History Will Absolve Me

The Reaper has been busy this year.  Prince.  David Bowie.  Leonard Cohen.  The Democratic Party.  The Republican Party.  The age-old belief that Presidents should not be pussy-grabbers.  And now, Fidel Castro. The man who bedeviled 11 U.S. Presidents apparently could not escape old age as easily as he escaped CIA assassins.

Castro was a great man, but great does not mean good, and history is littered with examples of great promise in young leaders degenerating into narcissism, dictatorship, and decay.  He was a man of a different time, a different world, the last leader of his generation.  Many of his contemporaries (Kennedy, Che, Khrushchev) died a half-century ago.  But Fidel endured.  He was the Bob Dylan of politics, whereas Kennedy, Che, and Khrushchev were the Hendrix, the Cooke, the Lennon.

The question, of course, is what did he endure for?  Castro was a revolutionary, but revolutionaries inevitably become conservatives if they live long enough, which most of them do not.

Fidel was a mass of contradictions.  Freedom fighter.  Tyrant.  Great driver of physical and educational leaps forward for his people.  Apocalyptic Egomaniac.  This is a man who absolutely improved the health, education, and dignity of his people, but also a man who was prepared to consign them all to a nuclear holocaust.

If there were every any such thing as a good Communist, it was Fidel.  But there isn't. 

Because of Fidel's total devotion to his people (whether his people wanted that devotion or not), Cuba has a higher literacy rate than the U.S., a longer life expectancy, and a lower child mortality rate.  This is remarkable.  But was it necessary for him to hold jealously to absolute power for decade upon decade to achieve those very real advances?

And when he was finally forced by physical infirmity to at least publicly hand over power several years ago, was there really nobody on the island better suited for the job than his geriatric "younger" brother?

Finally, some new blood!

Every revolution has its Stalin and its Trotsky.  The Stalin figure has a Machiavellian focus on preserving and strengthening the revolution in his own country.  The Trotsky figure has an idealistic (but no less bloody) obsession with spreading the revolution worldwide.  Fidel was Cuba's Stalin.  Che was its Trotsky.  Trotsky met his end via ice-pick, courtesy of Stalin.  Che met his end via abandonment, courtesy of Fidel.

Fidel wasn't Stalin of course; he didn't murder his former brother-in-arms, but he made no effort to save him, either.  Even 50 years ago, less than 10 years into the Revolution, it was clear that Fidel was about Fidel.  He saw himself as indistinguishable from Cuba itself, which may sound selfless and romantic at first, but is shown to be incredibly selfish and dangerous over time.

One cannot assess Fidel, of course, without assessing the United States.  Our Cold War Cuba policy, in large part, made Fidel what he was.  Perhaps without our obsessive enmity towards him, he would have opened up Cuba earlier.  But it is also true that Castro thrived on that enmity, and did not hesitate to label any Cuban critic of his dictatorship as a CIA stooge, a traitor to the fatherland.

While Castro has far, far, far less blood on his hands than any other Communist dictator (they call that "damning with faint praise"), he followed the worst instincts of Communism.  It is a testament to his genuine popularity among his people that was able to hold on to power for so long and with such comparably little bloodshed.

Castro's impact on American history is monumental.  Were it not for Castro, President Kennedy probably would not have been assassinated, as Lee Harvey Oswald was motivated in part by his delusional conviction that he was protecting the Cuban Revolution by murdering John Kennedy.

Turns out the CIA just gave him a really, really, really, really slow-acting poison

 If Kennedy had lived, it is entirely possible that no American combat troops would have been sent to Vietnam...

He doesn't look like a world-wrecker, does he?

The 2000 presidential election came down to Florida, and one of the reasons Florida was so close was due to Cuban-Americans' anger at the Clinton administration for sending Elian Gonzalez back to Cuba after his mother essentially kidnapped him from his father in Cuba and died in the desperate flight to freedom aboard a rubber raft.  No Fidel obsession, no George W. Bush.

What could go wrong?

Fidel Castro's ultimate legacy, of course, has yet to be written.  He will truly be measured by how his people fare after him.  Did he lay a foundation for Cuba to emerge as a free, prosperous, and independent nation?  Or did he retard the ability of his country to take its place in the world by holding onto power for so long?

Unlike other dictators, it is clear to me that Fidel was motivated primarily by a love for his people.  It is also clear, however, that across the decades that love may have become inseparable and indistinguishable from his love for himself.

Goodnight, Sweet Prince

Our culture lost a great voice today.

For those of you who are distressed by the election of an authoritarian mouth-breather, or who are facing any other tribulation that seems to stand like an impenetrable wall in front of you, remember what Leonard said.

"There is a crack, a crack, in everything.  That's how the light gets in.  That's how the light gets in."

Hallelujah.

First or Final Thoughts

Where to begin?  I have so many thoughts that rather than trying to order them coherently into a narrative, I'm just going to go Jackson Pollack with a few central themes in no particular order.

1.  STOP CALLING EVERYONE WHO DISAGREED WITH YOU A RACIST.  The outcome of this election does not prove that white people are racist.  That is a hateful, slanderous and intellectually lazy response and I am unfortunately not surprised that the left is framing this event in those terms.  Here is a fairly standard response from the left following the election:

I barely got any sleep last night. It wasn’t because the outcome of this election made me realize how many morons populate this country, I already knew that.

There are, of course, thousands of more examples of this attitude.  And people like the author of the quote above, who are so smugly certain of their moral and intellectual superiority, are part of the reason this happened.

The left needs to stop acting like white people are some weird alien race to be studied but never fully understood.  And by framing Trump's supporters as all white (false) and then using "white" as interchangeable with "racist" or "uneducated" or "angry", the left is guilty of the worst type of projection.  People who are obsessed with calling millions of people racist are maybe, just maybe, projecting what is in their own hearts.

Working class whites weren't racist when they voted for Obama, right?  But they magically became racist if they opposed Obamacare.  Then in 2012 they became un-racist again to re-elect Obama.  Now they're racist again because they voted for Trump. 

The left treats working class white folks with such utter contempt that it is really shocking that they did not see the inevitable backlash.  People tend to resent being called racist, sexist, and simple-minded.  That should not surprise us.

Well over 90% of black folks voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012.  The left did not call them racist.  In 2016, black turnout fell by millions, perhaps because there were no black folks on either ballot.  The left did not call them racist.  That would be stupid.  Black folks have been voting for white folks their whole lives.

I say to the left: if you want to convince working class whites to vote for you, stop slandering them in the most vile terms.  Stop nominating people who tell white folks that they "all have implicit bias".  It's insulting, it's disgusting, and it helped get Trump elected, which is precisely what the left did NOT want.

 2.  THE MEDIA WERE WRONG, AND THAT MAY HAVE SUPPRESSED HILLARY VOTERS FROM TURNING OUT.  Most establishment media outlets had the chances of a Clinton victory on the eve of the election at over 90%.  Even without the benefit of hindsight, that was absurd.

The media saw what they wanted to see.  They took Trump as a joke, gave him billions in free media for their own financial interest, all the while insisting he could not win and assuring people that Hillary's chances of losing were infitesimal.  They were wrong.  And in being so wrong, they may have convinced millions of Democrats that they had this election in the bag and that, therefore, one could be forgiven for not voting after a long day at work.

This helped get Trump elected, which is precisely what the media did NOT want.

3.  HILLARY CLINTON WON THE POPULAR VOTE.  This needs to stop happening.  It didn't happen for the entire 20th century, but this is now the second time in the last five elections that we get a president who won fewer votes than his opponent.  Not good.  The electoral college is a vestigial tale that needs to be cut off. 

The Republican candidate has won the popular vote once in the past seven elections, and then just barely (Bush in 2004)  Yet here we are with our third Republican administration during that same period.

Imagine how different the world and our country would be if George W. Bush were not in a position to invade Iraq.  Imagine how different the world and our country would be if Donald Trump were not elected. 

4.  TRUMP GOT 30% OF THE HISPANIC VOTE.  For those who never step out of the leftist bubble, this is perhaps the most difficult thing to comprehend.  How could any Hispanic vote for Trump?  People are confused by this because the media has been telling them for 18 months that Trump hates Hispanics.  But let's deconstruct that.

Trump's signature issue was his opposition to illegal immigration.  Which, when considering that illegal immigration is illegal, would not have been all that controversial if Trump were not so devoid of empathy and moderation when explaining his position.

But here's what the leftists and the media did: they conflated illegal immigration with legal immigration (wildly dishonest).  Then they conflated both of those terms with "Hispanic" (wildly inaccurate).  So, to the media, illegal immigrants, legal immigrants, and Hispanics are all the same thing.  Wrong, racist, and idiotic.

5.  TRUMP GOT FEWER VOTES THAN MITT ROMNEY AND A LOWER PERCENTAGE OF THE WHITE VOTE THAN MITT ROMNEY.  Yes, that's right.  So how did Trump win while Romney lost even though Romney, read it again, got a higher percentage of the white vote than Trump?  Because Democratic turn-out was far lower this year than in prior elections.  And that's on the media for telling Democrats that the election was already won when obviously it wasn't.  And it's on the Democrats for insisting on nominating a criminal.

6.  OBAMA DIDN'T HELP.  For the President to say that he "feared for the Republic" if Trump won was not a great move.  Obama, of course, fancies himself the great guardian of the Republic.  This from a man who doubled the national debt in 8 years, signed executive orders directing the executive branch to not enforce laws he didn't like, and signed assassination warrants for American citizens who had not been charged with a crime.  For Obama to publicly state that a serious contender for his office might destroy the Republic displayed the same self-destructive bubble mentality that plagued the Clinton campaign and the mainstream media.

7.  OBAMACARE IS A DISASTER.  The most important story of the last weeks of the campaign was the massive premium increases due to Obamacare.  While any personal story is by definition anecdotal, I can tell you that Obamacare has increased my premiums, increased my wife's premiums, and decreased the number of hours I can work, thereby decreasing my income and increasing my bills simultaneously.  I don't like that.  And it's not because the President, whom I admire greatly, is black, and it's not because I didn't go to college (3 post-secondary degrees).

8.  WE NEED TO EMPATHIZE WITH EACH OTHER.  As a white man with family roots in the Midwest, it pains and angers me to see people like me slandered and condescended to.  For all the talk about Trump's lack of empathy (and an utter lack it indeed is) there needs to also be some talk about the lack of empathy for the working class.  Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump understood this.  The "experts" did not.

9.  WE'LL BE FINE.  The sun will rise tomorrow.  God will still be great.  Your children will still fill you with indescribably joy, and this will still be the greatest country on Earth.  Unplug and tune out for a few days.  We all deserve it.