Welcome to the midweek edition of the self-locked-down Mark Steyn Show, with today's civilizational fire sale of news and comment - plus a pasha assassinated, the only gay in the village evicted, Gone with the Wind gone, a famous locked-room murder, Dame Nellie Melba on the air, and a song for Hong Kong.
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Funny enough, I checked out the websites for the Democrats and the GOP earlier this weekend. Both parties emphasized how long they have been in operation, but only the Republicans listed party accomplishments since their founding. The Democrats start their timeline around the 1920's even though they were established prior to the GOP. Wonder why?
I loved hearing you talk about Hoagy Carmichael, and cluing us in to his unique talents and contributions to song. You always bring to fore, things I never knew before. I first became acquainted with him, by his appearance on The Flintstones, singing the Yabba Dabba Do song. Great stuff. Besides my parents, and their record collection, I thank the cartoons, Looney Tunes, Merrie Melodies and others, for giving me an introduction to classical music, and pop stars of the day.
Mark,
I saw a fellow that looked just like you on tv last night! Amazing.
I am sure you saw what happened in Portsmouth, VA where a woke mob tearing down a Confederate monument pulled one of the statues down right on top of some unfortunate fellow who judging by the grizzly pictures is either dead or a drooling vegetable. Police struggled to get to the guy as he was surrounded by people taking pictures on their phones. But the truly awful thing was seeing tweets by the most disgustingly narcissistic oblivious and self absorbed people on Earth celebrating the successful destruction of the statue. Um excuse me, you literally saw a guy get his skull caved in and probably die over this, perhaps doing celebratory "We did it" tweets is a tad boorish and insensitive no? And of course the media who egged the statue teardown craze on even though any thinking person knew something like this was an inevitability will in no way be held to account for their shameful irresponsibility in causing this
Karma is a bitch. If they cared about anything other than their raw emotions, you'd see a different reaction.
Gone With the Whinge is more like it.
Tucker was a real tease tonight, headlining at the top of the show that Mark would be on "momentarily" or whatever.
We watch Tucker anyway, so we didn't mind waiting for 50 + minutes to see Mark emerge from that cave.
Seriously, the build up was quite a compliment to Mark's star power, and I'm sure certain members were entranced by his rare open-collar deshabille once he finally appeared.
All that aside, his comments were right on!
A couple of years ago there was an attempted name change where the interested community mobilised against and won.
Balbo Drive in Chicago is interesting in that the eponymous Balbo himself was an original, actual Fascist (even taking part in the March on Rome). He made a flamboyant flight from to Chicago in the 1930's, and was lionised.
There was an attempt to rename Balbo Drive, the local Italian community went ballistic, and the renamers retreated.
Pity that can't happen more often ....
Is there any chance the re-election of President Trump and/or his next SCOTUS appointment will not result in rioting similar to that we've just seen?
Michael, Trump will not be re-elected (he might not even be nominated) unless he leads an attack on the anarchy. Right now he is MIA.
I would love to find out!
I can't believe there's not a critical mass of decent, competent Federal intelligence and law enforcement that is just arresting all the perps, intercepting all the communications and connecting the dots to shut the well-organized components down. I've heard estimates there are maybe 12,000 Antifa or whatever you want to call it, executing all this nationwide. Is Project Veritas really the only group that's going to step up and try to shed light on this?
I see Douglas Murray has raised the issue of why Muhammad, both a theoretician and practitioner of slavery, and a far less worthy human being than Robert E. Lee, is not banished altogether from the public square, if slavery is that big an issue. Make them explain the issue.
On a different note, I was astonished to see that the best Nancy Sinatra/Lee Hazlewood collaboration, Summer Wine, was left unmentioned.
You are not allowed to point out the uncomfortable parts of Islam. To do so is racist. Tut, tut!
OK explain this to me: we have to tear down every monument to the Confederacy because they were traitors who fought against our country? Correct? So you have a ragtag bunch of woke lunatics who have seized a part of a major city and declared it a sovereign nation. How in the hell is this NOT both an armed insurrection against the United States and treason? So if the spineless coward mayor or governor refuse to take action why has Trump (citing that this is an armed insurrection against the American government no different than if a commando team of militant Canada Geese descended on Seattle and declared that they had annexed it as a new province) seized control of the National Guard ala Ike and put a swift end to this nonsense. If he makes this long overdue stand for civilization I guarantee he would be reelected in a landslide. Nobody will care one bit what the likes of Poodle Mathis or Petraeus (the Washington Generals of waging war) think.
Time to rewatch your video of Kipling's The Gods of the Copybook Headings. How about doing Dane-geld? Isn't that basically what BLM et,al is all about.
Splendid show today! Delighted to hear the news that you/'re back on with Tucker tonight.
Et tu, Gladstone? I didn't know he even had a Twitter account.
The Left really ought to convoke something like a Council of Nicea, wherein some woke Athanasius can hammer out a coherent doctrine. Then we would all know which words are permitted and which are heretical or blasphemous.
I see that after the Colston statue in Bristol was dumped into the river by the mob a campaign entitled 'Topple the Racists' has got underway and the statues targeted for removal and /or destruction now include: Cecil Rhodes, Sir Francis Drake, Oliver Cromwell, William Gladstone, Sir Robert Peel, King Charles II, Robert Clive, Admiral Lord Nelson, Nancy Astor, Lord Mountbatten and Sir Winston Churchill to name but a few. To have lived in the past, advocated and/or worked for the interests of the Empire, worn a frock coat and been a white male (with the exception of Mrs Astor) is now enough for the 2020 equivalent of the damnatio memoriae to come into effect. First the monuments will go, then the names on buildings and public places (Guy's Hospital, Trafalgar Square etc) then the online records will be altered or scrubbed and the same for books in libraries or on public sale. The last bastion, as in Germany in the 1930s and 40s, will be private collections but for how long will they be safe? People in hundreds of years time may dig up copies from the basements of old buildings of 'Gone With The Wind' and 'Little Britain' along with battered biographies of odd looking men called Clive of India and Walter Raleigh and wonder what kind of civilisation produced them. It'll be their version of Sutton Hoo.
Woke-up to a brave new world without residuals, Cop Show actors, writers, directors?
Many a has-been TV gendarme lives on payments for each episode re-run. I wonder if Amazon, which is running a big headline about how the company is in total solidarity with 'the black community', will be making payments to Bosch stars Jamie Hector and Lance Reddick, when they cave to BLM and pull the show from their schedule.
Letter from CHAZ (Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone), where nature abhors a police vacuum;
The Red Guards have set up barricades around a 9 square block area in Seattle. Armed men ask for your papers if you try to enter. Enforcers tell business owners it would be a shame if anything happened to their nice hipster emporiums, so for $500 they'll be protected. Some are partying like it was 1984, in the People's Streets.
City Councilmember Kshama Sawant--a friend of mine's signature being on her NC State Economics Phd--is self-named Party Ideologue, and calls for the insufficiently radical Mayor Jenny Durkan to resign.
Patrick - An anecdote you may find interesting: In the mid 80's a group of 70s black racist radicals called MOVE took a house in a black neighborhood in Philadelphia. They all took the last name Africa and shot off their mouths like BLM and Antifa today. They harassed and terrorized people in their neighborhood for a few weeks.They had violent confrontations with the police. All from one house in one neighborhood. The mayor of Philadelphia at the time was Wilson Goode, a Democrat and a black man. He basically ordered the house firebombed by the police and several of the MOVE people were killed. End of problem. True story. I guess things have changed a bit since the mid 80s, but not exactly in the right direction.
Mark – Two questions for the next show. First, for the last 50+ years in the US, every major corporation (and minor one), every governmental entity, and every academic institution has provided every type of preferential treatment to blacks in hiring and promotion. But for the past week, watching the business channels, I've seen CEO's from every type of company talk about how few blacks are in their employ and how they all need to do better in "diversifying." My question is, how can this possibly be after 50+ years of affirmative action?
My second question: Helping my kids apply for college the last two years, I've learned that they don't see race the way I did at their age. In my childhood, Jackie Robinson was not that long ago and Jim Crow still existed. What they've seen is the last 20 years of affirmative action. They are both in good schools, but they know they were likely aced out of their top choices by less-qualified minority applicants. When they hear about "systemic racism," they regard it as unjustified whining and complaining and they are pretty fed up. Do you think this coming generation might be more inclined to fight this notion of "systemic racism" than the current crop in government?
THANK YOU for Hoagy Carmichael--and in time for my birthday! I've been a fan since seeing him in To Have and Have Not as a teenager. Loved that song and loved him as performer, composer, actor. In fact, when you put out your requests request several weeks ago, I put up "The Nearness of You" as my nomination. Not with the social distancing times, but an absolute favorite of mine. What can I say for the lengthy Hoagy tribute, but thank you again. I'll re-listen on my birthday.
PS: Back on Tucker! Talk about burying the lead!
Thanks for the foray into "Hoag Land" even if limited to Hong Kong Blues. I just saw Hoagy the other night on Turner Classics with Kirk Douglas (that recently-embalmed 103-year old Mummy) in "Young Man with a Horn" featuring a gorgeous soundtrack by Harry James and Doris Day, creating the kinds of soaring melodies our grand-kids will never know existed on Planet Earth.
Hoagy played "Smoke" Willoughby in the 1950 movie everyone (including Monty Alexander as Turner's expert commentator) said portrayed the life of Bix Beiderbecke, but Bix could never play those high notes. I always thought the movie was more of a Bunny Berrigan parallel. Bix and Bunny both had BB initials and died young of Bad Booze, but Bunny could hit the stratosphere.
Writing from Seattle, where the Mayor and Police Chief ordered the SPD's East Precinct building in the city's Capitol Hill neighborhood be abandoned--it's now in the hands of Antifa, BLM or similar ideologues, and has been re-named The Seattle People's Department East Precinct. Also renamed, is the neighborhood; Capitol Hill Area Zone, or CHAZ. Presumably to call forth, as Harry Lime put it, Centuries of peace, love and brotherhood, though I doubt they'd be capable of inventing even a cuckoo clock.
For a 20th century example of what could be in store for Seattleites, we can look to the Wikipedia description of the memoir, Wild Swans by Jung Chang:
"The Cultural Revolution started when Chang was a teenager. Chang willingly joined the Red Guards though she recoiled from some of their brutal actions. As Mao's personality cult grew, life became more difficult and dangerous. Chang's [high ranking CCP member] father became a target for the Red Guards when he mildly but openly criticised Mao due to the suffering caused to the Chinese people by the Cultural Revolution. Chang's parents were labeled as capitalist roaders and made subjects of public struggle meetings and torture. Chang recalls that her father deteriorated physically and mentally, until his eventual death. Her father's treatment prompted Chang's previous doubts about Mao to come to the fore. Like thousands of other young people, Chang was sent down to the countryside for education and thought reform by the peasants, a difficult, harsh and pointless experience. At the end of the Cultural Revolution Chang returned home and worked hard to gain a place at university. Not long after she succeeded, Mao died. The whole nation was shocked in mourning, though Chang writes that: 'People had been acting for so long they confused it with their true feelings. I wondered how many of the tears were genuine'. "
didn't Wendy have a thing with Mansbridge?
I believe they were married to each other for about 5 minutes in the early 90's before he left her for the hottie on Street Legal.
Now that Wokelywood is attempting to confirm the accuracy of Dorothy Parker's witticism (You can take all the sincerity in Hollywood, put it in a flea's navel and still have room for three caraway seeds.), it would be a good time to remember one of the more famous examples of how Lefties honor freedom of speech (from Wikipedia):
"In February 1946 [Albert] Maltz published an article (written in October 1945) for The New Masses titled 'What Shall We Ask of Writers?' in which he criticized fellow Communist writers for producing lower-quality work, owing to their placing political concerns above artistic ones. He also referred positively in his article to the work of James T. Farrell, a Trotskyist. This article brought upon Maltz venomous attacks from fellow CPUSA members, both in print and in person at party meetings. He was accused of 'Browderism' and in order to retain his good standing with the party he had to humiliate himself by publishing in the Daily Worker a rebuttal of his own article. Furthermore, he 'publicly denounced himself onstage at a writer's symposium chaired by party members.'"
Maltz was specifically criticizing the Communist dictum that, 'Art is a weapon.' He found it was, only when it was turned on him.
Thanks Democrats. I was born at Fort Hood (Camp Hood in 1943). Sheer anarchistic nonsense.
Recently one of our members posted a short list of organizations that have folded and joined in with the social justice warriors including a zoo! Today you could back-door the master list by simply stating that all Corporations and organizations of every stripe have caved by instead listing the few that haven't. Good luck finding any and your list will be very brief. When chick-fil-a betrayed all of their supporters and cut ties with many religious organizations that the Southern Poverty Law Center opposes then cravenly donated to the SPLC many may have been shocked as well as puzzled. I had a odd thought about a scene from 'No Country for Old Men' that had stuck in my mind. It's at the motel pool when a very observant gal asks LLewelyn what has him so spooked. He replies "just lookin' for what"s comin' and she says "yeah, but no one ever sees that".
I believe that the restaurant owners took a long look down the road and believe they did see what's coming. Better to appease now than face the wrath of these haters when they run America. The smart rats are fleeing the sinking ship while there is still time. Sorry for the unkind phrasing but I'm not feeling very charitable these days.
This presents a thorny problem for The Ministry of Truth. Tara can't have black slaves as servants and it probably can't have free blacks either because they would be depicted as subservient to whites. I guess that means Benson and Rochester (Jack Benny) have to go down the memory hole. Ditto for Ben Cartwright's houseboy Hop Sing. What about Consuela (Family Guy)? The Jefferson's were black but so was their maid Florence. Does that character have to get (pardon the expression) whited out too? And what who to replace them with? Hazel, Alice from the Brady Bunch, Daphne from Fraser? But wait, they're all white! Grrrr!!!! What's a Thought Policeman to do?
Love the content. When you have no shared national story left what do you have ? How do we start serious civil conversation about what the corporate folks call a carve out / carve outs. I don't see enough discussion about solutions. Especially since some parties in this are not coming to the table honestly
Mark, do you think the chaos over the last couple of weeks will influence the VP selection process for Joe Biden? Or will short attention span disorder impose itself in time for the fall sports seasons and police brutality and disbanding of police departments will be forgotten?
Do you think Biden remembers what happened to Humphrey in 1968? Milwaukee isn't that far from Chicago. Joe Joe the dog faced pony soldier may want to call it in from his basement.
Will former police officer Derek Chauvin be Epsteined or found not guilty as an October surprise?
Should Tommy Robinson and other volunteers be allowed to defend the Cenotaph?
Only if they, unlike anyone else within a 10 mile radius, want to be arrested within seconds and subsequently break Tommy's own UK and probably world record for the quickest ever arrest/trial/sentence/incarceration.