Clarissa's Blog

This has been a consistent policy of the Biden administration, and I’ve done God knows how many facepalms when hearing how Biden is pro-Ukraine.

Before the left-leaning readers start feeling superior to the poor, facile right-wingers from the previous post, I need to remind them that their side believes that women can have penises and that the SATs were racistically manipulated to make black students fail them. Even if you personally don’t believe it, your side does. (And if you do personally believe it and still read my blog, you are an exceptional person with an extraordinary tolerance for differences of opinion.)

So sit this one out, my dudes. Your side manipulates right-wingers well but it manipulates you much better.

Back in 2014, the Obama administration silenced the reports on the damage inflicted on American embassy workers in Cuba because these reports went against the Cuban policy of the administration. Obama considered the pivot on Cuba to be his signature foreign policy accomplishment, and the wonderfulness of Cuba was promoted widely in subservient media.

The Obama policy on Cuba proved to be a gigantic fail but Obama was never accused of playing nice with dictatorial regimes because the media love Obama. Similarly, his policy of ingratiating himself with Russia and disarming Ukraine was never condemned or publicly blamed for the current war. Nobody ever hears “Obama” and “Ukraine war” in the same sentence, even though the war started with Obama and was aggressively facilitated by Obama and his actions not only in Eastern Europe but also towards Iran.

Because my memory doesn’t get erased every night, I remember all this very well. Sadly, most people’s memories do get erased.

Today, the dumber among right-wingers are letting themselves get baited into taking this legacy of terrible mistakes away from Obama and putting it on the shoulders of the Right. The next step is probably arguing that Hillary Clinton made no mistakes in Benghazi and no Americans died there.

One of the worst, most shocking things done by the Obama administration – and look who’s defending it. Obama’s best friend, the idiot, easily manipulated Right. Instead of finally talking about what Obama did wrong, we are defending him.

You really got to be. It’s Great Lent for the Orthodox, so I won’t finish the sentence. But you know what I mean.

Unless your brain gets erased overnight, in which case forget it.

I take back what I said about Haidt’s book. I’m very sheltered, so I thought there was a broad consensus that portable screens are terrible for children. But apparently there are many people who still pretend they aren’t.

One truly despairs sometimes. That adult people would openly argue that screens promote “social connections” and that “climate and inequality” drive depression rates is extremely disappointing.

Good luck convincing these folks to put down their devices at least to spare their own children.

“Trump’s relative is co-chairing the RNC! Corruption!” say the same people whose presidential nominee two cycles ago was a former president’s wife.

It’s either OK or not OK to place relatives into cushy political jobs. The whole Kennedy / Clinton / Bush phenomenon is either acceptable or it isn’t. I’d say it isn’t but the American public clearly pees itself with delight over this sort of thing. So why exactly are we supposed to be upset now after trying to elect people with the same last name time and again to the highest office in the land?

Vance has been completely pussy-whipped by his woke wife. At first, it looked cute how much he adored and deferred to her but now she’s gotten him to parrot all the far-left anti-American slogans. I feel sad for him but it’s something that often happens in men with absent or distant mothers. They appoint their wives to the role of “the good mommy” and self-infantilize into lisping little boys.

People will ask where all these great Canadian books I’m recommending suddenly come from. But it’s really simple. There’s a literary award in Canada called “the Scotiabank Giller Prize.” The banking industry in Canada is heavily monopolistic, so it’s always a “bank something” for every event.

The prize is good, though. Yes, it’s awarded to a fair amount of diverse crap. All of those novels about “the plight of the Armenian-Laotian-Quechua immigrant community in Canada.” These novels are all identical and deeply embarrassing, and I say it as a member of an immigrant community in Canada. Immigrants are typecast as having to write about being immigrants, and their novels always feature a pair of hard-working, earnest parents who want to preserve their cultural heritage, a rebellious teenager who just wants to fit in, an aunt with a spicy personal life that scandalizes the earnest parents but intrigues the rebellious teenager, and the wise old grandma who is traumatized by a long ago famine / civil war / genocide or some other atrocity.

I dislike these books not only because they are monotonous but because they make it sound like all immigrants do is sit there, thinking about how they are immigrants. And it’s stupid. One does a million things that have nothing to do with how one emigrated 20 years ago.

But once you weed out the books representing increasingly outlandish (pun intended) immigrant communities, the Giller Prize has some excellent authors. I’m discovering that Canadian literature is very different from US literature. This doesn’t mean it’s better or worse. It’s simply different. And I like it.

So prepare. I’ll probably be at it for a while.

This book tricked me into thinking it’s a Canadian version of The Diary of a Provincial Lady or Excellent Women. It’s prefaced by an article about the author, presenting him as this sweet, bespectacled teacher type who writes cute little books about daily life in picturesque villages. The novel is set in 1934-8, it’s narrated in the form of a diary and letters between sisters, and I prepared to have a cuteness attack of the kind one enjoys while reading E. M. Delafield.

Yeah, well, nah. The novel takes every convention of the “spinster of this parish” genre and tears it to shreds, together with the poor spinsters. Richard B. Wright is some sort of an incredible Canadian genius I never heard about until now. He writes about female loneliness and female longing with extraordinary realism and terrible cruelty. I’m not sure why he set his novel a century ago. Clara Callan and the rest of the sad spinsters from the novel would have been exactly the same today. But maybe that is the point.

It’s a brilliant novel, people, and it’s very mean. One hopes that the ending could offer some hope but the author added an afterword that crushes that dream, too. Also, Richard B. Wright visited our planet from a faraway galaxy where political correctness had never been invented. Dude had absolutely no idea what he was expected to think about female empowerment and all that. Clara Callan merited its author every literary award in Canada when it was published in 2001, and it definitely deserves the accolades.

Highly, highly recommended. Canadian literature rules.

P.S. The digital version is at $0.10 on Amazon right now. I promise it will be the best dime you’ll ever spend.

By a beautiful coincidence, my book came out exactly one year from the day I wrote the first 269 words of it. It took me a year to write and 20 years to prepare for writing this book because the very first reading I did for it happened 20 years ago.

Yes, I know how many words I wrote and on which project at any given day in the past decade. This is an answer to the question of how to write a lot and be productive.

So yes, it’s out, hard-cover, 336 pages, and I’m sensationally happy.

This has been happening since 2014, and the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations have gone to extraordinary lengths to silence the damage inflicted on US citizens who were simply doing their jobs.

What’s particularly curious here is that the three administrations were working in unison, betraying their citizens with zero qualms.

Remember: political partisanship is a mental defect.