Battle Royale

Guest Post by Jim Kunstler

The effrontery of Ms. Pelosi, Speaker of the House, in cancelling Mr. Trump’s State of the Union address in the chamber she controls is perhaps the worst insult to institutional protocol since the spring day in 1856 when Congressman Preston Brooks (D-SC) skulked into the senate chamber and smashed Senator Charles Sumner (R-Mass) about the head within an inch of his life with a gold-headed walking stick. Brooks’s attack was launched after Sen. Sumner gave his “Bleeding Kansas” speech, arguing that the territory be let into the union as a “free” state, and denouncing “the harlot slavery,” whom he imputed was Rep. Brooks’s dearest consort.

Many of us — except perhaps students immersed in intersectional gender studies — know how that worked out: a little dust-up in the meadows and cornfields known as the Civil War. We’re about at that level of animosity today in the two federal houses of legislature, though it is very hard to imagine how Civil War Two might play out on the ground. Perhaps opposing mobs (not even armies) meet in the Walmart parking lots of Pennsylvania and go at it demolition derby style, with monster trucks bashing their enemies’ Teslas and Beemers. Throw in clown suits instead of blue and gray uniforms and we’ll really capture the spirit of the age.

Not to be outdone, days after the SOTU cancellation, the Golden Golem of Greatness cancelled a Democratic Party grandstanding junket to the Middle East, led by Ms. Pelosi. A US Air Force bus has just departed for Andrews Air Force Base, where an Air Force jet waited for the junketeers. But then, with impeccable timing, Mr. Trump cancelled the junket — denying the use of military aircraft as Commander-in-Chief — and forcing the bus back to town with its load of elected dignitaries and their luggage — making the reasonable suggestion that they fly a commercial airline instead.

The peevish media played the story as though Mr. Trump had acted like a vindictive child. In fact, he continues to play a familiar role that the adolescent Left just can’t abide: Daddy’s in da House. Nothing is more hateful to the Left these days as a large-ish white man telling them what to do. I don’t think Mr. Trump really relishes that role, especially when he has to bring the hammer down on the kids, but considering all the things he’s not good, playing Daddy is perhaps a big exception. He is, after all, the father of at least five children, and there must have been opportunities a’plenty to straighten their asses out during those horrible teen years — especially in New York City of the 1990s, on fire with cocaine, AIDS, and nightclubbing gangstas with guns.

Interestingly, the quarrel du jour, is over boundaries — rather specifically the boundary between the USA and Mexico. The Left is against it. In fact, the Left’s mouthpiece, The New York Times ran an op-ed this week headlined: There’s Nothing Wrong With Open Borders. Well, you might ask, did they really mean it? Or was The Times just flopping the idea on the table like so much meat, to inflame the raging Beast of the Right?

Of course, the elected official cohort of the Left doesn’t believe it, but they are pretending to believe it as strenuously as possible just to oppose the wicked white Golem in the wickedly white White House, and, alas for them, they now own that stupid position. The fabled wall is a symbol, we all know that, but it is at least an apt one for a firm boundary. And it is a boundary worth fighting over, just to establish for an hysterical mob that the world is not one big intersectional mishmash of sentimental fantasy where anything goes and nothing matters.

Ms. Pelosi and her Democratic Party House majority have been sent to their room now, awaiting a fateful conference with Daddy. A majority of the public actually does believe that the boundary-in-question with Mexico ought to be recognized in the way that normal nations recognize normal national boundaries: namely, that they are barriers to entry, and that rational procedures must be followed to go from one side to the other. Ms. Pelosi’s next step will probably be something like a few weeks of anorexia, or some other sort of self-destructive adolescent rebellion. Let’s hope she doesn’t try to burn the house down in her boundless rage.

For more clarity and illumination on the deeper psychological angles of this impasse, please read this excellent guest essay by Jasun Horsley which I have posted on this website’s landing page: What is Liminality?

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