Angina Monologue 36

His Majesty has always been something of a contrarian.

In fact, I think he consciously makes an art of it.

Palpatine has long kept bonsai, the ancient, twisted, but tiny potted trees beloved in Japanese culture. I’ve dutifully endured the big monster’s  monologues while he was pruning the little monsters, risking his wrath by interrupting him only when I perceived he was enjoying monologuing so much that he was in danger of overpruning, and thereby wrecking, a prized specimen.

Of course, all the cool villains keep orchids. It’s precisely this cliche that caused him to choose bonsai instead. But His Majesty is so dedicated a contrarian that he is even contrary about being contrary, and so I was not entirely surprised recently when he suddenly took up orchid keeping in a big way. You know something? I think it’s really mixing up the chemicals with which to fertilize them which interests him the most. His Majesty has long dabbled in the applied sciences, with laser technology and bioengineering being obvious favorites, but he rather likes chemistry as well. Alas, bonsai are not supposed to be fertilized much. Fortunately, orchids thrive on careful fertilization.

Those of you who have only seen His Majesty as portrayed (highly inaccurately) by Hollywood may have the impression that Palpatine is all dapper manners, fashionable black outfits, and calamari opera. And I admit that that was much of his public face back when he was actively engaged in politics. Political success means suborning the elite, and the elite are happy to be suborned if it’s done by brutal but elegant men.

So you’ve never seen His Majesty dressed in his faded blue overalls, measuring out grams of potassium nitrate and ammonium phosphate and iron EDTA on the kitchen scale to mix with liters of deionized water to produce fertilizer solutions of suitable molarity. Watching him do so, I came to a sudden realization this week: At heart, Palpatine is a mean old hillbilly guarding his still.

The insight came to be as I was reading J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy.  This is the latest in the genre that began with Charles Murray’s classical Coming Apart and includes the more recent Alienated America, also on my reading list. These discuss the pathologies of the American underclass by focusing on the white underclass, which seems necessary to avoid the charges of racism that would follow from any equally honest evaluation of any other ethnicities’ underclass. Also, the white underclass of the Rust Belt is credited or blamed for Trump’s ascension to the Presidency, so it’s a timely topic. But Thomas Sowell has already made the connection between hillbilly culture and urban black culture, which I suppose he can get away with by right of being black himself.

Depends on what you mean by “get away with.” Sowell is considered an Uncle Tom by many other black intellectuals. And it’s only a matter of time before the Left decides that books about dysfunctional white culture are really dog-whistle condemnations of dysfunctional black culture.

That’s ridiculous.

True. So?

The Left has dropped the pretense of even pretending to be sane or realistic in its politics. I am no fan of fetuses raised outside a test tube, but the latest Democratic positions on abortion and infanticide are literally insane.

“Literally.” I don’t think that word means —

You know better than to interrupt me when I’m monologuing. I literally mean literally. It’s not just that the Democrats are adopting policies I consider outrageous; I don’t even consider them that outrageous. You know me better than that.

Don’t act so surprised, Your Highness. You weren’t on any mercy mission this time.

It’s “Your Majesty” to you. Let’s keep our styles straight.

The Democrats are adopting policies so morally incoherent and so politically suicidal that they cannot be the product of rational minds. … You can stop with the stony expression now.

I’ve been wearing this stony expression ever since that unfortunate incident on Mustafar. I can’t really help it.

I’ve always been able to see behind the mask, my young apprentice.  You think I’m just being contrarian again. It’s true I’ve never troubled myself much over the idea that the more disagreeable portion of the human species is limiting its own reproduction by whatever means necessary. The Roe Effect strikes me as the kind of mistake you should never interrupt your enemy when he’s in the middle of making it.

Positively Yoda-esque, that last sentence was.

But as a professional politician, I find it incredibly irritating when politics is played badly, and manages to win anyway.

The Trump administration must be a constant source of irritation to you then.

The more disappointing because I expected it to be a constant source of amusement. Looking at the Republican administration under Trump, and its opponents in the bureaucracy, the judiciary, and Congress, I am led to conclude that “the lunatics are running the asylum” is no longer a metaphor.

My chief irritation is not really over Democratic infanticide. The self-weeding garden seems like a positive development. It’s the deranged mindset underlying it, which leads to more dangerous things, like the Green New Deal.

The Green New Deal does not deserve to be taken seriously.

Which is entirely besides the point, because a majority of voters are too badly educated to realize this. No energy policy that excludes nuclear power deserves to be taken seriously. And this is not just an energy policy: It is a caricature of the Republican fears that anthropogenic climate change is actually a conspiracy to impose a tyrannical New World Order.

Republicans are perfectly capable of adopting wacky conspiracy theories about their opponents without being prompted. What is new is that the Democrats seem to regard this as a challenge. It’s as if they thought 1984 was a how-to manual.

That’s a rather old cliche, Your Majesty.

All the more shocking that the Democrats seem determined to live down to it. And, in general, the Democratic response to Trump has been to try to prove they can out-crazy him — at which they’ve had remarkable success.

I didn’t vote for Trump in 2016. I won’t vote for him in 2020. I am rational enough to know that my one vote cannot possibly alter the outcome of the election, so there is no reason to feel the need to vote for the lesser evil. It’s Cthulu all the way for me.

Cthulu, alas, is an alien, and not even a naturalized one, so he will not be running.

He’s a supernaturalized citizen. [cackles]

I wonder if His Majesty can see me rolling my eyes behind the photoreceptors. His puns are remarkably lame for someone so educated.

It is because, I confess, I have no real sense of humor. No one who takes himself seriously can.

But getting back to the Green New Deal: It’s not just that someone is insane enough to propose a sweeping new energy policy that excludes nuclear power. The plan is mind-boggling expensive, but that is being dismissed as no concern, on the basis of Modern Monetary Theory — a cauldron of economic snake oil that has nonetheless gotten the endorsement of a great many of what passes for intellectuals on the New Left.

And you know things are bad when even George Will is starting to sound like Kevin D. Williamson.

A complement when applied to any writer. Kevin D. Williamson is the most brilliant political opinion writer in the country at the moment. As was George Will before him, and with a remarkably similar style in his younger days. Any writer who can succeed in getting both the feminist writers of The Atlantic and the most ardent Trump supporters to label him an existential threat, as Williamson has done, has got to be doing something right.

Modern Monetary Theory basically says: We have a fiat currency; we’ll pay for everything by simply printing the money, and this time there won’t be hyperinflation, because trust us.

It’s lunatical.

It’s like a teenager given his dad’s credit card. What Washington needs is some adult supervision.

And there we see the real threat. Big America has prided itself on not being a banana republic, like the little Americas are, because military coups are not a feature of our government. What people do not realize is that it’s not the military coups that are the problem; it’s the necessity for military coups that is the problem. In many South American countries, the military is the adult supervision, and it’s only the military coups that keep the system working at all.

His Majesty is, of course, somewhat biased in favor of military coups.

Which alters not a whit the truth of what I’m saying.

We are raising a generation that does not know how to adult. The exception are those who enter military service, which still has a tradition of assuming every recruit nothing nothing about how to be an adult, and proceeds to teach them. The drill instructor is the only reliable maker of men left in our society. And that means that, sooner or later, the military will start feeling justified in supplying the adult supervision.

I think not, Your Majesty. When West Point can graduate an out-and-out anti-American Marxist, forcing the Army to go to the trouble of a court-martial to strip him of his commission, I doubt the military is going to maintain the tradition of the drill instructor successfully. Particularly when so many of those being drilled aren’t boys and so many of the officers’ corp are no longer men.

(His Majesty was visibly irritated, and I withdrew before he savaged another bonsai or drowned an orchid in a bath of concentrated chemicals.

But it struck me that there are, in fact, still the equivalent of drill instructors doing their work of molding men out of boys in certain crucial segments of our society. Oddly, they are older women with no formal authority but impressive capability and considerable informal authority. We sometimes call them mission moms.

So there is still hope.)