At school, Klara has an activity called “mandatory fun.”

I’ve been pondering this for weeks, and I’m still not fully over it. Truly, only teachers can come up with something like this.

I visited the research presentation of our graduating French student who wrote a paper on Michel Houellebecq’s Anéantir. Yes, we offer a very well-rounded education. But the point is that I understood everything. The talk, the questions, the discussion. Everything. But the moment I tried to say something, and I even prepared the sentences in my head, what came out was in Spanish.

It’s very frustrating.

Save for the quaintly outdated words “neighbors” and “community”, it’s impossible to say definitively if this is a far-right or a far-left creation:

Add a couple of “we, the people”, a few additional spelling and grammar mistakes, and it could be a right-winger leaflet easily.

A mother-daughter relationship is often intensely competitive, and the competition is always conducted along the lines of who is a better woman. When the first child is born, for example, it frequently occasions a bloodbath between Mom and grandma as to who is a better expert on the feeding, the clothing and the raising of the child.

But that’s not the worst case. In most serious cases, the mother pushes her daughter out of the field of childbearing completely, cannibalizing her fertility to remain the only fertile woman in the family. What makes this hard to spot is that, almost always in these situations, the mother is ostensibly desperate to have a grandchild, badgering her daughter about it incessantly. This badgering is a triumphant cry of victory. The process of repeating, “you are childless” is the reward.

There are also cases where a mother drives the daughter out of the possibility of having a stable (or sometimes any) romantic relationship. These are usually mothers with difficult personal lives of their own, often on their second marriage, especially when the marriage is to somebody younger. Or maybe it’s a mother who didn’t marry the man she loved and settled for somebody else out of convenience.

None of this is done consciously. My grandmother only had one child, and it thwarted her life. I’m not saying, of course, that it would thwart everybody’s life but it did hers. She concocted a complicated theory about how having more than one child was wrong and immoral, and when my mother got pregnant for the second time, grandma went to truly extraordinary lengths to prevent my sister from being born. Thankfully, grandma wasn’t my mom’s mother. She was the mother-in-law, and her mandates had zero effect on my mother.

Now look at me, who only has one living child, and this thwarted my existence. You know what my grandmother’s name was? Klara. She renamed herself as Clarissa, and I thought she was my mother until the age of four because my own mother was very absent at that time.

It gets even funnier in the case of my sister who is repeating the life of the great-grandmother whom she never even knew. They have a striking physical likeness and a similar life journey in quite extraordinary ways.

My husband is the exact copy of my great-grandfather, in ethnicity, profession, gestures, personality, and attitude towards me. The moment I first saw him, I knew, this is my great-grandfather sent back to me and we must be together. My great-grandfather was not biologically related to me, so it’s not icky.

This is why I always say that it’s crucial to know about your ancestors. We play out their games, looking for a resolution of the problems they never solved whether we want to or not, whether we even know about it or not.

Nothing, including actual door-to-door pogroms, will pry American Jews away from the most left-wing political option on the ballot.

There won’t be pogroms. But the point still stands. This is an unpersuadable constituency that will not relinquish its 32 Inclusive Pride flags and its BLM stickers for absolutely any reason.

I, on the other hand, am only half-Jewish, so I’m majorly persuadable. Nobody is trying because everybody thinks it must be obvious why the other candidate sucks even more than theirs. But it’s not.

An absolutely brilliant article by Nate Hochman appeared in American Reformer. It’s a review of a leftist screed White Rural Rage, and it’s one of those cases when a badly written, unintelligent book gives rise to a brilliant, devastating response.

I didn’t know which part to excerpt because the whole piece is excellent, so I went with this one:

Conservatives will construct sophisticated ideological theories and perform Olympic-level mental gymnastics routines to evade the obvious. At times, this verges on absurd: In a recent interview with Steve Bannon, for example, Newsweek editor Batya Ungar-Sargon angrily lambasted [the new book] White Rural Rage as an attack on the “multi-racial working class” — a notion disabused by the very first word of the book’s title — before launching into a monologue about how Trump’s base was “multi-racial” and “the majority of Hispanics” were “also part of the MAGA movement.” (Spoiler alert: They are not). Her outrage was not that the left was anti-white; her outrage was that the left was accusing her side of being white.

https://americanreformer.org/2024/04/the-angry-kulak/

If you are forced to read White Rural Rage at work, you can use this review to demonstrate that it’s been rejected by reputable scholars everywhere. I’ve bookmarked it for that reason.

It’s come to that, eh? People are forced to read insulting screeds and recite humiliating mantras as a condition of employment. I don’t know how one sits at work, knowing that there are colleagues in the room who are terrified of speaking honestly in front of you. Do people think all of us whom you forced to do these things forgot about it? That we don’t mind?

We mind quite terribly.

No, this is not a post on the evils of online prostitution. The woman in the picture is a probate judge who has been removed from her job in Georgia for systemic incompetence. She put a woman in jail – IN JAIL – for trying to amend her weeding license to include the name of her real father she had recently discovered. She threatened people, behaved erratically, and posted inappropriate photos, soliciting cash gifts from strangers.

After the review board voted unanimously to remove Judge Christina Peterson, she predictably claimed that the board members were racist.

It’s not remotely possible to post all of the stories that show a sad degradation of our most important institutions. Illiterate university presidents, whorish judges, congresswomen descended from horses (or Russia’s propagandist Lavrov, it’s hard to be sure, because the likeness is too strong in both cases). Incompetent, embarrassing, stupid people screeching and wailing about their victimhood at every corner.

And by the way, we are very elegantly extorted into working for free. I will be teaching this French course for no compensation. Zero dollars zero cents will come my way. But it’s either that or the French program will be closed. My German professor teaches 6 courses every semester, half of them for absolutely no compensation because if he refuses, the program will be closed. This dramatically reduces the quality of education because people are overburdened and teach the stuff they are not qualified to teach.

This is extremely widespread at universities attended by normal students and not the spoiled rich brats that are featured constantly in news items about higher education. This is a real problem, a real injustice, and nobody – either on the Left or on the Right – gives a crap.

I’m teaching a course on the great French playwright Molière  this summer because we don’t have enough professors, and I’m the closest to a connoisseuse of French literature that we’ve got. Yes, I know. What are you going to do.

I do know Molière  exceptionally well, though. I’ve looked around for other courses on the author and found nothing except for a course at the University of Tel Aviv. Molière  is taught as part of a course in several places but it’s hard to find somebody focusing on him exclusively.

Please get ready to be peppered with Molière  references for a couple of months.

The ongoing Hamas protests are the new iteration of the BLM. They are organized and supported by the same people. They defend violent criminals who brought retribution upon themselves. They side with chaos and barbarity over order and civilization. They organize encampments and dream of revolutions. They target people based on ethnicity. They are rooted in egregious lies and a denial of reality.

What’s disturbing is that these performative ego-worship events now take place not every 40 years, like they used to, but every 4. This is an acceleration that does not bode well. It’s understandable – this is an opulent society and people get bored. But frequent chaotic eruptions create tears in the fabric of togetherness that are hard to mend.