Category Archives: Etiquette

On Grief And The Aggrieved

Crime, Democrats, Etiquette, Pop-Culture, Republicans, The State, The Zeitgeist

In the aftermath of the Arizona shootings, our masters in modern Rome are foregoing “partisanship” (read principle) and are coming together to spend funds not their own to secure their sorry asses against the statistically minuscule chance that these royal behinds will come to harm. Curiously, House Democratic Caucus Chairman John Larson is commending House Speaker John Boehner for being “extraordinary in setting the right tone” for “a more enlightened way.”

“A more enlightened way” than what?” It’s almost as though Larson is the aggrieved party and Boehner a member of the offending group. Both parties have assumed these respective roles.

Indeed: “Republicans are clearly responding as if they feel somewhat incriminated,” said University of Michigan political science professor Lisa Disch. “On the one hand, they are acting very quickly to distance themselves from the incident, but on the other hand, they seem to be feeling as if they have been caught at something; caught at using rhetoric that is incendiary.”

On the topic of grief: A day after their child’s dreadful demise, the parents of the “9-year-old girl gunned down in Saturday’s shooting rampage outside an Arizona grocery store” were liberally granting interviews.

To me this is unsettling. We once used to grieve privately—at least initially. These days, there is nothing people will not share and express in public, and ASAP. They have no private selves.

This is part of our festering cultural commons.

I, Obama

Barack Obama, Celebrity, Debt, Ethics, Etiquette, Foreign Policy

My reference in the title is to “I, Claudius,” an “award-winning television serial, based on a book about the Roman Emperor Claudius.”

Jim Kouri of the Examiner.com talks about President Obama and First Lady Michelle’s four-day trip to India:

“The U.S. will spend upwards of $200 million per day on President Barack Obama’s visit to Mumbai. Based on the projection that he’ll stay in India for four days, American taxpayers will be paying close to $1 billion so that the President and his entourage of close to 1,500 people will enjoy first-class accommodations
The huge amount of around $200 million will be spent on security, stay and other aspects of the Presidential visit,” a top official of the Indian government told the BBC.
The people accompanying the Obamas include Secret Service agents, US government officials and journalists favorable to the Obama White House.
Even Indian government officials aren’t certain what what will be accomplished during the Obama visit.”

It appears that this trip is the First Lady’s ostentatious sojourn to Spain on steroids. Somewhere in the US, productive activities are being suspended in order to fund the POTUS, the FLOTUS and their lavish lives. Remember though, that this outlay is nothing as compared to the cost of the legislation He devises. In fact, a $1 billion ransom would be a good deal if we could ensure that He never signed another bill into law, except to nullify what went before.

UPDATE II: Images From The WorldNetDaily 2010 Conference (& Snapshots From The Journey)

Capitalism, Etiquette, Family, Homeland Security, Ilana Mercer, IlanaMercer.com, Multiculturalism, Pop-Culture, The State

After nine years with WND, it was time to meet the people who have been brave enough to showcase my column for that duration; the people who patiently field my (weekly) pedant’s requests for this or the other editorial correction.

Unfortunately, I was unable to stay for the duration of the WorldNetDaily 2010 Conference, which was held at the Doral Golf Resort & Spa, in Miami. This was the case because my mother is visiting with us from The Netherlands, and was home birdie-sitting all alone on Yom Kippur.

“WND And Me” sums up the role of WND in my career, such as it is.

Never, “in all my years with WND.com, the Internets leading, largest independent website,” have I so much as been censored—not even when, in July of 2003, I likened Bush’s ‘Bring ’em on grin’ to the grimace ‘on the face of a demented patient with end-stage syphilis.'”

WND’s intrepid editors have fielded many a missive demanding I be dropped. ‘Guys,’ complained one devotee, “I am about to boycott your splendid website…Ilana’s views are just too … out of sync with other contributors on your site [when it comes to the invasion of Iraq].” What the reader failed to comprehend was that WND was not looking for conformity—at least not from me. And for that I am grateful. I am temperamentally not suited to obedience, not when truth is at stake.

Here I am with the gifted Albert Thompson (already a dear friend), who practically ran the event, and WND’s lovely young book editor, Megan Byrd:

With Joseph Farah at the WND cocktail party.

With the one-and-only Erik Rush, who, I discovered, is also a gifted musician

Jerome Corsi and former Assistant Secretary of State, Alan Keyes.

Dining out with Sean.

UPDATE I (Sept. 19): Snapshots From The Journey.

I am giving in to hyperbole, but when the large African-American woman—employed by the American taxpayer to torment the same subjects at the airport—summoned me with a crooked finger for a pat down, I thought of the film “Midnight Express.” And in particular, the scene where Billy Hayes’ far-from-delightful Turkish jailer schemes to enjoy some time alone with the young American.

America’s airports are ugly places, where statism interfaces with the squalor of mass society. The workforce at the nation’s airports is, mostly, a malicious, affirmatively appointed contingent of minorities, mainly imported. All speaking Pidgin English, and each one singularly focused on exacting revenge on thinner, richer, paler, perceived oppressors.

The poor are first to complain about capitalism, but it has given them cheap travel (and cheap everything else). Once-upon-a-time a trip was a special occasion. You dressed in your finest for it. Now, every tom, dick and harry can afford to fly. Thus the airport’s often-inhospitable waiting lounges are filled with the detritus of humanity; slack-jawed youths talking at the top of their voices, or texting feverishly, mouths agape. Or shamelessly scenting the ether with the orificial end product of nasty food. (Yes, I kid you not.)

Everywhere apparent are “women lost to shame,” to use Edmund Burke’s description of the new breed of woman loosed upon humanity by the Jacobin forces of the Revolution in France. I refer to the kind that spills out of her hot pants and blouses and carries on like a harlot.

A tea shirt popular at the Miami International Airport was one that read, “Miami Bitch.” Many women had voluntarily donned this thing, and it was the cause of much guffawing among them. In “Idiocracy” mode, a semantic trick achieved with vowels elicited a lot of laughter.

Of course, one does see the odd lady among the feral females.

Miami: From the little I saw of it, Miami is a hellishly hot, flat, hellhole. I can see why Tom Tancredo called Miami a Third World place. English is not a first language there. The word that encapsulates that spot’s work ethic is “mañana”: tomorrow.

What can one add about those unpleasant, ugly, old flight attendants? That profession too was once the preserve of females young, pretty and single, who got the opportunity to see the world. By the looks of it, youth and pulchritude are exclusionary criteria; banished, except, I am told, on airplanes flown by China, Singapore and Dubai.

When we emigrated from South Africa to Israel I was a little girl. I remember being awed by the beauty and gentility of the El Al airhostesses. These days, a look from the Delta flight attendants, all in their dotage, is enough to unsettle the most seasoned traveler.

UPDATE II (Sept. 21): These images have now been added to the gallery.

UPDATED: Pimp My FLOTUS

Barack Obama, Debt, Economy, Ethics, Etiquette, Government, Politics, Pop-Culture

I can’t bring myself to break a sweat over Michelle Obama’s lavish vacation. The First Lady and daughter took along to Spain “68 Secret Service agents from the US,” and for “her entourage she had reserved 60 of the 129 rooms.”

The comparison to Marie Antoinette, down to the wave, is flattering, of course—to Michelle. But how stupid is it to suggest that individuals so privileged as these—who have set themselves and their offspring up for life by working the political process (i.e., by pelf)—could, by “toning down the flash,” humanise themselves “and signify that they sympathise with the setbacks of the people they were elected to serve.”

That was New York Daily News columnist Andrea Tantaros’s much-publicized criticism and attendant advice.

Yes, precisely: if the Obamas and their hangers-on tone down, I’ll feel so much better about them and their undeserved riches.

Dumb.

Besides, the metaphor is all wrong. This sojourn to Spain, the “sedate” soiree for Mexican President Felipe Calderon, down to the pelvis-shaking Beyonce—this is out of the MTV series, “Pimp my Ride.” Or Pimp my president.

UPDATE (Aug. 9): The Idiocracy at large has taunted Michelle and her posse by saying that the American economy could have done with their dollars. The royal party should have spent its money stateside.

The American cognoscenti knows so little about the money in their society. Government workers are paid out of taxes. In other words, the money they spend is money confiscated from taxpayers. Productive activities were suspended in order to fund these parasite. It’s a zero-sum game. The BHO family doesn’t produce anything; it consumes wealth. All told, even if Michelle vacationed in the US, the money she blows has already resulted in less economic activity somewhere unseen. It’s Bastiat’s elegant argument about ‘What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen’ all over again.