It’s just so happened that today is also the day when I enter the final grades for my summer course and my sabbatical truly begins. So I have extra reasons to celebrate. Here is a little story that illustrates the importance of democracy.

As you know, I completed my second term as department chair and, in the spirit of a peaceful democratic transfer of power, stepped down from this role on June 30. It so happens that my department has to make an important decision in the first two weeks of July. We know what the right decision is, but we are also well aware that there are two people who are going to become very upset and litigious. I didn’t even want to imagine all of the drama they were going to generate. I told the new department chair that making the right decision was going to plunge her into a quagmire of grievances and complaints. But she’s fresh into the job, full of energy, and doesn’t really care. This is the energy I most definitely do not have after dealing with similar kinds of drama during my two terms in the position.

Transfer of power is important because people get jaded and low-energy.

I am being contacted for an interview to answer the question of why Trump doesn’t go to the World Cup soccer games, even though it would be an excellent PR opportunity.

My answer is that Trump’s popularity is largely the result of his sincerity. The guy is authentic. Whether you love or hate what he so authentically manifests is not the point. Politics is one of the fakest pursuits in existence. And here is a guy who goes and says whatever crap appears in his mind at any given point. That’s deeply refreshing.

Why would he go watch a sport that he normally doesn’t enjoy? As for PR, this World Cup has indeed proven to be a fantastic PR opportunity for our country. Trump doesn’t need to do anything to enhance that impression. The country is legitimately great. We thought for a while where to go on vacation this summer. We thought maybe Europe. France, Portugal, Italy. These are all great countries, but in the end we are going to spend our vacation here in the United States. Because these are excellent vacations.

A great country, and it’s wonderful that the World Cup visitors are discovering it for themselves.

P.S. Speaking about what’s authentic and what’s not, here’s a link to a hilarious video of Putin clumsily faking a visit to the frontlines.

https://x.com/i/status/2073342563797381264

Truly, the best country. Let’s all be worthy of its glorious history and extraordinary achievements.

I understand that everybody is tired of hearing me chirp about Chirbes. But bear up, my friends. I still have 460 pages left. I’m dragging it out at this point because I know what happens on the last page. The writer dies of lung cancer. I’m going to be bawling. I need to prepare myself for that.

To compensate, I will soon talk to you about a completely different writer from an unexpected country and era that I discovered thanks to Chirbes. A truly excellent writer that I didn’t even know existed.

We have some really great local activities to celebrate the 250th. They’ve been going on for the past couple of weeks, and I finally got to meet the Daughters of the American Revolution, which was pretty cool.

Unfortunately, the weather conditions are messing with our celebrations. It’s atrociously hot, and kids start fading very fast during any outdoor activity. I have no idea how we’re going to do the fireworks tomorrow. We like to stay out for hours for fireworks, but in this weather, this is going to be a tall order.

By the way, did you notice that when you like posts on X, every like explodes into little fireworks in the shape of 250? From what I have been able to gather, this only happens on likes to American posts that use the word “America”.

Speaking of Mamdani, here’s his beard prattling about her “art”:

I’m on page 1,900 of Rafael Chirbes’s diaries, and this man, who was one of the greatest artists of the early 21st century, would commit seppuku before referring to his writing as “my art” even in the privacy of his handwritten diary. After receiving a vast number of literary awards, getting translated into other languages, being invited to speak all over the world, and even having a mega popular TV series filmed on the basis of his novel, Chirves died wondering whether anything he had written was even a little bit valuable.

You can’t be an artist without loving, knowing, and understanding the work of the artists who came before you. When you do that, when you surround yourself with great literature, film, music, and paintings, as Chirbes did throughout his life, you begin to realize that an enormous distance separates you from greatness.

Vulgar, stupid people were always in the majority. Mamdani’s beard is not a new phenomenon in her embarrassing pretentiousness. She serves a useful function of illustrating what a completely different universe such people inhabit.

“I started exploring themes of nostalgia.” It’s sad.

Here is the least offensive part of Greasy Mamdani’s pouty speech:

NYC Mayor Mamdani on American exceptionalism: “We are told that America is exceptional because we are richer, stronger, more powerful than everyone else… The truth, my friends is that America is exceptional because here, nothing is fixed into place.”

This couldn’t be any clearer. America sucks, but at least it’s highly fluid. Excrement, like Mamdani, floats to the top.

On the positive side, even in the ultra-liberal circles where I find myself, I have never met a single person who doesn’t think that Mamdani is gross and pitiful. “We would respect him more if he came out already,” people reasonably say.

I knew that the woman who climbed the Empire State Building the other day was Russian immediately. She was wearing a hat with animal ears. The only place where women in their 30s are obsessed with wearing these hats with animal ears is Russia. I have absolutely no idea why they do that and why they think it’s cute. The funny thing is that it’s almost never young women. It’s the 30 to 40 demographic that does it.

When you tell liberals that slavery existed throughout history in every human civilization, they interpret it as a prescriptive statement. They think you are telling them that you want to re-enslave African Americans.

The roots of the misunderstanding lie in a different view of human beings. For conservatives, human beings are naturally extremely flawed. The default human existence is “nasty, brutish, and short.” Human beings can get better and live more civilized lives by constantly editing their originally shitty nature.

For liberals, on the other hand, the human nature is originally that of a noble savage. We are all good at first, but then social relations distract us from our original goodness. We have to disinter this original un-polluted self in order to achieve true happiness.

You can see this difference in my story about the local perv from yesterday. I believe that he should edit down his need to pose as a little girl in front of children for the good of the community. Defenders of his behavior believe that, as he sits there in his brightly pink skirt and pink sandals, he is accessing some deeply authentic part of his self, and that that experience is so valuable that any societal considerations pale in comparison. I also think he’s accessing a deeply authentic part of himself. The difference is that I think this is a bad thing.

To return to the example with which I opened this post, for a conservative, the idea that something was bad and then we worked together to control our mean evil impulses to get things better is completely normal. But for a liberal, the original state means something good. If primitive tribes did it, it must be wonderful. This is why, for example, Howard Zinn argues sincerely in his books that primitive indigenous tribes of the Americas were feminist and pro-gay. Because if they weren’t, it means that feminism and gayness are bad.

The freedom that is so important to liberals is freedom from civilization, because civilization requires limits to individual whims and appetites. Their ultimate goal is complete freedom of humans from each other. The ecstasy of the (neo)liberal subject is to be completely alone and not participate in society through work, relationships, or procreation. All of these activities require experiencing discomfort for the sake of others. And that makes them unbearable.

I can still eat my favorite pasta soup because its most important ingredient isn’t pasta. It’s the raw egg. With a lot of parsley and young carrots, it’s amazing.

Who else puts raw egg into pasta soup?