Radio Derb Is On The Air: Fifty Years Of Riots, Etc.

By John Derbyshire

05/02/2015

Radio Derb is on the air. To get the podcast, follow the instructions at Taki’s Magazine. The transcript will be archived on my own website Tuesday morning.

In this week’s podcast I drag old Fred Nietzsche down from the attic and do a riff on his notion of ewige Wiederkunft — “Eternal Recurrence.” If you want to practice your German, I note in passing (I don’t think I’m the first to do so) that wieder (“again,” “re-”) is a close homophone for VDARE.

Did you see the cover of Time magazine this week? baltimore-cover-final[1]

It’s a black’n’white photograph of cops chasing a rioter, with the superimposed legend America, 1968 … except that “1968” is crossed out and “2015” handwritten above it. What has changed. What hasn’t, says the subheading.

That about sums it up. I came of age in the mid-1960s, when the newspapers were full of race riots in the U.S.A. — Detroit, Newark, Washington, D.C., … And now, fifty years later, here we still are. Eternal recurrence.

The politicians are of course hopeless. Barack Obama says we should spend more money. What, the trillions upon trillions we’ve shoveled at social problems weren’t enough? Hillary Clinton wants us to search our souls. We haven’t been searching our souls diligently enough this fifty years past?

Does anybody have any original suggestions?

The full Radio Derb playbill: It’s all there at Taki’s Magazine.

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