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May 15, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
48:40
CIRQUE DU MERCHAN Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep833
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Coming up, I'll discuss the latest antics in George Juan Merchant's New York Circus.
I call it Cirque du Merchant.
I'll celebrate the first ever conviction of Antifa thugs in a San Diego courtroom.
And Susan Polgar, Olympic chess champion...
Grandmaster, one of the best chess players in the world, joins me.
We're going to talk about male-female differences in the sport, among other things.
If you're watching on Rumble or listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
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The times are crazy.
In a time of confusion, division, and lies, we need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
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The prosecution has finished making its case in the New York trial of Donald Trump.
And you have to say that it's a little bit baffling as to what they think that they have shown.
because it's quite clear what they needed to show, and it doesn't look like they have come close to showing any of it, any of it.
What the prosecution has shown and what it hasn't shown.
They started out going before the jury and saying, we're going to unravel, we're going to explain, we're going to lay out a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 election.
So that's what they're setting out to prove, that there's a felony violation of federal campaign law that Trump intended to commit.
All right, now they set about producing a bunch of documents and they spend an enormous amount of time showing that Trump made a payment through his organization and through his lawyer William Cohen, I'm sorry, Michael Cohen to Stormy Daniels and Stormy Daniels signed an NDA or a non-disclosure agreement, but this was a known
from the beginning, be uncontested by the Trump defense team and so they have established, okay, they've proven that there was a payment made to Stormy Daniels to kind of zip it.
to not talk about the subject, to drop the topic, and But, this is not what the criminal case is about at all.
Because, first of all, making a payment is legal.
And second of all, having the person that you make a payment to sign an NDA is not only legal, but customary.
It's very normal. When we have people, for example, who take part in our films, we make them sign NDAs.
We don't want them to be discussing or disclosing what's in the film before the film comes out.
What the prosecution needs to show, this is an absolutely essential element of the case, is that Trump deliberately and knowingly created false business records for these payments.
Now, these payments, as it turns out, were listed in a simple kind of accounting entry in Trump's books as legal, legal payments.
And the truth of it is some of them were legal payments.
They were in fact legal payments to Michael Cohen for services rendered.
So there was nothing actually wrong with saying legal.
Second of all, how do we know that Trump knew that they were classified in this way?
Answer, we don't know.
Now, Michael Cohen said so, but Michael Cohen is about as unbelievable or unreliable a witness as you can imagine.
Really kind of a habitual liar, an opportunist, someone who's been convicted, someone who's himself a felon who served time in prison.
So, is it enough that Michael Cohen said, well, yeah, you know, as far as I knew, Trump really did know.
There doesn't seem to be any proof other than that.
And even if the prosecutors could prove that Trump knew, even that would be a misdemeanor.
That would basically be an accounting deception that you say, okay, well, don't put this down as this, put it down as that.
All right, you shouldn't do that.
That's a misdemeanor according to New York law, but it's not a felony.
And so how do you get to a felony?
Well, this is where the plot gets really interesting.
Prosecutors have to prove...
That Trump not only intended to defraud with the knowing misclassification of the payment, but his motive in doing that was he intended to commit another felony, which is to violate federal campaign finance law.
Whoa! Now, let's turn to this federal campaign finance law, because...
First of all, the DA of Manhattan, Bragg, has no authority to enforce federal finance law.
He's a state guy.
Federal finance law is enforced by the FEC, also by the DOJ. And they very consciously decided not to prosecute Trump.
Why?
Because they know that payments, including NDA payments, payments accompanied by a non-disclosure agreement, are completely legal.
They're no violation of campaign law.
So it looks like what's going on here is that the DA, Bragg, is making up his own version of campaign finance law, claiming basically that Trump intended to avoid unpleasant news stories about the election and therefore somehow he was interfering in the election and that is somehow a violation of federal campaign finance law.
I mean, think of how dumb this is.
Let's say that I am running for office.
I hear that there are negative stories on me coming out.
I worked really hard to kill those stories.
That... We're good to go.
They're going to ask for what's called a directed verdict.
And a directed verdict is, listen, before we even defend, before we put on our witnesses, before we counter any of the claims of the prosecution, the prosecution simply has not proven its case.
There's just not enough here to sustain a conviction.
Now, do I think that that will pass?
It should pass.
But I don't think it will, because I think the judge is a bad guy.
Juan Merchant, I think he is in bed with the prosecution.
I think he's a leftist who hates Trump.
We know that he's donated to Biden.
We know his daughter is making all kinds of money off of this case.
She's using it as a fundraiser and is collecting, I understand, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars.
So this is a...
This is a look into a contaminated system of justice insofar as President Trump is concerned.
I think the good news is that everyone else, all of us on the outside looking in, can see it for what it is.
I'm very happy to say I think the American people are recognizing it for what it is.
And so Trump continues to surge in the polls.
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My friend Andy Ngo, who's appeared on the podcast at least a couple of times, Andy has a report out published by the Postmillennial, San Diego jury convicts two Southern Cal Antifa members of felony conspiracy to riot.
Now, what Andy's talking about is that in San Diego, there has been, going on in the last several weeks, a big trial of Antifa.
Now, very interestingly, I've seen no reporting of this in any other media, and count on Andy, who is...
Relentlessly on the Antifa trail to give us the details.
Antifa has been able to pull off riot after riot, destruction of property, attacks on individuals, and then just claim we don't exist.
Well, we're not a real organization.
We're just a loose alliance of people who kind of get the urge, feel motivated.
But no, Antifa, in fact, is a network and a very elaborate one.
It's a network that has armor, that has weaponry, that brings tear gas.
These are thugs.
This is a thug organization.
But it's an organization that, unlike, say, MS-13 or some of the other gangs, it's involved in political thuggery.
And they never get called to account.
Think of all the Antifa rioters who came to Washington, D.C., or have been raging in Portland for weeks and months, or actually years, or taking over a part of Seattle and declaring it an independent zone that they control.
All without accountability.
And so I think Andy's right that it's significant in San Diego that a whole bunch of these guys were rounded up.
This is after they attacked a bunch of Trump supporters.
By the way, they traveled 100 miles to Pacific Beach where they heard there was going to be a Trump rally precisely to disrupt and attack the Trumpsters, which is what they did.
And they caused injuries, and they caused harm, and they were arrested.
Now, there was a whole bunch of them, and most of them So,
Jeremy Jonathan White, 41 years old, this guy was accused of assaulting supporters of Trump.
And he's charged and found guilty of conspiracy to do that.
As I mentioned, 10 of the comrades were already convicted in plea deals.
A second guy named Lightfoot.
This is a guy who was found guilty of conspiracy to riot and five felony uses of tear gas.
Now... The trial itself was kind of interesting because the Antifa guys all tried to say that they were acting in self-defense.
They're saying, oh yeah, we just showed up.
The Trumpsters just got very aggressive.
And so the reason we had to use force is to defend ourselves.
Of course, this was not the case.
And what prosecutors did is they presented hours of riot video, encrypted signal messages, private texts, I hadn't seen a group that coordinated.
In other words, what she's saying is, these Antifa guys are not some random collection.
They came in multiple cars on a two-hour drive to conduct a sort of militant operation.
They brought with them riot gear, they brought with them weapons, they brought with them protective armor, and they brought with them tear gas.
Very interestingly, some of them pose as volunteer medics.
They act like, oh no, I'm only here in case anyone needs medical care.
But the so-called medic, this is Jeremy White, he pretended to be a medic, but he brought a whole cache of weapons with him, a whole cache of weapons.
And interestingly, in the trial, these Antifa guys were defended by two far left-wing attorneys named Curtis Briggs and John Hamaski, who tried to make this self-defense argument.
Our guys are completely innocent.
By the way, you saw some of this same kind of prevarication or diversion in the Kyle Rittenhouse case, where they were saying, oh yeah, these Antifa guys were, you know, they were set upon by Kyle Rittenhouse, gratuitously attacked and shot.
Of course, the moment you see the video, you see it's the opposite.
Kyle Rittenhouse is trying to run away from these guys.
They approach him, they threaten him, they attack first, they draw their weapons first, and then Kyle Rittenhouse fires in retaliation and he fires in self-defense.
One of these guys, this is the Antifa guy named White, he took the stand in his own Now, I think Andy Ngo amusingly notes that this is kind of a surprise because this same guy had claimed to be not guilty by reason of insanity.
So first he says, I couldn't have done it because whatever I did, I cannot be held responsible for because I'm nuts.
Then the same guy withdraws his insanity plea and shows up to testify, now making kind of a self-defense argument.
So I think that you begin to see here that this is the case where idiocy, maybe even comedy, meets brutality, meets violence.
And I think Andy's point in this article, it's a long article with a lot of detail that I won't be able to go into, but I think both Andy and I had the feeling at the end that, you know, finally...
These Antifa guys are being held to account.
This is a point that I've made multiple times on the podcast, which is we've got to make sure that these guys pay a price.
If the deep state officials who said that Hunter Biden's laptop was Russian disinformation, if they never have to pay a price, they're going to keep lying that way.
If reporters get away with lying time after time after time, no accountability, nobody cancels their subscription, nobody sues them for defamation, they'll keep doing it.
If Antifa can beat up people and they never get hauled into court, they never get convicted, they don't serve serious time in jail, they're going to continue to be a gangster organization that gets away with it and in fact escalates its tactics because there is simply no accountability.
So we are the side that needs to hold the other side fully accountable.
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It's D-I-N-E-S-H Dinesh.
Guys, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast a new guest and really a different kind of guest.
It's Susan Polgar and she is a, well, calling her a chess grandmaster is an understatement.
She's one of the most decorated female chess players of all time.
In 1984, age 15, she became the youngest ever to earn the world number one ranking.
She's an Olympic gold medalist.
She's in the World Chess Hall of Fame.
She also founded the Susan Polgar Foundation, which is a non-profit aimed at promoting chess throughout the U.S. to young people of all ages.
And she is the subject of a National Geographic documentary titled, My Brilliant Brain.
By the way, you can follow her on x at Susan Polgar, P-O-L-G-A-R, and her website, ChessDailyNews.com.
ChessDailyNews.com.
Susan, welcome, and thank you for joining me.
I know you're traveling in Europe, so it's really nice of you to make the time.
We've followed each other on social media over the years, and I've wanted to have you come on the podcast, but I'm delighted it's finally worked out.
So thank you for joining me, and I really appreciate it.
My pleasure. It's nice to hear from you.
Susan, let's talk a little bit about chess, and specifically about you, because Debbie was watching, my wife was watching the documentary, the National Geographic documentary, and she goes, wow, this is really fascinating, because Susan's father introduced her and her sister to chess at a very young age, and of course that seems to have been something that completely changed your life.
So can you talk a little bit about growing up in Hungary, Absolutely.
Yes, it's a very fascinating story.
In fact, I'm in the process of writing a book about it that hopefully comes out next year.
And my parents kind of started corresponding.
My mother was born in the Soviet Union, right on the border of Hungary, while my father was born in Hungary itself.
Yeah.
Yeah. So initially it was kind of a theoretical professional discussion, eventually turning to romance, and here I am, right?
So basically, again, fast forward, when I was nearly four years old, I was at home in search for a new activity, new toy, and randomly some chess pieces from out of the drawer I pulled out.
I asked my mom, what are these cute little figurines?
And she says, well, these are chess pieces, although I know nothing about them.
She didn't even know how the pieces move.
However, dad loves chess.
He'll be more than happy, you know, if you have an interest to teach you.
And hence, while he didn't know what the subject...
To prove his theory was, at that point, he felt, wow, this is a fantastic coincidence.
It's fate, because chess is wonderful in so many ways.
It's a beautiful game, and it's easily measurable, unlike so many other fields when there is a lot of subjectivity or it's a very long term.
Like in sciences, for example, if you want to race, so to say, a scientist, it can take many years until Or more, to prove a particular new discovery in sciences.
Chess, on the other hand, so he thought, you either win or you lose, or sometimes you draw, and the results are clear, right?
So here he had this theory even before getting married, before having children, and then finally this coincidence that I discovered chess, and then he started teaching me.
Now he was just a hobby player like you are, and He never really competed seriously.
In fact, he didn't even know chess books existed until I showed interest in the game.
And then he discovered, oh, there are plenty of chess books.
And he started collecting chess books to be able to help me better.
And I started playing early on, within about six months or so.
I played in my first competitions and I played in the elementary school championship for chess.
And obviously, I was just still four, four and a half years old.
So I needed kind of special exception permission to be even allowed to play as I wasn't quite a school aged yet.
And I won all the preliminaries in the neighborhood and ended up playing in the Budapest Championship, where I was obviously still the youngest by far.
In fact, most of the other girls were nearly three times my age, up to 11 years old.
And to everybody's shock, I won all my games, 10 out of 10.
So that's how my career started.
And obviously, my father and my parents, both my parents got encouraged in this is something is worthwhile pursuing.
And this is now the subject of my father's theory to be proven.
That is incredible. Susan, I sometimes have difficulty explaining what chess is all about to someone who doesn't play, because they see a board, they see that people are moving.
I guess most people are accustomed to games that involve a combination of skill and chance.
Because there's usually in games like cards, of course, you can be a good card player, but there's an element of luck.
Depends what cards you got.
But with chess, it's not like that, because the pieces are fixed, there's no element of luck at all, and yet it seems to me a little hard to say, is chess something that is fundamentally mathematical?
Is it fundamentally a matter of science?
Is it fundamentally a matter of art?
Is it a combination of both?
As somebody who has really devoted your life to the game, how would you describe it?
I think that's the beauty in chess, that it's so complex, and indeed it's a combination of it being a game, being a sport, being science, being an art.
And it's incredibly rich, and you need so many qualities at the same time to be successful at it, because you need to be able to calculate many moves ahead when it's needed.
You need to be able to be a good strategist, to plan ahead in an abstract sense.
You need to be able to predict kind of like the stock market or some other things, you know, because there is so many unknown, you know, every before every game, it's like a blank canvas.
And you never know how the game will develop.
And you mentioned that chess does not have luck.
Yes, definitely compared to card games or many things it does not.
But on a higher level, there is some kind of form of luck in the sense that, for example, I'm preparing for a particular opening against an opponent, and the opponent has an option to play five different things that he switches back and forth in between.
And against one particular one, I have a great idea, a new idea to surprise him or her and catch him, right?
So there is that kind of luck.
But yes, it's not the other kind of luck from the outside.
It's kind of, you can earn your luck by kind of doing your homework in a way.
Susan, what do you think that chess prepares you for?
In other words, there was a, around the time of the 70s and 80s, kind of a craze of teaching young people to play chess.
And this makes a revival every now and then.
And the idea is that I mean, I have no doubt that compared to, say, wasting your time on video games or sitting around watching the ceiling or just spending your time on websites, chess is, in fact, a very good preparation for the mind.
But do you think that, for example...
One could say that chess prepares you to be a better student in high school, a better student in college.
I heard Anand, this is the Indian former world champion, say something recently that I thought was interesting.
He said, yes, I think that chess is for the ordinary player.
A very good preparation for school and for life.
He goes, but for the top players, it only makes you better at playing chess.
It doesn't necessarily at that level translate to anything else.
You just get better at the game itself.
What is your assessment?
I think, in general, I agree with Vishy Anand, who is a good friend of mine.
Well, the thing with chess is that you can get to a pretty good level relatively quickly, but from that level, to become a professional, to become a Grand Master, you have to put in an insane amount of time.
As of the life skills or other skills, improvement will not be in proportion with the additional time you have to put in.
So in other words, I think every child should learn chess for the sake of learning to think ahead, plan ahead, constantly consider the other side's moves, you know, life moves, you know, don't just think about yourself, be patient, Calculate, manage your time.
It's like countless life qualities that so many people struggle with.
And probably most importantly is the decision-making skills.
That in chess, we play a game, we play 30, 40, 50, 60, or sometimes many more moves, and we have to make a decision with a limited time, every single time.
And I think a lot of people in our society really struggle with that decision-making.
That process and that pressure that they have to deal with and they have to make a decision.
And obviously sometimes not making a decision is a decision in itself because life eventually decides for you, the opportunity passes you by and so on and so on.
So I think that skill perhaps is the most important of them all that just prepares you for that constant decision making.
That good or bad, you have to go left or right and live with it and cope with it.
If you decided wrongly, don't panic.
It's not the end of the world.
If you made a good decision, it doesn't mean every decision you make next will be good.
So that whole dynamic of decision making and your homework to be able to make better decisions and cope with the bad decisions, I think that's just so essential for life.
And so many people struggle with that, that when something didn't work out their way, they just panic and collapse and make continuing wrong decisions.
Do you think that chess, Susan, is an inherited talent or do you think it is a learned talent?
And let me tell you how I'm thinking about this.
It used to be when I was growing up and I first learned chess, I was probably 9 or 10 years old.
One of my neighbors taught me.
And I looked around the world and I realized that, wow, of the top maybe 100 players, it seemed like 70 or 80 of them were from the old Soviet Union.
The Russia just dominated the game, I think, in men and women, although I'm not sure about the women, but certainly the Russian men.
Now, of course, we see there is a...
Well, I mean, we have a Chinese guy playing an Indian guy for the upcoming World Championship.
The top player in the world, Magnus Carlsen, is from Sweden.
So it looks like the...
I'm sorry, from Norway. It looks like the rest of the world is kind of jumping in.
And this would suggest that as people get into the game, you're going to see the talent come from all over the place.
On the other hand, I was scrolling down the FIDE, the chess association list of the top 100 players.
And as of now, I didn't see a single female name.
The top women players were...
Just outside the top 100.
And this would seem to suggest that chess is kind of a male-dominated sport.
And we even see this in the fact that they now have a chess championship, they have a women's chess championship.
So, how do you think about whether or not chess is something you're born with, or whether it's something that you entirely learn, or both?
I think you mostly learn.
You have certain skills that you're probably born with that could be helpful for chess, such as being patient, such as being able to, in a positive sense, be obsessed about one particular thing rather than jump around between different activities.
So yes, there are certain skills that are helpful, but I don't think they are necessarily chess-specific.
So, as for your question about women in chess, well, first of all, there are two women who would be easily in the top 100 or even top maybe 30 or so.
My sister Judith, as well as Hui Fan, was numerous times, obviously...
While she was active. The thing is, neither of them are active.
They have kind of retired at a relatively young age.
And so did I actually in my days.
I won my last world championship when I was 26 years old.
So, and I retired pretty much soon after.
So, it's that meant that they would keep staying with a career, like Korchnoi, until his 80s, you know, or usually until the 60s, 70s, they easily play, while women oftentimes decide to start a family and even just in another profession, you know, for practical reasons.
Yeah. I think generally women are just as capable as men.
I think just there are so many more men who start out playing and then take it seriously than women, being the primary reason the numbers game.
That obviously if you have...
10 times more men play than women, obviously there is 10 times bigger chance that the best players will be men.
And then on top of it, I can tell you from my own personal example that I had to go through so much hurdles and challenges being a girl in such a male-dominated field that...
That it made it extra difficult, for example, when for the first time in 1986, when I was 17, I was one of the top boy or girl 17-year-old in the world.
There was Vassili Vanchuk and Vishi Anand, the Indian former world champion we talked about.
So the three of us were basically the top three players.
So on one list in January, I was behind one of them, and then in July behind the other one.
So I was basically number two for the whole year as a 17-year-old.
And yet, 2019, in that same year, I qualified for the next stage of the World Championship from the Hungarian Male Championship.
I was not allowed to participate.
So that's just one example that, you know, it kind of broke my spirit and career that a guy would never have to deal with in a similar situation.
So, and the other thing is that there is a lot of sexual harassment and uncomfortable positions that girls, women are put in the world of chess.
It partly comes because, again, the numbers game that There are so many men and women.
Like recently, two American grandmasters, for example, were banned because of sexual harassment issues, and they are not the only ones that could be, unfortunately.
I'm sorry to hear that.
Susan, let's talk for a moment.
We have just a little bit of time about computers and the way that they have totally changed the landscape of chess, because now you've got this massive calculating machine that at one time people thought could never beat a human player, but that changed with Kasparov being defeated by Deep Blue, and now computers appear to be Measurably stronger than human players.
So you could almost say that the world champion today is a computer.
And we have the comical sight or somewhat comical sight of sometimes one computer playing another computer to see which computer is better.
It's also changed the human players because human beings now study using computers.
Is that a good thing for chess or is it taking chess away from the old sort of idea that chess is fundamentally about calculation but also intuition?
Presumably computers don't have intuition.
Yeah, it's been quite remarkable for me to see my lifetime in front of my eyes, you know, from the time I remember I received as a gift my very first chess computer called, it was a tiny box called Boris Diplomat and I would beat it easily.
Every single game, even when I was like 9, 10 years old when I got it.
And to the days when AlphaZero basically today would just demolish even the best humans that are.
It's really remarkable that I think...
But I think it didn't really hurt us.
I think, in fact, it helped us.
Because there was that phase when there was this questioning whether will computers ever beat humans.
And now that's ancient history, just like we're not racing with cars, we accept the fact that cars just get to one place to another faster than we walk or run.
And humans also accepted the same fate when it came to chess, that yes, we don't compete with them, but we learn from them.
We utilize them to be better at what we want to accomplish.
Susan, in closing, you started the website Chess Daily News, and you also have the Susan Polgar Foundation.
Tell people what you're doing these days and how you are working to expand awareness and interest and participation in chess.
Yeah, actually, I'm very passionate about my foundation, which I started back in 2002, initially with the primary goal to promote chess for girls and women, because there were very few opportunities back then.
And I'm very proud that we have awarded well over $6 million in scholarships and prizes to our university partners over the years.
And we're hoping to do more and more to give opportunities through chess to now not just girls, but also boys, mostly in the United States.
And I think chess is an amazing game that, as we discussed earlier, can help our society at large to have more productive and better citizenship.
There's a world championship coming up between the Indian Grandmaster named Gukesh and the Chinese Grandmaster named Ting.
Who do you think is going to win?
That's hard to say.
Hey, Alan, there is an experienced player, but kind of not so active anymore and not so ambitious, it appears, based on how little he plays since he became world champion.
While we have a super ambitious 17-year-old incredible young player from India, Gukash, obviously lacking the same experience as his Chinese opponent.
I think it will be a very close match, but I personally have the feeling that motivation is a huge factor in such things.
So is psychology.
So it will be hard to tell what things will bring in six months when the match will start.
But if the match would start today, honestly, I would bet On Kukash, but obviously in six months a lot can happen.
Din can get active again and get his ambition back and then it will be a very open match for sure.
Susan Polgar, thank you very much for joining me, guys.
You can follow her on x at Susan Polgar and the website chessdailynews.com.
I'm talking about the four distinctive British folkways that shaped America, drawing on the work of the historian David Hackett Fisher.
And I talked about the Puritans in New England.
I've now been talking about the Cavaliers who came from England, the southern part of England, to Virginia and established the culture of the American South.
Now, what are the distinctive features of that culture?
Well, one of them is eating.
The New Englanders were very dull in their cuisine.
By and large, they would boil things, boiled meat, boiled cabbage.
And in fact, one New Englander traveling in the South said that she was very surprised that in the South they didn't boil things together.
So, in other words, the New Englanders were used to putting everything into one pot Boiling it in a kind of stew, and then that's pretty much your meal.
Southerners had a much more varied and sophisticated taste.
Well, first of all, they just ate a lot of different stuff.
Gentlemen in Virginia, for example, if you looked at their table, you'd find things like pigeon, partridge...
So not just beef, not just a few staple vegetables.
The Virginia governor was a guy who liked to eat asparagus and strawberries every day when he could get them.
He tried to stay English in his ways and in his tastes.
And And even poor whites in Virginia ate a more varied cuisine.
Part of it was they developed more interesting ways of cooking things, so not just chicken that's just boiled, but roasted or fried.
That's how the Southerners invented fried chicken.
And today, fried chicken may be stereotypically associated with blacks, but blacks learned it in Virginia.
Blacks learned it from whites in Virginia.
Saltfish Foodstuffs with more spices and kind of more tang to it.
There were English recipes that were brought into Virginia so that the Virginians took the trouble to find out how to make dishes.
And they would add wine.
They would add oysters.
They would sometimes throw in a dozen egg yolks.
This created really the regional cooking that we now identify with the South, but it wasn't just about the cooking.
For the Virginians, dining was a kind of an art.
So you could say that New Englanders just ate food.
Whereas the Virginians dined.
And dining was a matter of sitting down, having an elegant table.
It was not uncommon in Virginia to have a display of silver or even like a family crest that was put above the table.
Even poor families in Virginia, historian David Hackett Fisher tells us, had tablecloths, for example, that they used was very often in New England, it was just the bare table.
And Virginians cultivated the art of conversation.
So in other words, it's not just that you eat, you eat and talk, and you eat and talk in a certain way.
Now, of course, it's not to say that New Englanders didn't have good food or that they didn't have feasts or banquets, they just didn't have them that often.
Typically, you might have a banquet once a year.
There's a banquet on an occasion.
But Virginians and Southerners kind of have dinners and banquets sort of all the time.
A French traveler in the 17th century says he visited William Fitzhugh's plantation, and he says...
That while he was there, 20 men showed up in military uniform.
He says, quote,"...but he has such a large establishment that he did not mind.
We were all of us provided with beds, one for two men.
He treated us royally.
There was good wine and all kinds of beverages.
There was a great deal of carousing.
He had sent for three fiddlers, a jester and a tightrope dancer, and an acrobat who tumbled around, and they gave us entertainment." So this guy had enough food on his plantation to feed all these 20 people who showed up unexpectedly, but not only that, but at short notice he was able to summon up entertainment as well.
In addition to food, in addition to conversation, Southerners are also better dressed.
Dressing is important to them.
And admittedly, these were dresses with the distinctions of rank and style.
So if you were in the upper class, you dressed one way.
But gaudy costumes.
And you see this, by the way, even if you go fast forward to the Civil War, and you look at the Northern soldiers and the Southern soldiers, you'll notice something.
The Northern soldiers all look like they're basically in ill-fitting uniforms.
They sort of look like they're country boys that have just been dressed up to go to war.
Not to say that they aren't deadly fighters, but it is to say that they look a bit like a sorry lot.
Then you look at the Confederates, and one guy will have a feather in his cap, another guy will have some beads on his jacket, a third guy will be wearing some sort of a chain, a fourth guy has sort of decorated his rifle.
In other words, there's a kind of panache, a gaudiness, a style.
And this was customary in Virginia from the very beginning.
There's a kind of a little amusing description here where it says that New Englanders sometimes wore caps, but Virginians wore hats, hats of all types.
The New Englanders had trousers, pants, but Virginians had breeches, which were rolled up, which were often more decorative.
The The Virginians had silver buckles, snakeskin garters, gold buttons.
So this was a dressing for display.
So what we're seeing here, the point I'm going to draw out of this is that although there's a common culture here, you've got people who are coming for a better way of life, people who are coming to live the way that they couldn't live in England anymore, nevertheless, There are important differences that have persisted right to the present.
I finally want to talk about the way that time had a very different meaning in the North than it did in the South.
In the North, they spoke very often of improving the time.
The idea being, God has given us all a certain amount of time.
The clock is ticking. Make time count for you.
Like, don't lose a sense of time.
Get it done. Be punctual.
Complete your task. There's only so much time.
At some point, time will run out.
The Virginians had a very different phrase.
Killing time. And killing time means there's a lot of time.
The day isn't going to go by all that fast.
And so, take it easy.
Kill time. I remember once looking at a manual.
This was about fishing practices in the plantation south.
And it basically said that if you're going fishing in the south, you can't just go fishing.
First, you have to camp outside a river for a week.
For a week? What?
You have the time.
Kill time. Hang around.
Make a fire.
Chat. Read.
Watch birds. So, the Southern idea was that life is to be sort of taken easy.
There's a little bit of a lethargic sense that time is going to pass, and so you pass time, you kill time.
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