Bastille Day Bash

Ah, summer in the Hamptons.  East Hampton, Westhampton, Bridgehampton, Hampton Bays, and of course, Southampton, where the hoi polloi of New York elite celebrities, politicians, and billionaires summer, calling for the cabin boys to bring their exotic drinks while they admire the ocean and Gucci fireworks over Gardiner Bay, work on their tans, and network on how to bring America to her knees.

Summer in the Hamptons wouldn’t be complete without Bastille Day, the celebration of the July 14, 1789 Paris riot, where the mobs broke down the gates of an already-empty prison.  In East Hampton, the farthest Hampton on Long Island – almost closer to Newport, R.I., than New York City – developer and restaurateur Ben Krupinski held a Bastille Day bash at his waterfront “cottage”.  Among his invited guests, according to an exclusive report by New York Post reporters Selim Algar and Chuck Bennet, was Cathie  Black, former chairwoman of Hearst Magazines and ousted New York City schools chancellor.

The report says that as she was backing out of the driveway, she bashed practically every tree in her path.  Finally, one of the other guests stopped her and drove her home to her mansion in Southampton.  Her publicist insists she was not inebriated; she was simply unfamiliar with the driveway.

Whatever.  She was well enough to attend the Nelson Mandela Day luncheon at the Four Seasons in Manhattan on Monday.  Black spent all of 95 days as Schools Chancellor before Mayor Bloomberg finally had to expel her.  If the swells vacationing out in the Hamptons think Bastille Day is something to celebrate, they need to go back to school.  Or at least read Ann Coulter’s new book, Demonic.

Coulter is fond of giving her tomes one-word titles, and posing in form-fitting cocktail dresses (and she’s in great form) for the cover just to drive her critics into a frenzy.  She’s brash and funny, and extremely intelligent.  Demonic isn’t merely some invective against Progressive Liberals; it’s about setting the history record straight about mob-rule.  Her research is impeccable, her writing very engaging, and her information, invaluable.

She treats many historical subjects, but the real story of the French Revolution is absolutely blood-curdling.  Coulter compares the American Revolution with the French, and demonstrates how there’s absolutely no comparison.  Her source for the study is LeBon’s The Crowd:  A Study of the Popular Mind.

Coulter explains how the crowds in Paris initially received the young, newly-minted Queen Marie Antoinette with great favor.  She was beautiful, sociable, kind, and generous.  “She was not given to excess, avoided ostentation in her decorating style, and was compassionate toward the poor,” Coulter writes.  She also “never uttered the words ‘Let them eat cake.’  Fittingly, that phrase came from the revolutionaries’ philosopher Jacques Rousseau, who claimed he overheard it on the lips of some nameless princess.  This was written in his Confessions, sometime before 1769,” when Marie Antonia was still a child in Austria. 

However, a crop failure caused by a hailstorm threatened the country with famine and poverty, and the crowds, never great on reason (LeBon says it simply is not in the nature of a crowd to think; they can only react emotionally to non-verbal images), turned on the king and queen.

They also turned on aristocrats, the nobility, then the middle class, and finally one another, even guillotining their own leader, Robespierre.  Coulter describes the senseless, brutal murders with the “National Razor.”  The French citizens, urged on by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which essentially stated that since there was no need for God, there was no need for priests, bureaucrats, nobility, or monarchs - off with their heads, took matters into their own bloody hands.

No one was spared by these vicious mobs.  The men would kill the victims and their wives, the women, would defile, desecrate, and consume (!) the bodies and organs.  The mob beheaded one of the Queen’s favorite attendants and bobbed the head up and down outside Marie Antoinette’s prison window.   At first, Robespierre’s mobs held show trials, but figuring they were a waste of time since the criminal was already assumed to be guilty, charged the victim and beheaded them the same day.

Marie was charged with all manner of heinous sexual crimes, which she defiantly denied to the very end.  Sick with tuberculosis and hemorrhaging, she wasn’t even allowed to clean herself and appear dignified in her last moments, Coulter tells us.  She was battered with jeers and garbage on the long way to the guillotine.  When she was beheaded, the crowd yelled, “Vive Le Republique.”

Coulter says that it is to such rampages and violence that today’s Liberal Progressives are heir.  France’s revolutionary ideas spread to Germany and then to Russia, where their various mobs gassed millions of Jews and murdered the Imperial Family – and personal freedom.

Racism, she notes, was not a Republican invention – Abraham Lincoln was a Republican and sacrificed millions of lives to free the slaves – it was a Democrat invention.  The Democrats saw voter blocs in the ignorance and violence of the Southern slave owners, with their tendency towards lynchings.  Democrats were responsible for blocking every Civil Rights Act since the Civil War up to and including the Civil Rights Act of 1965.  The Democrat Party opposed the integration of schools and the rights of blacks to vote.  Only when the blacks won the right to vote and became a major force, did the Democrats suddenly switch sides to carry the banner for civil rights.

Racism was institutionalized through Democrat bureaucracy.  The mayor of Birmingham, who enacted the segregation of the city’s buses, was a Democrat.  Every Congressman who voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1965 was a Democrat, including Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson.

Southampton held a Fourth of July parade, which included Tea Party members proudly bearing (if somewhat improperly) the American flag.  Although two recent studies have shown that the sight of the American flag “biases” people towards Conservative ideals, apparently the sight of the flag had no effect on Cathie Black.  Maybe she was just too drunk to see it.