Category Archives: Fundraiser Octave

Howling at the Moon

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Summer Fundraiser 2016, Day Four

This is turning out to be a real hotdog of a fundraiser!

I used to worry when these quarterlies came due. That ancient concern most of us have — i.e., “what-if-we-threw-a-party-and- no-one came?” — would be my anticipatory fret. But over the last few years, a delightful phenomenon has replaced my worry: in the week or so before the fundraiser begins, donations appear early, often accompanied by “hope I didn’t miss it” notes. Somehow or other a few readers had internalized the rhythms of this work-in-progress that is Gates of Vienna; thus their concern that they’d missed something. And the funny thing is, the early birds are never the same people; they vary from quarter to quarter. How wonderful is that?

Tip jarYour response has been global for a while, but new donors from new places always compel my curiosity. Given the great geographical stretch, I get the opportunity to study new territory every time. Google maps and Wikipedia are my companions as I try to imagine what it’s like to live where you do. The variety of places keeps me busy for at least a month afterward, looking at towns and areas I’d never heard of prior to your donation.

There’s always a mix of old and new. Some readers have been giving to the cause since the first fundraiser back in 2008. Others come by just once or twice and move on. Fortunately, the latter are not as numerous as our old faithfuls. With the advent of the internet, the formation of online “friendships” has altered how I view what that word means. If we didn’t do this every day, I’d probably be out doing some kind of volunteer work — limited due to my energy, yeah, but still some kind of connection that made me feel good about being here. Or Being Here, if that suits better. The polarization of our culture has changed so much, particularly our associations. There is no patch I can find not fraught or burdened with politics. Ugh…

We are so very grateful for your response. We could ask all we want, but if few respond we’d have to rethink the whole process. Fortunately, such a re-evaluation isn’t necessary, since this model seems to be working well.

For us, your donations are testament to the hard work our whole team does, day after day. For people new to Gates of Vienna, it may appear that the fellow whose byline appears on the posts is the only one in charge, but if they stick around they become familiar with the reality that this is a team effort on all levels. Yes, on the stage the Baron is the leader but behind the lights, he is the manager who pulls everyone’s efforts into a congruent flow of information. He loves to build teams of workers who can function without him, who suggest work, then do it and show up with the (mostly) finished product. This also gives him a level of satisfaction he lost when he had to stop painting. Now, for fun, he gets to create images. [At the moment he’s enjoying all the things he can do to Angela Merkel, things that would land him in jail were he in Germany. Scratch that: make it things he would think about but never actually create if he had the karmic misfortune to live in Germany.]

Y’all can’t see the ever-expanding team of volunteers. It’s a changing group, but for the most part, once people show up they tend to stay; the group just gets bigger and fewer people are overworked. Forced into being quiet where they live (and, yes, that means here in the U.S., too), Gates of Vienna becomes their refuge, the place they can apply a lifetime of expertise that they’d had to shove under a bushel basket where they live. This team of volunteers, all equally dedicated to pushing back against the mortal damage that Islam’s incursions into the West have wrought, derives the same deep satisfaction we do in making public their efforts.

Yes, it is the Baron’s job to keep all the plates in the air; that’s what a good leader does. But those plates are usually others’ work and it is his particular joy to simply coordinate what they offer to do — e.g., one person translates a video with the times marked. The B then corrects spelling or grammar and, in turn, passes it (I think this “it” is what he and Vlad term an “SRT file” but don’t ask me what that means) on to Vlad. Vlad fits the words to the screen, adds the group watermark at the end, and posts the finished product to whatever venue will accept our work. With racists like us and Vlad and our volunteers, finding an outlet can be problematic at times. Now if we were ISIS, we’d never have a problem finding a place to put it up. Funny how that works in the smothering politically correct West.

With essays, the Baron edits; he has a very light hand with that, too. Essentially he cares that the grammar, syntax, and spelling are okay. He may shorten run-on sentences (that’s especially the case with online essays. They need changes that, say, magazines or books don’t require). Occasionally, say for a writer whose native language isn’t English, he may polish it a bit, but mostly he just formats things to fit our page and style. Then it’s ready for posting.

Because he knows how to meld others’ work, conflict within the team is quite rare. Occasionally someone decides group work isn’t for them, but for people who have reached the stage in life where they have time to do this kind of work and are concerned with the way the world is going…well, mostly they seem to prefer company along the way. But no one needs to tell you, dear reader, that life on the right side can be a lonely adventure at times.

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As I mentioned in my last fund-raising post, I’ll be talking more about politics in these final months in the lead-up to the election. Now that the primaries are over and the candidates winnowed down to a final one from each side, it’s time.

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Running With the Hare

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Summer Fundraiser 2016, Day Three

Today is Wednesday, and we’re moving into the third day of our quarterly fundraiser.

The theme of this week’s bleg is “Dog Days”. Here at Schloss Bodissey in the very wee hours of an August morning, the day’s dog is a wet one indeed. We had cold rain all spring, and then hot rain most of the time so far this summer. Damp, steamy, insufferable weather. Any dog having his day today would be a fragrant dog indeed.

Tip jarThe response to our first two days urging our readers to make the Tip Cup clink has been gratifying indeed. And the cross-traffic from Western Rifle Shooters Association has been especially noticeable. I can tell as soon as they’ve put up a link over there to our fundraiser, because donations suddenly appear from the reddest parts of the red states — Arizona, Oregon, Nevada, Texas, etc. Thanks, guys! It’s good to see you show up here with your open-carry long guns.

For those of you who think we are wussies for our reticence on certain topics, WRSA is the place to go. I’ve often said that it’s not necessarily a good idea to discuss publicly everything you know about that’s going on. Given the future that likely awaits us after the excrement impacts the circulation device, I don’t want to needlessly add myself or anyone else to the list of people to be rounded up when the Loretta Lynch mob launches its crackdown. WRSA, however, has a mission that requires a more open discussion of the specifics of contingency planning for such eventualities. If you’re interested in those matters, and haven’t already been there, a visit is recommended.

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When I was thinking about these Wet Smelly Dog Days yesterday afternoon, a phrase popped into my head: “Running with the hare and hunting with the hounds”. I believe it’s a British expression, and it refers to someone who wants two opposite things at the same time. An American equivalent is probably “To have your cake and eat it too.”

It came to mind again when I was moderating comments on the post with two videos about three leftist women in Germany who had been raped and/or groped by “refugees”. These women are devotees of the “Welcome Refugees” movement, and loathe “right-wing extremists” who want to curtail immigration. Yet they are feminists, too, and dedicated Social Justice Warriors against Germany’s “rape culture.” The two different zealotries clash when their adherents experience the seamier side of cultural enrichment, driving them into a state of cognitive dissonance.

The left-wing mindset focuses on championing the victim. Among European leftists, migrants are the victims, and the hateful racist right-wing xenophobes are the persecutors.

But women are victims, too, especially when actual sexual violence is attempted upon them. Heck, even an admiring male glance at the appurtenances of an attractive woman is considered a “microaggression”. What about groping, molestation, and rape? But egad! The perp is a poor unfortunate migrant! (Or more realistically, a gang of seven or eight of them.) What are all these wymyn to do?

They want to have it both ways, and they can’t. They want to run with the hare while they abhor the hounds, but suddenly the hares have morphed into hounds. Something has to give, but which will it be?

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Hell is August

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Summer Fundraiser 2016, Day Two

Stuff happens: Day Two of this fundraiser started out with the loss of our Internet connection. Yikes! However will we continue on with Dog Days sans the technology to tell you about them? Oh well…Gates of Vienna has lived through worse; I figured if the cutoff was protracted, the B could always put my essay on a thumb drive and gallop off to town with it.

Tip jarWe could call these whimsical outages karma, or — closer to reality — put them down to the drama of living in the Back of Beyond, the place where technology hangs on by its fingernails, and where we don’t bother firing up our cell phone. Why do so when you can’t get a steady signal for more than fifteen seconds or so? “Smart” or not, our cell phone only works when we pass through civilization — which was all we needed it for anyway. And thanks to our last fundraiser, we were able to get the thing and a pre-paid plan.

Yes, we have peace and quiet here, and yes, the B can walk around in his birthday suit should he so desire, but there are trade-offs for everything. The advantage of living in a place where land values are falling is never having to worry about a shopping mall springing up near you. Since the “value” of our home is strictly based on how much we like it (a great deal), and since we plan never to move, a drop in our already low tax rate is a boon. I never did buy the “value” of real estate. For me, a paid-up mortgage meant you never had to move. Moving is hell. Familiar surroundings are a balm.

An area without a whole lot of housing regulations or intrusive neighbors brings with it the drawbacks of living without any assurance that the mod cons everyone else takes for granted will be operative here on any given day. Then again, we have real peace of mind in some areas: the chance of our sidewalk being the target of a terrorist attack is close to the vanishing point, especially since the nearest sidewalk is fifteen miles away. That makes Schloss Bodissey a not “target rich” opportunity for the murderous barbarians being inflicted on the West.

Yes, I do think about the fact that our very existence could be a thorn in some Islamic hides, so you never can tell: they might decide to visit the black forests of Vienna here (nudge, nudge) and cause trouble. I did notice a few years back, when some new house insurance policy riders came in the mail at renewal time that we had something new: a “terrorism exclusion”. When I called to pay the bill my sort-of-casual, off-hand question to our agent about this here “terror thing” was met with laughter: “Yeah, ain’t that something? Who’s gonna blow us up? I swear, it’s a crazy world out there; guess the big boys calculating all the odds have to apply ’em across the board. You ’n’ me, though, we just have to worry about fire and y’all are covered for that, sure enough”.

Oh…that insurance premium payment? It came right out of our donations, but I didn’t tell him that. It’s not that I’d be concerned about his knowing; it’s more about how long it would take to make plain what it is we ‘do’ and why we think it’s vital. A sure way to not blend in is to tell your neighbors you make your living writing about Islam and terrorism and the problems Europe is facing. It’s much easier to call ourselves “editors”. That job description all by itself is a conversation-killer. Sometimes I say I’m a writer.

So other than what we do online, we don’t stand out. No fear of going to the grocery store or the dentist and being pointed at for being WAYCISTS. Traveling to the Republic of Charlottesville is another story. That’s a place where you remove your bumper stickers — if you have any.

That’s one reason the theme of “Dog Days” appeals to me: it bridges the chasm between what we do (and know) and the daily concerns of our neighbors, and what they do (and know). In the latter case, that’s quite a lot when it comes to making do or building it yourself, both being traits I deeply value. And when you come right down to it, we are all equal in our search for a cool spot in the shade and a glass of sweet tea on the table beside us.

For all of us, farmers and editors alike, this year has been a brutal summer. The dog days started early, right after the Fourth of July. Instead of a slow climb to the clammy heat of intemperate August, it slammed into our area almost a full month early. No, it’s not global warming; it feels just like the second summer we lived here, the one we spent at the river on those blazing afternoons. The river was no cooler than the ambient air, but the sounds and smells of the riverside could convince you it wasn’t quite as bad as it seemed. This time, we have the luxury of central air-conditioning so the heat is more like waiting for things to “temperate” (as a friend said recently) and less like enduring Hell.

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Infidel Dog Days

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Summer Fundraiser 2016, Day One

Well, the Dog Days of summer are here. And that’s the theme of this quarter’s fundraising week: “Dog Days”.

Since this summer’s Dog Days began (I date them from June 12 — more on that later), we have once again acquired a substantial batch of new readers. So I’ll begin by explaining to those recent arrivals what we’re doing, and all the veterans of previous fundraisers can scroll through this part to get to the meat of the post.

When we got kicked out of Pajamas Media back in April 2008 (wow — more than eight years! Time flies), we lost the advertising revenue we used to get from their “skyscrapers” and banner ads. It wasn’t a whole lot of money, but times were tough, so it hurt. Dymphna and I took a poll of our readers and asked them whether they wanted us to scout around for other advertisers (hoping that we could avoid the sleazy ones), or should we raise money through periodic funding appeals, the way NPR affiliates do?

Tip jarOur readers opted for these fundathons over any further advertising (which was a relief for me; I hated those ads), so we established a routine: Every quarter we pick a week and put up a post each day, beginning on Monday, in which we badger regular readers to drop a tanner or three in the tip cup on our sidebar. Then, on the following Monday — the eighth day — I post a wrap-up that lists all the geographical locations from which the gifts came. Dymphna refers to the entire sequence as the “Fundraiser Octave”.

We’ve been getting by this way, quarter by quarter, for eight years now. It’s the 21st-century version of living hand-to-mouth. In the beginning it was anxiety-inducing, but we’ve gotten used to it now. Somehow we always manage to scrape up just enough to keep going — to pay the website hosting fees and whatnot, with enough left over so Dymphna and I can have our daily crust (along with some fine home-brewed espresso, I might add).

[Full disclosure: We do have some book ads on our sidebar, but those are static images with links that we’ve put up gratis for our friends. The ones that point to Amazon return a small commission for us, so if you click through to buy a book, make sure to order some power tools or a crate of saffron while you’re there.]

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Now back to the Dog Days, and why I date them from June 12.

In my Auxiliary Brain (a Microsoft Access database) I keep an indexed archive of images that I’ve uploaded, so I can hunt up graphics that I need with just a few keystrokes. The other day I went looking for a series of images, so I sorted the table in date order and scrolled through it, beginning at the current day and working backwards. Here’s what I noticed:

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Forward! …into Spring and Summer

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This post was supposed to go up on Monday, but events intervened, and I didn’t get around to collecting all the data until just now.

Last week’s (quarterly fundraiser, with its Soviet May Day theme) kept things hectic all last week. Fundraising weeks are grueling, and I didn’t fully recover from this one until this morning, when I slept in for an extra hour. What bliss!

Once again, the remarkable thing was the number of modest donations that came in from so many different places. Here’s the final list — I hope I didn’t leave out any locations:

Stateside: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia, Washington, and Wyoming

Near Abroad: Canada and the Dominican Republic

Far Abroad: Australia, Croatia, Denmark, Germany, India, Israel, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, and the UK

See you in the middle of the long, hot summer, comrades.

Good Night, Chet

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Spring Fundraiser 2016, Day Seven

Today is the final day of our quarterly fundraiser. It’s been a busy week — y’all really turned out for the latter part of it, and I thank everyone for your willingness to step up and contribute to the maintenance of this site.

Tip jarA lot of repeat visitors — should I call them “recidivists”? — made the tip cup clink this time. But we also saw quite a few new donors, especially from the UK, Australia, California, and Texas. I’m always surprised by the number of Californians who chip in — we think of the state as a lefty stronghold, but there seem to be a lot of Islamophobes out there. Presumably they keep a low profile…

We’ve been doing this crowdfunding intensively for about six years now. It’s still a little nerve-wracking, but not like it was in the beginning. Somehow it always seem to work — there really are a lot of people out there who read Gates of Vienna and are willing to donate a modest amount to see it continue. Every quarter it’s gratifying and encouraging to watch it all happen.

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The theme of this week’s bleg has been “May Day”, based on the date the week began. The header image chosen for the final post is a bit different from the other six. Rather than another gaudy May Day propaganda poster from Soviet days, it’s a somber monochrome photo of a May Day parade in Moscow. 1963, I believe — just six months after the Cuban Missile Crisis.

For most of my life this was the only type of image I saw of Soviet May Day celebrations. All those colorful Socialist Realist posters had to wait not just for the fall of the USSR, but for the arrival of the Internet. Now there is a brisk commercial trade in originals and reproductions of Soviet propaganda art. And there are huge archives of images available for free on the Web, a cornucopia of triumphalist Socialist art.

But when I was a kid, all I saw was the parade in Red Square, with bemedaled representatives of the Politburo — headed first by Khrushchev, later by Brezhnev (and Kosygin, for a while) — watching it all sternly from their lofty reviewing stand. A photo featuring the huge CCCP missiles on the front page of The Washington Post. Black and white newsreel footage — later black and white videotape — of the marching soldiers and rumbling missile trucks on NBC Nightly News with Chet Huntley and David Brinkley.

It was always Huntley and Brinkley, because that’s the channel we watched at our house. In those pre-cable days there were three choices for television news: ABC, CBS, and NBC. My parents were NBC loyalists, so every night we watched the local news on WRC, the NBC affiliate in Washington D.C., followed by Huntley and Brinkley for national and world news. No Walter Cronkite for us!

My parents were brand loyalists in many other ways. They always drove Nash Ramblers (and later AMC cars). They drank Coke, not Pepsi. They used Colgate toothpaste. They read Time, not Newsweek. They subscribed to The Washington Post, not the Washington Star. And they watched NBC TV.

So all the tension and worry of the Cold War entered my impressionable mind with the mediation of those two reassuring, avuncular news anchors. When the Berlin Wall went up in August 1961, the first barbed wire unrolled across the NBC News screen on our TV. When President Kennedy stood at the Wall and said, “Let them come to Berlin,” it was on an NBC News special. During the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, Huntley and Brinkley spoke to us in somber tones about the looming possibility of nuclear war. Eyeball to eyeball, but the other fellow blinked. Or so they said.

Those were scary times for a kid, those Cold War days. Duck-under-the-desk drills in school. Fallout shelters in people’s basements, stocked with water, canned goods, and iodine pills. Old footage of nuclear explosions on TV documentaries (and in Lyndon Johnson’s notorious “Daisy” campaign commercial).

I used to have nightmares about a nuclear attack. We lived halfway between Washington and Baltimore back then, and in my dream I would look out the window and see that flash brighter than the sun above the horizon over one or the other city, followed by the rise of the mushroom cloud. Then I would wait for the blast to arrive… The dream would usually end there, and I’d wake up with a sense of great relief that it was not real. Not yet.

A lot of us youngsters just matter-of-factly assumed that we would not live to adulthood, that the mushroom cloud would get us sometime before that. We’d speak about it occasionally among ourselves, but not too often — it was just there, a tacit assumption. When I grew up, I remembered that. Every birthday after my 21st seemed a gift.

I still dream about that bright flash from time to time. But it’s not really a nightmare anymore — just a disjointed remnant, a relic of another time.

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“Jeez, Baron,” I hear you say, “that’s a nice cheerful way to raise money for your blog!”

Yes, well…

When I sit down and start writing one of these fundraiser posts, it’s almost always in the wee hours of the morning. When my mind is this frazzled it does strange, hypnagogic things. I collect the chosen images, bring the week’s topic into consciousness, and then the prose just free-associates wherever it decides to go.

And here we are. It’s 2016 — Who’da thunk it?

The interesting thing about these post-modern times, more than a quarter-century after the Wall came down, is that the nuclear scare is still looming over us. It’s not Russia we fear this time — not most of us, anyway — but the Hosts of Mohammed.

Barack Hussein Obama has basically handed the Iranian mullahs the key to their own mushroom cloud. Pakistan already has the “Islamic nuclear bomb”. Other Islamic states — the Sunni ones, the enemies of Shi’ite Iran — are preparing to acquire their own.

And the Islamic State is working really, really hard to get theirs.

But there are no duck-and-cover drills this time. No fallout shelters, either. And no Huntley and Brinkley to explain it all to us in reassuring tones from a black and white screen.

It’s a different world. Not quite the future we were expecting fifty or sixty years ago — when we dared to believe we might have a future.

Strange times, these.

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Yesterday’s generosity flowed in from:

Stateside: Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Tennessee, Virginia, and Washington

Near Abroad: Canada

Far Abroad: Australia, Sweden, and the UK

That’s it for the Spring 2016 Fundraiser. Thanks to everyone who chipped in! I’ll see you sometime tomorrow for a brief wrap-up.

The tip jar in the text above is just for decoration. To donate, click the tin cup (or the donate button) on the sidebar of our main page. If you prefer a monthly subscription, click the “subscribe” button.

Who Rules in a Post-Political World?

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Spring Fundraiser 2016, Day Six

We’re rounding the bend into the home stretch now.

The Baron says our donations have maintained their pace, though a few old faces are missing. He has to keep track; I have the luxury of waiting until the Octave is over. That’s when I have the leisure to read each name and think about the person who gave and where they live.

Tip jarMy post-quarterly process of pondering our donors is then followed by a payment to Vlad Tepes before I leave the page. I’m so glad I had the inspiration a few years ago to tithe your donations; I was sure that inspiration was utterly right when it suddenly dawned on me to give the sum to Vlad Tepes.

This step has become one of the most pleasurable aspects: as I am, Vlad’s memory is like a sieve, thus the gift always takes him by surprise. The closest description I can think of is watching one of your favorite relatives open a present you enjoyed giving to them. My wish for each of you is that you have a Vlad-equivalent in your life, too: a creative person of integrity who can’t remember who he’s sworn never to work with again, a person of deep wit and humor with a strong sense of silly, and someone who continues to surprise you with off-hand anecdotes which make you realize how widely his talents reach. The sterling silver cross he created is just one example of his talent.

The first time I ordered a chain from Amazon it was too short, so I returned it for a longer (stainless steel, not silver) version. I’m not much of a jewelry person, though I do ask for earrings when the Baron travels — each pair is a reminder of where he went. (I wish some genius would sell earrings in sets of three. Many women would snap ’em up since earrings have the same cannibalistic tendencies socks do: in the middle of the night the alpha earring consumes its timid rival.)

I also don’t generally advertise my faith, but… Sometimes I forget to tuck in the cross after I put it on — yeah, ADD. Like putting on one earring. On occasion I notice I’ve made someone uncomfortable (i.e., they stare at my chest, which hasn’t been worth a glance for some years now). When that happens, I pull the cross inside to rest on my tee shirt. Can’t make folks uncomfortable, or have them thinking I’ve made their space less safe, eh?

Each time we do one of these Fundraiser Octaves I’m always surprised — and always mention — how quickly this week has seemed to fly. Since your response to our appeal this time has been even more encouraging than usual, I am especially heartened. On the other hand, the process itself cheers me, and that hasn’t changed; it’s simply moved to an ever-earlier point in the week. One thing that has changed over our years of fund-raising is the locus of my concern about these quarterlies. In the beginning it was a stomach-fluttering “can we possibly find the courage to keep asking for donors to step up for a whole week?” As often happens, though, the “answer” is provided when the question itself changes. Thus my underlying thought as I go through each day of this fundraiser is now “how do we maintain the presence of mind required to create an appeal worth your time?”

I’m not sure those are really different questions.

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The image at the top is my choice. Well, they all are: the Baron found lots of illustrations from that era and we narrowed our selections down to what you’ve seen this week. It was such a wonderful era for Soviet art; what a shame that talent didn’t pass over into Soviet architecture. Anyway, notice how they’re all marching fearlessly left, umm, “Left”. As in Hard Left. It looks backwards to me, as though the image had been flopped. But then the Left has always seemed retrograde at best. One worn-out idea after another.

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The Red Tide Flows From East to West

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Spring Fundraiser 2016, Day Five

Well, we’re past the midweek hump of our quarterly fundraiser and rolling down the far side.

Tip jarThe pace has picked up over the past 48 hours, and we owe a big thank-you to all the dedicated readers whose generosity came out in full force. That includes quite a few from the Western Rifle Shooters Association — I can tell by the ornery places they come from in the South, West, and Southwest of the country. They’re ornery enough to put aside their firearms for a few minutes and come over here to the Counterjihad side of things to make the tip cup clink. Hi, guys! Good to see you here.

Real thank-you notes are starting to roll out, too. But that will take a while, given how many we have to write. Last time I got so far behind that it took me about six weeks just to write all the thank-yous for the donations that came in during the Fundraising Octave. I’ve vowed to do better this quarter — a little late for a New Year’s resolution, but still…

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The theme of this week’s fundraiser is May Day, with a special emphasis on the socialist festivities that surround the celebrations on the first of May. We’ve been focusing on the Soviet Union because that’s where I drew the iconography from for the post headers — you can’t beat the USSR for snappy May Day graphics.

The image at the top of this post features a venerable depiction of Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, a.k.a. Joseph Stalin, who ruled the Soviet Union with an iron fist from the late 1920s until his death in 1953. The image is old, but the occasion of its display is recent — as far as I can tell, the banner was being held aloft by Stalinophiles to celebrate his 130th birthday in 2009, possibly on May Day (although Stalin’s birthday is in December).

Stalin is revered by a significant percentage of Russians, and remains popular in other parts of the former Soviet Union, including his native Georgia. Although probably not in Ukraine, I would guess.

For the rest of the Socialist diaspora, Mr. Dzhugashvili does not rate as a high a place in the pantheon of beloved Communists. Not like Mao, Trotsky, Che, and Ho Chi Minh. Even Lenin enjoys a modicum of respect abroad. But Stalin? Well… The Gutmenschen in Ann Arbor and Berkeley would generally rather not discuss him. Yes, yes, we know you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs, but why so MANY? Real Communism has never been tried, and now it never will be, because Stalin ruined the brand. More’s the pity…

For a brief time — from 1941 to 1946 — Stalin was our beloved Uncle Joe, that calm, smiling benign fellow who was our staunch ally in the war against Hitler. We knew he got a little overzealous when dealing with his political opponents, but, hey — it was wartime, and besides, conditions in Russia were very different than they were in the Western democracies. We had to cut him some slack.

We had our reckoning with Nazi crimes after the war, during the occupation and de-Nazification of Germany. But any reckoning with Stalin and Communism had to be postponed until after the Cold War.

Four decades later, when the Wall came down and Communism was tossed onto the garbage scow of history —that’s when we should have had our reckoning with Stalin’s crimes. But we didn’t. George H.W. Bush declared the New World Order, we reached the end of history, and then marked time until Osama Bin Laden strode onto the world stage to strut and fret his hour.

Stalin should have earned his rightful place alongside Hitler as an icon of ultimate evil. His face should be loathed and spat upon. Godwin’s law should be invoked concerning his name, just as it is with Hitler’s. Politicians should excoriate their opponents and liken them to Joseph Stalin in their callous disregard for the welfare of their constituents.

But none of that happened.

It was easier for us just to forget about what Communism had done. We turned it into kitschy consumer items and trendy fashion wear. Che T-shirts and red star berets and all that other swell stuff.

And it was especially easy because Stalin had moved West.

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The Habits and Habitats of May

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Spring Fundraiser 2016, Day Four
Well, thanks, y’all! Gratias plena! The pace of donations is picking up and we’re feeling much more encouraged and energized as a result.

It’s akin to the wonderful feeling I got when Tommy prevailed in court… there are not words sufficient to describe my sense of renewal. And all of you must know by now how seldom an Irishwoman is short on words.

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When you depend on the generosity of others, you must pay meticulous attention to your audience. In the beginning, we wrote for ourselves, as a way to maintain contact across the miles, so we answered only to one another.

Tip jarNow, with all of you, and the necessity to ask for money from you, the scope of our vision has long since changed: who we’re answerable to, and for what, and why. Thus each of these week-long events requires us to step back. We take the opportunity to look at our work and at our direction; we spend even more time than usual talking about both the content and the process of our child, this website.

Yes, really. Gates of Vienna has evolved into a something we cherish and nurture. The conversations we have about it are similar in process to the talks we used to have as our son was growing up. Imagine if parents got report cards four times a year! If real live kids got the attention we give this blog, the future of next generation would be less parlous than it seems now.

To put it in strategic terms, the Quarterlies function in a way to maintain our situational awareness and to remind one another why, after all this time, we’re still here doing this every day…

This is a question worth asking as long as you’re comfortable wandering in the cloud of confusion between the query itself and whatever answers show up. At the risk of being thought sentimental (not something I’m accused of very often), I can sum it up in one word: love. Love in all its permutations and emphases, but love nonetheless is the engine that drives Gates of Vienna.

Perhaps I can clarify this with one of my favorite poems. This is probably Richard Wilbur’s most famous and most studied work. In a deceptive simplicity he pulls together the components of — as he might say — a quotidian process: the way in which we come back to life each morning and so begin to pull the pieces of ourselves together, however scattered they may have been by sleep.

Love Calls Us to the Things of This World

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.
                        Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.

     Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.
Now they are rising together in calm swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;

     Now they are flying in place, conveying
The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water; and now of a sudden
They swoon down into so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.
                                                   The soul shrinks

     From all that it is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every blessèd day,
And cries,
                  “Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.”

     Yet, as the sun acknowledges
With a warm look the world’s hunks and colors,
The soul descends once more in bitter love
To accept the waking body, saying now
In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,
     “Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;
Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating
Of dark habits,
                         keeping their difficult balance.”

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If you read it slowly you’ll see not only the profoundly simple truth of his images, but the fun he is having juxtaposing those brilliant, quickly changing images on the page (and in the mind of his reader). For example, notice how he begins with the opening of his eyes, but then moves immediately not to what he sees, but to what he hears as a clothes line is sent squeaking down a pulley, its load of laundry flies into the morning. Not only sight and sound, but the unseen hands working the pulley and its accompanying joy… for many of us, that joy doesn’t arrive until we’re holding cup of coffee, ready to face the day’s offerings.

Opening Gates of Vienna each morning is much like that for me. I sit/lie on the chaise longue in the sunroom off the kitchen, listening to the Baron’s morning sounds as he makes coffee. I already have my own cup (espresso brewed in a Bialetti on the stove); with the comments page open I begin the ‘laundry’ of overnight comments while the steaming coffee revives my soul. It is most often in the morning, not quite awake, that those verboten words get past me, but then, I think y’all know that already.

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Love in the Ruins of the Revolution

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Spring Fundraiser 2016, Day Three

Each quarterly fundraiser has its own rhythm, and this one has been pretty slow so far.

It’s hard to identify the reasons for the early lag in donations. Maybe people are burned out on politics — it’s been intense for many months on both sides of the Atlantic. It could be that a sort of cultural jet lag has set in. All that information — too much, too fast, all day every day. Especially the jihad-jihad-jihad that thrums unremittingly in the background. Everybody’s aware of it, subliminally or otherwise, and it can be wearisome (as I know too well).

There’s only so much of that stuff that you can take before you have to do something else for a while. Dig in the garden, maybe. Play bridge. Watch old Netflix movies.

Build a ship in a bottle.

Tip jarBut no jihad, thank you! I’ve had a sufficiency.

And times are tough. Money doesn’t go as far as it used to, and just about everybody has less of it.

A lot of our readers are close to my age, which means they’ve moved into the “fixed income” geezer class, or will soon. They have to watch their pennies carefully nowadays. Especially with those high co-pays at the doctor’s. And the price of medication, prescription or otherwise…

But maybe you’ve got an extra sawbuck stashed in the pocket of your other pants — better take a look. It may even be marked with a note in fluorescent ink: SAVE FOR THE COUNTERJIHAD.

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The theme of this week’s bleg is “May Day”, especially Soviet-style May Day, with red banners and proletarian slogans and unremitting exhortations to work harder to make the socialist dream come true.

The Soviet style of socialism was different from the sclerotic sort we’ve settled into here in the post-modern West. It was more destitute, more dramatic, and more deadly.

And funnier. Somehow it offered ample opportunities for jokes, a sort of samizdat culture of dissident humor. We’ve posted collections of Soviet jokes here in the past — nothing is funnier than those old jokes. But the milieu that nurtured them is fading into the mists of history. It makes me wonder if modern Russian jokes are as funny as the ones from Soviet times.

In the spirit of Soviet humor, I’ve dug into the archives and pulled out a post from November 2005, more than ten years ago. I had come across an advertisement that morning on the Internet, for Match.com or a similar dating service. It featured photos of two youngsters, and you were supposed to decide whether their relationship was a go. You click the button for your choice, and that takes you to the dating website, where they try to sell you the service.

The girl in the picture had on a red top, and the guy wore an olive-drab beret with a red star on it. I looked at the two of them and thought: Socialist love!

So I screen-capped the ad and posted this:

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The Garlands of May Day

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Spring Fundraiser 2016, Day Two

Our fundraiser weeks (which grew into an eight-day octave over the years) used to scare me. Being a random writer, I was always afraid I’d end up with nothing to say. Or, even worse, I’d be so dysphoric that readers would be chipping in for my coffin.

Tip jarBut those times are finally behind me: not only are the Quarterlies events to look forward to, but that dysphoria is fading into the past. Logically, it shouldn’t be: we’re all sitting here getting older, after all, and the handbasket the world was hellbent on climbing into for the trip down has morphed from its modest size into a big honking bus full of “immigrants” who hate us. What’s to laugh about? Who in his right mind wants to celebrate this state of affairs, right?

Wrong, at least in this case, since I’m an inveterate Pollyanna kind of girl.

I suppose one ought grow up and assume a mantle of sober mien. But now I’m finally getting to the point where anything is possible if you’re of a certain age (“she’s dotty, surely?”). I’m still Pollyanna.

As I’ve mentioned before, during the years I lived in the Girls’ Home I spent my free time reading; it was my great escape over the walls. We had lots of books because people would clean out their attics and donate the detritus to “those poor little girls at the home”. One great gift was a set of all the Pollyanna Glad books, with their yellowed brittle pages. Along with the books were sometimes crates of old dresses that looked suspiciously like the ones Pollyanna was wearing in those books from the 1930s. Most of us managed to resist the nuns’ suggestions that these “frocks” were perfectly wearable.

Still, I was in heaven: here was a girl who knew how to live in spite of adversity. She ate adversity for breakfast and asked for more. As Pollyanna famously said, “…if God took the trouble to tell us eight hundred times [in Scripture] to be glad and rejoice, He must want us to do it at least some of the time…” or another favorite, when she declares “if you keep hunting long enough you’re bound to find something to be glad about”. Sometimes you can just be glad when you get to quit hunting.

To this day, I intermittently practice Pollyanna positivity: at night I write down five things I experienced during the day that made me happy. This is a good night-time exercise because if I do it in the morning, I often can’t remember what I did the day before. Without work or children it becomes hard to structure one’s days. When a friend of ours was fired from her long-term job because her work in the Counterjihad was exposed (her employer was bullied into it. He didn’t want to let her go and have the trouble of training another personal assistant), I remember her reaction: how would she ever remember what day it was without keeping someone else’s calendar straight? I understood her dismay completely because it is — or was — often mine.

But thanks to your donations, I’ve been able to hire a house cleaner. She’s far more than that, though: she works in the garden with me (and I get to teach her about plants), she reminds me what needs to be done and she’s even gotten out some CDs I haven’t felt like listening to for a long time. As the Baron says, she fills the hole in my life where my daughter used to be. In fact, she’s the same age. We go shopping for house-organizing gadgets. She brings me the offal from her chickens when she and her farmer husband slaughter them. I even talked her into bringing me the chicken feet for broth.

My lady’s home companion comes for two hours, three times a week. Any longer than two hours triggers my fatigue. Any less and we wouldn’t get much done. Without your donations, I couldn’t have this woman in my life. Now I can’t imagine not having her company and ideas. It sure eases the burden on the Baron, too. He looks forward to hearing that doorbell ring on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays…

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May Day!

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Spring Fundraiser 2016, Day One

“But Baron,” I hear you say, “how can it have been three months since your last fundraiser? That’s simply not possible!”

Yes, I know. I feel the same way. But time flies when you’re having fun, doesn’t it? Last time it was all ice and snow; now the irises and the rhododendrons are blooming. Mind you, it’s been cold and rainy here for a while. But still, it’s definitely spring.

Tip jarWe’ve acquired some new readers in the wake of the jihad attacks in Brussels in March, so for the benefit of those who weren’t here for previous fundraisers: Gates of Vienna eschews advertising, and instead funds itself through quarterly fundraisers. Four times a year we dun our readers in a process that is now commonly known as crowdfunding.

If you appreciate what we do here, and want to see more of it, please clink the tip cup on our sidebar (not the jar here in the post — it’s just for decoration).

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The theme of this week’s fundraiser is “May Day” combined with “May Day!” (more on that distinction in a minute). Even though it’s no longer May 1st, the week began on May Day, and I started writing this post while it was still May Day. That’s close enough for government work.

Especially Soviet government work. The header images for the week will be drawn from Soviet iconography surrounding May Day, which was one of the most important celebrations in the Socialist calendar. Possibly because the traditional holiday had almost no Christian connotations, but remained resolutely pagan, and was thus easier to appropriate for the cause of advancing World Revolution. And May Day is a prominent holiday for socialists in general, a chance for proletarians all over the world to march down the street carrying red banners in solidarity with all their brothers in the struggle against capitalist oppression.

Throw the exclamation point on the end, however, and you have a cry for help. It’s traditionally called out by airplane pilots over the radio when their craft is in distress. So it makes an appropriate theme for the week’s bleg — even though Dymphna and I are not strictly speaking in distress. Thanks to the generosity of our readers, we have made it through OK up until now.

The distress call “May Day!” is said to derive from a French imperative, “m’aidez”; that is, “Help me”. But that’s never made sense to me, because we were taught in school that French people cry out for help by shouting “Au secours!” So who says “m’aidez”? Is it maybe a Québécois idiom?

In any case, “May Day!” is our fundraising cry for the week. Illustrated by selected socialist art.

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The style of art used in Soviet propaganda was known as Socialist Realism. When it reached full flower in the 1930s and 1940s it was lavish in its elaboration and stylized forms. As an artist looking at it from a technical perspective, I find it fascinating. If you put aside the ideology that went with it — hard to do, I know — the work of the best Socialist Realist artists is quite accomplished.

The style is not to be confused with Social Realism, its contemporary cousin in the West. There were some similarities between the two styles — both were fond of sturdy figures in agricultural or factory settings, often bare-chested well-muscled men operating farm equipment or machinery. It was the 1930s, and such was the zeitgeist back then, for fascists, socialists, and corporate capitalists alike.

John Steuart Curry, who painted the mural “Tragic Prelude” that was featured here several weeks ago, was a Social Realist of the sub-genre known as “Regionalism”.

But Soviet art was a Baroque extension of all that. There was only one school in the USSR, and that was the Party’s school. If an artist wanted to advance in that school, he executed his work with full Socialist Realist rigor.

As is often remarked these days, the nations of the West — Europe, Canada, the United States, and Australia — are drifting inexorably into a Soviet-style totalitarianism. Soft totalitarianism, mind you — no gulag necessary just yet — but still Soviet-like in its insistence ideological conformity.

So what artistic style would we associate with the democratic totalitarianism that dominates the post-modern West? What ideology are we obliged to conform to in our visual representations if we, the artists, want to get ahead?

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About Those Thank-You Notes

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Time to ’fess up: it is taking us much longer than usual to finish writing our thank-yous for donations from the last quarter’s fundraiser.

We’re slow.

I’m verbose.

Fatigue interferes with all my plans. And sometimes, like the woman in the picture, I have a bad hair day. Not just that I hide it under my hat, but also there are moments when even my hair hurts.

The Baron still has to keep the home page rolling, plus his work behind the scenes.

And y’all! My heavens, so very many donations, without which we couldn’t survive, at least not as Gates of Vienna.

In spite of these impedimenta, we will be writing to each of you. Just because you haven’t received an acknowledgment yet doesn’t mean it’s not coming or that we don’t think about your gift. Failure to answer a donation is bad karma… but many of you know my views on that subject.

While I’m here: we have two unknown donors to acknowledge, both of them snail-mail givers. The first is the Mystery Donor, who has donated incognito in the past. The second sent a gift using his name, but the Baron was unable to find an email under that name, despite an intensive search. Let it be known that we appreciate those two gifts as well.

Our Yesterday Lives

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As you all know, we just finished our week-long winter fundraiser. For new readers who are unfamiliar with the closing routine: this is the “wrap-up” post, the main point of which is to give an overall list of the places that donations came in from. A few stragglers are likely to trickle in over the next few days, so the list may not be absolutely comprehensive.

This past week was notable for an astounding number of modest donations from a wide variety of places, which probably makes the list below the most diverse of any we have seen so far since we first started quarterly fundraising:

Stateside: Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, North Carolina, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia, Washington, and Wyoming

Near Abroad: Canada and the Dominican Republic

Far Abroad: Australia, Croatia, Denmark, Germany, India, Israel, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Thailand, and the UK

I’m not certain, but there may even be a place or two in that list we’ve never seen before.

A big thank-you goes out to everyone who decided to hit the tip cup. Individual thank-you notes are now trickling out, but it will take a while, because so many have to be written — a pleasant task, under the circumstances.

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Dymphna and I riffed on the lyrics of an Al Stewart song for the seven topics of last week’s fundraising posts. To wrap up the occasion I’m going to feature a different song by the same artist. Unlike “A Man For All Seasons”, it doesn’t have a historical theme. Despite Mr. Stewart’s disclaimers in the interview that Dymphna posted last week, he does write an occasional love song.

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