"Here's a talk between Bill Kristol and James Carville on the 2020 election and what came after. You'd think the two would be ecstatic, exultant. Trump is gone. The Dems are spraying money on citizens like cheap perfume on a whore. White men make up 14% of the class at the many Ivy League colleges. Good times. But these two are somber.. Bill Kristol keeps begging Carville to tell him where the Democrats are going and Carville seems to think the Democrats have a flimsy, rickety coalition that will fall apart if the Dems keep saying 'people of color' and 'Latinix' and keep canceling people of whom the Amherst College English department disapproves. Carville seems to regard Biden as the man standing between the Dems and the deluge. Perhaps 'buyers remorse' isn't quite the term I'm looking for - maybe 'Belshazzar's Feast.'"
Writes Wild Swan in the email. I tried watching the video....
... but the video and audio on Carville's side is horrible. Unwatchable. Is he filming from a laptop on his lap? What a ridiculous place for a laptop! I don't know why the audio is also herky-jerky, and bad audio with his idiosyncratic manner of speaking is unintelligible. And that's quite aside from whether he's making good points (and good sense).
But — lo and behold — there's a transcript! I can skim, and I can cut and paste:
KRISTOL: You mentioned defund the police, you mentioned identity politics, cancel culture, whatever you want to call these things, but how worried are you about that complex of issues? Some the attacks may be unfair, some may be fair, but the Democrats, parts of the Democratic party coalition, giving enough oxygen to that stuff that allows Republicans to just scream and yell about it for two years or four years and really have an effect. You think it did have an effect 2020, certainly down ballot, right? The police stuff?
CARVILLE: It did. It did. It is the thing that I’m most worried about. And because, first of all, who they are. I don’t know of anybody, and I talked to, I live in New Orleans, okay? It’s no secret. I don’t know of a single person that thinks of themselves as a “person of color.” I really don’t. I had Ruben Gallego, who’s a Democratic congressman from Arizona, and we did much better in Arizona than we did in Texas or Florida, and he said, “I’ve never heard anybody use the word LatinX.” And that’s just not the way people talk. It’s not what they — It’s just not the way. When people hear that — And it’s a little different because when you’re in the middle of it, you hear it so much it doesn’t stand out. When you’re out in the rest of the country — It was like the janitor at Smith College. That story. I give Tom [?] the credit for running the story, but there is a feeling — And I got to tell you, I’m a supportive, ardent Democrat, passion and everything, but the English faculty at Amherst has too much power in this party. They really do. And they come up with all of these different things and when people see that, they don’t like it because it’s not what their life is. I think Biden does a — Congratulations, he stays out of that.
"Belshazzar's Feast" is a fantastic Rembrandt painting, showing the Old Testament story about "the handwriting on the wall":
The Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar looted the Temple in Jerusalem and has stolen the sacred artefacts such as golden cups. His son Belshazzar used these cups for a great feast where the hand of God appeared and wrote the inscription on the wall prophesying the downfall of Belshazzar's reign. The text on the wall says "mene, mene, tekel, upharsin." Biblical scholars interpret this to mean "God has numbered the days of your kingdom and brought it to an end; you have been weighed in the balances and found wanting; your kingdom is given to the Medes and Persians."
FROM THE EMAIL: mezzrow writes:
The memes gush from this like a fountain.
1. The consiglieres of two warring dynasties unite and plot together after years of conflict to hold on to their waning power as they age and die.
2. Have any members of the English faculty at Amherst failed to be informed of this exchange? If any are persons of color does this exchange become racist in fact, regardless of intent? Will this result in the cancellation of Kristol, Carville, or any persons adjacent to them? (stay tuned, this is what I’m watching.)
3. The sheer boomerness of the technical incompetence of Carville is a delight to those youngsters who would dismiss him. They forget that he would happily watch their bones bleach in the sun before he would give them one ounce of his consideration. Treat it like Chin Gigante’s bathrobe and beware, youngsters.
4. The biblical reference is timely on this Sabbath morning – I have long suspected that the winners of the last election are staring at the mess of pottage they currently hold in a suspension of disbelief. If they get to write the history of this, we’ll have one future. If they fail, we’ll have a different future. I say WE as if I’ll be here to see it, but life is filled with possibilities. We’re just passengers now, more than ever.
Great comment. I added the link.
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