»  Radio Derb — Transcript

01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! This is your fathomlessly genial host John Derbyshire, podcasting to you from Taki's private island here is the sunny Aegean.

Things are not actually so sunny here since last Sunday's referendum on the latest bailout package for Greece from the Europeans and their banks. Our own banker, Mr Kleptocopulos, went off to consult with his superiors on the mainland last week and hasn't been heard from since. It's mainly a barter economy here, cash not of the first importance, but the locals are worried none the less. Rumors are the villagers have been sacrificing chickens.

Enough of our petty parochial concerns, though. Let's take a look at the larger picture.

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02 — Eloquent nationalism.     Where does Radio Derb get its material, the stories we comment on?

Well, most of it comes from notes I take when doing my daily read of the news and opinion websites. And then, some of it is from listeners.

People send me items by email. Lots of people, lots of items: If you sent me something but I didn't email back an acknowledgment, please don't be miffed. I get copy from these items, and I am grateful for them — THANK YOU! — but if I conscientiously answered all my email, I'd do little else.

An item much sent to me by listeners this week was the speech delivered in the European Parliament on Wednesday by Nigel Farage, leader of the U.K. Independence Party, which wants Britain out of the European Union and immigration into Britain brought under control.

First let me play you the speech. It's just four minutes long, but worth listening to as an eloquent expression of the defensive nationalism that's rising all over the civilized world, including the U.S.A.

You need just one item of background here. Alexis Tsipras, the Prime Minister of Greece, was present as a guest in the Parliament chamber. Farage addressed him directly.

OK, here we go: Nigel Farage.

[Clip: Nigel Farage.

"What we're seeing in this chamber this morning, and indeed across the whole of Europe, is an irreconcilable cultural difference between Greece and Germany — a split between the North and the South of Europe.

"Europe, the European project, is actually beginning to die. Nobody in this room will recognize that, but actually the peoples of Europe are saying, 'We were never asked whether we wanted this. This has been foisted upon us.'

"And we need to understand why EMU [i.e. European Monetary Union] doesn't work. Those monsters, Kohl and Mitterand, backed up by the clever but dangerous Delors, believed that if they put in place an economic and monetary union, then as night follows day there would be political union: that there would be acceptance of this project, that the North and South of Europe would converge, that we'd all start to love each other, that we'd all begin to feel a European identity, that we'd all begin to show allegiance to the flag and to the anthem.

"Those of us of course that criticized this were told that we were extremists and that we lacked vision.

"Well, one vision we didn't lack is, we understood that the countries of Europe are different; and if you try and force together different people or different economies without first seeking the consent of those people, it is unlikely to work. And the plan has failed.

"This isn't just Greece we're talking about today. The whole of the Mediterranean now finds itself in the wrong currency. And yet virtually nobody in the political arena has got the courage to stand up and say that.

"Indeed, I feel that the Continent is now divided from North to South. There is a new Berlin Wall, and it's called the Euro.

"And the old enmities have been resumed. Just listen to the way that the German leader of the Christian Democrat group this morning attacked Mr Tsipras. I think it was absolutely disgusting; but it shows the way … [applause] … it shows the way North and South now feel about each other.

"Mr Tsipras, your country should never have joined the Euro. I think you've acknowledged that; but the big banks, the big businesses, the big politics, forced you in. Goldman Sachs, the German arms manufacturers, they were all very happy.

"And when the bailouts began, they weren't for the Greek people. Those bailouts were to bail out French, German, and Italian banks. They haven't helped you at all. [Applause.]

"And these years of austerity, these years of high unemployment and increasing poverty: None of it's worked! In fact your debt/GDP ratio has gone from 100 percent at the start of the crisis to 180 percent right now.

"It would be madness, Sir, to continue on this course.

"You have been very brave. You called that referendum. When one of your predecessors tried to do the same, the bully-bys of Brussels had him removed.

"They tried their best again. Mr Juncker said you would have to leave the Euro and leave the European Union. Even Mr Schultz, the president of the parliament, who I would have thought might be neutral, said that if the Greeks voted no, their power supplies may even go down.

"There were threats and bullying but the Greeks stood firm. But, Sir, you cannot have your cake and eat it. They will give you no more, these people. They can't afford to. If they give you more, they'll have to give other Eurozone members more.

"So your moment has come. And frankly, if you've got the courage, you should leave the Greek people out of the Eurozone with your head held high. [Applause.] Get back your democracy, get back control of your country, give your people … [continuing applause] … give your people the leadership and the hope that they crave.

"Yes, it'll be tough for the first few months; but with a devalued currency, and with friends of Greece all over the world, you will recover."

[Prolonged applause and cheers.]

OK, that was Nigel Farage addressing the European Parliament, where Alexis Tsipras, the Greek Prime Minister, was seated as a guest.

I can see why my listeners liked the speech. It was nationalist. Its premise was, that the best people to run the affairs of a country are the people of that country. International organizations have their place, of course, to supervise things like mail and air traffic, pacts for common defense, peaceful settlement of border disputes and deep-sea fishing rights, and so on. The actual day-to-day management of a country, though, should be in the hands of that country's people, acting through their representatives, under a constitution and laws that they've developed out of their own unique national experience and temper.

Nigel Farage believes those thing; so do my listeners; so do I. So far so good.

Now the qualifications, for which I shall need an entire new segment. New segment!

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03 — The libertarian-communist alliance.     First qualification: Alexis Tsipras does not believe those things. He's not a nationalist, he's a globalist.

Tsipras's globalism is not the merely commercial kind, either. It has its roots in his adolescent Marxism — he was actually a Communist Party member, and his views haven't changed much. He's an ideological globalist. He wants the workers of the world to — and here I quote from an interview he gave in November 2013, quote — "to repress xenophobia and nationalism and embolden democracy and peace."

That's "democracy" as in "Democratic People's Republic," and "peace" as in those bogus "Peace Congresses" that the KGB used to stage back in Cold War days for Western gulls.

Further quote from that same interview:

We reject the so-called "Fortress Europe" which only operates as a seeding ground for xenophobia, racism and fascism.

End quote.

If you've been watching with alarm those boatloads of Muslims and black Africans pouring into Europe from the Mediterranean's southern shore, you might think that "Fortress Europe" looks like a pretty good policy right now.

Well, Mr Tsipras begs to differ. In fact, he thinks you are a fascist for wanting to keep the Third World hordes out. He is an open-borders multiculturalist.

At VDARE.com earlier this week, VDARE's occasional Greek correspondent, Dimitrios Papageorgiou, spelled this out in detail. Lengthy quote from him, slightly edited, quote:

Abroad SYRIZA [that's Greece's radical-left governing coalition, headed up by Mr Tsipras] is only known for its anti-austerity stance. But its stance on the EU-Greece relationship is not as much a priority as is its Leftist agenda: the abolition of any traditional structure in Greek society and Electing a New Greece through mass non-traditional immigration …

SYRIZA is mainly composed of ex-Communists. Their ultimate aim is to turn Greece into a one-party state. So besides putting their people into key positions — there is a long list of affiliates and family members of prominent SYRIZA ministers who have taken over important state positions in just two months — they are aiming to import a heavy presence of immigrants, who will soon be given voting rights, to ensure that they will be able to win any elections.

Whether SYRIZA decides to stay in the EU or leave it, Greece's immigration crisis will only get worse. Of course, the government cannot bring the immigration issue to a referendum, since every poll is showing that overwhelming majorities of Greeks consider immigration a problem that needs to be solved. In true Leftist fashion what SYRIZA will do is compromise with the EU bureaucracy, while at the same time using the time given to it to turn Greece into a multicultural hellhole.

Greece has one of the smallest populations in Europe. Along with Italy, which I recently visited and was awed by the sheer number of immigrants in the center of Rome, it is accepting one of the largest proportionate influxes of aliens.

Greece, Italy, and France, which already has a huge issue due to its immigration from its former colonies, might well be the first countries in Europe to see their indigenous populations becoming a minority.

That's the backstory on Mr Tsipras, the gent being so effusively praised by Nigel Farage, head of Britain's UKIP.

Is Farage a radical-left open-borders multiculturalist? No! The best description of Farage's outlook, and of UKIP's overall policy positions, is the title I gave to a column back in 2006: "Libertarianism in One Country." Quote from that column:

Libertarians who favor mass immigration are nuts. If there is any hope at all for libertarianism, it rests in the libertarianism of my title: libertarianism in one country.

There is no contradiction between maximum liberty within a nation and maximum vigilance on the nation's borders. Not only is there no contradiction between the two things, in fact, it may be that the second is a precondition for the first.

End quote.

That's Farage's position. He loves the traditional liberties of the British and feels that globalism, in the shape of the EU and uncontrolled mass immigration, is degrading and nullifying those liberties.

So why is he swooning over Alexis Tsipras? And why, come to think of it, is he claiming that the people of Europe were never asked if they wanted a European Union? These are all democratic countries. The EU has featured as an issue in their elections, and often in referendums too. Farage's own Britain held a referendum in 1975; two-thirds of voters opted for the EU.

How to resolve these contradictions? I'm afraid it's going to need one more segment.

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04 — Mr Tsipras, put up that wall!     Let's please remember the background here. I just mentioned the 1975 referendum in Britain on EU membership. A 1975 British voter who was just middle-aged, say 45 years old, had clear memories of living through WW2, perhaps of huddling in an air-raid shelter while bombs fell on his city. Voters a few years older than that had actually fought in the war.

A democratic fellowship of Europeans to safeguard against such a terrible intra-European war happening again, seemed like a jolly good idea. Nationalism was in bad odor in post-WW2 Europe, and not for frivolous reasons. Aggressive nationalism had brought about the war.

The fact that nationalism need not be aggressive, and in fact usually isn't; and the other fact that inter-nationalism can be pretty damned aggressive in imposing uniformity where it's not necessary or wanted — these facts had been temporarily forgotten.

And even if you were hesitant about linking arms with nations that had tried to kill your Dad, back in those early years — the 1960s and 1970s — there was no EU. It was called "the Common Market," and that's what people took it to be: a free trade zone. Political union, with bureaucrats in Brussels interfering in countries' laws, even laws that had nothing to do with trade, crept up on Europe slowly; rather as the Commerce Clause in the U.S. Constitution gradually became an excuse for stripping states of their rights and smothering regional differences under federal power. That sound you hear in the background here is the sound of a frog being boiled.

So there are excuses that can be made here for the voters of Europe having allowed the EU to take over their lives and property.

Are there excuses that can be made for libertarian nationalist Nigel Farage heaping praise and honor on totalitarian globalist Alexis Tsipras? Well, I'll try. I regard Farage as, in a general sort of way, a Good Thing, so I'll do my best here.

Obviously Farage's thinking tactically, along the lines: My enemy's enemy is my friend. Farage wants Britain out of the EU; Tsipras looks like he might pull Greece out of the EU; Hey, let's give him some words of encouragement! Churchill allied with Stalin, didn't he? Anything that weakens Europe is good for Britain.

In fact Tsipras has no objection in principle to a united Europe dominated by a bureaucratic nomenklatura. He just wants the nomenklatura to be taking their orders from socialist functionaries like himself rather than from bankers and businessmen. As Dimitrios Papageorgiou said in my previous segment, Tsipras probably wants to cut some deal with the EU bureaucrats so he can go ahead and fill up Greece with blacks and Muslims.

That would explain Tsipras's body language on the video of Farage's speech. I won't say he was exactly squirming, but he didn't look thrilled to be getting encomiums from Farage, former commodities trader and privately-educated son of a stockbroker.

As I said, I regard Farage as basically a Good Thing. He is surely right on his main points: The justice and good sense of a defensive, democratic nationalism, and the folly of ignoring the major cultural differences between North and South Europe.

I can recall skepticism on that latter point way back in the early days of the EU, when the idea of a Euro currency was still being cooked up. Thoughtful people said it should be tried out in just North Europe, and called — of course — the Neuro.

I think Farage is right, too, that the European project is doomed. The cultural differences here are deep and ancient. Google the Hajnal Line, H-A-J-N-A-L.

As for a Berlin Wall between North and South Europe: With the hundreds of thousands of unassimilable people from the most backward parts of the world flooding across the Mediterranean into Greece, Italy, Spain, and the Balkans, North Europeans might be forgiven for thinking that a wall between North and South sounds like a pretty good idea at this point in time.

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05 — Trump rattles teacups.     How about that Donald Trump, eh? He's certainly rattled some of the teacups in the cosy little lounge of Republican establishment politics. What's not to like?

On the evidence of the polls, a great many Republican voters do like Trump. A poll published on Thursday this week shows him actually leading the field nationwide among registered Republican voters, with 15 percent of respondents naming Trump their first choice and 12 percent their second choice. Put it another way, better than one in four Republicans who are registered to vote say Trump is their first or second choice. Rand Paul and Jeb Bush were tied second, both winning 11 percent first choice votes and 7 percent second choice.

Among key Republican constituencies Trump does even better: 66 percent of "very conservative" voters see him favorably to only 24 percent with a negative view of him.

He's polling well all over, though. Among likely voters in the Iowa caucuses he's placed second behind Scott Walker, level with white guilt candidate Ben Carson. In Michigan he's just one point behind Walker, tied with Carson and billionaire cheap labor candidate Jeb Bush.

It's regrettable to say it, and I'm sure Trump would not have wished for it, but he got a boost from the July 1st murder of Kate Steinle in San Francisco. Steinle was shot dead, apparently at random, in daylight on the early evening of that day while strolling with her father at a popular tourist spot. The shooter was quickly apprehended. He is Francisco Sanchez, a Mexican drug addict with seven felony convictions who has been deported five times.

In a jailhouse interview with the local ABC affiliate, Sanchez was asked why he came to San Francisco. He replied that he knew San Francisco was a sanctuary city where he would not be pursued by immigration officials.

San Francisco has been a sanctuary city for years. You may recall the murders of Tony Bologna and his two sons back in 2008 by Edwin Ramos, another illegal alien with a long rap sheet. The citizens of San Francisco are regularly robbed, assaulted, raped, and murdered by illegal aliens whose previous crimes are known to the authorities but who cannot be deported. San Franciscans regard this ongoing mayhem as a small price to pay for the satisfaction of flaunting their moral superiority over the tobacco-chewing, gap-toothed, Bible-quoting nativist bigots of less-enlightened jurisdictions. And after all, white lives don't matter.

Trump's popularity shows that there is now significant nationwide resistance to this lunacy. Those of us who have been arguing for years — at least fifteen years in my case — for fair but firm enforcement of fair immigration laws, are coming into our own. Trump is hugely assisting that trend.

I feel about Trump the same way I feel about Nigel Farage. The man's heart is in the right place, but I have some concerns about his head.

Still, as I've said before, if we elected Trump President and it turned out a mistake, how big a mistake would it be? Bigger than the mistake we made in twice electing a radical-left narcissist who partied with terrorists and donated tens of thousands of dollars to a preacher of anti-white racial hatred?

Trump is sane, smart, a wily and seasoned negotiator, beholden to no-one, and an instinctive patriot. He has decades of experience in the real world — not faculty lounges or "community activist" bull sessions, the real world of bricks and mortar, iron and stone, profit and loss. On any rational calculus, Trump is a hundred times better candidate than the present incumbent ever was, and ten times better than the Chamber of Commerce glove puppets that populate the rest of the GOP field.

Yes, I can think of many ways a Trump Presidency might degenerate into fiasco or farce. None of them has an outcome half as bad as the present ongoing process of national destruction, aided and abetted for twenty years by Presidents from both big parties. Put me down as a Trump voter.

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06 — Alien scofflaw hates America.     Back in those innocent days of fifteen and twenty years ago, when a few of us began noticing and writing about the swelling problem of illegal immigration, there was a little snippet of humor we used to deploy against mainstream media outlets like the Wall Street Journal, who took the side of the illegals.

"Yeah," we used to say, "it's all very well for you bigfoot journalist types with your big fat salaries and air-conditioned downtown offices. The illegals aren't coming after your jobs. You'd be singing a different song if they were! It's the workers at the bottom, the construction laborers and landscapers, the meatpackers and fruit-pickers, that are taking the hit, not you guys."

We had seriously underestimated the depth of elite white ethnomasochism. That snippet of humor fell apart in 2011 when Washington Post reporter Jose Antonio Vargas, who'd shared in the Pulitzer Prize for reporting a couple of years earlier, confessed that he is an illegal immigrant from the Philippines.

In a self-respecting country under rule of law, Vargas would have been hustled onto a plane back to Manila right there. Instead he became a celebrity. He even got his picture on the cover of Time magazine. Such strange times we live in.

It helped that Vargas is a diversity twofer: As well as being an illegal alien, he's also a homosexual. With the Homintern backing him up (as it were), he is completely untouchable.

So much so that instead of gushing his love for this country and his admiration for the founding stock that established and built it, which is the strategy followed by less — what's the word? less … privileged — illegals, Vargas is advertising his contempt for us on nationwide TV. He has put together a show that will air on MTV July 22nd, titled White People. Some quotes from the show's website.

Quote:  Race isn't biological — it's a social construct.
My comment:  Race most certainly is biological. It's what you get when different populations of a species are separated and left to inbreed for many generations. They diverge. Ask a dog breeder. Race is also in part socially constructed. A half-black, half-white person might be considered black in Iceland but white in the Congo. Biology and social construction are not mutually exclusive. If you think they are, present an argument. [Crickets.]

Quote:  In America … white people are often given unearned advantages.
My comment:  So are nonwhite people. We call it "affirmative action."

Quote:  In the late 1800s, groups we now think of as white, like the Irish, Italians, and Jews, were looked down upon … Once whiteness was conferred on these groups, those unearned disadvantages went away.
My comment:  Yeah, WASPs could be real snooty. However, after a generation of the Irish, Italians, and Jews showing that they were willing to work hard, support their families, respect the law, and fight for the country if asked, the snootiness died out. Funny how that happens.

Quote:  Racism keeps people of color in the limelight and makes whiteness invisible.
My comment:  Does it? That's funny. One of the classics of Black Grievance Literature is Ralph Ellison's 1952 novel Invisible Man. Ellison, a black guy, says he feels invisible in America. Quote from him: "They see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination — indeed, everything and anything except me," end quote. So is it whites who are invisible, or blacks? I can't keep up with this stuff.

Here is a word to Mr Vargas from Radio Derb. Whatever problems we have here in the U.S.A. we'll sort out ourselves, lawful citizen to lawful citizen. If we want advice from foreigners, which is not likely, we'll ask for it.

Now go publicize and try to fix some of the problems of your own country. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.

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07 — What inspired Dylann Roof?     OK; we started off this week's podcast with someone else's voice, the voice of Nigel Farage. Before our closing miscellany kicks in, let's close out this main part of the podcast with yet another voice. My working assumption here is that you hear quite enough of my fluted tones, and will be pleased and soothed by a little vocal variety.

The topic of this segment is last month's church massacre in Charleston, South Carolina; or rather, the dishonesty and the disgraceful finger-pointing and guilt-by-association slandering that the mainstream media indulged in regarding the factors that sent Dylann Roof off on his murderous rampage.

The speaker you're about to hear has an answer to all that. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the voice of Dissident Right vlogger Ramzpaul, reproduced here with his kind permission.

[Clip: Ramzpaul.

"I'm just a guy with a camera, an American, and I'm just trying to make sense of things, right? And the Left is all ouraged at the Council of Conservative Citizens.

"In case you don't know them: They're a group, and they have a website, and they just post links to various stories. They don't write these stories, they just link to 'em.

"And it came up in this Roof's manifesto when he started to observe the reality of most of the violent behavior tended to be blacks against whites. He said, 'Hey, I went on the internet search and I went to the Council of Conservative Citizens and wow, it's an eye-opener. I found it's true.'

"And it is true. I haven't heard anyone really dispute what the Council of Conservative Citizens has said is false because they don't write the stories, they just link to stories.

"Like, you know, in Tulsa, those two kids were slaughtered by blacks. It doesn't make national news but it happens, it happens all the time. The major media, though, really hushes it up and does not report on it, but it still happens.

"But somehow, because the Council of Conservative Citizens posted something that's true, they're somehow responsible for this killing. Right.

"I'm like: Well, OK, that seems kind of strange to me. But what also, if you read the manifesto, Roof also said that what really triggered him with the whole Trayvon Martin thing — you remember that, that poor little boy with skittles just minding his own business when this mean white supremacist gunned him down for no reason — that was the initial narrative, right? And that's what started all this tension.

"But really, how all this started — and I'll link to this — is NBC, they had the 911 call and they edited it intentionally — intentionally, and I'll link to it — you can't do this … I do videos, I understand editing. It wasn't by mistake. They intentionally edited it to make Zimmerman look racist.

"You can watch the video, see how they did it; but it was totally false. In fact they apologized afterwards. They were caught lying on the 911 calls, how they made the edits look.

"So, intentionally. I don't know the motivation, why NBC did this. Did they do it because they wanted to inflame racial tensions, or they just wanted more shekels? I don't know, I don't their motivation; but they did it. They intentionally told a false narrative that helped to spark the whole Trayvon Martin thing.

"And — it's interesting how things in life are connected — because NBC hyped this, a false narrative, for whatever reason, it created the whole Trayvon Martin thing, it blew everything up, it had all the riots and all this and that — you know, the whole big thing — 'Black Lives Matter' … and that got Dylann Roof upset. When he saw the whole Trayvon Martin thing, he said that was the primary thing; and that Trayvon Martin thing was triggered by NBC's lies.

"So I'm just thinking, I'm just trying to be honest, it's like: Why are people upset about the Council of Conservative Citizens, when I haven't seen anything they posted is false? They just post local news stories about black-on-white crime. Whereas NBC, they lied, maliciously lied, to stir up racial tensions. Why is NBC getting a pass?

"Why isn't NBC held accountable, if you're going to hold the Council of Conservative Citizens accountable? I think NBC is way more accountable because they intentionally lied to spin their narrative — to show evil white people — and they knew it was a lie. They should be held more accountable.

"And people that advertise on NBC, they should be, like, 'Why are we advertising on NBC, which intentionally inflames racial tensions?'"]

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08 — Miscellany.     And now, our closing miscellany of brief items.

Imprimis:  Since this is a different-voices edition of Radio Derb, I'm going to play you brief clips of two more voices. They will be instantly familiar to a small subset of my listeners, and utterly baffling to the rest. Bear with me, please: all will be explained.

First clip: [Voice of Lenin.] Second clip: [Voice of Stalin.]

Got those? As I said, a small proportion of the Radio Derb listener demographic will know who those voices belong to. That would be listeners raised in the old Soviet Union. For the rest of you, the first voice there was Lenin's, the second was Stalin's.

What is the relevance of those voices to current news? Story from the London Daily Mail, July 7th, quote:

A pair of street performers impersonating Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Lenin have come to blows near Red Square in Moscow. Lenin impersonator Igor Gorbunov suffered "soft tissue injuries" after a Stalin lookalike repeatedly struck him in the back with an umbrella. The fight ensued while they were vying for business from passing tourists near the Kremlin.

End quote.

See, if you go to the main square in a big American city — New York's Times Square, for instance — you get harassed to have a picture taken with performers dressed up as Minnie Mouse, Elmo, or Snow White. In Russia you get Lenin and Stalin impersonators.

This probably tells us something deep and significant about our respective countries. What exactly it tells us, I'll leave you to discuss among yourselves.

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Item:  Also from the Daily Mail, which is an invaluable source for these lighter items, headline: Man appears in court facing the ancient charge of hamesucken.

Hamesucken: Yes, that's a crime in Scotland, where this particular offense occurred, and it's nothing to do with mistreating a leg of salted pork. Hamesucken is the act of assaulting a person in his own home — that's the "hame" part — with the intention of assaulting them — that's the "sucken" part, from an Old Norse root meaning "to attack." Hamesucken.

I get a quiet thrill, I don't know why, from hearing about these long-forgotten crimes left over from medieval law books. Can you still get arrested for simony?

I am not alone, either. There's a blog devoted to legal history that sometimes caresses these old terms.

"Embracery," for example, which has an enticingly salacious sound to it, but is really just an archaic word for jury tampering. Or how about "barratry," defined by Black's Law Dictionary as, quote, "the offense of frequently exciting and stirring up quarrels and suits, either at law or otherwise." Hm, isn't that the entire raison d'être of the Trial Lawyers Association?

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Item:  The U.S.A. women's soccer team won the women's soccer World Cup, beating Japan 5 goals to 2 in the July 8th final.

News-wise this was a huge event, I'm not sure why. Nearly 27 million people watched it on TV in the U.S.A., making it the most-viewed soccer match ever on American TV.

I didn't watch the game myself. I dislike soccer, and vented my dislike some years ago in an opinion column, from which, quote:

Possibly — this is my private opinion — the game was brought into the world by Satan to drive the human race mad. There was actually a war fought over a soccer game once: El Salvador vs. Honduras, 1969, two thousand dead (I do not know the game score).

End quote.

However, in this case I'm going to do my utmost to summon up some enthusiasm for Sunday's victory.

For one thing, these are girls — fit young women in shorts and sports bras. How can you be negative about that? It reminds me of the games of beach volleyball that my loyal research assistants Mandy, Candy, and Brandy play here on the island, that I so much enjoy watching — "bouncy-bouncy sessions," I call them … referring, of course, to the motions of the volleyball.

Yes, yes, I've seen some of the unkind remarks about the soccer gals' femininity at certain sites on the internet. I shall not dignify those remarks with further comment.

For another thing, there's the patriotic aspect. It's great to see so many Americans excited about a victory by a national team. U.S.A.! U.S.A.!

And then, there's racial pride. The U.S. women's soccer team is whiter than a Bernie Sanders campaign rally. It's great to see such an affirmation of my white privilege, which I sometimes fear may be slipping from my grasp.

So for a multitude of reasons I offer my hearty congratulations to the U.S. women's soccer team. I'm afraid I can never love your sport; but I do love your outfits, your pony tails, your contribution to our national self-esteem, and your proud, privileged whiteness.

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09 — Signoff.     That's it, ladies and gents. Thank you for listening.

In the Radio Derb tradition of helping keep alive fine old American songs, here is a historic recording.

You may not know the names of Ada Jones and Billy Murray, but if you'd lived in the U.S.A. a hundred years ago and been on the leading edge of consumer technology — the early 20th century equivalent of an Apple Watch wearer — you surely would have heard of them. Jones and Murray were both singers, working the concert and vaudeville circuits, but most importantly, both were stars of the early recording industry.

Here they are singing together in a 1916 recording of a fine old American favorite.

More from Radio Derb next week!

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