Apologies if this newsletter seems incoherent. Midway through writing it, I took a break, wandered out to the pool, sank into a lounge chair, and fell asleep. What could possibly go wrong?
A lot, it turns out. Our Andrew Stiles reviews Chris Whipple’s Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History.
“Some were keenly aware of Biden’s condition, but didn’t care. Ron Klain, the longtime Biden adviser who returned to help him prepare for the debate, was ‘shocked’ by the president’s condition at Camp David. He was ‘fatigued, befuddled, and disengaged.’ He wouldn’t stop babbling about NATO and how much ‘foreign leaders loved him.’ He grew irritated when Klain suggested he should outline plans for a second term. At one point, Biden abruptly walked out to the pool and fell asleep in a lounge chair. Despite all this, and the catastrophic debate that followed, Klain was one of Biden’s staunchest defenders until the very end. On July 19, with practically the entire Democratic Party clamoring for Biden’s withdrawal, Klain called the president and ‘urged him to resist.’ When Biden dropped out two days later, Klain was devastated. It was a ‘mistake,’ he said, an ‘avoidable tragedy.’ Klain is clearly one of Whipple’s main sources for the book, and the author never really tries to explain the discrepancy between Klain’s alarm at the president’s decline and his insistence that Biden keep running. It’s possible he chose to charitably omit the most obvious explanation: That Klain was among the many leading Democrats who thought the befuddled geezer was still a better choice than Kamala Harris.
“There were apparently lots of Democrats who, like the vast majority of American voters, could tell that Biden was losing his marbles and (allegedly) tried to sound the alarm (in private). ‘For months [before the debate], Democrats had been privately telling one another that Biden should step aside,’ Whipple writes. It’s a remarkable claim, one that’s been hinted at but has yet to be explored in great detail. Who are these Democrats, and what were they saying? Whipple’s failure to elaborate is frustrating, and suggests that despite all the now-it-can-be-told reporting unleashed in the aftermath of the debate (and the election), we still don’t know the full extent of the party’s failure to avert the inevitable fiasco that ensued. There are some choice quotes from Bill Daley, the former White House chief of staff under Barack Obama. He claims to have been so alarmed at Biden’s condition he started lashing out (in private) at White House staff. ‘This is crazy,’ he told longtime Biden aide Mike Donilon, who shrugged it off. ‘How are they letting this fucking thing go on?’ He called the White House chief of staff, Jeff Zients, and begged him not to let Biden go on stage with Trump. Daley, one of a handful of sources willing to speak on the record, offers the most plausible assessment of what happened. ‘Everyone ignored it,’ he told Whipple. ‘And every politician, every big shot, they all bought into the attitude that if you run against him and he gets softened up and loses to Trump, you’ll be blamed and your career is over. Every freaking one of them had no balls.'”
Fitting if true, considering Kamala was for they/them.
Speaking of they/them, Joseph Epstein returns to the Weekend Beacon with a review of John McWhorter’s Pronoun Trouble: The Story of Us in Seven Little Words.
“Pronoun Trouble recounts the history of our contemporary English pronouns, while adding reflections on language generally. McWhorter writes, again in Nine Nasty Words, ‘language change becomes a spectator sport of sorts for linguists rather than the tale of woe and degradation we are so often taught.’ He adds: ‘All languages leak.’ Language, in other words, like life itself, is subject to endless alteration.
“Consider the history of ‘thou’ and ‘thee,’ which preceded the pronoun ‘you.’ From John McWhorter we learn the various permutations of this complex second-person singular pronoun. McWhorter writes: ‘People of higher social status used thou downward, to people of lower status, including children and also, alas, men addressing women.’ In Shakespeare’s day ‘thou’ was used to address people below one on the social scale, ‘you’ used, so to say, upwardly. Thus Othello addresses Iago as ‘thou,’ Iago Othello as ‘you.’ Yet in the Bible, God is addressed as ‘thou.’ Thou eventually disappeared from common speech, though not among Quakers, who continue to use ‘thou’ and ‘thee.’ One of the fascinating if not also troubling things about language change is its inconsistency. ‘Amid all the rules and patterns that drive language change,’ McWhorter writes, ‘serendipity always plays its hand.’
“McWhorter devotes a section to the ‘I-me’ question. When one knocks on a door or rings a bell and is asked who it is, one answers ‘It’s me,’ or at least it feels natural to answer ‘It’s me.’ In fact it is grammatically correct to answer ‘It is I.’ The distinction, I would say, is between normal and formal English. I happen to be an ‘It is I’ man, which puts me in the category McWhorter calls ‘stockinged grammar-pusses grappling to square a circle.’ I also say ‘He is older than I,’ and ‘She is cleverer than I,’ instead of ‘than me.’ Many years ago Winston cigarettes ran a commercial with the tag line, ‘Winston tastes good like a cigarette should.’ Grammar-pusses of the day objected to the ungrammatical use of ‘like,’ to which Winston, in a second commercial, responded, ‘What do you want, good grammar or good taste?'”
“McWhorter cites who uses the new ‘they’ and who doesn’t: ‘A survey of several hundred people in 2019 showed that the new they was accepted, and often used, by most subjects under thirty-five, was more often dismissed by subjects over fifty-five, and elicited mixed feelings among people between thirty-five and fifty-five. Nonbinary and trans people were especially likely to approve of and use the new they.‘ On television recently I heard McWhorter suggest that capitalizing the T in the new use of ‘they’ might be helpful. I, for one, do not find it so.”
What appears to be helpful is The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West by Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska. Matthew Phillips gives us a review.
“The founders of Palantir—a name from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings—saw themselves as embarking on an adventure out of the comfort of the Silicon Shire and into the real world. While their peer companies remain ensconced in the valley, tending to the decadent tasks of building yet another social media or food delivery application, the founders of Palantir decided to engage in skirmishes against the orcs and balrogs threatening domestic and national security.
“In their recent book about their idea, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, the CEO of Palantir, Alexander C. Karp, and its head of corporate affairs, Nicholas W. Zamiska, make the case that Silicon Valley has turned its back on the American people by poaching talented engineers who might have done nationally important work, and refusing to collaborate with the government on meaningful ventures. More important—and surprisingly, coming from the tech-world—they urge for a revival of the Western canon of literature, culture, and religion to reunite the country and rediscover a shared purpose.
“Within the strangely powder-blue book of around 200 pages (with another hundred of notes and sources), the authors argue that advancements in artificial intelligence—in particular, the advancements made by foreign adversaries—demands closer collaboration between the technology industry and the government. Many of America’s brilliant minds in the technology sector are squandering their talents in the absence of a national project, the authors say—and convincingly so. They champion artificial intelligence and its application to security and defense as the next all-in national project.”
It’s true America’s brilliant minds spend a lot of time developing food-delivery, dating, and doorbell apps. But have you seen that doorbell app? It truly is one ring to rule them all.
Original News Source – Washington Free Beacon
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