Today we had one of our identity dinners.

That’s what we call them. We experience our culture during the identity dinners.

Boiled potatoes, salted herring, smoked haddock, pickled cabbage, pickled mushrooms, pickled veg.

It was delicious but the consequences of this salt bomb will not be pretty.

That’s our identity. It feels good for a short while but then there’s heavy payback.

Poor students are so scared of saying “Merry Christmas” that they were greeting me with “Happy Monday!” yesterday.

OK, I’m cured.

Some more of this, and I’ll live forever.

All nations are made up. So are computers. So is dentistry. So is indoor plumbing. Air travel. Underwear. Cake. Houses. Shoes.

Many of the best things in life don’t arise spontaneously in nature. And we still love them and use them to survive.

Some nations are more rooted in geography and language than others. It doesn’t make them stronger than those that were cobbled together two minutes ago in another hemisphere than their roots are from. Look at the US. Look at Canada. These are massively successful nations that are completely made up.

“My nation is natural while yours is made up” is something that only absolute morons say.

N and I are sick, and after an intense day of entertaining Klara, all we can do is watch a Netflix series. We found a really calm one where nothing happens. It’s titled Virgin River, and it’s very non-woke.

It’s still very neoliberal, though. The characters’ neoliberal worldview is presented as utterly normal and commonsensical when in reality it’s nothing short of insane.

“I was never that serious about our relationship,” says a man who’s pushing 50 about the woman he’s been with for two years and who’s pregnant with his twins. “This was supposed to be just casual. I’m not in love with her.” This man is a positive character, the hero of the series. Viewers are expected to take in stride his assertion that a two-year relationship that culminated in a pregnancy is “not that serious”.

The show’s heroine starts a romantic relationship with this man while he’s expecting children with another woman, and again we are supposed to accept this as normal. We all know that in actual reality only the generationally unemployed meth addicts behave this way but in the show it’s the educated, propertied middle classes that exist in this relational messiness.

This worldview not only doesn’t lead to happiness, it also doesn’t result in accumulation of wealth. Flittering about in search of new loves and leaving behind a slew of broken relationships and unwanted children, is a recipe for poverty. We receive the message that this is the only normal way to live from every electrical appliance and every gadget, and it’s the most impoverishing worldview, both economically and emotionally, that anybody can imagine.

It’s 17°C here (summertime in Fahrenheit), we are all sick as dogs, and I’m planning a French menu for the Christmas Eve dinner. Beef bourguignon, mashed potatoes, herbed wild mushrooms (Polish), Brussels sprouts with bacon, and baked apples with currant jam.

The degree of supervision is often a more eloquent class indicator than mere income, which suggests that the whole class system is more a recognition of the value of freedom than a proclamation of the value of sheer cash. The degree to which your work is overseen by a superior suggests your real classes more accurately than the amount you take home from it.

Paul Fussell, Class

There’s definitely an enormous difference between getting up at 5 am because you have an early shift assigned to you and getting up at the same early hour because your self-imposed productivity schedule demands it. The difference is rooted in the fact that it’s a lot harder to choose it anew every day than to accept the externally imposed reality. What a society values is what’s rare.

The capacity to contain and discipline the self is the highest class marker today because it’s becoming a rare quality.

It is among members of the upper class that you have to refrain from making compliments, which are taken to be rude… The paying of compliments is a middle-class convention, for this class needs the assurance compliments provide. In the upper class there’s never any doubt of one’s value, and it all goes without saying.

Paul Fussell, Class

The CNN recognizes that a majority of voters, including immigrants, prefer Trump to Biden on immigration:

A growing number of Americans are dissatisfied with the level of immigration into the country, and a growing number wants it decreased.

Nearly 80% of voters want an increased effort-presence at the southern border to stop illegal immigration, according to a September Marquette poll. This includes a majority of Democrats, Republicans and independents… Many voters – immigrants among them – are, at a minimum, willing to look past Trump’s rhetoric. They believe Trump is more likely than Biden to do what they prefer when it comes to immigration and the border.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/22/politics/analysis-trump-biden-immigrants/index.html

The strategy of media blitzes about how “Trump said a racism / sexism / Hitlerism” doesn’t work any more. We’ve been hearing how Trump said something scandalous since 2015. It’s become boring. People want a dramatic reduction in sky-high immigration levels. And at least a recognition that the punishing inflation is real. Whoever is advising the non-existent Biden campaign that voters can be satisfied on both of these very pressing issues with stories about how Trump is Hitler and the economy is fantastic is making a gigantic mistake. Even the CNN is seeing it.

There is a plot that appears obsessively in a multitude of novels in English. Six 14-year-old friends (three boys and three girls) spend a summer together. It thwarts their development forever, and they dedicate the rest of their lives to moping over that one mega-important summer. The only variety that Colin Walsh brings to this plot is that the characters of Kala speak with Irish accents and spend most of the novel boozing it up. We’ve all heard the stereotype that the Irish drink but Walsh wants to make sure that the belief in an irrepressible Irish alcoholism is hammered into every reader’s head.

Out of the 6 former teenage friends, two are drinking themselves into a stupor on every page, one became a woke drone who makes even the most sober of readers think longingly about a large bottle of rye, two escaped both alcoholism and wokeness by sagely meeting an early death, and one grew up and became normal, which makes her an absolute freak to the other characters.

For 400 booze-and-snot-covered pages, we follow the characters through long and painful hangovers during which they try to squeeze out of their addled brains who was a bigger douche at age 14.

For the life of me, I’ll never understand this fixation on the teenage years. I find adulthood much more fun. I finished Kara because I had started it on the day before I became sick, and I had no energy to select a different book once the symptoms started. It’s not badly written, except that one of the characters addresses himself as “you” and uses “ye” when talking about himself and his group of friends. This kept reminding me of Kanye, especially since the character is an infantile and addled rock star.

The resolution is appropriately woke plus there are many somewhat garbled musings on how important it is to “be like a river and flow” and “not put up walls”. Usually, in a mystery you really want to find out who murdered the victim. In Kala, however, all I wondered is why the murderer didn’t get rid of all these mopey alkies at once and spare us the pain of reading about their war on liver health.