Hints of Desperation

Whose farmers? Bet I know more of them than Trump does. 79th Street Greenmarket, via Yelp.

One of the reasons Christopher Buskirk of the blog American Greatness thinks there will be a Red Wave in the 2018 midterms, if there is one, which he doesn't claim to know ("If There’s a Red Wave Election in 2018, This Will Be Why", in Sunday's New York Times, see Lemieux for more) is the president's pronoun usage, when he's speaking extemporaneously:

When he speaks off the cuff, he talks about “we,” “us” and “our.” He has said repeatedly that we love our farmers, our police, our flag and our national anthem — even our coal miners. It is an odd construction, or at least one we’re not used to hearing. It speaks to the essential fraternity of the nation, but when Mr. Trump says it — maybe when any Republican says it — too many people don’t believe that they are included in the “our.” They hear something much narrower than what is meant. People reject the essentially wholesome message because of the messenger. That needs to change because they are, in fact, our farmers, our police and our coal miners, and we should love them.

Well, yeah, in the first place, when I hear Trump saying, "We love our farmers," I do not feel included—I don't have any farmers. I mean, I've met lots of farmers, and I feel respect and affection for them, but I don't feel Trump has any sense of who I love, on my own part or as a member of the collective, that he can assert on my behalf, and what I hear is the "we" of a king or emperor, admiring the population as if it was his personal property, and even the flag and the anthem, which "we" love in opposition to the insults of professional football players (with the implication that if the rest of us stand, or kneel, with NFL players in favor of the civil right not to be killed by a policeman, we're out of the sunshine of his imperial beneficence and don't have a share in the song or the flag).

I'm not the only one who hears it, either—for one, Lauren Sergy did, right from the beginning, February 2017, in a very nice blogpost looking at statements like "…we are transferring power from Washington, D.C. and giving it back to you, the American People":

For the Record: Bannon Song

Hotel Tweet Tweet Nest in Pattaya, Thailand. Via.

Stephen Bannon: “Let them call you racist. Let them call you xenophobes. Let them call you nativist. Wear it as a badge of honor, because every day we get stronger and they get weaker.”

Steve Bannon to French Far-Right Party: “Let Them Call You Racist” https://t.co/zzhtGzWuKA

— Nicholas Mitchell (@puxxled) March 12, 2018

Let me call you racist
I'm so tired of you
Let me hear you whisper
That you hate me too
Let me see some panic
In your eyes of blue
As you realize you're
Going to drown in poo https://t.co/cbpwT15jeW

— YastronomicalOdds (@Yastreblyansky) March 12, 2018

That last line really should have read

When you realize that
 I'm a filthy (((globalist))). 

And odds and ends and some Dinesh below the fold:

Not to bury Thatcher

Nor to praise her either (RIP!!), but just to call attention to some language abuse.

NPR's London correspondent Philip Reeves on the late baroness (not yet online):

But they keep quoting her doing it—"The lady's not for turning."

• Keeps saying that while some saw her as an icon of British conservatism, of a status like Churchill's, others saw her as a destroyer of trade unions and divider of rich from poor: this is not two different opinions but one opinion expressed from two different directions
• Keeps calling her "Britain's first female prime minister" as if we aren't sure whether there have been any more of them (finally at 8:30 a female news reader adds, "and so far only")
• Keeps referring to her as a "statesman"—should it be stateswoman? statesperson?

BBC showed an NPR-like centripetality in going for its commentary on Thatcher's death from the "left" to Lord (formerly Dr.) David Owen, possibly the only Briton to have done more to destroy socialism in the UK than Thatcher herself.

From CNN via Raw Story. Not meant to suggest that the baroness was a child rapist, but that is Sir Jimmy Savile (OBE KCSG) with her, and it looks as if they had a good deal in common, starting with a hairdresser. 

Hyperrisible

I don't normally have a reason to mention television here, or even to watch it, but there is a lunatic soap opera that I sort of watch with my as yet somewhat teenaged daughter called Pretty Little Liars, featuring four high school girls dressed like society matrons (the skinny kind) who have been persecuted for some time by cell phone messages and other communications signed A, the pseudonym masking the identity of a cruel and demented supervillain who seems [jump]

Language Abuse Watch--Clerical department

I didn't realize that the Roman Catholic prohibition against contraception was any older than the creepy Victorian gimcrackery of the Immaculate Conception, but in fact the theological basis for it has been around forever. St. Thomas Aquinas, in the Summa contra Gentiles, explains it thus:

God has care of everything according to that which is good for it. Now it is good for everything to gain its end, and evil for it to be diverted from its due end. But as in the whole so also in the parts, our study should be that every part of man and every act of his may attain its due end. Now though the semen is superfluous [jump]

German chess bishop, 14th-15th c., British Museum. From the Game of Kings exhibition, Cloisters, 2011.