It is many years since I have watched any regular U.S. TV. Having discovered streaming, I am able to watch European television, superior in every way to the trivial and trashy emanations of the Hollywood cesspool. The Europeans are by no means perfect, but their characters and plots portray real people and real situations that can appeal to mature minds.


I have remarked before on how Europeans present American Southern characters. There is a good Norwegian series “The State of Happiness” (“Lykkeland”) about the discovery and exploitation of the North Sea oil fields in the 1970s. Two Oklahoma oil men characters in Norway have perfect Southern accents, something Hollywood is incompetent to do. Looking them up, you discover that the two actors with perfect accents are Brits. Note that the Europeans are not ashamed to present genuine accents of people usually denigrated.


Europeans have some sensitivity to real speech. The average American Yankee wants above all else to conform to what is considered (falsely) intelligent and respectable. Historic regional accents to them betray social and educational inferiority.


While I am on the subject of TV, I have to remark on the strange role that Africans have assumed in that medium. Even the Europeans are committed to affirmative action. In any police show, whether British, French, or Scandinavian, an admirable black character will appear invariably in the first five minutes, whether it is really appropriate to the situation or not. And, alas, in many cases, in the first ten minutes we will see an admirable sodomite character portrayed as a normal and unremarkable member of society.


Fairly recently I have seen Africans portray Egyptian, Phoenician, and Persian monarchs, Roman soldiers, a Viking queen, one of the Three Musketeers, a president of Finland, brilliant police inspectors and computer geniuses, and commanding an American warship in battle in World War II. This is surely a falsification of our human past.


Let us give all good credit to the accomplishments of African Americans, but in the long run this kind of false history, I think, will do more harm than good.


And in television advertisements, 90% of the time, American families are now portrayed as black or mixed race, with an occasional bow to Asians and Mexicans. A normal white family is seldom seen enjoying the vast cornucopia of American products. It seems to me that this is designed to in the long run degenerate into disgusted saturation.


​Here is another aspect of our sad culture as portrayed in advertising. About three-quarters on the screen are for drugs, in most cases drugs that no one has ever heard of and has no need of and no doctor has ever prescribed.  This is because the crooks in the pharmaceutical industry have so much money that they can afford lavish advertising in a campaign to keep on the good side of the public and the media owners.

Trump and Elon Musk have lost a hundred thousand supporters by their strange endorsement of the HB1 program to bring in Indians to take American jobs. I thought the new administration was going to deal with destructive immigration. That was Trump’s strong suit.


Liberals always favour mass immigration, but they do so from pseudo-charitable reasons—supposedly to welcome unfortunates seeking American democracy and opportunity. But Musk-Trump advocating Indian importations is crass---entirely motivated by anticipated profits.


It is true that quite a few very intelligent Indians have entered our society in recent years. No surprise that they are intelligent and achievement-oriented. After all, they are a small fraction of the top one percent of a population of many millions.


I have always thought that inviting in talented immigrants was duplicitous in terms of charity. Why don’t these people stay and help their own struggling countries? Is it charitable to bribe them away from their own needy societies? What kind of citizens do they make for a country to which they have come for profit and comfort? Not to mention that Indians, with few exceptions, are aliens to real America.


​The Yankees so far have been able to move away and personally avoid all the damages that they have wrought by their misguided “civil rights” policies. But the Indians are affluent and can easily move into wealthy and upper middle class Yankee neighbourhoods and jobs.

If a President Trump really hopes to engage in the gigantic battle to break the Deep State, to curb the dominant power of leftist bureaucrats and judges, his greatest obstacle will be the Republican party. This should have been obvious all along, but the euphoria of an election victory and first-time hope has caused his enthusiasts to overlook this plainly evident fact.


The Republicans have been willing collaborators of the Deep State’s creation and maintenance for the last half century. “Mainstream” Republicans are not inclined to any revolutionary action against the status quo. They have never been a genuine party of opposition to the leftward distortion of American government and society. They are heavily infused with the Midwestern desire for respectability and conformity. They have no ideas except those created by advertising men. Their only firm principle is “moderation.”


Remember how quickly they abandoned the defense of traditional marriage. Remember how they preferred the Bushes, Dole, Romney and such for presidential candidates. When Trump defeated a half dozen of their groomed celebrities in the 2016 primaries they were shocked. When he took office many of them engaged in sabotage of their own President, so anxious were they not to disturb the Deep State.
The Party may be populist at the grassroots, but in Congress it is what it always has been. Even while Trump was riding to victory, the Republican House chose as Speaker a museum-quality specimen of weak Establishment empty suit. In total regard of his incoming President, he fostered Biden’s destructive initiatives. The Speaker will be essential to any Trump legislative victories. Republicans have slight majorities in the House and Senate for the first time in a long time. It only takes some of them to join the Democrats to kill any Trump legislation. And that defection has been normal practice for decades.


Trump enthusiasts, like most Americans, are very short-sighted and ignorant of history. The entire history of the last half century is marked by Republican participation in the Deep State and evil deceitfulness to their conservative voters. Nixon and Reagan were elected by large majorities as reformers. Instead the consolidated state only grew bigger and more intrusive. These presidents and a majority of Republicans in Congress supported civil rights laws, ever-increasing immigration, and some of the worst Supreme Court appointments in history.


Republicans are now balking at two of the most seriously reformist of Trump’s nominees—Kennedy and Gabbard. “Mainstream” Republican leaders recognize that these are genuine threats to business as usual, and they have no interest in harming the Establishment that provides them prestige and pelf. They have been this way for a long time.


A young man I know - talented, articulate, and determined - recently entered a Republican primary against a House incumbent. Our young man raised the immigration issue. His establishment opponent could only answer that we needed to bring in talented people. This is pure boilerplate from Republican headquarters, and it is obvious that this dunce never had even thought about a real issue. See a typical Republican congressperson.


The Republicanisation of the South has been a grievous defeat for conservatism. In the second half of the 20th century, Southern Democrats were the firmest and most skillful conservative force in America. Now the South is sending to Congress mostly Republican empty suits with no interest except in themselves and crony capitalism.
The Republican legislature in my beloved South Carolina is one of the most big-spending and corrupt of all state lawmaking bodies.


And now we have the great spokesman against immigration endorsing bringing in more Indian technicians to replace American workers. Liberals love immigration through assumed benevolence to the suffering. It is not benevolent to hire away their most talented people from struggling countries. And what kind of citizens do such people make who left their own needy countries for profit and comfort? In this case Trump and Musk motives are crass---profit-oriented. What an insult to the American people and their wish to become great again---that we need talented immigrants for important jobs. What a lie.


Trump’s recent grandiose pronouncements about acquiring new territory seem absurdly counter to our wish for domestic reform. Let us hope that this bad idea is only a publicity ploy.


We can have some hope that Trump might have learned something from his previous term and knows more about picking the right people and wielding the big stick. He will have to defy the federal courts that will throw out nets to hamper him and make ruthless use of executive power against the bureaucracy while opposed by a large part of his own party.


​Let’s have a modest hope that in this interesting and changing time, Trump may be able to avoid war with Russia and other international calamities, although his role as peacemaker is compromised by his zealous Zionism. And maybe he will be able to eliminate some of the spending and bureaucracy that now burden the American people. Whether it is too late for real recovery of that imagined Good America remains to be seen.

​Archibald Rutledge, a major South Carolina and national writer in the first half of the 20th century, seems to have dropped nearly out of sight. His books are mostly available, when obtainable at all, in over-priced used remnants. Yet Rutledge was in his time a celebrated and best selling author of hunting and nature accounts, memoirs, and a poet of lasting stature. He is the outstanding recent writer of the South Carolina Low Country.


Renewing an interest in Rutledge recently, I turned to the supposedly definitive South Carolina Encyclopedia. The clueless writer of the entry on Rutledge (1883-1973) does not bother to mention more than a few of the titles of his 50 books (some bestsellers), nor his many honorary degrees, nor the still lively international interest of hunting readers. This “historian” is very short on facts but strong in opinions. We are now to dismiss Rutledge as no more than a misleading nostalgist for the Old South and a white supremacist.


One is surprised to see such an important part of South Carolina culture dismissed so ignorantly, but actually such is so commonplace that we should not be surprised. That is one of the consequences of being a conquered people.


South Carolina still recognises its brilliant son by making his hereditary plantation at McClellanville into a State Park. And the University Press in 1992 did publish a collection Hunting & Home in the Southern Heartland: The Best of Archibald Rutledge. The editor Jim Casada knows the subject well and provides an excellent criticism and biography.


There is still plenty of room for publishing other collections of Rutledge’s work and republishing some of his books. His little inspirational book, Life’s Extras, was immensely popular at the time. If you want to get started, besides the hunting stories, I would suggest My Colonel and His Lady, Tom and I on the Old Plantation, Home by the River, and the nearly unobtainable collected Poems of Archibald Rutledge.


Rutledge was a direct descendant of John Rutledge and of other historic South Carolina figures, and inherited a plantation. But he was by no means affluent in his start in life. He attended a small college in New York State. For more than thirty years he served as chairman of the English department at Mercersburg Academy in Pennsylvania, only occasionally able to visit his home place. Only after retirement was he able to restore Hampton into a vital place.


The encyclopedia writer is completely wrong to dismiss Rutledge’s treatment of the black people among whom he lived. He was paternalistic yes - what else was possible at the time? We ought to give him credit for an affectionate attitude, especially when we remember the negative attitudes toward black people that were widespread in the South - and, yes, in the North and West as well. Anyone who is interested in knowing African American life will find much of value in the writing of one who knew them well and who expected their improvement.

Nobody has ever written more and more meaningfully about the South Carolina Low Country, of which Rutledge is the eternal bard.