By Daniel M. Ryan
web posted June 5, 2017
Satellite and the Internet have made for a distanceless world in ways we’ve been slow to assimilate. Having had to endure an Internetless time-out for the past few weeks, I found myself feeling like a recluse cut off from the outside world – even though I live in a big city. On the other hand, Sirius XM satellite radio allowed me to keep up with the nuttiness even when stuck on a mud road which proved to be a formidable challenge for a 4X4 truck. It is a new world when you can be connected to the goings-on when driving along a sparse highway in Northern Ontario, while being profoundly out of the loop in a megalopolis while the gremlins have taken your Internet away.
‘Twas this fate that gave me a driver’s seat at the ringside for the two events that gave us our weekly maintenance dose of schadenfreude. Looking for an open gas station while listening to CNBC and Bloomberg transmitting satellite-conveyed pleas for President Trump to keep the U.S. in the Paris accord; being startled out of tracking the Kathy Griffin disaster by a doe moose convinced she had the right-of-way: such is the world we live in.
“Now You’ve Done It�
There’s no point in dignifying Ms. Griffin’s self-caused trouble by calling it a Greek tragedy, or by calling it a Christian tragedy about the perils of thinly-disguised vanity. It was nothing more than a standard publicity stunt which backfired – the same kind of stunt Alec Baldwin pulled in 1998.
You know how the routine goes: a celebrity says or does something that’s shocking, offensive or disgusting. The celebs’ amen corner gets filled with hallelujahs about said celeb’s daring, bravery, subversive genius or whatnot. The likes of us get angry and show it, which inevitably mixes the hallelujahs with the same old smugness. The standard routine, perfected from the heartland of “There’s No Such Thing As Bad Publicity.�
But not this time! In the olden days, when the Hollywood machine was better oiled, those ‘transgressive’ celebs bragged about the “hate mail� they got. They adduced it as evidence that they were better than you and me. In a weird but solidly-ensconced blend of stage-set leftism and the old “they’re just jealous� conceit of fast-trackers, the practitioners of this slick art treated flyover-country hostility as a sign that they were anointed: that they were avatars of whatever. Lately, this routine has been modified by issuing apologies that are probably boilerplate. Unsurprisingly, it was the protected-class types who were responsible for this modification.
But not this time! For the first time in a very long time, a celeb who crossed the line into plain grotesquerie was visibly shaken by the anger directed her way. Ms. Griffin didn’t even get defensive until she lawyered up with the daughter of Gloria Allred. She wailed about her career coming to an end after CNN dumped her like a load of aggregate. Al Franken ditched on his invitation to her to attend his California book-signing. The reason he gave, significantly enough, was...constituency feedback.
I bet there was.
It’s too soon to call a turn in the tide, but the flooding we’re used to has lost its momentum. Even if President Trump gets frustrated in some of his goals because of a bucking Congress, it’s very clear that the Age of Trump is making its mark. He has the almost unique knack of getting under posh-progs’ skins, to the point where he’s playing them as a grand-scale series of publicity stunts. It’s almost as if he’s turned them into...reactionaries.
Penthouse Prog Blues
He certainly flushed out their insecurities while he strung them along before the big announcement. Look at who emerged while they were waiting with bated breath to make the decision we all knew he’d make: the CEOs of Tesla, ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, Apple, Dow Chemical, JP Morgan, General Electric, Salesforce all urged Trump to stick with the accord. Even Lloyd Blankfein emerged from Twitter silence to decry President Trump’s decision. His second tweet, the New York Post described as “bizarre.�
There’s a cosmic justice in seeing the same progs who’ve worked so assiduously to build up Big Government showing a profound anxiety when that same Big Government falls into the hands of an alpha. We’ve seen lefties eat their own on the same college campuses that seemed to have turned into insane asylums, but the Paris-Accord meltdown is much bigger in scale. It’s no secret that what passes for global-warming ‘science’ is profoundly politicized: Bill Nye the Intersectionality Guy certainly found out. But it’s more than politicized: as Tucker Carlson observed, it’s a de facto religion.
Last Thursday, we saw Elitists at the Hand of an Angry Government. The Big Government that they’ve had such a consistent hand in making Big.
This spectacle does show that the physical outback ain’t that bad. Ironic how the thoroughly urban President Trump is making the fable of his age The City Mouse and the Country Mouse.
As for Ms. Griffin, all I’ll suggest is grabbing a bottle of vino and cranking up a sad song. 
Daniel M. Ryan, as Nxtblg, is shepherding the independently-run Open Audi Initiative Prediction Market Shadowing Project. He has stubbornly assumed all the responsibility and blame for the workings and outcome of the project.