The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Patriarchy Means Paying the Bills

Posted on | April 17, 2017 | Comments Off on Patriarchy Means Paying the Bills

My son Jim taking an Easter afternoon hike with his two sons.

Friday, I worked from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. with my 24-year-old son who does home-improvement contracting jobs with a side business mowing lawns. It was the latter enterprise where I’d volunteered to help, which meant riding around on a zero-turn lawnmower at six different locations. Let me tell you that doing a big lawn on a high-powered zero-turn mower is huge fun, compared to sitting in front of a computer yakking about politics. My wife has been nagging me about . . . uh, I mean, encouraging me to get out of the house more often, so with spring and the beginning of lawn-mowing season, I volunteered to help my son with his business. After we’d knocked out a half-dozen lawn jobs, then my son had to finish up a roofing job which required his specialized skills, so that my share of the work was mainly handing him tools and stuff for four hours. It was dark by the time that job was finished, then we went to dinner at Bennigan’s.

All in all, it was a fine day of honest work for honest money and also educational. Most of the work my son does is on “flips” — investors buy a house that’s been foreclosed then hire contractors to do improvements to the property so that it can be re-sold at a profit. You might be surprised at how many really nice houses end up in foreclosure. Certainly I was amazed to see these big homes in fine neighborhoods where, for some reason, the former owners stopped paying their mortgages and also, usually, let the property get into a deplorably run-down condition. Did the owners get hooked on meth? Was there a divorce? Mental illness? There’s time to wonder about things like that while you’re thundering across a gigantic lawn on a $6,000 mower.

One of the reasons I get so annoyed at people like Sarah Silverman claiming Donald Trump is an “emotional child” and a “superficial bully” is their apparent assumption that Trump’s success in the business world was easy. Whatever his flaws as a human being and his shortcomings as a political leader, it should be obvious that you don’t become a billionaire real-estate tycoon by being lazy or stupid. Trump had been working nearly a decade in his father’s real-estate business when, in 1978, he negotiated a deal to renovate the run-down Commodore Hotel which re-opened as the Grand Hyatt, and by 1983, he had completed his first skyscraper project, the Trump Tower. It was these successful development projects that made Trump something of celebrity in New York, and led to his book contract for The Art of the Deal. Trump started building his real-estate empire before Sarah Silverman was even born, and he was negotiating multimillion-dollar deals while she was still in elementary school. How is she qualified to criticize him?

Watching my son work Friday — that roofing job was a masterpiece of craftsmanship, I tell you — and seeing also how many excellent properties end up in foreclosure, I had occasion to reflect on the way some people always resent success. Plenty of business ventures fail, and lots of people who once lived in big houses somehow lose their homes to foreclosure, so when people actually succeed, they ought to be admired for their achievement, rather than becoming the objects of envious mockery.

Honest work for honest money is derided by the Left, which cares only about protests and other such destructive forms of “activism.” All these anarchist rioters in Berkeley — when have any of them done an honest day’s work, huh? Or how about the Michigan professor claiming “the English language is sexist”? What does she get paid to teach this nonsense, and why are Michigan taxpayers expected to foot the bill?

“Social justice” is nothing but a racket, a scam, a dishonest hustle. Consider what happens when someone turns feminism into a business:

On her LinkedIn profile, Chelsea Leibow calls herself a “Patriarchy-Smashing PR Priestess.” In a complaint filed last month with New York’s Human Rights Commission, however, Ms. Leibow calls herself a victim of sexual harassment. According to Ms. Leibow, while she was employed by the Manhattan-based firm Thinx, her boss “groped female underlings’ breasts, pranced around the office naked, and video-chatted workers from the toilet.”
The alleged perpetrator of these offenses was not the “patriarchy,” but rather Thinx CEO Miki Agrawal, a self-declared feminist whose company specialized in marketing blood-absorbing underwear for menstruating women. . . .

Read the whole thing at The Patriarch Tree. Given a choice between working for a feminist and mowing lawns, I know which one I’d choose.



 

Category: Family, Sex Trouble

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