Wednesday, November 15, 2017

Two things

The muse didn't show up for work, so I'll refer you elsewhere.

First, Gino on Roy Moore.

Second, Victor Davis Hanson on the Baby Boomers. One pull quote:

What caused this societal meltdown among our Boomer custodians?
It was not material want. Our inheritance ensured we were the most affluent and leisured generation in history. Rather, excess led to hubris. We masked incompetence with snazzy technology and the elite’s ability to travel and acquire at will — and to sound hip and “with it” in speech and diction.

Our generation also, inevitably, became divorced from both nature and the muscularity of the physical, desperate ordeal of surviving. The result was a vicarious romance about the wild and an ignorance of and disdain for those who must fight the wild to produce our food, wood, steel, concrete, and fuel. The result, again, is a vicarious life. Silicon Valley grandees pontificate about open borders, “undocumented migrants,” and “sanctuary cities,” but beneath their noses are streets lined with tightly parked Winnebagoes in which thousands of poor Mexican nationals sleep, live, eat, and prep for another day servicing the masters of the universe. To suggest that the geography of the Bay Area is still vast and its open spaces ripe for affordable housing is the heresy of “how dare you even suggest getting near my Portola Valley estate”?

Our culture and financial elite are primarily a coastal tribe, cut off from both the poor and the material conditions that face the poor. They find penance and exemption for their privilege in loud but empty virtue-signaling and in easy contempt for the supposedly grasping middle class. But what we wanted from them was excellence, competence, and leadership; yet they had neither the education nor character for any of that.
And I'm one of them. In both cases, hit the links.

1 comment:

Gino said...

Our generation also, inevitably, became divorced from both nature and the muscularity of the physical, desperate ordeal of surviving.

this is why i hunt.why i enjoy the gutting and disemboweling. i had to teach myself to enjoy it, and even revel in it.