Does Nate Maingard Love The ANC?

"Even as a civilization we are simpleminded."-- Jonathan Weiner, digital location 3450

The post-Mandela ANC may appear to be more humane than the European legacy which evolved into Botha's apartheid, but what is kept quiet, in a "sssh, keep it under your hat mode, is that ethnic black Africans cannot govern Africa according to the principles of inherent natural human rights developed during the Enlightenment. Why? Because black African societies evolved their mores in accordance with totem identification, survival strategies against exotic parasites and malaria, and not all the might of Europe and China and Russia combined is ever going to change a damn thing about that.

Does this mean I side with Arikaners who created the Orange Free State over sweetheart hotties like Nate, who may be wondering why I'm singling him out when he's given the dowager a great deal of latitude?

Ah. Well, things aren't quite that simple. European aggression lucked out in the New World. Natives had a mass die off, and the Aztecs, who were in the best position to fight back against superior European hardware, miscalculated, and as a result, North America eventually took over global hegemony. But Caucasian emigration failed to successfully transplant itself within mainland China and central Africa, and guilt over the Holocaust has gone so far in the other direction that Muslims created a new Fascism.

Granted, Kerry and his counterparts have simmered things down, but what led to the incarnation of ISIL isn't going to fade away simply because Putin is still trying to fend off Anglican satire of Russian backwardness, pretending Slavs are as European as the continent, which Slavic ethnicity isn't.

Radical egalitarianism is a brutal fiction, and the sooner we face up to it, the better. Leave west and central Africans alone, and you know what? I bet they resolve their societies in their own way, and would have done so faster, with more efficiency, than Carter's medical intervention over the guinea worm. What does this have to do with the price of beans, or power sex with Ray Liotta? You know in your heart that behind his comment to TV guide about kissing his informant extra, we avert our eyes from those pictures, don't want to contemplate the grotesque escapades of Hollywood's underside, and even if we did, buying porno invariably uncovers child sex harems. Capisce?

Doyle, as a contemporary of the Boer War on the side of the Victorian Empire closing ranks on what it had left, still peaks a mild interest over that of his autonomic character who "changed the world". (And in a whisper: I have more followers than Weiner, and he's a professor!) So there!

Special Emissary

When Ronald Reagan announced in November 1994 he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, even some of his most ardent political opponents paused to wish him well.-- Cal Thomas

I am considering petitioning the Obama Administration to place me on a citizen's guest list for the ceremonial lying in state when Jimmy Carter passes away. His impending absence is relevant to individuals like columnist George Will and I, in the startling things we discover about the impending loss of time worn adversaries. When the moment arrives I'd like to pay my respects, a genuine sentiment which astonishes me. In an upper track history course, with yet another teacher who aroused my father as first love sexual promiscuity, the essay election choice question for Ronald Reagan over then President Carter served as a bell weather prediction for the 1980 election. Twenty odd essays going pro-Reagan predicted that November evening landslide, just as a grey Cardigan sweater on television with the grooved face of a peanut farmer sparked the dawn of political consciousness, and created the ex-President's trajectory, of which Carter's was tedious, overly long. Habitat for Humanity, which I've contacted, is absolutely no help, and sends pre-formatted emails suggesting the disabled contact Liberty Resources, for which you may picture my wearied and martyred tableau of emotions, but this flags the notion of persistence and maybe I need to persuade Carter's organization that the intake center needs to be closed.

The rise and fall of a peanut farmer in the evolution of liberalism is dynamic; his programs are, in contrast, monolithic, and at least in the fabric of the social safety net, sterile. I little minded leaving Reagan's passing as a video footnote. His was the celebrity artifice, the uneasy realization that ideology merely moves the needle one way or other, unless revolutions implode, and tyranny has its run until succession softens things up. Jimmy's failure as a leader tailgated a certain youthful idealism that spastics could also be whitewashed into a meteoric rise, actually more like that of a portable ramp incline. I find myself wishing to say goodbye, which would involve convincing the Secret Service that I'm not Miriam Carey, and of course, the man hasn't yet been admitted to hospice, but the inevitable has begun. He's 91 this October.

Carter's Bell Curve

The interview O'Neal does with Smiley, which I highlighted in the spring of 2012, remains interesting because the normal studio promotion mesh falters, grinds to a halt, and the actor with his cancer, disabled son, and his tinsel worship of Farrah seems shallow and incongruous. Overlay this on a method film like The Driver, and an interesting language develops. Bruce Dern, always the prickly pear, has continued on in old age with strong supporting roles, but O'Neal is an echo of the smooth seventies lead, smooth, but intense in investment, nothing but a polite fiction of constraint, ushering in the modern age in which Carter himself is an animated mummy, religious in his humble ex-President striving to save all of West Africa, and though The Driver hasn't a word to say about politics it speaks volumes about Carter era liberalism fallen flat on its face. This was the period of my youth, when the car chase was the studio technological meme, speed rubber asphalt and cool, these the delineated weapons, the process had its own goals toward affluent living on the graft-- crack wasn't yet the new boogie man but the me decade was ripe for it, in their wing tips and thin suits-- all that sturm and drang with its polite codes-- today's police would laugh at Dern's honor system, and Ryan's character could have been arrested for intent even with the empty attache case which closes the film.

The brutality here isn't about much, other than a breach, which, nearly 35 years after the fact, is nearly laudable by contemporary standards. Everything digitized, with GPS, skills with an engine on wheels has been relegated. We watch people in space suits go very fast on tracks with sponsors, helmets, sometimes watching drivers die anyway, fully insured for the risks, the emptiness in excelling at something for nothing, bound by a nearly Victorian entrapment, if not the money, or the law itself, then, simply giving the finger, a gesture of defiance. Intriguing, what it does to people. O'Neal, quieter than others I've mentioned, was a shaper of my era, but if I met him, I'd be uncomfortable, having perceived a little too much about him, not caring for his aura of unpleasantness.

Recognition is strange and intangible in that way, because with a very few, and in my case it would be that, a few select, I'd behave like a fan-- but not with O'Neal. Odd. I may revisit this, not satisfied. but intuitive to a fact that I'm onto the scent of a thesis.

Turnstile Passes

"It may even be worse for you, in the end."-- Robert Shaw

Richard Rodriguez is perhaps ecstatic, positively jubilant. With only a glancing reference to his essays, I relent and forgive him for his sexual orientation. Why am I able to offer Rodriguez this gift, when I would otherwise drive Josie and Erik and Jimmi and Fern, my mother's surviving ex-friend Kmac, my own ex-collegiate friend Alan Gordon, who met Jimmi exactly once, ditto for the old queen Jim who I had to tolerate in the strange topography of Germantown when I drew my salary off of the Pew Charitable Trusts, why does Rodriguez get off when LBGT activists could throw themselves off Niagara? I have never observed the fabled hysteria of lemmings stampeding themselves off an escarpment, but that would be my jubilee, as far as the activists and myself are concerned. "Why are you blaming us for a trauma triggered by your supervisor, who enjoyed her little mind fuck at your expense? We didn't do it."

Your permissive promiscuity lays the groundwork for evil that has nothing to do with a messiah as a transmuted human deity. Zealous willful blindness of indulgence, Richard Rodriguez may not lack it, but he recognizes it as a Hispanic Catholic minority, and he is willing to be conflicted with it, not let himself off. He knows he sins, and this is his metaphysical decency within his faith, so I forgive and respect him, though I only know how heart felt his writing must be from the sincerity and gravitas of his media appearances. In a future dalliance, one day I must immerse myself in his work beyond that offered on public airways. Not that this isn't further complicated by Proustian intertextual superfluity, but I have spent the evening with the night, and plod one plank at a time, even in envy.

Envious. Thomas Harris generates psychical wounding thrillers, Hannibal churned out of covering criminal courts, or at least, speculated as such. Black Sunday was spawned from the 72 Munich games, but let us enlarge on geopolitical aspects. We once believed in Robert Shaw's Major from the film. Understood him, held fast to his ruthless expediency keeping us safe in our beds, perhaps even held a reservoir of sympathy for Bruce Dern's sociopathic veteran, but even this has vanished. The complicated mosaic of the Mossad is not quite so contingent on move and counter move in causation, saving us in the end. As a thriller, Black Sunday has an elocution, a prescient elegance of a unipolar map long since vanquished in the post 9/11 era. It began here, however, with a weak southern politician still ambling about in his near 90's, with his prefabricated simple dwelling habitats, carrying Guinea and the Sudan in his harvester. Jimmy Carter is a guilty man, and he knows it, all the more why he posits onus on Israeli apartheid. The heirs of Zionism may carry age old intransigence, but it is within the bloom of Carter's failure that the world we have today is what it is, right in the bosom of Obama's exhausted integrity. 

More is the pity.