The American Palace

Maybe we are beyond WEIRD

You want to know what’s wrong with America today? I’ll tell you what’s wrong. Marie Antoinette and Louis XIV. A lot of people say it’s white privilege this or deep state that or rigged elections. Nah. It’s bigger than that, and it’s deeply embedded in the very core of American philosophy. It’s our natural rights.

A Rude, Obnoxious & Heretical Premise
What the Founders understood, because they grew up under sovereign princes, is how royals considered themselves with regard to their God given endowments. So these Founders calculated that if we watered those endowments down a little bit, we could call them ‘rights’ and have a bigger slice of that power pie than ever before in history. It could be justified by the same kind of Reason that built the Enlightenment. All of us have a soul, that is in Christendom. So why don’t we have more of what these Papist dynasties have? Yeah. So the American experiment, in my speculation, my entirely reasonable speculation, was just the government version of the Reformation. I can say that because I have God given reason. So yeah that’s circular and self-justifying, but then again so is having an immortal soul worthy of the attention of a Supreme Being.

I’m just saying.

Elite Lifestyles
So what is it that Marie and Louis have in common with the rest of us, the Peasants? Not a goddamned thing. What they have in common with Americans, that specific group of Americans who are the 15%, the Rulers and the Geniuses, is that they have lifestyles. If you have a lifestyle, or if you presume that something about your life is actually stylistic, then you are putting on the very same airs as Thomas Jefferson and the royals who preceded him. You righteously claim almighty provenance for your uncommon facility with X. You say ‘Constitutional Right’ but you still presume that the Founders and the Constitution are right with God, with the laws of physics and with the rules of the Universe and thus are consequentially and unimpeachably irrevocable. So you have a claim to the same greatness as kings and queens and popes and Caesars and everybody all the way back to the first chimp who flipped a femur into the sky and discovered its use as a club. Every society ever said “We The People”. Americans made it something else entirely.

Understand that in the same way Jefferson and the Founders could not imagine the Manhattan Project or the Five Eyes, one cannot fault them their ambitions. Whatever lofty goals you might have that lends you the power to defy George III, surely there is nothing wrong with invoking the name of God. But when you become something more godlike in your power, the silence of god and the reverence of the people are insufficient reigns on national transgressions.

When you live in a palace, you have court jesters, dangerous liaisons, political intrigues, and a menagerie of sycophants who, outside of royal protections wouldn’t last long out with the rough and tumble crowds of peasants. The protections offered by the crown are inconsistent arrangements executed along lines of shifting hierarchies, re-interpretations of tradition and spontaneous hysterias. Or as we like to say these days “It’s trending.”

What is this palace I’m talking about? It’s your media diet - everything you read, with few exceptions, on social media. It’s the full set of expectations we in the middle expect of ourselves in America. Every popular actor or singer is a slightly more perfected version of ourselves. Who among us doesn’t think that with a year off from our job, we could cook as well as Guy Fieri and be just as good a celeb. With a little makeup and a briefing, couldn’t we do a better interview of Morgan Freeman than Whoopi? Couldn’t we all write an episode of NCIS or Scandal? What are you sending your kids to Ivy League schools for, if not? This is our inheritance. This is America, dammit!

As I’ve said in something of a pissy mood before is that we’re spending an inordinate amount of energy politicizing and punishing each other over our studied opinions on Israel. But what’s trending inside the palace has little bearing on what’s useful outside of the palace. But how many of us go outside? Why bother? If it ain’t in America what should we care? How can our declarations of what is and is not problematic matter on the other side of the border? Americans in the chatting class can always fight each other, like James Carville and Mary Matalin used to do. What would say are the chances of Joy Behar and Tucker Carlson getting together?

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Two Nations
This afternoon, I’m in Providence, Rhode Island catching up with my sister. She gives me a refreshing set of thoughts to consider. But being about ten years younger, her children are still not fully fledged. So she’s catching the edges of the Woke mind virus in exclusive private schools. Her youngest is in her senior year of high school in one of those places that resemble Hogwarts except with a higher percentage of parents like the Malfoys. She calls them The Handwringers - they being the ones breaking their affluent necks to insure their offspring are not overly troubled or uncomfortable in their educational experience. “Well at least they’re not in public school.” (Not said by Sister) It occured to me as we cruised through the leafy suburbs of the Eastside and continued that vein of conversation, that we are heading towards a domestic sickness we have seen before. Separate and unequal.

So here is our way out, but it’s not going to be pretty. Public school kids will soon be adults. Private school kids will soon be adults. With any luck it will be the Christian kids, the ones who played football, who will lead us through the conflict that’s up and coming. Those who indulge the palace intrigues of navigation through their virtual worlds will try to impose their will on those who live where safety glass regularly is in the streets. Many noses will be punched. Many billy clubs will be swung. Many avocado toast eateries will go bankrupt. Many children will grow up uneducated. The principle works a little something like Race To the Top. Honestly, did it work? Please read the point system for funding. Nowhere does it demand that students actually learn.

• Great teachers and leaders (138 total points)

• State success factors (125 total points)

• Standards and assessments (70 total points)

• General selection criteria (55 total points)

• Turning around the lowest achieving schools (50 total points)

• Data systems to support instruction (47 total points)

All sides will claim their rights and all will invoke the Constitution, God and the Laws of the Universe. I’ll get through it. Will we all? Be prepared for Cringe.