Belle Burden’s Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage is a very entertaining book. In the second week of the COVID lockdown of March 2020, Belle’s husband of 20 years packed a bag and told her he wanted a divorce. “I don’t want the custody of the children or the house,” he said. “I just want this to end.” Belle was shocked and decided to write a memoir about the divorce.

The reason why the book is funny is that Belle is mega woke. She’s an extremely rich woman who owns tens of millions of dollars. This is inherited wealth. Belle has always led the life of extreme luxury. The vast fortune she inherited is the source of her luxury far-left political beliefs. By itself, this would not be unusual. All trust fund babies vote for Mamdani and Co. What’s funny is that this woman, who prattles endlessly about how she’s an empowered feminist, is the most infantilized, weak and helpless princess in existence. There is more agency under any random burka than in Belle Burden. There is more female power in a harem. Belle should give master classes in tradwiving to self-declared tradwives because she managed to turn herself into an appendage to a degree rarely seen since the Middle Ages. 

Belle’s husband worked for a hedge fund and saw his 50-year-old child bride very infrequently. As a result, her bumbling incompetence didn’t register much with him. It was after being forced to spend two weeks in lockdown with her that he freaked out, packed a bag, and ran away. As I read Belle’s narrative of her utter doe-eyed helplessness, I found it increasingly harder to blame the husband. Of course, he’s a jerk for leaving his children with this calamity of a woman. There is a very sad part of the narrative where Belle’s 14-year-old daughter takes on the role of mothering her utterly self-infantilized mother before being shipped off to boarding school. Both parents suck, and the children are screwed.

Belle has become some sort of a female empowerment guru as a result of writing this memoir. If that’s not the funniest thing ever, then I don’t know what is. Woke people are really bad at the things they constantly proclaim as the most important ever. Have you seen them around a black person? They get so flustered, it’s embarrassing. That’s why Robin DiAngelo’s books were so popular before Matt Walsh destroyed her brand. To us, they sounded insane, but liberals found that the books perfectly expressed their feelings of intense discomfort around African-Americans. Belle Burden is a Robin DiAngelo of leftist womanhood. And that’s what makes her memoir so funny.

Finally, we found an English-speaking kid at the swimming pool to play with Klara. Everybody else speaks Spanish, including a family of extremely rude, chain-smoking rich people dressed head to toe in Calvin Klein clothing and accessories.

Here is a quote from an excellent novel The Interpretation of Murder by Jed Rubenfeld. It’s set in the early 20th-century New York, where the three fathers of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Sándor Ferenczi, come for a visit. At a high-society dinner party, one of the attendees confronts Freud regarding the ultimate results of the sexual liberation that Freud’s ideas seem to seek:

“What sort of world would it be, Dr. Freud, if your views became general? I can almost picture it. The lower orders come to scorn ‘civilized morality.’ Gratification becomes god. All join in rejecting discipline and self-denial, without which life has no dignity. The mob will run riot; why should they not? And this mob, what will they want when the rules of civilization are lifted? Do you think they will want only sex? They will want new rules. They will want to obey some new madman. They will want blood—your blood, probably, Dr. Freud, if history is any guide. They will want to prove themselves superior, as the lowest always do. And they will kill to prove it. I picture bloodletting, great bloodletting, on a scale never seen before. You would pipe away civilized morality—the only thing that keeps man’s brutality in check. What do you offer in exchange, Dr. Freud? What will you put in its place?”

This novel was recommended by Chirbes, so of course it ultimately leads to the issue of Nazism, even though it is set in 1909. Leaving that aside, the query posed in this quote is important.

Psychoanalysis has long stepped away from sexual liberation as its focus. But the question remains of what happens when the corset of outwardly imposed rules is removed from people who are utterly incapable of creating and obeying rules for themselves. See my previous post for one example of what happens.

Once the self is liberated from any constraint, the result is really, really ugly.

Ben Shapiro did an hour-long show ridiculing Candace Owens’s ridiculous conspiracy theorizing. It’s extremely funny, but this humor is inaccessible to Candace Owens’ followers. These are cognitively deprived people who already have low intellectual powers that are depleted daily by the incessant pandering from a crowd of dishonest people like Candace. I feel bad for them. They don’t control their disability, and it’s not even considered a disability but a moral flaw.

Chirbes loved this 1933 American novel, and I read it on his recommendation. It din’t impress me, though. There are so many American and European novels from this time period, all of which are written in the same brittle, sarcastic tone which aims to shock the reader with its transgressiveness. I’ve read so many of them that I find them almost indistinguishable. Miss Lonelyhearts it’s an American novel, so it has a religious component, which many of its European counterparts lack. But other than that, reading about a bunch of disordered, mean alcoholic and promiscuous people who feel extremely dramatic about themselves makes very little sense.

Miss Lonelyhearts is about a young journalist who writes an agony column for a newspaper. He is traumatized by the letters people send in recounting their tragedies. His incapacity to find solace in religion makes him desperate. The idea for the novel is good, but the tone kills everything. It’s been done too many times to make an impression. I understand that it’s the zeitgeist, and the writer can fail to avoid channeling it. But this understanding does not advance my enjoyment.

If you want to read something from that era, I recommend the short stories by Dorothy Parker. They are very similar to what Nathanael West is doing in this novel, but Dorothy Parker had a sense of humor and that she makes her writing worth it.

Do you want to guess to what Chirbes dedicated the last pages of his diaries?

To how much he hated Ukraine and loved Putin.

Why, you would ask? What is it to him? A dying Spanish writer in the last months of his life who had never been to Ukraine and knew absolutely nothing whatsoever about it. Why would he be possessed by a profound dislike of a country that had never been on his horizon?

The answer is simple. Mass media told him that the 2013 revolution in Ukraine was a revolt of Nazis. Chirbes had spent his entire life reading and thinking about Nazis, and the possibility that some new Nazis were suddenly cropping up at the outskirts of Europe was devastating to him. Putin’s regime advertises itself as fully dedicated to the goal of battling Nazis. So if you are opposed to Nazis, the reasoning goes, you have to be pro-Putin.

I am not sad or disappointed to find out that Chirbes was pro-Putin. Every Spanish and Latin American writer in existence, except for the Colombian Hector Abad Faciolince, is painfully and hysterically pro-Putin. It is only upsetting the first 63 times when an artist you otherwise admire turns out to be what my daughter calls a “dodo head.” After that, you get inured to the whole thing. Hispanic means anti-American, and since nobody is more anti-American than Putin, Hispanic invariably means “passionately in love with the anti-American Putin”.

The reason why I’m mentioning this at all is, once again, to insist that we need to move imaginatively, intellectually, and spiritually away from dwelling on Nazism. It’s not working out well for us. Look at Chirbes. He spent his entire life dwelling on a big evil of the remote past, and as a result of that, he supported and celebrated an identical evil of the present.

It gets really funny at times. At one point in the diaries, Chirbes bemoans the increased criminality and mountains of trash that migrants bring to the area where he lives. He describes these migrants as “Africans and Ukrainians.” Given that there is absolutely no way in existence he could have distinguished a Ukrainian from a Russian or a Belarusian, it’s clear that the choice to identify dirty criminal migrants as Ukrainian was ideological.

Chirbes is still my favorite writer, and I will continue bugging the living daylights out of everybody with him. If I cared about the absolutely unhinged hatred of Ukrainians among Hispanic writers, I’d have to quit my profession, and it’s kind of too late for that.

Why do very educated, relatively well-off people vote for low-intelligence, bumbling morons like Darializa Avila, Mamdani, or all the rest of them?

They don’t want to be people on whom changes are inflicted. They prefer to see themselves as people inflicting the changes. In the incoming high-tech favela, they want to associate themselves with the high-tech side and not the favela side. They believe that Darializa is their ticket out of victimhood and into control. “It’s not something that others did to me. It is what I did to others” is the positioning they seek. If it’s coming anyways, why not associate oneself with the forceful nature of the inevitable?

Of course, in the world that is being ushered in by Darializas and Co., there’s no place for the very people who are voting for her. They are three levels of subjectivation above the favela part of the new societal order and one level of subjectivation behind its high-tech part. They’re stuck in the middle between these two extremes, so they’re doomed to be tossed away as soon as the transformation they so hopefully enable is completed.

A DSA candidate who recently won a primary in New York, Darializa Avila Chevalier believes that schools should be abolished. You know why? Because, as she correctly says, they are an inevitable foundation of the nation-state, and she hates the nation-state:

Avila Chevalier supports abolishing traditional schooling, describing schools as “parallel to prisons,” tied to “settler colonialism and white supremacy/racism,” and linked to “genocidal practices of the nation-state.”

Back in 2013, I explained on this blog that the nation state is being taken down, together with all the forms of welfare that it provides, including policing and public education. Of course, Avila Chevalier also supports police and prison abolition. She says directly that this is due to her hatred of the nation-state.

I knew that this was going to happen over a decade ago. This all sounded insane back when I first said it, but only 13 years later, New Yorkers go and vote for a politician who advances these ideas.

My new prediction is that soon enough, the Democrats will run candidates alongside whom Avila Chevalier will look downright moderate. They will offer a hodgepodge of seemingly unrelated and extremely bizarre measures that can only be understood if you realize that they have one common goal. That goal is the change of the form of statehood in which we live.

I can’t stop thinking about the terrible waste of it. Charlie is dead. His tiny children are orphaned. Tyler Robinson is likely going to be convicted, and rightfully so. And for what? So that Lance Twiggs could play with makeup for a couple of months?

Instead of accepting that this is a phase, youthful experimentation, nothing serious, which is exactly what it was, these young people were taught to turn Lance’s play acting into an existential issue that demanded a blood sacrifice.

Little boys would always clamber into mom’s high-heeled shoes and pretend that they were mom. Little girls would make a beard out of cotton wool and strut around with dad’s briefcase. Kids always did it. It was funny, a game. Then, all of a sudden, we decided that this play acting had to lead to medication, surgeries, and a campaign of societal bullying.  Is it any wonder that some impressionable young people took it seriously? This does not remove an iota of responsibility from Tyler Robinson. The guy is trash, and I hope he gets the death penalty. But there is a bigger issue here than his evil nature.

Tyler Robinson’s formerly transgender boyfriend testified at the preliminary hearing today in a suit and a tie, looking very male. I very much hope that before Robinson’s capital punishment is carried out, he gets to see Lance get married and have children. Nothing else will bring home the message of what an enormous moron he was to murder a man for explaining Lance’s affliction so correctly.

There is no better proof of how right Charlie was than Lance’s performance today.