GSTAAD—Birthdays at my age are for the birds, but always a good excuse for a party. Messages of good wishes began early on, with loyal Speccie reader Arnold Taylor ringing from South Africa, and Rosemary and Wafic Said texting from the English countryside. (They wished me a happy 39th. I accepted.) My great buddy Michael Mailer, staying with the Kennedys at the family compound in Hyannis Port, had hoped to fly over but the you-know-what prevented it, while Charlie Glass rang from London to announce the end of capitalism as well as yours truly. I asked Charlie to answer me truthfully because it was my birthday, and he swore he would: “Do you have as many children out of wedlock as Boris, or more?” He hung up on me.
That evening Johnnie and Martine Cotton gifted me a ginkgo tree, one that I suspect will outlive me by rather a lot. Then the boozing started in earnest and I’m still under the weather. There’s not much to say about old age that hasn’t already been said, but this: Wisdom does not come automatically with advanced years, nor does the urge to seduce women take a hike. To be happy when one’s old you need luck and good health, the rest is all bulls—. One tends to weigh the few triumphs and numerous disasters, the ethical choices one has or has not made; one also appreciates the absurd happiness one feels at small pleasures like violent karate training, stolen kisses, family evenings. and boozing with friends. Travel is no longer a must, especially when one has been almost everywhere and seen almost everything there is to see.
For some strange reason America is always on my mind nowadays. I have bittersweet feelings about the place because of my past life there, with magical moments and images flooding back, some poignant, others funny, all of them happy and nostalgic. Way back then one felt invulnerable, an allegory for a past America sitting on top of the world. Now witch-hunting has replaced baseball as the national pastime—its one pitch being racism—and is trotted out for all occasions. So what does one do about the ongoing falsehoods that are ruining lives on hearsay alone? Get rid of Twitter, I suppose, or exterminate 90 percent of all journalists, but it’s easier said than done. Oh yes, I almost forgot, Harry and Meghan are also calling for an end to racism or else, which means eternal damnation is just around the corner.
Basically all this shows is how ignorant people really are. All over America, self-hating products of its schools are encouraged by the media and the politicians to paint the darkest possible picture of the history of the country. Nothing else will satisfy them except the abolition of America, and this by people who look like those who created the country in the first place.
The post Old Glory appeared first on LewRockwell.
The daily news and opinion site LewRockwell.com was founded in 1999 by anarcho-capitalists Lew Rockwell and Burt Blumert to help carry on the anti-war, anti-state, pro-market work of Murray N. Rothbard. Visit https://www.lewrockwell.com