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[Music clip: From Haydn's Derbyshire March No. 2, fife'n'drum version]
01 — Intro. Well, there was a nice change for you, listeners: as usual, Franz Josef Haydn's Derbyshire March number two, but this week on fife and drum. No particular reason, I just thought we'd have a change. A change is as good as a rest, my dear mother used to say; and since there is little rest in this hectic world, I'm giving you something just as good. This is of course your imperturbably genial host John Derbyshire with Radio Derb's roundup of the week's news, brought to you from Taki Theodoracopulos' private island here in the sunny Aegean. We've actually had a spot of political bother here on the island recently. My research assistants, the extraordinarily capable and ever-sporting Mandy, Candy, and Brandy, during some of the free time I very generously allow them, were sunbathing in a secluded cove near the studio when they heard a buzzing sound. Looking up, they saw one of those mini-drones you buy at hobbyist stores, apparently taking pictures of them. Naturally I was outraged. I called a meeting of the village council, demanding answers. Is it within the village by-laws to spy on people like this? When Mayor Papakonstantinou was not forthcoming with answers, I determined to keep talking for as long as I could. By the time the Mayor yielded, I had spoken for twelve hours non-stop, with the village schoolmaster, Spyros Apostolopoulos, heroically translating for me. Mayor Papakonstantinou at last agreed that there is no unrestricted right to fly drones over the beaches. So now my assistants can sunbathe in security … except, of course, when it is necessary for me to slip over to the cove, treading silently in the soft sand, and summon them back to their duties. I still don't know who the drone culprit was, though. My suspicions rest on George Manolarakis, our island dentist. He is the most technically adept of the villagers; and I've had my doubts about his clinical practices. Does a young woman really need general anesthetic for a teeth scaling? But perhaps Candy misunderstood the procedure. Enough of our petty insular concerns. Let's take a look at events in the world outside. |
02 — Great White Defendants. You remember in Tom Wolfe's 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities how the personnel of the Bronx District Attorney's office get so jaded watching the endless parade of black and Hispanic perps shuffling though the court system, they are desperate to get their hands on a Great White Defendant? Tom Wolfe nailed a key feature of our age there. American liberals have an enormous emotional investment in the notion that non-liberal whites are endlessly plotting cruelty and violence against blacks, Hispanics, women, and homosexuals. In a nation of three hundred million, the number of non-liberal whites who actually are so plotting is probably not zero, but it is very, very small — far too small to satisfy liberals' hunger for a Great White Defendant. Nature abhors a vacuum, though; so in the absence of real atrocities against Designated Victim Groups by Great White Defendants, liberals just make them up, often with the eager assistance of minorities themselves. Hence the Tawana Brawley hoax, hence the Duke Lacrosse Team rape hoax, hence the Trayvon Martin sensation of last year, and the stunned bafflement of liberals when the Great White Defendant in that case turned out to be, in point of fact, Hispanic, and a registered Democrat to boot. The New York Times recovered the situation as best they could by describing George Zimmerman, in print, as a, quote, "white Hispanic." And hence any number of lesser cases. Matters have now reached a point where any sensible and well-informed person, hearing about a noose being found on someone's door, or "KKK" painted on someone's car, or whatever the equivalent insult is to homosexuals — I dunno, a defaced picture of Liberace, perhaps — assumes it's a hoax perpetrated by a member of the offended minority, or by sympathetic liberals striving to keep the ideology of victimization alive. Our suspicions are further fortified by the fact that these hoaxes always seem to occur in the very heart of liberaldom. Remember the Columbia Teacher's College Noose Hoax of 2007? The most liberal department in the most liberal college in the most liberal precinct of the most liberal city in the most liberal state in the nation, and someone's threatening a black faculty member? Even some mainstream media types were rolling their eyes at that one, I can tell you — though not in public, of course. Mainstream media types have to pretend to take these things seriously, even the most preposterous ones. Turned out that particular professor was under investigation for plagiarism, for which she was actually fired a few months later. All right, that's preface. Here's the story. |
03 — Terror on Campus. That's the context for the story out of super-liberal Oberlin College, Ohio. Here's the story, quote from the local newspaper, the Lorain County Chronicle-Telegram, Tuesday, March 5th, quote: Oberlin College's "Day of Solidarity" on Monday was sparked by a student who reported seeing a person wearing what appeared to be a Ku Klux Klan hood and robe near the college's Afrikan Heritage House while driving through campus between 1 and 2 a.m. End quote. That's it, that's the story. I note in passing that "Afrikan" is spelt with a "k" instead of a "c." That's the German spelling; so I suppose they just want their house to sound mean. The late George Carlin once suggested that we should start putting an umlaut over the "U" in "U.S.A." — "Ü.S.A." — so that we'd be scarier to other countries. Same principle here, I'm guessing. So, as I said, that's the story: In the small hours of the morning, someone thought they saw someone in what might have been a KKK outfit, or might have been a girl wrapped in a blanket. The college's response — its official response — was to cancel a whole day of classes, replacing it with the aforementioned Day of Solidarity. Students and faculty gathered together in solemn crowds to show sympathy and support for the excruciating pain being borne by the black, female, and homosexual among them. In fairness I should note that the KKK-blanket incident came after a string of lesser atrocities. Black History Month and Year of the Queer posters had been defaced, and a swastika had been drawn on a window. So far as I'm aware, no faculty members found nooses on their office doors; but perhaps the Oberlin faculty aren't quite with the program yet. And concerning those earlier incidents, here's a quote from the Guardian, a left-liberal British newspaper, quote: McCloskey [that's the Oberlin police lieutenant already mentioned] … indicated that those responsible for the racist vandalism had now been caught and were being dealt with … Two students are thought to be behind the vandalism, but it is unclear if they were motivated by racial hatred, or — as has been suggested — were attempting a commentary on free speech. End quote. Let me just translate that for you out of Liberalsperanto into plain English, quote: Two students have confessed to the incidents. Both belong to designated victim groups. College authorities would rather pluck out their own eyeballs than have this known. End quote. My own emotions on reading about this were, I'll frankly admit, shame and disgust. What on earth has happened to Americans? These are people whose ancestors rode the wagon trains, farmed the prairie, tamed the wilderness, fought the Indians, stood up to fascism and communism, went to the Moon. Now look at them: keening and weeping over what, if they have any functioning brain cells at all, they must surely at some level know are fabricated incidents; and which, even if in fact they were not fabricated, would not be worth fifteen seconds of attention from any robust mature adult. What on earth has happened to America? What has happened to turn a nation of pioneers, warriors and adventurers into a nation of whining, weeping, hysterical, simpering pussies? Can anyone tell me? I really want to know. |
04 — The man who brought down a communist dictatorship. It's not just the U.S.A., though. This horrible, poisonous, anti-human doctrine of utopian liberalism has infected the whole Western world. To illustrate that, here's a story from Poland. National hero Lech Walesa, 69 years old and a Nobel Peace Prize winner for helping bring down the communist dictatorship in his country, delivered himself of some remarks about homosexuals. Oh, what? He wants to burn them at the stake? No, of course not. He only thinks that open homosexuals have no right to sit on the front benches in Parliament and, if represented at all, should sit in the back, and, quote, "even behind a wall." Longer quote from Walesa, quote. They have to know that they are a minority and must adjust to smaller things. And not rise to the greatest heights, the greatest honours, the greatest provocations, spoiling things for the others and taking (what they want) from the majority. I don't agree to this and I will never agree to it. A minority should not impose itself on the majority. I quite agree. In fact, on the subject of minorities imposing themselves on the majority, I once wrote a column about it, title "Minoritarianism," which is in my archives somewhere. Homosexuals are around three percent of the population. That the other 97 percent of us should upturn all our traditional institutions to suit that three percent, is ridiculous. I say again: Nobody want to burn homosexuals at the stake. If they keep quiet about their inclinations, the rest of us will happily tolerate them. That's how it used to be. I was recently browsing some biographies of the older generation of British comedians. Many of them were homosexuals. Nigel Hawthorne, for example, who played the head bureaucrat in that fine British TV comedy Yes, Minister, lived happily for decades with his male partner. Far from wanting to advertise his homosexuality, he was outraged when someone outed him in the 1990s. Hugh Paddick, who was Kenneth Williams' foil in the great radio comedy series Round the Horne, was likewise shacked up happily most of his life with another man, and nobody bothered them about it. Why should they have? It was nobody's business but their own. A homosexual who made a nuisance of himself in public facilities, or proselytized his lifestyle to the impressionable young, would come to the attention of the police, and quite right too. Otherwise nobody minded them. In my college days in the mid-1960s I lived in rented rooms all over north London. One house I rented a room in was the home of two homosexual men. They were very nice. I didn't mind them, and they didn't bother me. One of them used to do the housework, I remember, and the other did the shopping. That was the old, civilized attitude. We called it "tolerance." Well, there's no more of that in the brave new world of liberalism. Liberalism, remember, is a totalitarian ideology. It conforms to the general totalitarian principle of no center. That is to say, there is nothing in the middle of the spectrum, nothing that is not total. You totally approve of this or that, or else you are totally, raving hostile to it. You either love Big Brother, or else you must be plotting to assassinate him. If you are not loving, you are hating. This is the totalitarian mindset. All those attitudes that dwell in between the extremes, attitudes like mild dislike, grudging acceptance, amused tolerance, or plain old indifference, are seriously out of favor. If anyone wants my opinion, I think those attitudes are essential to civilized social life; but that's a very unpopular opinion nowadays. You love, or you hate. If you claim to do anything in between, you are lying. Hence the concept of "hate speech," which basically means disagreeing out loud with liberal orthodoxy. I am sorry to see that the Poles, a proud and ancient nation with a noble military tradition, have fallen under the spell of totalitarian liberalism. And in fact the old proud spirit is still alive, at least in the 69-year-old Walesa. More recent quote from him, quote: I will not apologize to anyone. All I said (was) that minorities, which I respect, should not have the right to impose their views on the majority. I think most of Poland is behind me. I hope that's true. Walesa is right: Never apologize to these commissars. Spit in their smug faces! Throw their words back at them! Then one day perhaps the spirit of civilized tolerance will return to the world. If it doesn't, we are in for a long dark night of mental slavery. And take away from this segment with you, and hold tight onto, Lech Walesa's wise words: "A minority should not impose itself on the majority." |
05 — Sequesterday, the musical. The tremendous sequester happened on schedule last Friday. Paralysis seized the nation as the federal government was obliged to cut spending by, oh my God, 2.3 cents on the dollar. Just kidding, of course. The dream of Democrats is to reprise the government shutdown of 1995, which rebounded on congressional Republicans in general and House Speaker Newt Gingrich in particular, to the advantage of President Bill Clinton. That shutdown was in fact as much Clinton's doing as Gingrich's; but the media were desperately seeking some way to help Clinton get back from the disaster of the 1994 midterms, and the shutdown gave them their opportunity. Two point three cents on the dollar is not in fact a reason to shut down anything much. Properly managed, it would improve federal services; just as your morbidly obese aunt would move around more easily if she lost a few pounds. Of course, nothing could be further from Obama's mind than that the sequester be properly managed. This White House is all politics, all the time. Properly managed, fiddlesticks: Obama's idea is to manipulate the sequester to make Republicans look bad. Even trying his best to cause us as much pain as possible, though, Obama couldn't accomplish much. There were reports of inefficiency, angry travelers, and chaos at airport security screening gates; but as Dorothy Parker quipped when told that Calvin Coolidge was dead: "How can they tell?" The sequester did, though, inspire one of my listeners to song. This was Larry in South Carolina — Hi, Larry! — who, together with a friend, composed a little ditty which I shall attempt to sing to you. It goes to the tune of the old Beatles song, "Yesterday." Sequesterday — Thank you, Larry. I'd compensate you for your time and trouble, but unfortunately we operate on a barter economy here on the island. If you need any figs, though, or some feta cheese, just drop me a line at Taki's Magazine. |
06 — Dennis does Pyongyang. North Korea's been kicking over the traces again. News item one: Following the latest North Korean nuclear test, the U.N. Security council passed tough new sanctions against the rogue state. North Korea had threatened a pre-emptive nuclear strike against, quote, "the strongholds of the aggressors." That was too much even for China, which of course has a seat on the Security Council, and which signed on to the new sanctions. The White House put out a wussy pussy statement declaring that, quote, "the United States is fully capable of defending against any North Korean ballistic missile attack," end quote. This is probably not true; but then, it's also not true that the Norks could strike the mainland U.S.A., though they could of course hit our bases in Japan or South Korea. The correct White House response would have been that we will take an eye for an eye, but of course the girly-men in the Obama administration don't talk like that. News item two: North Korea is expanding its stock of labor camps to accommodate ever more political prisoners. This confirms my impression that Kim Jong-un is a nastier piece of work even than his father and grandfather, who God knows were bad enough. The day I see pictures of this fat bastard swinging from a lamp-post, I'll crack a bottle of champagne and smoke a big cigar. It might happen: When too many people have nothing to lose, that's the danger point for a dictator. Go to YouTube and enjoy, as I frequently do, the clips of Nicolae Ceauşescu and his wife getting their tickets punched back in 1989. News item Three: I don't believe I have in the entire course of my life paid more than fifteen seconds attention to basketball. No offense to anyone: if it's your sport, hey, good luck to you; it's just not mine. It is, however, Kim Jong-un's. When he's not torturing small animals or threatening ballistic missile strikes, the fat boy likes to relax watching a basketball game. Well, there's this black American fellow named Dennis Rodman, who apparently is very famous for playing basketball. So Mr Rodman went off to North Korea and copped a personal interview with the Great Successor. On his return, Mr Rodman had things to tell us. What things? Listen for yourself. [Clip: "His grandfather and his father were great leaders. He's such a proud man. He's proud; his country like him; not like him, love him … I love him. The guy's awesome."] You might be wondering: What is it with American blacks and commie dictators? Before Dennis Rodman swooned over Kim Jong-un there was Jesse Jackson dropping trou for Fidel Castro, quote: Castro is the most honest and courageous politician I've ever met. End quote. That was in 1984. Thirty years before that there was Paul Robeson kissing up to Stalin and praising the Soviet suppression of Hungary's 1956 uprising. The operative principle here is: My enemy's enemy is my friend. A lot of blacks think of America as their enemy. Since the U.S.S.R., Castro's Cuba, and North Korea are or were all enemies of the U.S.A., they must ipso facto be friends of the colored folk. Leaving aside the question of why anyone who hates a country so much would want to go on living in it, when it's rather easy — I mean, it's easy if you're not a citizen of a communist dictatorship — it's rather easy to go and settle in another country (I speak as a person who's done it several times); leaving that aside, and leaving aside also the fact that America has been awfully good to Robeson, Jackson, and Rodman, the last two of whom are very wealthy men; leaving all that aside, I urge anyone thinking of following the example of these men to at least inform themseves about the place they are going to. I further urge them to take to heart the question that Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky said every Western celebrity should ask before engaging in smiling photo-ops with the vozhd, the caudillo, or the Great Successor: "What will it look like to the boys in the camps?" |
07 — Miscellany. Out of time, I'm afraid, ladies and gents. Very quickly, our closing miscellany of brief items. Imprimis: Just going back to the sequester for a moment: inevitably, there were stories about how women and minorities will be hardest hit. To be precise, there's this story from the congressional newspaper The Hill, March 4th, quote: Federal budget cuts under sequestration would quickly mean cuts to federal, state and local public-sector jobs, which disproportionately employ women and African-Americans. End quote, that one from Rep. Barbara Lee of California. Now hold on there just a minute. Don't I recall Michelle Obama, back in the 2008 election season, advising black kids to avoid the private sector? So these federal workers followed her advice, and now they're getting canned? Why am I not weeping? Item: A state Senator in Florida — of which party? … let me see … ah yes, she's a Democrat — this lady is pushing a bill that would make it a crime to sell ammunition to people who have not completed an anger management course. This story makes me so mad, so ma-a-a-ad, I can't continue … [heavy breathing] … next item … Item: If gun control bothers you, just be glad you don't live in England. Having pretty much banned real guns, over there they are now banning imaginary guns. Quote from the Daily Mail, quote: A primary school in north London has banned its pupils from playing cops and robbers, or any playground game which involves imaginary weapons. School chiefs at Worcesters Primary School outlawed the games over a fear that they will upset other children. End quote. What can one say? Perhaps this: That when the kids graduate from Worcesters Primary School, they'll be perfectly suited to a college career at Oberlin. Item: Lions misbehaving. Lion One: At an animal park east of Fresno, California, a young woman interning as a lion keeper was killed and partially eaten by one of her charges. The young woman's father said she had been fascinated by big cats from an early age. Quote from him: "She was absolutely fearless." Not necessarily a good thing to be around lions. Lion Two: A couple in Zimbabwe were enjoying intimate congress in some roadside bushes when a lion saw his opportunity and grabbed the woman, identified as Sharai Mawera. That, unfortunately, was the end of her. The man, who apparently suffers from a severe chivalry deficit, got away. He ran to the nearby road wearing only a condom and tried to flag down vehicles, but nobody would stop. A failure of charity there on the part of the motorists. Personally, I always stop when flagged down in a wild area by a frantic man wearing nothing but a condom; but I guess things go differently in Africa. Quote from the wire service where I found this, quote: Unfortunately the woman, who was also known as Mai Desire, was mauled to death by the lion. End quote. Say what? "Mai Desire"? What line of work was she in, I wonder? Given the poor woman's fate, I guess it's uncharitable of me to ask. Item: Finally, one more animal story. Twenty-one-year-old James White of Selby in Yorkshire, England, was sentenced to do 120 hours of unpaid work in the community after being found guilty of frying his roommate's hamster. The unfortunate creature was found in a frying pan next to a heated hob in the communal student accommodation that Mr White shared with other students. Asked by the roommate what had happened to his beloved hamster, Mr White, who seems not to be a very dedicated teetotaller, replied, quote, "I f****** fried it, I fried it." So although not a rodent's best friend, Mr White is at least a truthful man. |
08 — Signoff. That's it, ladies and gentlemen. More from Radio Derb next week. If you caught my column in Taki's Magazine last week, you'll know that I was in New York last weekend to see Parsifal at the Met. Beautiful, beautiful music. Here are some of the closing bars, just to give a flavor. This is the Bayreuth Festival choir and orchestra, James Levine conducting. |
[Music clip: From Parsifal, Act 3, Höchsten Heiles Wunder!]