Before getting on to the usual tomfoolery, let me say that I love me some CO Nation!
When I was writing my somber column about the fire at our Victorian house — Rosewood — on Easter evening, I anticipated that it would not be a popular column, just because of the joke-free, Tenebrae-ness of it all. (To all of you who said, “I bet Martin can’t find a way to work the Latin word for darkness into a normal conversation,” you now stand corrected.)
(Also, my favorite Springsteen album is “Tenebrae on the Edge of Town,” my favorite expose of Communist perfidy is “Tenebrae at Noon,” and one of my favorite novels is “Heart of Tenebrae.”) (I think I’ve made my point.)
But boy, did I underestimate you folks! If you read the comments, you saw the outpouring of well wishes, prayers and commiseration that accompanied that column. Readers told their own stories on related topics. Alan Greenleaf hit my Tip Jar hard – thanks Alan! – and everybody was just as “salt of the earth-y” as we’ve all come to expect from this little corner of the internet that the Great and Powerful CO set up years ago.
I tell you, if I weren’t as tough as a $2 steak, it would have brought me to tears! Instead, I kept a stiff upper lip, but also gave each and every one of you a tip of the metaphorical cap and a curt nod in salute. Thank you all!
There have been a lot of developments in that story in the last 4 days, and I’m going to be writing more about it next week. But in the meantime, I’ve put up a new picture of one of the downstairs fireplaces on my page at Martinsimpsonwriting.com. It was taken this week, after the fire, and yet the room appears remarkably undamaged.
The mantel is carved from the “rosewood” heart of pine, and the firebox is lined with glazed red-and-yellow tiles interspersed with lion’s head tiles. (I’ll be posting some close-ups later.) When I first walked into Rosewood 7 years ago, I was already smitten with the outside of the house, but when I saw those tiles, I said, “We are buying this house!”
Because that’s how you want to make huge financial decisions, kids: with a burst of completely irrational emotional attachment! 😊
But enough about the ups and downs of my own little life: let’s get back to our political scene. Because there have been some highly mockable events that my preoccupation with our fire has delayed me from addressing.
Where to begin?
How about in NYC, where a black nationalist, whitey-hater named Frank James shot up a subway car and terrorized many New Yorkers for a while. It doesn’t take someone with an advanced degree in race-ology to know he was probably black just by reading the initial reports, and for the same reasons you all knew the same thing: his race was never mentioned.
It’s amazing to watch the MSM pushing their racial narratives, no matter what lengths they need to go to. If the criminal suspect is black, the story will go on for days without mentioning that fact. If the perp got away and is on the loose, and they therefore must give a description, it will be something like this:
Between 5’10” and 6’, wearing jeans, a blue t-shirt and Air-Jordans with a slight scuff on the inside of the left shoe, and gray laces. Also, he had a far-away look in his eyes, and an overbite, and an air of ennui.
If the suspect is white or Asian? “The WHITE/ASIAN suspect is described as WHITE/ASIAN, less than 10 foot tall but over 3 feet tall. Possibly wearing clothes. Racial bias is the suspected motive in this horrendous, racially motivated hate crime by this alleged WHITE/ASIAN nationalist.”
My two favorite parts of this story were: 1. The perp committed his crime in one of the most heavily surveilled areas of our largest city (run entirely by guess which party?) … and none of the city’s cameras were working.
2. After the perp was arrested, Police Chief Eric Adams took a victory lap, crowing, “My fellow New Yorkers…we got him!”
Which would have been impressive, if the cops had tracked him down using a network of informants, high-tech tracking devices, good ol’ fashioned shoe leather, and a comically oversized magnifying glass.
But nope. The racist loon called the cops and said, “I’m Frank James and I shot those people in the subway. I’m here in this specific McDonalds, so come and get me.”
That’s not exactly on par with some American soldiers tracking Saddam Hussein to a specific spider-hole in a gigantic country, or Holmes tracking Moriarty to his mountain hideout deep in the Alps, is it?
I’m no big-city cop, but I bet I could be a darn good one if the job mainly involved finding a body on a busy street and calling out, “Anybody shoot this guy?” And then one moron steps out of the crowd and says, “Over here!”
But the Dems who run NYC are looking for a win anywhere they can get it these days, and you can’t blame them.
By way of comparison, how about a crime story that took place in a red state?
Let’s go to Dale County, AL, where a homeowner heard someone making multiple attempts to break into his house. He called 911, but as he was still on the phone, the criminal came through the window in his child’s room.
So the homeowner shot him in the head. Because: America.
“Isn’t it awfully callous to joke about someone getting shot in the head, even if he is a criminal climbing into a child’s bedroom?” you are not asking yourself, unless you’re NY Dem Police Chief Eric Adams.
No, it is not. With everything else going on in Brandon’s America, this counts as a feel-good news story. Because, as I may have mentioned, I’m from the 19th century, and I like it when good defeats evil. And this is good vs. evil.
Breaking into someone else’s house is evil. Giving a criminal a little “ballistic hello” is good. Full stop.
Which, ironically, is what the home invader came to.
Also, hat tip to the writer of the story about this on PJ Media, Kevin Downey. I love a good, telling detail in a story, and Downey offered several.
He said that when the cops showed up, “they found the thug on the ground, weighing roughly 25 grams more than he did when he arrived,” due to the weight of the bullet in his head.
He also called the criminal “the now-horizontal hooligan.” Well done, Mr. Downey!
But race stories don’t always have to be downbeat or upsetting. For example, a couple of race-obsessed “diversity, equity and inclusion experts” in Arizona made everybody very happy recently.
Jill Lassen – who is so pasty that she could cosplay as Lizzie Warren (#wemustneverstopmockingher) – and Stuart Rhoden – who is black, both got their Kente cloths in a bunch when a PTA fundraiser at Hopi Elementary school featured a DJ wearing black face.
Now I can’t imagine what would possess anybody in this ultra-woke age to go out in public in blackface. And neither could our two intrepid racial offense hunters! They quickly complained to the school’s principal and the local PTA about this outrage
But just when they were about to link arms and sing a rousing chorus of, “We Shall Overcome,” the head of the PTA explained that the DJ had a good excuse for being in black face.
It turns out he’s black, and he has a face. (Cue the sad trombone.)
That’s right, these two SJWs threw a fit over a white guy in black face who turned out to be… a black guy, with a correspondingly color-coordinated face.
You’d have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at these two dullards.
Avenatti/Eric “Inspector Clouseau” Adams, 2024!
Martin Simpson 