In the social realm what is conventionally meant by “progress”, now, is the direction of societal drift, whatever it may be. The aggregate of all those liberated, loosed souls, whose beneficent effect is presumed. Social Progressives concern themselves with identifying the general direction of this drift, so that they may then name it, and approve of it as, Progress.

From the Untethered Newswire

October 31, 2021, Stamford CT (UNS)

In an incident experts are calling unprecedented, a veteran daytime talk-show host died today when his soul fled his body.
“At approximately 12:59 this afternoon Maury Povich died of multiple complications resulting from the catastrophic, sudden detachment of his soul from his physical body,” a spokesperson at Stamford General Hospital read from a prepared statement hours later.

Povich, 76, collapsed during the taping of his television program Maury, which has been running in one form or another since 1991. In the recording of his final, incomplete show, disseminated on the Internet within minutes of his death, Povich appears to become disoriented, massaging his chest before taking a seat on the edge of the stage and waving off a concerned assistant. Then he loosens his tie and, smiling pensively, says, “you know I’ve done about a thousand of these paternity tests by now…”
At that point (warning: disturbing content at 10:58) his voice becomes unintelligible as he appears to physically implode. To the horror of his crew and the confusion of audience members, Povich collapsed in a gelatinous heap, unrecognizable as human, within seconds.

The studio audience reacted violently, as some bolted for the exits, some laughed at what they, perhaps, took to be a stunt, and others jockeyed to photograph or prod Povich’s remains. At one point a man, who had just learned he is the father of three children, can be seen trying to cut away a piece of the former host for a souvenir. Stamford police took several hours to contain the chaos, making several arrests.

Loquatious DeVonne, 36, a participant on the program, was nearby when it happened.
“His voice got all weird and blubbery, like he was underwater or something. Then he just went all like a big rubber baby, you know, that was all hollow inside. I was like damn!”

Dr. Hal Ashborne of the Institute for Scientific Theology, after examining the tape, said the incident is vindication for the religious belief in the existence of a soul as the “core element of the human person.” Dr. Ashborne played and analyzed the recording for reporters.
“Right here, just as he begins to collapse in on himself, we can clearly discern the implosion beginning in the chest, proving a longtime, nearly universal human intuition wrongly discredited by science–that of a soul extant as a physical reality within the human breast. And then here, precisely at 10:59:06, you can actually see Mr. Povich’s soul leaving his body.”

Ms. DeVonne and others could not confirm the soul’s departure from their eyewitness accounts.
“All I know is it got real smelly up in there right when he fall down and he kind of made this loud fart sound.” She said.

In an historic news conference scheduled for tomorrow, several of the world’s top scientists and theologians reportedly will join to assert the death has demonstrated conclusively the existence of the soul as a “physical and ontological reality.”
“I know. I couldn’t believe it either.” Richard Dawkins, celebrity atheist, said, shaking his head. “But what other explanation is there?”

The debate over the nature of the soul has only just begun, however, according to Dr. Samuel Mitchell, head of Connecticut University’s theology department.
“The question remains as to the disposition of that soul. The soul is known to depart the body following death, not to precipitate or cause death. What became of it? Was it destroyed? And if it was, then has the existence of the soul really been proven? The soul is supposed to be immortal and immutable. Or is it subject, with enough time and effort, to degradation the same way a biological entity is? The question remains: can a man lose his soul?”

Dr. Mitchell reassured those concerned about meeting a similar fate. Povich was an extraordinary case, he said.
“One thing is clear. After years of intense, unremitting assault upon the seat of his own humanity with utter disregard for its well-being, Povich has unintentionally proved the existence of the soul, providing us here with the first recorded image of it. But it required concerted effort over a lifetime. It’s unlikely there are very many people capable of scaring their soul from their own body, even if they tried.”

Mitchell suggested the death of Jerry Springer, another veteran daytime talk-show host, may have to be reexamined in light of today’s event. According to a police inquiry, Springer was killed in 2017 when a stage-light fell on him during a staple of his show, his “final thoughts” on the day’s program. Yet several in the studio audience insisted they saw a lightning-like electric current passing from somewhere overhead and through Mr. Springer, who was reduced to ash in seconds. Controversy has surrounded that incident and was exacerbated when the recording of the program turned up missing. Mitchell isn’t prepared to link the two deaths, but insists the degree and nature of Springer’s injuries have not been adequately explained and should be reevaluated.
“This was no lighting accident.”

Birth Fangs of Democracy

Too bad for Hillary Clinton, so proud to stand on “the soil of a free Tripoli”, so humbly furtive in arriving there, as our declining prestige (born largely of just the sort of intervention she was celebrating) warrants yet another secret Mideast visit from the Secretary of State (shuttle diplomacy has given way to touch and go diplomacy). Consequently, she just-missed the world’s newest democracy taking its first tentative baby steps. They’re so cute at that age!
And I’m sure they’re just getting started. Maybe Ms. Clinton can drop in on her way home (in secret, of course), to have her picture taken with the corpse, trophy-hunt style. Hurry Hil, that thing’s got to be ripening quickly.

The hush was almost deafening

From the Apotheosis:

The statue, representing a “Stone of Hope,” sits forward from a “Mountain of Despair.”

In reality it’s made to appear as if MLK has split the mountain in two and is morphing out of the granite like some great, sullen chthonic deity. After complete societal collapse the site will be suitable for virgin sacrifices and the like.

Visitors pass through the mountain on their way to King’s statue and an expanse along the basin rimmed with an inscription wall covered with stone carvings of some of his most famous quotes. The four-acre area will also feature the iconic cherry blossom trees that draw thousands of tourists to the Mall each spring.
“The very first time that I came to the site, I was almost overwhelmed,” Martin Luther King III said. “I really was impressed by this artist. He was able to capture the essence of my dad.”

What does he know?

Sculptor Ed Dwight, who has made seven statues of King, objects to the memorial’s depiction of the icon — and to the artist chosen to create it.

“This idea of having this 30-foot-tall sculpture of this man, and this confrontational look, he would not appreciate that, because that was not him,” Dwight argues.

Dwight is a black American artist, which might have seemed to make him an ideal candidate for the job, but he doesn’t have access to a Chinese quarry and the indentured laborers who come with it.

You try steal happy family lucky civil rights! And cigarette lighter! Good for you we no white racist! Stop looking at girl! Up against wall!

[Chinese artist Lei Yixin], for his part, said America did not have sole claim on King.
“Martin Luther King is not only a hero of America, he’s also a hero of the world,” he said.

They could not find a capable black sculptor. They would not have a white one. Or they simply didn’t want to pay a decent wage. So the Chinese, who disdain democracy and embrace ethnic nationalism, who despise blacks and view America’s experience with multiculturalism and diversity as “chaos” largely because of the civil rights movement, who have contributed nothing to the advancement of individual or minority rights–they have the same, or greater claim to the civil democratic tradition than an American of European descent, whose forefathers have been dying for centuries to advance the cause.

A Communist Chinese national creating an image of an African American to harry European Americans about legal and political rights. And none dare note the ironic affront. This is the inverted empire of American multiculturalism, where hypocritical foreigners use the perverted language of civil rights to impose upon us an oppressive mediocrity.

He’s all yours, Mr. Lei. But just between you and me, he ain’t really all that. Then again, I suspect you knew that already.

Gulls on Parade

Is it me or is the Left adopting a National Socialist aesthetic? Here’s the president’s iEnemies site (note the link may re-direct to Obama’s main campaign site):

Report lese majesty here. Or else.
Bringing to mind the SPLC’s longtime paranoid theme for its Hatewatch. An interrogating eye emerging from pixellated obscurity immobilizes the viewer with its aggressive gaze:

Jeepers, creepers, it’s the virtual panopticon! “Here’s looking at you. And you. And you…”
And this poster from a minor Occupier faction apparently isn’t parody:

The Starbucks Putsch.

Then of course there’s Martin Luther King as the Mall’s forbidding doorman:

“Free at last? Nah, man. There’s a cover.”

Its heroic gigantism calls to mind Hitler and Speer’s ambitions for Berlin. As sculpture, its scale makes modest the far superior works of National Socialism’s Arno Breker (Richard Spencer on the subject here). At least Breker’s heroes gaze romantically off into the distance or benevolently upon the people.
The Left’s triumphalist/paranoid style is incapable of benevolence, only condemnation or condescension. After all these years it’s still a mirroring response to fascism, substituting contrition in place of achievement as the noblest of individual or national ideals (that will show those mouldering Nazis!).
So MLK must glower forever downward in sullen, lizard-lidded reproach upon generations of American schoolchildren touring their capital; no matter how many more disappointments come from the promise of civil rights, whatever degradations remain for us, a maudlin tyranny of the mediocre etched crudely in stone.
This exceptionalism is distinguished from the fascist brand by the accusatory, inward focus of its aggression. I don’t see how this recommends it. America must now phrase its boasts in the fawning language of minority rights; the most craven imperial adventure or corporate mission adopts it to advantage. Having made a fetish of contrition our sins become magnified, numerous–and jealously guarded by those for whom they have proven lucrative. This is imperialism for the postmodern Left. This is its nationalism. Why and where else would the cultural elite assent to such confident, earnest kitsch?
This is why we elected Barack Obama, our Cipher-in-Chief. After the crimes, humiliations and, finally, the economic collapse of the Bush administration we lost confidence and faith; we turned with unrecognized nostalgia to what we’ve been conditioned to see as our greatest achievement and finest hour–the black civil rights movement. This is what America does right! This was what we did in our uncorrupted past. Pastoralism for Progressives. That impulse is spent. Multiculturalism, unchallenged by anyone in power and vulnerable only to reason, empiricism and history, has nowhere now to go but reaction when confronted by change or critique.
When Barack Obama slighted American exceptionalism (a perfectly defensible thing) he wasn’t being honest. He does not reject American exceptionalism as such; he merely improvises on it. Obama has reminded us time and again what is exceptional about America: him. Only America, remember, could produce the wonder that is he.
Obama is an improvisation on our theme of national greatness, made incarnate. How dare they. The president reveres American exceptionalism.
The MLK monument is a fair representation of the now cynical civil rights narrative after decades of black failure–perpetual condemnation from an obscenely aggrandized figure.
If a tyrant pays himself tribute on such a scale, its purpose is clear. Those beyond his reach denounce his ambition and mock his vanity. Just who does this man think he is? We call him mad.
Likewise, just who does the Left think MLK is? Whose madness is this? What is their ambition?
Are we beyond its reach? Because in this curious case, American citizens have little more freedom than that tyrant’s subjects to meaningful dissent.
Black Americans remain atop the hierarchy of grievance by virtue of their now proud helplessness and dysfunction. By achieving political success by virtue of failure everywhere else, black America has created a disastrously effective demagogic model, giving impetus to an ever-increasing host of ethnic and other factions mimicking the chauvinism and hostility of the black political identity. For this they pay their tribute in return, defending the narrative; but like resentful mafiosi kicking back upstairs to a decrepit godfather, they jockey among themselves, bide their time.
Had black America risen, as was expected, to the extraordinary, continuing measures adopted on its behalf at the advent of the civil rights movement, achieving a true equality, the movement might have passed into history a success. But this hasn’t happened, so we’ve adapted by declaring the old expectations quaint and the original ideal–equality before the law–racist, burning the boats that brought us here.
Like the fascists before them, with whom they remain obsessed, our generation’s revolutionaries co-opted their nation’s racial mythology with disregard equally for religion, custom or decency. Revolution quickly became rule, and here in its most deliberate artistic expression it makes of MLK a static, reactionary bulwark against dissent, built to last a thousand years. The movement, like its monument, is derivative. Worse than a crime, a cliche.
What damn poor timing for MLK’s apotheosis though, with the economy going to hell and youthful black lynch mobs cleansing the streets. In the present those insensate eyes, that petulant scowl, the schoolteacher’s accusatory stance are an unearned and dishonest condemnation issuing from mediocrity and failure. Fitting for our inverted empire and its hectoring project of division and displacement directed upon its own. The MLK monument is an opportunity, a teachable moment as they say, to reflect on the wisdom and justice of that project.

The Roost is on the Left

Making themselves to home.

The latest alienated, homicidal incompetent to personalize the sort of racial pandering the president is presently cranking to eleven for the 2012 campaign was shot and killed by police today. And we’re off:

“He used to do so much for the community. Something must have happened to make him flip out like this”, said Pastor Oscar Dace of Bible Way Christian Center. “Everybody just can’t believe that this has happened”.

Recall Omar Thornton’s (no doubt to his mind heroic) final testament:”this is a racist place”. What child-like confidence he had in its power to absolve him of cold-blooded murder (racism is the universal moral solvent, present in all human agency); that confidence was quickly validated by the unconscionable coverage that followed.

The comparison to Thornton isn’t apt, though. Omar was an apolitical dullard. Shareef Allman has been identified by his friends and neighbors as a “pillar of the community” and, with the grim-comic oblivousness only black Americans can manage, a “kind-hearted mediator of conflict” who hosted a public access show and even got to interview Jesse Jackson on camera. This was a black man politically active in his community, an intellectual and emotional imbiber of the Narrative,* exacting retribution for, as he sees it, discrimination. How much more explicit does racial-political violence have to get for the topic to be broached by the High and Serious of the media?

*At this point I don’t know the level and nature of Allman’s activism. Sure would like to get a look at those public-access shows (the crazy sh-t you find yourself saying!).

update: I just got my wish. This was not a politically sophisticated fellow. A standard issue idiot. Met a hundred of them. God help us.

A Belated Introduction to Your President

New and improved, 10/4
Updates below

The hits just keep coming for the Wonder Brother.

I discount the president’s more explicit race-baiting; he’s never more full of shit than when he’s adopting that phony gospel intonation for such as the naive souls at Trinity United. Sinister as it is, the president’s fervor is depressingly dull. He remains the void he set out to be–only we no longer project onto His Blankness the illusion of–whatever it was the liberals were on about–but now its disillusion. The former magnified his image, the latter reduces it. And still we ask–who is this man? His life has been about contriving an identity–now he has none.

The world’s been turned upside down: now for advantage one assumes a black rather than white identity. But it’s still true that you can pass but you cannot hide. Your life is a loop, you come from a mother and return to one. That’s the inexorable pull that draws us to authentic origins–religion, ethnicity, family–as we age. To where will you return, Mr. President? Will there be anything there?

There is nothing exceptional behind that visage, other than a yearning ego, a sort of psychological greed. Obama never expected to do what his acolytes took for granted: to reconcile black and white America. He wasn’t here to change anything, but to keep the movement on track, tightening the cordon around the white boys. That’s what we get for being so good to him in Hawaii–perhaps we should have bullied him like the Indonesians. He took to the White House the plan and model he’d had for Chicago: the implementation and solidification of a permanent non-white regime, maintaining power by distributing your wealth throughout a network of identity-advocacy groups in league with corrupt business interests. What an asshole.

The president and his attorney general are small men (preceded by small men) who cannot see far. Whatever imagination they have is spent on their private psychodramas. But Holder and Obama’s aggressively racial-political Justice Department letting those buffoons off for their voter-intimidation stunt* looks more enticingly actionable than ever. Darrell Issa just lost control of his bowels.

*update: that is in light of these new allegations of one “Malik Shabazz”* signed in as a visitor to the White House. Imagine what a Nixon meets Elvis moment that might have been. I’ll pay good money to any reporter who’ll ask: “Mr. President, did Mr. Shabazz wear the fascist get-up for his tour?”

*correction: not new at all, and previously explained by the White House as “another” Malik Shabazz, along with another Bill Ayers, when releasing the logs as a transparency gesture (presumably a separate visit–I mean, if you brought too many of the more ferocious elements of Obama’s base together at the same time it’d resemble the bad-guy casting call in Blazing Saddles, complete with scowling reconquistos declaring their contempt for the rule of law).

That voodoo you do. BHO exhorts the multicultural minions of Project Vote: “To stamp out runaway decency in the West…”

I wonder if anyone has seen the actual signatures, which might be subjected to verification–because if even the absurd appellation M. Shabazz can belong to anyone now (I mean how far can you take this: “Oh, that’s another Bernie Madoff“?), then the gesture’s transparency only reveals it to be hollow.

“Log book? We don’t sign no steenking log book!”