What’s in Your Wallet?
What’s in Your Wallet?
‘Serendicity’ is a word I coined years ago to describe a common experience in my life. It’s what Lewis Carroll called a portmanteau word, combining two into a new one with connotations of both. Serendipity is chance leveraged into some kind of breakthrough, as when a scientist had a dream that led him to the solution of a chemistry problem he was working on:
Synchronicity is a term created by the psychologist Carl Jung to describe a meaningful accident that seems like an interjection of the universe into a human conversation.
Serendicity involves both the concepts of meaning and chance, as well as the enhanced influence of timing. Its recurrence through time separates it from its components. I’ve had these lucky accidents for many years now, which I can generally distinguish from background thought processes interrupting other activities because for me the easiest place to identify them is in my graphic work and other principally visual experiences. It can be both enlightening from the start or delayed in its discovery and somehow resonant, even prescient-seeming, later on. Serendipities can be big or small. Here’s a garden variety example of a small one…
When Ketanji Brown Jackson was undergoing her confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court I was amazed at how little attention she was receiving and how little resistance from GOP senators. Confirmations of Republican nominees are almost always protracted and ugly affairs when the Democrats identify serious ideological differences, and Jackson evidenced unsettling signs of Marxist influence and some other symptoms of radical progressivism. I began to wonder if anyone was even watching her testimony. I play games with graphics, and I stared at pics of Jackson trying to think whose face she reminded me of. A name popped into my head, which I ignored because it was so ridiculous, but then it didn’t go away. She looked like Larry Holmes, the last great boxer to be Heavyweight Champion. So I did the graphic grafting work and reposted a portion of a Breitbart article describing Jackson’s doubts about the existence of natural rights of citizens vs the government. I wanted to see if anyone would call me on it or notice at all that it wasn’t Jackson. No one did, Here’s where serendicity came into play:
As it happens, I had performed and posted my transgenderization joke before she told the Senators that she couldn’t define what a “woman” is. I did NOT republish my fake photo when that laughable moment occurred. I was already in trouble with Facebook for other fancied sins against Community Standards, and though I made the graphic above, I didn’t publish it. What happened next?
FTA @ WIKI: <<On April 7, the Senate invoked cloture on her nomination by a 53–47 vote.[115][116]Later that day, she was confirmed by the same margin.[117] Republicans Mitt Romney, Lisa Murkowski, and Susan Collins joined all Democrats in confirming Jackson to the Supreme Court.[118]>>
[Guess which “woman” GOP senators are back in the news at this moment, preparing to deepsix the DNI nomination of Tulsi Gabbard. SSDD.]
Then, years later, just a few days ago in fact, there was a story that Jackson vents her pent-up Court frustrations with boxing workouts. How perfect. It doesn’t mean anything in particular. That’s why I mentioned the Serendicity attribute of resonance. Resonant to me if no one else. Maybe Larry Holmes could give her a few pointers… All water under the bridge now though.
On to a new Serendicity occurrence, which is the reason this post exists. I did a lot of work on an idea I was probably going to shelve as I had done the file on Jackson’s gender confusion, But like the book that fell off Freud’s shelf, I fell into a movie that made me change my mind about that.
Since the election, the Democrats have been flopping around like beached fish in a red tide. They have seemed unable to understand or confront the reasons they lost so convincingly. How long has it been since Republicans had official control of the White House, the Senate, the House of Representatives, and the Supreme Court? Many of them can’t believe it yet, let alone concoct an explanation of why it happened and how to regain their historical advantage in the electorate. Bill Maher is succumbing to Multiple Personality Disorder, alternately deploring Trumpistas and despising the dumb Democrats who sabotaged their own inherited empire. James Carville is in even worse shape. He made news the other day saying nobody wants anything to do with Biden anymore. One of the best ever examples of Democrat projection. The old snakehead hasn’t figured out that nobody wants anything to do with him anymore either. Indeed, they’re on the verge of remembering that he’s a cracker-sounding old white Gyrene who is even trashing the once esteemed half-woman/half-black (or whatever bi- gender-race collage she is now) victim of The Man.
In short, there’s a lot of emotion in the hot air exhaled by Democrats of every stripe at this juncture, and the quest for a rallying point is having the most success among those who have the deepest talent bench when it comes to monolithic blame games. Why there’s been a proliferation of unrelated-but-related stories like these:
Stacey Abrams has made a career out of claiming that racism
has cost her elections she really won, though courts said no.
No one remembers anymore the wreckage of human emotions
Sharpton generated with his infamous Tawanna Brawley hoax.
Crockett has played to the cameras in the past by provoking
race-related catfights with female GOP members of the House.
The Minority Leader of the House is quite comfortable threatening a recurrence
of the violent protests that cost dozens of lives and $1B+ property damage in 2020.
The video speaks for itself. The Dems didn’t lose in 2024 because of inflation,
crime, and 10M+ unvetted illegal immigrants, but because of race and sex bias.
The DNC accordingly elected a DNC Chair, white male (!) Minnesotan Ken Martin, whose platform seems to call for use of the fabled “race card” to oppose the new Trump administration rather than any substantive change in destructive economic, energy, border, and law enforcement policies. So I designed a 21st Century media approach for the DNC to make the race card as tangible, inflammatory, and pervasive as the red MAGA cap.
Interestingly, the card advertised at the top of this post has provoked suspicion that the spokesman
isn’t really Samuel Jackson but an AI rendering of him. My spokesman is absolutely AI. For sure.
Then I just filed it away, like the “woman” graphic of Ketanji Jackson-Holmes above. Until I got hit unexpectedly with a one-two punch combination from the universe. First was this stunning report from a Fulton County, Georgia, where a local leadership panel, clearly all black, called their Chairman on profligate personal spending from county coffers. Clearly, they did not feel that a self-indulgent trip to Africa was justified by the race of the man who used taxpayer funds to pay for it. Misguided use of the race card may have rationalized the poor decision making involved in the fraud but it did not excuse it.
Hmmm, I thought. Maybe I’m not the only one who thinks the race card is getting pretty dog-eared at this point, no matter what the DNC thinks. I did a more time-worn version of the card itself and prepared to file it away also. Then the second part of the one-two punch landed.
What was that? Serendicity reared its head, much more powerfully than in the trivial example above. I’ve been avoiding cabinet confirmation hearings like the plague, all those demagogic speeches and accusations masquerading as questions… don’t have the patience or stomach for it. My escape is movies, preferably movies old enough to predate all the virtue signaling of the woke era, which built up its momentum in the later Obama years. On one of the many streaming services that featured more reruns than new stuff, aI found a blurb offering an Indie film about faith and renewal, which boasted more than the usual optimistic number of stars. The name that caught my wife’s and my eye was Lou Gossett, who died in the last year or so. We decided to give it a look, even though movies in the faith genre tend to be somewhat heavy-handed in our experience. I joked to my wife that the critical time measure was how deep into the script we’d get the first quotation from the Book of Matthew. If it happened in the first 15 minutes, we’d bail. The date here was 2010, which could go either way. The title was “The Grace Card.” The word ‘grace’ rang a bell. The word “card’ didn’t.
The plot was about a cop who had lost a son in a pedestrian car accident right in front of his house 17 years before the time of the movie. The experience had turned him into a bitter, angry man, He was harsh and cold with his wife and his surviving teenage son. He no longer attended church or believed in God. As the story opens, this very unappealing man is assigned a new partner, the young patrol officer who had received the sergeant promotion he and his wife had been counting on, and an admonitory Captain has placed the two in the same patrol car till transfer of the new sergeant takes effect in hopes that the much more gregarious up-and-comer will have a positive effect on the downward spiraling veteran. Here’s the trailer:
We were both repelled by the nasty, not so unobtrusively racist older cop, and the script flirted with but did not cross the line of being over the top about the contrast between him and the black part-time pastor. Not just the one but both were struggling with the race issue. I watched till we had learned that the driver who had killed the older cop’s 5-yo son was a black petty criminal and that the pastor not succeeding in his pastoral duty to forgive his partner’s racial animosity. Then I put the movie on pause, as I frequently do when I reach a decision point in a streaming choice and looked up what the ‘Metacritics’ at IMDB had to say about the production. Their thumbnail reviews were more helpful than usual. Atypically, they represented the bicoastal liberal MSM newspapers almost perfectly:
Here is the admittedly melodramatic final scene:
I like the idea of the Grace Card as an explicit repudiation of the Race Card. Both are used not by one race but by all races, though sometimes to different ends. Why I decided to write this post instead of filing my cheeky graphic away where nobody but me would see it. The misuse and exploitation of human emotions which everyone experiences to one degree or another is damaging to the larger duty we all have to rise above what is pettiest in ourselves in pursuit of something higher and greater than the blame games our noblest religions condemn. On a personal note, it was good to see Lou Gossett in what may have been his last significant role. He looked as if playing this part was at the edge of what he could still manage physically. His heart was definitely in it though. Fine actor, good man I’m thinking.
I’m also thinking it’s time to haul out a pair of scissors and do what we always do with credit cards past their expiration date. Take them out of our wallet, cut them up into unusable pieces, and throw them away where they can do no harm.
Comments
Post a Comment