Headline: Reality Arrives to the Trump Era

Andy Divine reads Camus’ ‘The Plague’:

‘Plagues routinely start with denial. In his great novel, The Plague, Albert Camus describes a scene at the very beginning, after several rats in a town started dying identical deaths:’

‘These rats, now?’ the magistrate began. [Doctor] Rieux made a brief movement in the direction of the train, then turned back toward the exit. ‘The rats?’ he said. ‘It’s nothing.’ The only impression of that moment which, afterwards, he could recall was the passing of a railroadman with a box full of dead rats under his arm.’

…

So begins Mr. Divine’s latest collection of moralizing political interventions, or just more smug  self-congratulatory chatter , or should it more rightly be called his political/moral toxicity?   

On a ‘sane post-Trump conservatism’ in the person of Boris Johnson’s new chancellor of the exchequer Rishi Sunak: 

If I were to point out a possible future for a sane post-Trump conservatism, I’d point to one Rishi Sunak. I don’t blame you for not knowing his name yet, but he recently became Boris Johnson’s chancellor of the exchequer, responsible for Britain’s finances and economy, the second most powerful figure in the British government. He’s the grandson of Indian immigrants to the U.K., went to Oxford and Stanford, and became a hedge-funder. First elected to Parliament in 2015, his handsome smile has been matched only by the perfect fit of his suits. He’s said to have a personal fortune of $250 million, helped by marrying the daughter of one of the richest men in India. A member of a thriving minority group in the U.K., he’s a Hindu, known for lavish parties on his Yorkshire estate, and called by the locals the Maharajah of the Dales. And he isn’t yet 40 years old.

Note this description of Rishi Sunak: ‘…his handsome smile has been matched only by the perfect fit of his suits.’ Sometimes we gay boys focus on the wrong things! What could that ‘sane conservatism’ mean, but another handsome, and  bespoke suited oligarch?  Andy offers this, as a former acolyte of the Iron Lady:

But what really marks him is his abandonment of Thatcherism. 

What follows is a dull witted apologetic for Toryism as ‘adaptive’: the jejune masquerading as telling insight, Mr. Divine’s calling card!

Final entry is Andy’s  shaming of The New York Times for its ‘1619 Project’. the editor ‘Jake Silverstein, and primary author, Nikole Hannah-Jones’.  Mr. Divine who gave space in the New Republic to the ‘The Bell Curve’ and has no standing to lecture The Times, on any question of the history of race/slavery. There are other actual writers who don’t carry the heavy racial baggage, that Mr. Divine carries with him, like the chains of Jacob Marley. The New York Times columnist Michelle Alexander, and her The New Jim Crow has the moral/political standing to engage in such a critical exercise! 

Old Socialist 

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/03/andrew-sullivan-reality-arrives-to-the-trump-era.html