My Uneasy Truce With Liberal Christians on the Border Crisis

My wife and I, having retired to an area of the Appalachian foothills where she grew up, are supposed to join formally a small church this Sunday.  I have few expectations, and no illusions.  At my age, one is aware that faith either lives and breathes in what one says and does… or else it is a body without breath, a mere word gracing a convenient nexus of social diversions.  I love the compound’s century-old trees, the whispering creek under a small bridge, and the 180-year-old-church itself.  The people are probably no better than I at my best or worse than I at my worst.  I don’t really need a church to tell me when I walk with God… and I’ve never been able to convince myself that I’m walking with God because I belong to a church.

It’s actually very hard to find a denomination that will countenance the sentiments of my last sentence, especially along the more conservative edge of the spectrum.  Among the hardliners, you either hear and adore the Word every Sunday… or you’re hell-bait; and to hear the Word, you come to church and listen to Preacher Paul exegize select verses (which need no exegesis because everything in the Bible is literally true and means just what it says, except… whatever).

Well, we have steered clear of Preacher Paul this time.  I like our new minister, though a passing allusion (which I may have misconstrued) to LGBT issues in one of her sermons made me squirm.  As a woman who attended seminary in the Deep South, she endured a baptism of fire, I’m sure, that left her more sympathetic to liberal causes célèbres than I could ever be.  And as a straight white male who has navigated the shoal waters of college English departments for over three decades, I’m sure I could tell her things about leftist hypocrisy, coarseness, and inhumanity that would shock her.  But I probably won’t.  We settle where the tides of life have cast us ashore.  Some of us have known dense swamps, and some only barren rocks.

Yet this general magnanimity of mine doesn’t always wear well in specific cases.  The defense of our border is one such: I’m challenged to give my “live and let live” shrug when I hear trash talk about ICE.  If a devout libertarian were to explain to me why all borders should be nullified, I would heartily disagree, but I could understand how his principles had generated his position.  The connections would be logical and relatively unprovocative.  What makes me want to cry foul on discussions of this subject is the mention of children.  It’s tantamount to hitting the lights when you know you’ve drawn a losing hand and then raking in all the chips during the scramble.  No, sorry—you don’t get to skulk away free on the border crisis just by uttering the word “children”.  Even if you squeeze “Christ” into the same sentence, you’re not sneaking out of the room with the pot.  In fact, if you start throwing “Christ” at me routinely, I’ll have you permanently banned from the game… or I’ll just stop playing games, since I’m not the organizer here.  I’ll design my conversations to orbit tightly around “hello”: I’ll keep the peace of a quiet outsider visiting a lunatic asylum.  Sound familiar?

Let’s look at children, by all means—we of sound mind.  Take a six-year-old who’s been dragged from the rural village whose lanes, creeks, briar patches, and sand flats are all he’s ever known… and bundle him along a series of rattletrap bus-rides and crawling night transits in flatbed railroad cars until he comes to the desert.  Then make him walk two or three hundred miles through spaces that have no water and steady, brutal sun.  Why art thou doing this to him, thou follower of Christ?  Or why are you defending those who do this to him?  The reason is said to be a “better life”.  What better life?  Better how?  Better for his “parents”?  (Let’s assume for the sake of argument, and in the teeth of probability, that all our six-year-olds are being dragged through Hell by a true parent.)  How better for his parents?  Because they will harvest free health care, free police protection, free food and shelter in some cases (so they’ve heard), and free-and-permanent victim status in our ongoing high-stakes political game of subverting the republic?  How will this profit our boy?  What positive life lessons—assuming he survives the trip intact (and waving aside more probabilities)—will he learn from these new habits?  Dependency, indigence, victimhood, protest, envy, resentment… along with all the duplicity, cynicism, despair, and passive-aggressive tricks of exploitation that are first cousin to these… have we given this child, my brothers and sisters in Christ, a better upbringing than he would have enjoyed on the dirt floor of his hovel?

My Beacons of the Christian Conscience, ironically, are always among the first to deplore our overcrowded cities (and little Pedrito’s dad does not intend to pick apricots and lettuces), our high unemployment levels and (when those fall) low wages, our soul-killing ghettos, our deadly-violent streets, and our garbage-laden popular culture.  Yet by inviting hordes of fortune-seekers to ignore our laws, they are feeding the machine that generates all such misery.  Is it so important, then, that Pedrito not be brought up on a dirt floor?  Why?  For health reasons?  Are the mouthpieces of our Collective Conscience remotely aware of what massive movements of people into tightly condensed population centers do for infectious diseases?

But the children, the children!  They’re already here.  How can you turn them away?

An observation, and then a suggestion.  If it were known far and wide that our border was firmly shut to illegal penetration, then no child would ever be forced to endure this excruciating, sometimes fatal ordeal.  If a “parent” nevertheless feels so drawn by the prospect of a rich payday that he will submit his child to such torture, then I say that we have a prima facie case for severe child abuse.  Therefore (and this is my suggestion), instantly put each child up for adoption who is rescued from such a parent, and send the parent back home.  Fortunately, the volume of American families willing to adopt a child within two hours of a phone call is immense, thanks to the success of the Left at killing off very adoptable infants.  My wife and I would take Pedrito tomorrow.

Why is that “not Christian” of us—but leaving children in the hands of anything-to-get-ahead parents is a deed of mercy?  Are we truly trying to be disciples of Christ in a fallen and intricately compromised world… or are we posing for a selfie in some situation whose props and lighting “look Christian”?  (“Here’s another of Jesus and me… that’s me on the right.”)

I try to remind myself that inviting ignorant, dependent masses into red states at grave risk of igniting plagues and gang warfare—all for the sake of illegal enfranchisement and permanent hijacking of the nation—is the psychotically amoral scheme only of the Democrat Party elite (and more than a few Republican fellow-travelers in the beltway).  I try to recognize, even, that not all the “Lord, Lord” Christians who condone this calamity are merely of the virtue-signaling, selfie-snapping sort.  I truly believe that some, perhaps many, are honestly mistaken about the situation’s squalid facts… that is, I think I truly believe it.  I try to.  Truly.

But my vexation with people who are well old enough to understand just what a desert is, even if they’ve never seen one, can get the better of me.  My impatience with people who decry our repellently commercialized Christmases yet cannot accept that children may grow up spiritually healthy without iPhones and x-Boxes makes me nearly snap sometimes.  I know they mean well, some of these people… maybe most of them.  (More likely just some of them.)  And scarcely a one of them, at the same time, can credit that anyone holding my position isn’t a racist animal.

I’ll be okay.  I’ll listen to the wind high in the century-old pines, and the incessant watery whisper beneath the bridge.  All the projects of this world end in futility, from an earthly perspective… and the stream flows on.  Who knows?  Maybe I can politely nudge a mind or two in a different direction.  Maybe I will discover that one or two minds covertly occupy the same turf as mine.

But it’s a shame that so many children will have to suffer, in the meantime.  And it’s beyond shameful that their suffering will be abetted, and even engineered, by people calling themselves Christians—engineered in the very exercise of this self-indulgent, extravagant short-sightedness that they are pleased to call Christian living.

A Fearful Future Designed by Fearless Idiots

I’ve evaded this issue for months; I evade it every day.  I politely step around it as one might smile distantly at a visiting relative over the holidays who shows up with a cold.  I don’t utterly ignore it… but I sidle away, postpone, and break off in mid-thought to address more “pressing” matters.

The future.  I happened (don’t ask how) upon a collection of off-beat essays by a late twentieth-century author, now deceased, named Giorgio Manganelli.  A particularly long piece comments on a just-published (back in about 1980) anthology whose distinguished contributors anticipate what life in 2000 will be like.  In other words, I was reading a wry satirist’s view of several views of the near future from my own view almost twenty years later than that near future.  It’s an uncomfortable experience… and the pathos is a little too keen for me to delight in the absurdity.

Forever present in the human animal, apparently, are certain projections about the future… which would lead one to believe a) that notions of tomorrow are hard-wired in our imagination, and b) that the “real future” may be shaped quite deterministically by this stubborn hard-wiring.  There are the visionaries who foresee the resolution of all problems (without defining a “problem” while preserving any sense of human nature) by technology.  Cancer?  Cured.  Illiteracy and ignorance?  A computer chip implanted.  Traffic congestion?  An air-buggy in every floating garage.  Then we have this giddy band’s dark cousins, the visionaries who see right-wing generalissimos under every bridge just waiting to blow the high-tech train off the rails.  The less lyrical, more clinical prophets possessing an actual background in science will describe a society whose citizens are telepathic or semi-robotic without stirring in un-scientific words like “good” or “evil”… but one can sense their myopic eyes glowing in excitement through the print.  Dour moralists, on the other hand, will point to the script of Sodom and Gomorrah and advise the hasty construction of another Arc.

I remember an edition of My Weekly Reader that must have passed through my hands when I was in first or second grade.  I won’t attempt to peg the year… but let’s just say that 1980 may have been to those estimable publishers of educational matter what 2000 was to Manganelli’s elite commentariat.  What I truly remember—all I truly remember—from that delightfully newspaper-scented front page is the bichromatic image of a monorail.  Yep.  By 1980, well within my generation’s lifetime (we hadn’t heard the word “Vietnam” yet), all of us would get from A to B by hopping aboard a whirring, slightly subsonic centipede.  We’d go everywhere that way: to grocery store, to church, to ball park and movie theater.  There would be no on-board crime, no risky drop-offs at midnight… and cost?  What’s cost?

Apparently, a large portion of California’s current population recalls the same My Weekly Reader issue, was just as impressed by it—and has not learned in the intervening decades about factors like blown budgets, tax hikes, government waste, contractor fraud, zoning laws, and the inviolable limits of three-dimensional space.  I’m surprised, frankly, that the late great Governor Jerry Brown didn’t substitute a teleportation system when his Pacific-corridor bullet-train went bust.  The current governor, I believe, has in fact teleported to us from some other planet… some planet rendered uninhabitable by his race’s brilliant engineering.

Meanwhile, the future continues to arrive on its own terms.  Every day, tomorrow becomes today; and every day, today preserves qualities of yesterday that we had hoped never to see again but did virtually nothing to eliminate.  That’s why the future… yes, I’ll say the word: that’s why the future frightens me.  Because what frightens me is ourselves.  We don’t learn.  We never learn.  We keep turning the page expecting the tragedy to end and a comedy to carry us the rest of the way through the book—as if we were merely browsing through a book, and not writing it.  The boldest (i.e., most insane) of us express a keen interest in scribbling all over a fresh page, but… but they didn’t read the earlier pages, where the tragedy was ignited precisely by a zeal for erasing everything and starting from scratch.  We are held in thrall by the most incorrigible idiots among us, who also seem to have the most energy and the “boldest vision”.  Why wouldn’t they?  Wouldn’t you be bold, too, if you knew nothing about history, resisted acknowledging anything about your nature, and indulged your selfish whimsy as if it were the voice of God telling you how to arrange everybody’s life perfectly?

What could possibly go wrong with such “dreaming”?  How many graduating high-school and college seniors have just been exhorted by impressively idiotic speakers to dream their way out of the present’s miseries?

The very act of writing these paragraphs today, as it turns out, has proved another sly evasion of the future on my part; for I have written in very general terms about the futility of forward-aimed thinking, but not about several specific details of tomorrow—or this afternoon—looming so plainly as to be almost unavoidable.  I wasn’t always such an escape-artist.  When I was childless and single, I used to spend hours trying to bore straight into the future’s thickly veiled face.  Now that I have others to fear for, I can scarcely tolerate the misgivings that the stare-down produces in me.  That cavernous gaze is too similar to the Grim Reaper’s empty sockets.

John the Gospelist writes in his first epistle, “True love hath no fear.”  I’ve never understood that one, honestly.  It seems to me that those who truly love are precisely those who would truly fear.  The idiots with their designs unrelated to anything of the past or to any shred of common sense or practicality, in contrast, seem to be as fearless as lions… or as fearless as tripping addicts who imagine themselves lions.  I understand, from the perspective of genuine faith, that all things of this world end and that all worldly devices and desires are condemned to nullification… but that, in the ultimate comedy, none of the vast desolation matters, since this world is not the real world.  Nevertheless, as a traveler—a drifter, a vagabond—making his way through this futile, trivial, vainglorious, ridiculous world, I cannot completely inoculate myself against the anguish of gullible children who must watch the idiot-dreams of idiot-prophets explode one by one.

Heaven, maybe, has monorails powered by moonbeams.  I’d never thought of My Weekly Reader as a proselytizing instrument… but that’s exactly what it was.  Childhood dreams become reality where adult corruption is forever washed away.  That location is not right here, awaiting just another sunrise or two.  It never will be.

Are We Still Willing to Pay the Cost of Free Speech?

It wasn’t my intention to begin any kind of “series”… but I seem to have written a lot lately about the rising challenges of free expression.  People are on edge.  They don’t want to hear what might be taken (or mistaken) for a middle position.  This is probably because giving any ground at all may be seen as bringing one another few feet closer to the abyss, a tactic used by the opposite polarity repeatedly to suck one in and down.  I know the feeling.  I often share it.  I’m seldom in a compromising mood lately.

With that said, I remain nonetheless shocked at just how edgy my fellow citizens sometimes seem to be.  Earlier this week, a reader on Twitter had “liked” one of my comments; and, as I usually do when I have the time, I studied her profile and some of her posts.  She appeared the sort of person with whom I might make common cause.  (Note: I use Twitter to gather news and to seek after an intellectual community; and, yes, I know how naive that sounds: but what other options do we have in our anti-social nation of e-introverts?)  I returned later that evening to “follow” her and a few others who impressed me (as is also my pattern)… only to find that I had been blocked from her account.

Now that was sudden!  I have to conclude that this person imitated me in reviewing a few of my earlier posts—and saw something of which she disapproved.  So she slammed the door permanently to all further communication.  She didn’t respond to whatever objectionable comment I may have made in explanatory disagreement; and she also didn’t choose simply to read my opinions more selectively—none of which would ever be directed to her personally.  She certainly wasn’t censuring me for slinging about foul language or inciting mayhem, because I never do any such thing.  Just an idea… she saw an idea expressed that rubbed her the wrong way, so my voice has been forever silenced in her universe.

This is a small thing—but not, I contend, an insignificant one.  It’s a sign of the times.  Even as NGOs are busily trying to control our thoughts on every subject from the proper moment to mutilate a human fetus to the permitted circumstances for using words like “owner”, private citizens are beginning to behave the same way.  As individuals, we aren’t putting up a principled resistance.  We aren’t protesting, “I will neither be bullied into condoning baby-slaughter nor shamed into trimming my speech of harmless words.  I have inalienable human rights.  You needn’t listen to me, but you can’t cut my throat.”  No; we’re adapting formal airbrushing and permanent ostracism to our personal habits.

Young singles won’t date a person sympathetic with the opposition political party.  Families won’t hear of a child marrying someone once seen in a MAGA hat.  Social-media users won’t allow a person’s post to crawl across their screen ever again once he disapproves of executing Julian Assange or suggests that Putin might be less our cultural enemy than Angela Merkel.  An editorialist’s home may be surrounded by a mob if he argues in print that CO2 is not turning Earth into a death trap.

Disney, Starbuck’s, and Yahoo are not driving us to do these things.  We do them unbidden: we do them because they are our new etiquette.  We are turning into tribalists incapable of understanding the finer points of the First Amendment, or even the crude parameters.
Also on Twitter (what an eye-opening education in twenty-first century manners is that otherwise great sinkhole of wasted time!), I enjoyed this past week my first experience of being “reported”—or my first conscious experience of it.  (Who knows how many times I’ve made the “bad boy” roll without being informed of my achievement?)  I had repeated, with the brevity inescapable on Twitter, a charge about Hillary’s having accepted a fat Russian donation to the Clinton Foundation in return for using her office of Secretary of State to lubricate access to uranium deposits: the so-called Uranium One Scandal.  Turns out that my information was somewhat old and somewhat exaggerated.  The Russian entity actually failed to secure the kind of access which it had assumed would be the quid pro quo.  A message awaited me the next morning.  It simply read, “Reported.”  Reported.  As if to say, “Your action has not passed unnoticed, K.  A date will be set for your trial.”

Now, in the first place, Clinton remains ill-positioned to be mudslinging at Donald Trump because of a hotel in Moscow; that she cheated the devil by using her office to wring money out of crooks who ended up with nothing doesn’t exactly make her the gold standard of probity.  (For the record, I did not vote for either of these two in 2016: those few words alone will earn me a dozen “blocks”.)  I immediately corrected the excesses in my original statement—which did not include, “POS”, “burn in hell”, or anything in that genre.  Doesn’t matter.  Merely for typing the two words “Uranium One” on Twitter, you’re likely to get yourself “reported”.  No response voicing disagreement with referenced link, nothing even so personal as a complete sentence.  Just “reported”.  That passes in our time as a communication between two human beings.

As I say, Twitter has been an education.  I use the past-present tense because I think daily now about severing all ties with it.  I suppose I’ll continue until my first actual suspension; I’m kind of curious to see when that comes—if one idiot’s “report” of one slightly inaccurate (but not fundamentally wrong) news summary will suffice.  A single suspension will terminate my connection.  I’m too old to be nagged by a nanny, and too punctilious about my own conduct (John Cleese would consider me an anal-repressive) to tolerate an arrogant corporation’s moral halter in my mouth.

It’s a shame, though.  You can’t talk to people in the streets.  You can’t talk to your own relatives.  On the job, you risk termination for voicing an honest opinion.  For mainstream publishers, you have to propagandize suitably for your niche of the market.  You might risk talking to the trees… but an old Irish proverb warns, “The walls have ears, and the field has eyes.”

A Payday for Neanderthal Descendants? Why Not?

Practically every Caucasian, it seems, has about two percent of the Neanderthal genome.  Current theory has it that Homo Sapiens, having invaded Northern Europe from Africa, interbred with the much less numerous species until, about 30,000 years ago, individuals clearly identifiable as Neanderthal disappeared.

Now, some of us go beyond the two percent.  I’m certain that I do.  No, I don’t have red hair, or a receding chin, or an aquiline nose… but I do have deep-set and fairly large eye sockets, I comfortably possess all of my wisdom teeth, my bones are exceptionally dense, and my hands are strangely broad with short fingers.  I’ve decided on this evidence to bump my Neanderthal percentage up to three or four.

“Why would you want to do that, and in public?” you may ask.  “You’re admitting that you’re a knuckle-dragging caveman—you’re making yourself an object of derision!”  Ah, dear reader, you are making my case for me!  Discrimination!  Vile slander!  I have been the victim of it throughout my life… and I haven’t even understood the basis of it, nor have my persecutors.  None of us fully realized what separated me from them.  It wasn’t my distant, distracted manner; at most, that was a consequence of being viewed as “different”.  The difference was never clarified in any quarter—not until now—but it was perceived subconsciously from every quarter.

And sometimes the contempt leaked out in a conscious, if unexamined, sneer.  Knuckle-dragging, indeed!  Why do we have the mainstream image of the Neanderthal as a simian, stooped-over ruffian who hadn’t enough sense to climb back into his tree?  That particular calumny arose from the misidentification of an arthritic spinal column as belonging to a healthy adult.  Neanderthals walked quite as erectly as the most upright H.S.  Their cranial capacity actually exceeded that of the typical Homo Sapiens.

But you H.S.’s, with your genetically encoded scorn of other species, naturally projected a pejorative interpretation upon the evidence.  And your “Neanderthal sensors” were constantly deployed in their wicked subconscious scan of your environment for any intruder with a more-than-two-percent genome.  You have endless laughs at the expense of redheads or “gingers”.  You deride the gloomy or the daydreaming (tendencies which Swift bestowed upon his ape-like Yahoos).  You crack obscene jokes about people who lack your long, slender fingers.

White racism is vile enough (and we’ve all learned that only Caucasians can be racist, so “white racism” is a redundancy).  But to bully, belittle, and ultimately breed out of existence a species upon whose territory you trespassed uninvited—and trespassed when you left Africa, by the way (just saying…)—falls nothing short of genocidal.  You loathsome people!  You have destroyed, not my life alone, but the lives of all in my tribe.  Oh, you possess a few of our genes… a very few, which you commandeered by raping our maidens after murdering their families.  It was our genetic inheritance that made you resistant to northern contagions; and for this, our thanks is eternally to be the butt of your off-color jokes!

I’m owed reparations—generous reparations.  I have already been somewhat compensated, to be sure, by the geneticist’s gift of explaining to me everything that has ever turned out less than perfect in my life.  It was all the result of persecution!  I no longer have to look back and question if my best-laid schemes were perpetually sabotaged by a character flaw that I couldn’t correct.  But those years of self-doubt were torturous, and simply to be absolved of their swirling accusations is too small an indemnity.  I need something more material.  I’ll take a check.

And even after I deposit the payoff, I’ll ride this nag until she falters and faints beneath me.  Then I’ll skin her hide and hang it on a stick, and I’ll ride that stick around about the wide world.  Universities must have programs in Neanderthal Studies.  Politicians must busy themselves courting the Neanderthal vote.  The calendar must have a Neanderthal Culture day… but schoolchildren must not knit frowns into their smooth brows or wear pads to broaden their shoulders as if to “ape the ape” in solidarity.  Such displays of cultural appropriation hurt our feelings.  The whole “caveman” thing

leaves very painful scars.  I can sense a lawsuit against Geico looming.

Membership in an oppressed minority turns out to to be the Sutter’s Mill or the Klondike of our time: it’s a gold strike.  One has to dig, sometimes quite deeply… but there’s gold in them thar genes!