I was laughing at work tonight with a friend about the question-meme going around today, namely, “What do 28 October 1929, 6 December 1941, 21 November 1963, and 10 September 2001 have in common with 4 November 2024? How is today different?”
The answers, we thought, were “Those are the days no one remembers before the days they will never forget when everything about America changed, seemingly overnight. The difference between today and all those other ‘day befores’ is that we have known for months, even years, that this date would be a crisis, literally, a turning point.”
According to one poll, a quarter of America believes that riots will begin nationwide after a winner is declared, regardless of who is the winner, i.e., that neither side will accept the validity of the election if their totem falls. Ten percent of the country thinks tomorrow will be remembered as the beginning of the second American Civil War.
Chris Bray, whose ‘Tell Me How This Ends’ Substack page is always worth reading, wrote a piece today that I thought was both sober and challenging, ‘The Enervation Election: Choose the Other One.’ He takes the ‘Decline and Fall’ view of America today, which is certainly the sobering part of his day-before-election-day reflections. Do read the whole thing.
I want to share here, though, a clip he included from a 2016 talk by Camile Paglia about “transgenderism” and what today’s Gender Theory madness represents in any civilization’s arc from rise to fall. If it sounds a lot like J. K. Rowling’s Gender Critical position that she publicly took in December 2019, it is because Rowling has a lot in common with Camile Paglia, from her biology based feminism, her views on abortion and rape, her literary preferences, even her taste in rock music.
I’ll be writing about the Rowling-Paglia connection soon, albeit only if the various soothsayers predicting the incipient end of America after this election are wrong (and the lights stay on, the internet operates, and martial law is not declared to prevent Trump from taking office…). Today, here is a taste of Paglian contrarianism years before Gender Critical Feminism was cool (which is to say, “last week”). Enjoy the bracing historical perspective on America today from eight years ago…
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