Clarissa's Blog

The blog readership has dropped off a cliff since Friday. It’s like 80% of my readers are in Florida.

It’s still not clear how bad the surge will be and how deep the damage. But the evacuation seems to have been impressive.

It seems like everybody who has a distant relative killed in the Spanish Civil War is busy digging him out – metaphorically and sometimes literally – and writing a novel about him. Cercas is a known opportunist, so how could he miss a chance to cash in on an uncle who’d died in the war at the age of 19?

The novel about the dead uncle ended up boring as dust, of course. Is there anybody who can’t find an ancestor killed in some war? Maybe even a more interesting than this one? Men – and some especially dumb women – die in wars, it’s nothing new. You can’t milk the subject in perpetuity because it’s not that special.

So Cercas found a way to spice up the novel. He has a friend, a well-known film director, whose wife dumped him for Viggo Mortensen. The wife has made every effort to keep her relationship with the star private. In the 5 years she’s lived with Mortensen, she maybe appeared in public 2 or 3 times with him. The public is understandably desperate for dirt on the whole thing. 

In the novel, Cercas inserts a few juicy bits of gossip about the film director, the wife (who’s a fairly known actress in Spain), and Mortensen. I wonder how the director reacted to Cercas spilling his private drama all over the dang novel. He seems to be spineless enough to just swallow it in silence. The wife must be livid, though. 

Of course, every review of the novel quoted the gossip and mentioned nothing else about it. Because there is nothing else. I don’t watch movies so I don’t give a crap about the gossip but the novel itself is just not good. The genre of the Spanish Civil War seems to have fizzled out.

Of course, what I’m suggesting is risky. Dump the fanatical wing that scares everybody away with its privilege rants, safe spaces, 24-hour-a-day apoplexy, shock doctrines, identity lists, and Russia conspiracies. And instead make a play for people who might or might not respond. 

It’s risky because the crazies are always reliably there. But they don’t exist in numbers that are great enough to win anything. I’d risk it but I saw Bernie meekly step aside when two self-involved cows on his stage hassled him and realized that it wasn’t going to happen.

If everything goes right, I hope to vote in the next election. Right now, it seems like the only way for me to do it is to repeat like a mantra, “The other guys stink even worse, even worse, even worse.” And if you can’t energize even somebody as excitable as me, something is very wrong. 

This is why the Left keeps losing:

Fear has become a defining characteristic of life in America since September 11, interrupted by the brief glimmers of hope declared by Shepard Fairey’s posters and Barack Obama’s inauguration.

If I ask my students whether this rings true for them, they’ll just think I’m crazy. 

All of this alarmism that’s so popular on the left, all of the “we’re back to feudal times! Half of the country is starving! The younger generation is hopeless! The American dream is dead! There are no opportunities! Meritocracy is a joke!” are completely at odds with the Weltanschauung of the majority. And most damningly, it’s in discord with how the young feel. I don’t mean the rich spoiled young on private yachts and at Berkeley but the normal young, the majority.

I spend a lot of time with young people. They either don’t vote at all or vote Republican because they are repelled by moaning and negativity. Every poll shows that the young share the basic ideology of the Left, that they are into justice, fairness, social conscience. Yet the Left loses every election in sight because not enough people come out to vote. 

It’s the framing that stinks, the delivery, the general mood surrounding good, valuable ideas. I don’t know what to do to get people to stop, to get their heads out of their asses and stop saying embarrassing stuff like the quote above. 

Why are all the fun kid activities planned for the same weekend in this town? On September 22, we have a visit from Moana, on September 22-23 there’s a hot balloon festival, and on September 22-24 there’s an Art Fair. 

But there’s nothing at all in the weeks before and after. 

Ahead of a talk from conservative political commentator Ben Shapiro at UC Berkeley, a letter has been sent by the university to students, faculty and staff, stating that counseling services will be made available to those who feel “threatened or harrassed” by certain speakers. “We are deeply concerned about the impact some speakers may have on individuals’ sense of safety and belonging,” the letter states.

And you are going to tell me this place hasn’t turned into a total joke? They haven’t been able to teach or produce any research in the past decade, so they hypercompensate with these childish tantrums. It’s their recruitment strategy. They no longer can attract good scholars, so they try to recruit students who aren’t looking to learn. They cater to the rich brats with an exaggerated sense of grievance against the world that fails to celebrate their magnificence as much as they want. 

The farmer I tried to buy 2lbs of garlic from reacted as if I asked him to engage in unnatural sexual practiced with his tractor. Have people never heard of pickled garlic? This is rural Midwest, I thought people pickled garlic for fun. 

I did finally wrench my 2lbs of garlic from the farmer, by the way.

In 1932, Stalin was obsessed with getting money to fund the big war he was planning. As part of his money-making activities that year, he was not only starving 8,000,000 Ukrainians to death but also trying to attract Western tourists with posters like this one:

It looks like cars were allowed onto the Red Square back then but I don’t know if it’s true or part of poetic licence. Today they aren’t, of course. Neither are pedestrians unless there is a special dispensation. 

One of the very few good things about Facebook is this group called “Soviet Art.” They never say anything, just share art from the Soviet era.

This is a painting by artist Ivan Vladimirov titled “Tsar’s Box at the Theater” (1918).

I’d love to know what they were watching. 

Did Irma get to Fort Myers? What’s its strength right now?

I’m very worried. It’s a lot harder to accept when it’s a place you know well.