Visiting the Museum

 

More than 19,000 unguided rockets have been launched at Israel since the start of the war in October, the Israeli military says.

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"We need to say out loud what we know to be true, which is a worldview that measures fairness by equality of outcome rather than opportunity, a worldview that thinks merit and excellence are suspicious, is one that is fundamentally hostile to us and all that we stand for." Bari Weiss said this, implying equity laws specifically disadvantage the Jewish people. That is, such laws are essentially anti-Semitic.
Fascinating.
So, are the Jews the modern Kulaks?

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Visiting the Museum

France is opening Notre Dame after years of repair. Now, with the time scrubbed off, the world will have insight into the real creations of the Old Europe.  

The trolling on the internet will start soon. The Americans don't offer this. They offer baseball.

That's true. America is too young to offer classical anything, too big and diverse to offer an identifiable, uniform style. Indeed de Tocqueville thought it a characteristic--and advantage--of its people. Its exceptionalism was practical, not necessarily flattering. He thought Americans a small-town, agricultural people interested in productivity, freedom, and self-reliance without much interest in abstract culture or science.

Nor do they seem terribly interested in other places, including, one would assume, Notre Dame. Only 51% of Americans have passports--up from 10% in 1994.

Contrary to what the European docents would have you believe, this is not a simple matter of esthetics. America is really big and offers good reasons and variety for staying home. From Los Angeles to New York is about the same distance as London to St. Petersburg. You don't have to cross lands you recently fought over and the people are friendly--particularly they don't hate you for where you come from.  There are other elements, like Notre Dames's damage done by the French Revolution and the Paris Commune. And, of course, the two world wars. America has had its human problems but does not have much of a history of institutionalized savagery. (Defenders of The Mausoleum will accuse Americans of their slavery sin but everyone was guilty at the time, many still are, and the Americans were the only ones who fought a war over it. One should remember that at the time of the American Civil War the British and the Russians were losing 100,000 men at Stebastapol, a battle so horrifying and pointless that it changed Tolstoy's life, and those combatants are still at work now in Ukraine.)

With more passports in circulation, more Americans will be traveling. A good thing, presumably. One would hate to miss a trip before Europe closes. And time travel should be provocative as Americans visit the European Museum from the future.