by Mark Harvey
There’s a video of Ivanka Trump going on breathlessly about how she and her husband, Jared Kushner, happened upon an island named Sazan in the Mediterranean while yachting with friends. In her story, they noticed the island in the middle of nowhere, swam to its shores, then hiked barefoot to the summit. She describes the whole sequence of events as if she and Kushner discovered the land a la Vasco de Gama. Then she describes their plans to develop a multi-billion-dollar resort there, but with a light touch so that people can live the way she likes to live.
If you knew nothing about Sazan, and nothing about the gaslighting genes of the Trump family—practically an annex genome—you might envision a virgin isle enshrouded in a soft mist, fairly begging to be transformed by the light touch of Ivanka.
But as with all things Trump, Ivanka’s version of the world travels through a snookering prism so bizarre that it has anyone with a marginally functioning brain hopping up and down yelling, “That’s not true.”
Ivanka’s blasé comments about developing Sazan may not be entirely responsible for tens of thousands of Albanians taking to the streets in May and June to protest what they consider to be a corrupt government and flagrant abuse of power, but the Contessa from Florida definitely added fuel to the fire, in an uprising nicknamed The Flamingo Revolution.
Sazan is a tiny Island of just two square miles and sits where the Adriatic Sea meets the Ionian Sea. It’s part of Albania and is only virgin land in the sense that the Flushing Line of the NY subway system is virgin land. In fact, Sazan shares some features with the NY Subway system in that it is riddled with more than 3,000 Cold War bunkers and 10 miles of secret tunnels. Enver Hoxha, Albania’s dictator from 1944 to 1985, went on a bunker-building spree that made the Soviets look downright Haight-Ashbury, live-and-let-live. He is said to have considered Soviet leaders like Kruschev much too soft and ultimately aligned Albania with China in an effort to find a partner more committed to Marxism-Leninism. Read more »
If you had to design the perfect neighbor to the United States, it would be hard to do better than Canada. Canadians speak the same language, subscribe to the ideals of democracy and human rights, have been good trading partners, and almost always support us on the international stage. Watching our foolish president try to destroy that relationship has been embarrassing and maddening. In case you’ve entirely tuned out the news—and I wouldn’t blame you if you have—Trump has threatened to make Canada the 51st state and took to calling Prime Minister Trudeau, Governor Trudeau.
It doesn’t take a lot of effort to be a bootlicker. Find a boss or someone with the personality of a petty tyrant, sidle up to them, subjugate yourself, and find something flattering to say. Tell them they’re handsome or pretty, strong or smart, and make sweet noises when they trot out their ideas. Literature and history are riddled with bootlickers: Thomas Cromwell, the advisor to Henry VIII, Polonius in Hamlet, Mr. Collins in Pride and Predjudice, and of course Uriah Heep in David Copperfield.
There is something repulsive about lickspittles, especially when all the licking is being done for political purposes. It’s repulsive when we see it in others and it’s repulsive when we see it in ourselves It has to do with the lack of sincerity and the self-abasement required to really butter someone up. In the animal world, it’s rolling onto your back and exposing the vulnerable stomach and throat—saying I am not a threat.
A Republican used to be someone like Dwight Eisenhower, a moderate who worked well with the opposing party, even meeting weekly with their leadership in the Senate and House. Eisenhower expanded social security benefits and, against the more right-wing elements of his party, appointed Earl Warren to be the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Warren, you’ll remember, wrote the majority opinion of Brown v Board of Education, Miranda v Arizona, and Loving v Virginia. If Dwight Eisenhower were alive today, he would be branded a RINO and a communist by his own party. I suspect he would become registered as unaffiliated. 
There is a story that Clemenceau, the Prime Minister of France, was in conversation with some German representatives during the Paris peace negations in 1919 that led to the Treaty of Versailles. One of the Germans said something to the effect that in a hundred years time historians would wonder what had really been the cause of the Great War and who had been really responsible. Clemenceau, so the story goes, retorted that one thing was certain: ‘the historians will not say that Belgium invaded Germany’.
Not long ago there was an article circulating on Facebook about ‘Hating the English’, originally published in a large circulation newspaper. The Irish author says something to the effect that once she thought it was just a few bad ones etc., but now she hates the lot of them. It’s been stimulated, I think, by the repulsive English nationalism that has been raising its head since Brexit, plus the usual ignorance about Ireland, Irish history and Irish interests on the part of your typical ‘Brit’. It’s not a very good piece of writing, and it has a rather slight idea in it. I’d ignore it but for the ‘likes’ and positive comments it’s received, particularly from ‘leftists’. It’s an example of what we could call ‘bloc thinking’ – the emotionally satisfying but futile consignment of entire masses of people into categories of nice and nasty.
think about that. Though others may have one, I lack an analytic framework. The best I can do is to offer some things I’ve been thinking about.
There is a famous exchange in Casablanca between Rick (Humphrey Bogart) and Captain Renault (Claude Rains):