Mark Steyn has a reminiscince of Peggy Lee, who died five years ago yesterday, and I found this little note in the middle of it:

The novelty number they’d recorded a week earlier – “Manana” – was Number One for nine weeks in 1948….

Even more irritating, Miss Lee lived long enough to see “Manana” rendered all but unperformable, a harmless novelty number (“I’ll go to work manana/But I gotta sleep tonight”) scuttled by political correctness. Steyn’s Song Of The Week #39

The song, featuring a Spanish accent and a theme of procrastination, is likely to either give offense, or be suspected of giving offense, which will trigger politically correct reflexes. (The Mañana sterotype may have some accuracy in it–according to Mexicans and Americans: Cracking the Cultural Code, By Ned Crouch, when you’re told in Mexico that something will be available “Mañana” it doesn’t mean it will be available “tomorrow,” it simply means “not today.”) Speedy Gonzalez was brought back from politically correct oblivion, because Hispanics missed him.

This verse

The window she is broken and the rain is coming in,
If someone doesn’t fix it I’ll be soakin’ to my skin,
But if we wait a day or two the rain may go away,
And we don’t need a window on such a sunny day!

is a direct steal from story of The Arkansaw Traveller whose cabin didn’t leak when it didn’t rain. (He was a white fellow, with a fiddle rather than a guitar.)

Here’s Miss Peggy Lee, singing Mañana, in 1948, via Youtube:

I still maintain a guarded optimism about the new Mexican administration of Felipe Calderon, who has certainly hit the ground running in his new presidency (see here , here and here.

I notice too that George Grayson, Mexico-watcher at the College of William and Mary, is giving Calderon high marks. In a recent interview in the Mexican media, Grayson said of Calderon that “he has begun his presidency excellently - a grade of 10!- better than any other president in the recent history of Mexico.” [‘Calderón inició con 10 combatiendo al crimen’El Siglo de Torreon, January 14th, 2007

Calderon faces enormous challenges, as Grayson sums them up: “fighting poverty, narco-trafficking, Mexico’s big monopolies; he has to attack the bottlenecks in the economy.”

Grayson suggested that, in going after Mexico’s various monopolies, Calderon should go after the pharmaceutical companies first.

Regarding immigration, which is the real question of interest on VDARE.COM, Grayson commented that

“Calderon knows quite well that there is no magic powder to resolve the problem of migration. It will be in domestic affairs in which the president can have his greatest success.”

Calderon would do well to concentrate on Mexican domestic affairs, where the challenges are certainly great enough, rather than meddling in U.S. immigration policy.

The immensely active Reason “Hit & Run” blog (resources make a difference, unfortunately) slipped in a characteristic sneer at the late Sam Francis last week: (Three-Fifths of a Man David Weigel January 16 2007)

Martin Luther King Day has come and gone; it’s safe now to link to Michael Brendan Dougherty’s essay on the late Sam Francis, from the America’s Future Foundation magazine Doublethink

Reason gloats

It’s striking how quickly Francis’ work has receded from the public conciousness

Of course, the cause of any diminution of awareness of Sam Francis is exactly what destroyed his career in his lifetime: his relentless and ruthless eradication from all normal channels of conservative expression. Sam was by no means the only victim of this and it is still ongoing.

However, the forces of repression reckoned without the internet. VDARE.com sees persistent and quite heavy traffic on our archive of Sam Francis work, much of it from search engines.

Sam will certainly be remembered for a first class political joke (extremely relevant to the immigration debate today):

“IN AMERICA, WE have a two-party system.” There is the stupid party. And there is the evil party. I am proud to be a member of the stupid party.”
“Periodically, the two parties get together and do something that is both stupid and evil. This is called—bipartisanship.”

And, of course, his principled opposition to the MLK holiday against the whole political culture stands to be resoundingly vindicated when/if the MLK archives are eventually opened.

It is on this subject that Reason’s blog is silliest

the King holiday didn’t launch everything Francis said it would…The “egalitarian commandment” tide started rolling ashore in 1978, and it crashed in the 1990s. We’ve been taking MLK Day off, and our presidents have basically been consecrating it, and the push for racial preferences has been struggling since prop 209.

This is quite wrong. Sam Francis correctly saw where setting up a national holiday on the basis of a race-pandering lie would lead. The road to disgraces like the Duke atrocity is short and direct. Reason misrepresents the situation because of its House reluctance to accept the significance of ethnicity.

Michael Brendan Dougherty’s DoubleThink article (The Castaway - Jan 14 2007) is also weak on these issues and fails to account properly for the role of the Neoconservatives in the purging of Sam Francis and his kind. But it does have some useful and interesting material about a patriot who made huge sacrifices for his country.

UPDATE: click here to read about the new book collection of Sam Francis articles.