afternoon a friend and I watched amazed the TV coverage of the engineless US Airways plane that had “landed” in the Hudson River, intact, with no one killed, ending up floating perfectly upright with most of its fusilage above the water line, and, so it appeared, being tugged through the water as though it were a boat. How was all this possible? I want details.
Meanwhile, fellow New Yorker Howard Sutherland was so impressed by the event he actually purchased a New York Post:
Today I bought the New York Post. Usually I don’t bother, but I wanted to read about US Airways Captain Chesley B. Sullenberger III’s achievement of saving his passengers, crew and himself when he lost both engines of his Airbus A320 to birdstrikes. To handle losing both engines at low altitude, with a near-full fuel load and a full complement of passengers and crew, then ditch a heavy, engines-out airliner into a freezing river and not lose even one of 155 souls on board—that is a remarkable feat of airmanship. (I was pleased, but not surprised, to read that Capt. Sullenberger is a fellow Air Force fighter pilot. In this case, though, it may be his reported expertise flying gliders that was most helpful to him in the crunch.)
Of course, we also have to credit a level-headed US Airways crew and the Hudson River ferry skippers who rushed to the rescue, along with the Coast Guard and the NYPD and FDNY. New York City is a dysfunctional mess, but a few things still seem to work. And Capt. Sullenberger’s coolness under fire is a reminder of what Americans are still capable of. But as New York City, indeed the United States overall, transforms endlessly into the Third World, for how much longer, I wonder?
Fish wrapper already in my hands, I kept flipping pages after I read about the chilly drama in the Hudson, which led me to at least three items that exemplify the West’s social and political decadence.
I flipped along, eventually getting to Page Six, the Post’s somewhat salacious gossip page. (Today’s Page Six is on page 24—go figure!) [LA replies: traditionally Page Six appears on page eight.] I was about to flip on to the hockey scores, when this caught my eye: Sperminator strikes in Paris. Hmm. I used to live in Paris, so I’m curious about what goes on there. And “Sperminator”! Too good to pass up. Turns out this tit-bit is a revealing look at the pervasive decadence and sheer alien-ness of the dross we have allowed to replace true social and political elites in every nation of the West. It’s worth quoting in full, I think, to get the full flavor. I also think it speaks for itself. If anyone is still afflicted with the slightest fantasy that French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his habitués are “conservative” in any sense, French or otherwise, this should dispel that delusion. Hell, most of them aren’t even French.
January 16, 2009—
WITH le tout Paris wondering who fathered the baby of French Justice Minister Rachida Dati, suspicion is now focusing on billionaire Gucci heir Francois-Henri Pinault, 46, the sperminator who’s already sired children with Salma Hayek and (allegedly) Linda Evangelista.
The glamorous Dati, 43, a protégé of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, is the offspring of Moroccan-Algerian parents and has 11 siblings. When she announced her pregnancy in September, she said, “My private life is complicated and I am keeping if off-limits to the media. I will not say anything about it.”
The list of suspects has included former Spanish PM José Maria Aznar, who denied the rumor as “totally and utterly false”; Henri Proglio, boss of Veolia Environment; Dominique Desseigne, chief of the Barriere hotel chain; and Sarkozy himself.
After a New Year’s Eve dinner at the Elysée Palace, as Sarkozy’s new wife, Carla Bruni, and Dati walked past a double bed, Bruni snarked: “You’d have loved to occupy it, wouldn’t you?”
Dati gave birth on Jan. 2 to a baby girl, Zohra. Now the prime suspect is Pinault—who also sired Hayek’s 1-year-old daughter, Valentina, and reportedly, Evangelista’s 2-year-old son, Augustin. “He’s a playboy extraordinaire,” one Parisian told us. “He is a fils a papa, as they say here—a papa’s boy, meaning he’d be nobody if he weren’t the son of Francois Pinault. He isn’t known to be the brightest star in the sky.”
But our insider noted: “It’s very French to have a baby alone and to register the father as X. Since it’s a Catholic country, it’s more acceptable to have the baby than an abortion.” More than half the babies born in France are out of wedlock.
“I wonder if Dati herself knows who the father is. She’s a serial dater,” said our source. “What’s the female term for Lothario?”
The other two items are in the Opinion section. The first of those is the “conservative” Post’s full-throated endorsement of the farcical notion of appointing, umm, like, y’know, Caroline, uh, Kennedy (Schlossberg?) to, y’know, like sit in Mistress Hillary Clinton’s U.S. Senate seat for the next two years. It, too, speaks for itself, and I can’t be bothered to quote it. So this neocon mouthpiece’s advocacy now extends to inflicting yet another Kennedy on us in the Senate. If anyone is still afflicted with the fantasy that neoconservatives are “conservative” in any sense, American or otherwise, this should dispel that delusion.
The next item is a column by Ryan Sager. I don’t know who Mr. Sager is, but he looks very young and soft in his photo, and his column comes off as very neo-connish. >[LA comments: Sager is a libertarian, whom I’ve written about a few times, mainly in connection with the 2008 Republican primaries, e.g here and here.] Sager muses on what direction the GOP should take after its recent defeats. Sager presents his musings as though they represent some kind of New Thinking. What conclusions does he reach? Roughly that Republicans should forget about appealing to people who actually vote Republican (socially conservative white Americans), and broaden their appeal. Sager couches it as needing to appeal to younger voters and minorities. To do this, of course, means reaching out to “moderates, the Log Cabin Republicans [a homosexual pressure group] and abortion moderates”. It just so happens that, in Sager’s view, there is only one prominent Republican who fits the bill, former Maryland lieutenant governor Michael Steele. And, no doubt entirely fortuitously, it just so happens that Mr. Steele is—black! So the only way for the Republicans to beat the now black-led Democrats is, according to Sager, to be copycats and pick a black standard-bearer for themselves. (If the Democrats run Obama again in 2012, will the Republicans dare nominate a white American to oppose him, or will they engage in a desperate totem-search for their nominee?)
The idea of strengthening the GOP’s support among people who might actually prefer its positions never enters Sager’s head—no doubt because he would not wish to associate with such retrograde Flyover Country hayseeds, even though he wants those hayseeds’ votes for his party. There is no New Thinking here. Sager is just taking the suicidal alienation of the Republican base that led Bush, Rove and McCain to catastrophe to new depths.
There is also a Ralph Peters column. About that, truly, No Comment!
All these little things add up. And they are reminders (not that most VFR regulars need reminding) that traditionalism and real conservatism have no voices whatever in mainstream society and major party politics. None. Beyond that, they are reminders that the mainstream media, major party politicians and social and cultural movers-and-shakers are not indifferent to our concerns, but actively hostile. That’s as true of the mainstream “Right” (The New York Post, a Nicolas Sarkozy who would make the alien strumpet Dati France’s justice minister, the Ryan Sagers of the press) as it is of the Left.
VFR is one of the best sounding boards for traditional voices around, and probably the most intellectually consistent. How to get that rigor and consistency a platform where ordinary people will hear traditionalists’ concerns and, God willing, think about them seriously? We need new institutions, and I wish I knew how to build them. HRS
Karl D. writes: