court case. In this landmark 1946 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 7–1 that Virginia's state law enforcing segregation on interstate buses was unconstitutional.
A flurry of decisions came after that, dismantling Jim Crow.
The southern states resisted following these laws. Generally, federal law overrides state laws. A president can’t send in federal troops every time a state resists. In Little Rock, Eisenhower did send in federal troops because the defiance was so brazen, but he couldn’t reoccupy the entire South, so the situation festered until passionate activists decided to take matters into their own hands and force the world to look. The murder of Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman blew up in the southern establishment’s faces.
The shaming worked. By 1968 Jim Crow was dead. By 1979 even George Wallace publicly repented.
If you want to be logical, the ICE agents, as representatives of federal law, are the Freedom Riders, and Renee Good is a southern resister.
Of course, even I wouldn’t say that the two are exactly equivalent. Of course not.
I am saying: there is a legitimate argument about Federal power. We can discuss this in good faith, but that comment wasn’t good faith.
Nor am I arguing that the ICE agent did everything right. I am saying that he was exercising lawful, legal sovereignty and was being illegally interfered with by Renee Good.
That’s all I have to say. I refuse to be jerked around by the same people who turned Rodney King and George Floyd into secular saints. And if this continues, I think the president has the right to invoke the Insurrection Act.
And finally, one of the more amusing genres on Substack and various ‘zines is this: “Why I Left The Left.” I’ve never contributed because, who cares. But for the record, here is why I left the left:
Because I never met a nastier bunch of shits in my life.
They were rude, peremptory, presumptuous. The women were the vilest, most unbearable mean girls. The men were worse. Like the commenter, they thought they had the right to aggress every boundary and dictate to you. To ridicule you, to put words in your mouth you had spoken, to misquote, to distort.
Yesterday I wrote that I had felt sympathy for the dead woman, thinking she was really illegal/undocumented and reacted badly in panic. I had, and I do. I repeat that: if she really had been illegal and was about to be apprehended, I’d have felt genuinely sorry for her. But my sympathy dried up learning that she chose to be there and was hampering a legal process.
For that, I was compared to a Klansman. And, wait for it, he didn’t write a note. That would have been fine. He came to my ‘Stack and abused my hospitality. That’s also very leftist. Zero manners.
I had an exchange on another note thread, which consisted of this:
I did watch the video and I didn’t see a close up execution without cause. I saw chaos. I do not think she “deserved to be shot,” I do think she put herself in danger. I am not just lacking compassion, I lack a soul. I’m a Trump cult monster.2
There’s more. This comment perfectly encapsulates the left in all its moronic, juvenile rage:
I’m a captive of my own conditioning — he’s free, I’m a slave to my conditioning. He doesn’t know me, doesn’t know what I’ve gone through, but he’s entitled to categorize my entire “lived experience.” I have a “comfort zone” - he’s a brave pioneer on the Ship of Truth. The rest of the paragraph is raving madness.
These leftist men are always so… nuts. I looked at his profile and found this note:
Girls: avoid. When they start raving about Dostoyevsky3, close the door behind you.
I’m joking, but I did spend a few years of my youth in the leftist cult and as soon as I graduated from college, I was OUTTA THERE. I didn’t think about it too hard. It was like shedding a skin.
And I didn’t leave the left because I read The Gulag Archipelago. I did it because I hated them.
I’m glad I did, because I know a lot of people who didn’t make the break until they were older. After all those years of emotional abuse, they emerged as literal shells of themselves.
Not that “Why I Left The Left” isn’t important, I’m just over it.
The greatest “Why I Left The Left” book is Whittaker Chambers’ Witness. Not an easy read to say the least, but essential. Even for someone with a background in Old Left politics (as I have) finds much of it impenetrable. Actually, it’s best read over a period of years, bit by bit. I return to it every so often and I always find something new in it.
A great help is to read Sam Tanenhaus’s bio of Chambers. It explains the context, synthesizes, speeds up and slows down the action when necessary.. Chambers was a genuine former American Bolshevik who really did sacrifice to leave the left. Losing a few friends isn’t the same as being on the lam from the NKVD, who assassinated defectors in the 1930s, in the US and Europe, and who had networks in places of power in the US.
Chambers hated informing and he was nothing like the cardboard anti-Communist he’s been portrayed in leftist slop history. Only the great Europeans understood him; although thoroughly American, he was one of them.
I let his comment stay but I banned and blocked him. He removed his comment. His choice. I’ve cropped out his name because I am simply no longer interested in engaging with leftists or groypers.
Just read my archives, I am a MAGA supporter and Trump skeptic.
Or Nietzsche
For what it’s worth, my favorite factoid about Whittaker Chambers’ is this: he translated “Bambi” into English and it was his version that Disney used.
According to the introduction of a newly released translation (don’t ask, I read based on whim), Chambers wasn’t particularly fluent in German and his translation flattened out the story.
I have no way to judge but I do admire someone who takes a shot like that. Reminds me of the hubris of I F Stone who late in life learned classical Greek, read Plato in the original and published a book on Socrates that, according to the reviews, missed the mark by quite some distance.
But still, to be bilingual is to have access to two views of the world and how go navigate it. I know this comment is not particularly on point with what joy wrote, but everyone can use a distraction on occasion.