Boundary Problems

Guest Post by Jim Kunstler

It’s no accident that Donald Trump’s vaunted wall along the US-Mexico border became such a potent metaphor for a floundering American polity. The US has boundary problems — and not just with illegal immigrants (whoops, undocumented visitors). A mighty flux of standards and principles is symptomatic of an economy in freefall. Nothing is settled. All values are put up for re-negotiation. Steamrolling and bullying are the new fair play. Foundational ideas, such as the first amendment, erode under a flood of special pleadings. There is no center left to hold.

The latest identity politics fracas at Princeton University is instructive. Princeton students’ Black Justice League demanded both the vilification of former university president Woodrow Wilson as an arch-segregationist at the same time they demanded a segregated “cultural safe space for black students.” The pusillanimous current Princeton president, one Christopher Eisgruber, entertained their “demands” perhaps knowing that the threatened “indefinite” occupation of administration offices would be cut short by the Thanksgiving week vacation. (So far, the occupying force of the Black Justice League has not demanded delivery of free turkey and cranberry sauce — turkeys problematically have distinct regions of white and dark meat.)

The past ten days have also seen protests against free speech at snooty eastern elite Amherst College and a “white privilege retreat” at the University of Vermont for students “self-identifying as white” — why not “students of whiteness?” — with required reading on “The Invention of the White Race,” “White Privilege, Male Privilege in Race, Class, Gender,” “The Feminist Classroom,” and “The Abolition of Whiteness.”

You might whiff a general drift in all this of antagonism against people of whiteness and men in particular. Hence it’s extra-specially unfortunate that the oafish and sadistic Donald Trump is so conspicuously out there representing that identity group. I suppose what that shows is that the process of boundary dissolution can really call out the demonic. The sad part is that white men of principle and reason are so beaten down that none dare oppose the forces of identity vengeance on the loose.

The fugitive truths surrounding the Black Lives Matter protests are too unpleasant for the public interest to digest. For instance, the behavior of the new Holy Trinity of Black Martyrs, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Tamir Rice, in the incidents where they lost their lives. All were doing something likely to get them into serious trouble: 1) beating up on an armed sentinel, 2) groping inside a patrol car for a policeman’s gun, 3) brandishing a pellet gun designed to look like a .45 automatic in a public place. I’d go so far to suggest that the Black Lives Matter movement has become so virulent because it’s increasingly obvious that black behavior is so embarrassingly bad and nobody knows what to do about it, especially black people. (Check the national murder rates.)

The colleges and universities have become the theater for these histrionics because they are institutionally so vested in the wish for better outcomes that evolved from the civil rights struggles of the last century. A general failure of those expectations has driven the colleges collectively crazy — or, more precisely, made them places for the enactment of craziness. The careers of reasonable people are hostage to the new campus Red Guards, who operate much like Mao Zedong’s lunatic minions of the 1960s, who were set loose to distract public attention from the enormous failure of Mao’s five-year plan economy.

A reasonable argument can be made that the temperament of the USA is worse than that of Germany in 1932. We’re more foolish, feckless, and savage, our politics more ridiculous, and the wave we’re riding is much more dangerous.

Coming in 2016
World Made By Hand 4 (and final)

Harrow_cover_final

The third World Made By Hand novel

!! Is available !!

(The Fourth and final is complete
and in production for May 2016 publication)

Kunstler skewers everything from kitsch to greed, prejudice, bloodshed, and brainwashing in this wily, funny, rip-roaring, and profoundly provocative page- turner, leaving no doubt that the prescriptive yet devilishly satiric A World Made by Hand series will continue.” — Booklist

HistoryoftheFuture_Thumb

My local indie booksellers… Battenkill Books (Autographed by the Author) … or Northshire Books
or Amazon

 

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Iska Waran
Iska Waran

“Oafish and sadistic”. He says that like it’s a bad thing.

card802
card802

I’m probably wrong but it would seem to me that if our elected representatives would eliminate all the free shit illegals receive, make it a system like Canada to become a citizen, actually enforce the laws, and once legal we have tax paying contributors to a system rather than takers, we wouldn’t have to build a wall at all.

Left a comment
Left a comment

The Black Privilege movement: Extreme Anti-White Tweets from #BlackLivesMatter Movement

Extreme Anti-White Tweets from #BlackLivesMatter Movement

Should whites be demanding a safe space too?

Lysander
Lysander

The only ‘safe space’ White people will have will be limited by the range of their weapons.

pablito
pablito

“Black Justice League”

WTF, did these kids read too many comic books?
Do they really think there is such a thing as justice?

When I asked the cop who was serving me a search warrant, to investigate my septic system in a small rural town that does not like outsiders (Green Acres described that reality)

I told him: “this is not fair”

his reply: “if you want fair, go down the road to where they sell popcorn and cotton candy, that is the only fair around here”

underfire
underfire

This is what we get when there’s a group too sloppy and undisciplined to conduct themselves within the boundaries of civility….. attack the rules and those that follow them.

I. C.
I. C.

LMAO…
Look, Mr. Kunstler, just spit it out in regular English: You are sick of the obnoxious black thuggery and violence, along with the Lefty-Lucy college crap, too.

Face it, you are no longer able to completely identify as a Left Loon.

Welcome to common-sense Conservativism.

Left a comment
Left a comment

Pabilto: The Black Justice League v. Woodrow Wilson

http://www.vdare.com/posts/the-black-justice-league-v-woodrow-wilson

bubbah
bubbah

Kunstler, has certainly changed his tune. He basically used to be a liberal democrat who thought the world was going to crap, but Rep’s were the main reason. Now that he has got targetted by the Authoritarian Dems on college campuses and sees that perhaps some of these problems aren’t being solved by Dems or his “Hope and Change” candidate he endorsed back in 2008.

I have to say though Kunstler is one of the few writers out there that forces me to have to open up a dictionary nearly every time I read one of his rants.

Westcoaster
Westcoaster

All you guys who constantly bash Liberals should remember that neocons are responsible for all of our recent “wars”.
Many of us who lean left could also be described as Libertarians. For example, I have no problem with public assistance for those who truly need it, but I have a big problem with the FSA lifestyle, anchor babies, issuing driver’s licenses to illegals (as the gov does here in CA) and letting illegals work here. And while I’m in the camp of “we created all these refugees” I don’t think the solution is to move them to the U.S.

For my part, what’s going on with our college campuses is the result of the abundant student loan money; back in the day college kids had jobs to “work their way through” college; and the big protest was the Vietnam war.
I find it interesting that the election of a Black man as our “leader’ has acted as an irritant rather than balm for our race relations. Why that is I don’t know except that it sure riles up the far right. As Zach Galifianakis asked Obama during his spoof interview on “Between two ferns”
“How does it feel being the last Black president”?

http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/18e820ec3f/between-two-ferns-with-zach-galifianakis-president-barack-obama

Kill Bill
Kill Bill

Kunstler reminds me of one of this things you jam into a countertop tool. On the tip of my tongue…no not a blender. You have to take the food out, flip it, and cram it back in again. Did i mention the square of food was frozen?

Oo Oo.

I got it now.

Kunstler reminds me of a waffle.

Overthecliff
Overthecliff

Card,what you advocate is not good but great. It won’t happen because of the capture of the system by PTB.

Iska Waran
Iska Waran

Westcoaster, Just because I disdain progs doesn’t mean I don’t disdain neocons, too. Libs think anyone who’s not a lib is a neocon. I have to keep telling people. “I’m not a neocon – I’m a paleocon. Get it straight!”

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