Charles Dickens really was a genius. (I know: breaking news from the 19th century!)
A Christmas Carol will always be my favorite of his works, but it’s hard to beat A Tale of Two Cities. His famous opening line sets up a comparison of opposites: the best of times and the worst; an age of wisdom and one of foolishness; a season of light and one of darkness, and the spring of hope and the winter of despair, among others.
I think of those lines often, because they seem to be ripped from today’s headlines.
For example, the current upheavals at our colleges are a mix of the worst behavior of feckless administrators and imbecilic students, and the best examples of the opposite.
When you see students across the country pulling down the American flag and putting up a Palestinian one, and protesting on behalf of genocidal terrorists who would happily murder them if they could, it’s nauseating. They violate a raft of laws and school codes, take over buildings, and wrap a statue of Washington in a terrorist doo-rag, and I can’t help but think of the obvious answer:
A phalanx of flamethrower robot dogs rolling across the quad, lighting up Soros tents, white-kid dreadlocks and keffiyehs by the dozen! Followed by me, strolling along shirtless and wearing an air cav hat like Duvall in Apocalypse Now, taking it all in serenely. (“I love the smell of singed terrorist cosplayer during finals week. Smells like… victory!”)
And while that’s just a fantasy – and not just the shirtlessness (you’re welcome, ladies) – the reality has at times been just as good.
As when a bunch of frat guys in North Carolina scared off the soy boys (and soy-he/shes, and soy-she/hes, I guess) and took down the Palestinian flag and raised the Stars and Stripes again. Or when a protest leader beclowned herself by demanding that the university she despises provide her fellow “revolutionaries” with food and water, lest they (literally) die of starvation or thirst. In their first 36 hours of “occupation”!
Or when some smart counter-protestors at UCLA installed a huge screen beside an encampment of pro-Hamas dopes, and then showed video of the various Hamas atrocities that those dopes insisted had never happened.
And the scenes when administrators in Florida and Texas gave the protestors the bum rush immediately, and the ones when the NYPD was finally allowed to knock down Camp Plywood and roll a few entitled whiners down a set of stone steps?
Why, that was just wholesome family entertainment, if you ask me.
And in a time when it seems like powerful politicians are never held accountable for their actions, we get a breath of fresh air from Scotland, home of the awful first minister Hamza Yousaf.
If you read my April 17th column (which you can find at Martinsimpsonwriting.com, if you are interested), you’ll remember that he was the guy who went off on a tirade about how many white people there are in Scotland’s government: “The chief constable, white! Every high court judge, white! Elizabeth Warren, super white!”
(See what I did there? #wemustneverstopmockingher)
When Yousaf championed a “hate speech” law (i.e. a law to quash government-unapproved speech) that went into effect on April first, he was immediately (and hilariously!) the subject of thousands of complaints citing HIS hateful and racist speech. The uproar that followed when the Scots stood up for their rights (unexpectedly!) led to his resignation only 28 days later.
The only way his tenure could have gone any worse would have been if he had written a memoir about how he took his family’s Dalmation puppy (mostly white!) to a gravel pit and shot it in the face because it was a lousy hunting dog.
In his exit speech, he demonstrated that he’d learned nothing, playing the identity politics card immediately: “People who looked like me were not in positions of political influence…when I was younger….”
By the way, the two leading candidates to replace Yousaf are John Swinney (white!) and Kate Forbes (white!) HA!
Thus falls Clan Yousaf, hopefully never to rise again!
There has also been some best of times/worst of times oddness regarding a couple of prominent American political figures.
On the left, John Fetterman has transformed from a badly dressed, mentally compromised leftist numbskull into a badly dressed, mostly coherent person. He’s called out Bob Menendez’s obvious corruption, slammed the influx of illegals, and staunchly supported Israel. And yes, calling him the best Democrat Senator is damning with faint praise, but it’s still praise, and I’m happily surprised by his recent behavior.
On the conservative side, though, I’ve been really disappointed to see the way Tucker Carlson has gone off the rails lately. I’ve never agreed with him 100%, but he always seemed like a thoughtful, decent and brave iconoclast, willing to take on RINOs and their mushy positions.
But recently he’s embraced some bad people, and attacked some good ones. He did a softball interview with the misogynistic creep (and literal pimp) Andrew Tate, during which he couldn’t bring himself to push back on any of Tate’s gross talking points. Then he acted like a modern-day Walter Duranty in an embarrassing tongue bath of Putin, praising what he saw on his tightly controlled visit to a Potemkin subway station and grocery store in Moscow. (Everything is so clean, and the store shelves are stocked with a great variety of cheap but top-quality products!)
He’s also taken an anti-Semitic position (IMHO) regarding conservatives’ support of Israel against the Hamas terror attacks, including smearing Ben Shapiro with what is effectively worse than the old dual-loyalties canard, explicitly saying that Shapiro doesn’t love America!
To top that off, his recent sit-down with Joe Rogan – whom I generally like – featured several leftist tropes of America hatred, including lambasting us for dropping nukes on Japan in WWII. He ridiculed the idea that there could ever have been any justification for dropping the bombs that killed around 200,000 Japanese.
Never mind the logical assessment that not dropping the bombs would have meant either a conventional invasion of the home islands – reasonably predicted to cost the lives of at least 250,000 American soldiers, and way more Japanese deaths – or a naval blockade of the islands, which would have starved millions of Japanese to death.
That’s the kind of simple-minded argument I’d expect from some MSM talking heads or MSNBC guests, but not from Tucker! I don’t know what’s happened to him, but I hope he comes back to his senses.
In all of these stories, we are whipsawed back and forth between depressing dark clouds and heartening silver linings. But there is one constant, one lode star, one bit of bedrock that we can always count on, even in the midst of our topsy turvy politics: the essential and instinctual awfulness of Joe Biden.
The guy cannot do anything right! He can’t walk without falling, he can’t talk without slurring, and he reads a teleprompter like it’s a series of Rohrschach ink blots telling the story of Corn Pop murdering Dr. Jill with a lead pipe in the conservatory.
He’s getting beaten up by both sides for his handling of the Hamas/Israel war. His tepid mutterings of weak support for Israel enrage the pro-Hamas factions in the Democrat base. And his pressuring Israel to not finish off Hamas enrages everyone else.
So what does he do for an encore? He proposes bringing Gazans to America as refugees. Because that could never go wrong!
By now it’s pretty obvious that the vast majority of Americans don’t want cosplaying, angry white-kid pseudo-Gazans on our campuses. So why would we want authentically angry actual Gazans in our country? It’s not like there is a shortage of America-hating anti-Semites around here, Joe!
He’s even angered the Papua New Guineans with his offensive fairy tale about Ol’ Uncle Appetizer.
I’m just hoping that his handlers, his doctors and his taxidermist can keep him in this race for six more months. Because while those months may be the worst of times, we can look forward to the best of times if we can just get this guy out of the White House.
Hamas delenda est!
Martin Simpson 