Yule be sorry

Photo by jag9889 at Flickr.

For my whole life, Macy's Herald Square, the World's Largest Store, recycled an increasingly dingy-looking window display every Christmas consecrated to the store's own peak presence in popular culture, the 1947 film Miracle on 34th Street, starring Natalie Wood as the little girl raised not to believe in fairy tales and Edmund Gwenn as Mr. Kris Kringle, the man who believes he is Santa Claus and who ends up not only convincing the little girl that he exists but in bringing about a Christmas truce between the warring titans of capitalism, Macy's and Gimbel's.

But a couple of years ago they finally abandoned it in favor of something new, referring to the story of Virginia O'Hanlon, the eight-year-old who asked the New York Sun, in 1897, to confirm for her the same saint's existence, to which the editor Francis Pharcellus Church notoriously replied, "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus," in language attempting to double-speak the audience between parents who'd see the line as a metaphor and children who wouldn't:

Boot on Ground

Image by Creekside, vintage 2006.

Bloodshed enthusiast Max Boot, late of the 101st Fighting Keyboarders, perhaps best remembered for his 2005 remarks about how the torture practiced in Abu Ghraib was really no different from what our soldiers experience in basic training (maybe that's why they call it Max Boot Camp), is out with yet another of those Where-Did-We-Go-Wrong pieces expressing his shock and horror at what's happened to the formerly Grand Old Party, "How the 'Stupid Party' Created Donald Trump", in today's Times, blaming it on the anti-intellectual posing of figures like Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, Ronald Reagan, and, yes, William F. Buckley, Jr.:

William F. Buckley Jr. famously said, “I should sooner live in a society governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the 2,000 faculty members of Harvard University.” 

....In a way, the joke’s on the Republican Party: After decades of masquerading as the “stupid party,” that’s what it has become. But if an unapologetic ignoramus wins the presidency, the consequences will be no laughing matter.

BooMan responds by reminding us, correctly, as he himself along with many others (me too!) has been saying since September, that the Republicans deliberately created a Racist Party, and the Stupidity was simply an inevitable consequence of that:

It wasn’t dabbling in stupidity that weakened the party to the point that it could be stolen from conservatives. It was dabbling in racism that did that.

A political movement that relied on polarizing the nation by race in order to survive without compromising or evolving their ideology wound up getting a racially polarized nation and losing their party and their power.

So, now, conservatives are actually offended the racism goes too far and is sincere, and the pretense to stupidity has become the reality.

But I think there's a lot more to it than that, which emerges from Boot's nostalgic tour of the Republican intellectuals of the good old days:

Declarations, continued

Via somebody's Zachary Taylor Pinterest page.

OK, I hope you all don't mind this extension of the previous post. I think it should be the end. One part of it continues the stupid debate over whether (white) Christian churches ran the abolition movement in the 19th century, with a backing off the position:

Rich Puchalsky 06.20.15 at 11:35 pm

Getting back to the thread, Jerry V. writes:
“What I mean is that neither of those other languages had the kind of penetration that would have been required of a mass movement in opposition to a society-wide problem like slavery. “

Declarations

This Declaration mentions a Supreme Being, but the nontheism of the authors is universally acknowledged. Image via VideoGamesAndTheBible.

Spent an awful lot of time yesterday commenting in a vast and fancy-ass academic thread at Crooked Timber, which ran for some reason a post by the George Washington University political theorist Samuel Goldman arguing, in a post on Danielle Allen's Our Declaration (2014), that you can't really comprehend the meaning of the Declaration of Independence unless you believe in God:

Can you agree with the Declaration of Independence if you don’t believe in God? ....  On the level of intention, the Declaration presumes a personal and providential deity. 

...while people can accept the Declaration’s claims about rights for secular reasons, I suspect that those who take its religious elements seriously are more likely to act in the ways necessary to secure them. This is important because the Declaration is not, as Allen claims, “a philosophical argument”. Instead, it is a call to arms. People generally don’t fight for “commitments” and “grounds”. For better or for worse, they do fight for what they believe God demands...

I'm running most of my own comments here, with a little continuity, because it's my blog so I can do it if I want, and to take the opportunity to edit some. You should totally look at the whole exchange, though, which covers an enormous range of topics, and contributions, as always happens there, at a very high level along with some idiocy.