My Friend Vlad (Part Two)

You won’t like what I’m about to write.  I don’t like it myself—not one bit.  I wish things were otherwise.  I wish we could strap on our magic masks and be transported back in time to the days when our layers of government were virtually invisible except in the matter of protecting us from criminals and invaders: when we would take our kids to the park and throw a Frisbee, plan a Thanksgiving trip to Grandma’s where the height of all the little ones was penciled on a door frame, worry over no greater crisis at work than how to deal with a congested parking lot.  But…

but no.  Only in our dreams now.  In this, our waking Hell, the concern—the one resonant, irrepressible concern—is government, government, government.  No malingering in the park after curfew, and no presence on any sidewalk without a mask.  (Absolutely no concealed weapon, either, to protect your family in case a released rapist takes advantage of “stand down” police protocol.)  No assembly in Grandma’s house to exceed X warm bodies… and, very soon, no travel in vehicles that burn carbon fuel.  No going in to work physically, or at least no opening of the doors to more than three people at a time.  No refusal of the restroom to homeless wanderers.  No new hire for less than twenty bucks an hour.

You’re a slave, a helot.  So am I.  This is our new world.  Let’s be clear: it’s not our revised world, our old America amended constitutionally to create a kinder, gentler republic.  It’s the new totalitarian regime against which most of us voted, and whose ascendancy was nonetheless ordained by our thought-controlling class: the broadcast media, the entertainment media, the journalistic propaganda-mill, the academic brainwash-tank, the high bench of judicial mandarins, the globalist banking industry, and the careerist guns-for-hire teeming in our bureaucracy (including our elite security forces).  The 2020 presidential “election” served formal notice that our votes no longer count.  We have arrived.  The next train you climb aboard will pull nothing but cattle cars.

Assuming that 2021 opens as most pundits now predict, I do not have a president.  I do not have a country.  I serve my own formal notice here and now: this state under the plunder of a vast band of Huns is not my nation, and the band’s teetering, morose, incoherent, through-and-through corrupt Attila is not in any wise my leader.  He is my enemy unto death, the murderer of due process, accountability, rule of law, individual rights, freedom of assembly, freedom of dissent, open exchange of ideas… he and his flock of circling, mask-draped vultures (masked like highwaymen—how appropriate!) are the antithesis of everything I have devoted my life to preserving, everything our forebears devoted and sometimes sacrificed their lives to sustaining.  This squalid, diabolical assassin of humane society is now in possession of our home turf.

So… what to do about it?  I’ll attempt to restrain myself from further flights of indignation, and to complete this essay with something like icy objectivity.  Otherwise, I’ll never be done.

I offer three recommendations.  All three respond to the necessity of redefining “we”.  The Vandal has defeated us by dividing us.  Let us therefore accept the divisions which we were too dull to resist when we might have saved ourselves.  Let us instead play the hand which the Vandal has dealt us.

Race: the race card.  Let us play it—but not in the manner scripted for us by the Vandal.  For decades, I have read commentators like Pat Buchanan and Ann Coulter with interest, but also with a deep spiritual dyspepsia every time the theme, “demography is destiny,” emerged.  (And it emerged frequently.)  We were supposed to dread the dissolution of “white European” society in the rising tide of Third World peoples.  They would ruin everything: they would vote for the Nanny State until we all had Orwellian surveillance devices in our kitchens and bedrooms.  Non-Caucasian people… for some reason, they just couldn’t understand that they were being led to the slaughterhouse.  And, by popular vote, they would take us all there.

At this instant, it’s unclear in my state of Georgia whether or not the kind of election fraud reported verbally over and over and caught on tape by Project Veritas—state employees deliberately tallying a “Trump” as a “Biden” in the recount and harassing observers who point out the error—it’s uncertain, I say, whether these shenanigans will have surrendered our nation’s future into the hands of Beijing’s lackey.  Many of my acquaintances sermonize in hushed tones, “It’s those Atlanta blacks.  The Democrat Party offers them anything and everything, and they keep selling their souls for an empty promise.  Look at all the unprincipled party hacks caught cooking the books: black, every one.”

Well, not every one.  And if you want to assign the Georgia debacle to a particular racial influence, I should think the “white, college-educated, upwardly mobile professional” demographic would be a much better choice.  It’s primarily white people who have created all the engines of moral squalor enumerated a few paragraphs above: the media, Hollywood, journalism, academe, the judiciary, the banking industry, elite bureaucracies like the FBI and NSA… white people, overwhelmingly.  White people who patronize—and, to be sure, often promote—black people in ostentatious flourishes of high mission (and in the implicit, largely unconscious presumption that people of color can’t make it on their own merits).  In the vanguard of virtually every “social justice” initiative decrying racial inequity is a band of “superior to thee” Caucasian crusaders.

Sorry, Pat and Ann… but your race of choice has in fact authored our gravest miseries.  One of the few hopeful developments I see in the tea leaves left behind 2020’s bitter draught is the emergence of outspoken resistance from the likes of Col. Allen West, Candace Owens, Kimberly Klacik, John James… from black athletes of high recognition-value like Burgess Owens and Hershel Walker… from entertainers, even, like Kanye West and “Ice Tea”.  The leadership supplied by the socially pampered, morally supercilious Caucasian anomists who pullulate in our universities has proved lethal to our free society.  People of African descent are beginning to tire of serving as their “pity pets”.  A slave upon whom you lavish gifts just for scowling sullenly—and oh-so-cutely—from your couch’s cushions all day long is no less a slave than the wretch who sows fields under the whip’s lash.

People of Latin descent, Buchanan et al. notwithstanding, are also showing a new propensity for preferring individual freedom to government patronage.  What has historically driven the Hispanic vote to the Democrat Party is stuff, much of it free: more and better jobs than anything “back home” (even though, by American standards, the pay is poor and the benefits negligible), free schooling for the kids, free health care for the extended family (illegal aliens regularly receive Medicaid in many states, contrary to federal law), relatively uncorrupt police services, hands-off tolerance of petty infractions in sanctuary cities, and a host of quota-driven head-starts into white-collar careers.  Who wouldn’t grab that deal?  But the shelf-life of the pantry’s more extravagant goodies is mere months—perhaps mere weeks—from expiring.  The national debt is careering toward thirty trillion, the Chinese are busily laboring to supplant the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, and the Vandal has promised more lockdowns and the strangulation of our domestic energy industry.  Tens of millions of Hispanics, legal and otherwise—and the Democrats have now endowed the latter with the right to vote in many locales—may soon be without work and without government subsidy.  The party that engineered such misery will not inspire patient devotion.

If conservative America has given little thought to constituencies of this composition, my next suggestion will be vastly more shocking: the Muslim community.  Like black Americans and Hispanics—rather more than they, in fact—traditional Muslims deplore the core values of the new Democrat Party.  They’re dismayed by the extent of sexual liberation in the Western world.  They have no doubt about the number of genders Mother Nature has assigned to human beings.  Their family units are extremely tight-knit.  They weigh the individual male’s dignity to some considerable extent upon his ability to make his way by the sweat of his own brow.  They believe in a higher power whose authority must not be eclipsed by the whimsy of human institutions.  They intensely dislike public obscenity aimed at deriding or vilifying figures and symbols held in honor by their culture.  Culturally, they could not be more antithetical to the New Left.

In the unsorted rubble which is all that remains of the United States, friends of the Constitution would do well to strike up a common cause with the Muslim community.  Of course, in Europe and in many Canadian cities, Muslim “no-go zones” enforce Sharia law and defy civil authorities to set foot in their streets.  A constitutional conservative would naturally prefer to have another sort of Muslim at his side.  I don’t propose that the friends of individual freedom stockpile explosives for a cultic religion’s lockstep-marching suicide-bombers: that would be a bridge too far.  Yet during the ongoing ruination of our republic, counter-revolutionaries need not collaborate in the neutralization of radical Islam’s homicidal “scare value”.  The energy of violent jihadism will steer itself by nature in the direction of the Constitution’s nihilist destroyers, even though it tramples upon constitutional principles in doing so.  If nothing else, the totalitarian state’s zeal for collecting all defensive weapons from its citizenry might be blunted when a subset of that citizenry proves to be too hot to handle.

I understand the ghastly undertones of what I’ve just written.  I wonder if everyone reading my words understands equally the horrors of the progressive totalitarian state now descending upon us, whose proponents (e.g., AOC, the Lincoln Project) have already boasted publicly about rounding up dissidents and dissuading them with all the finesse that Xi Jinping has employed with Xinxiang’s Uighur population.  We are not now in a position to choose friends fastidiously: we can only survive by matching potent enemies against our enemies.

And I hasten to add that I’m not among those who view all Muslims as closet-jihadists.  As a retired educator, I remember many chaste, gentle, humble souls among my students whose simple decency put many of their ostensibly Christian classmates to shame.  In fact, I’ll say candidly of the Muslim community what I said above of black Americans: if we white Christians sincerely want to pinpoint the rot that has gnawed away our free republic’s sinew, we might as well start with a session in front of the mirror.  Too many imams, yes, incite fanatical violence among their abject faithful… but the Catholic faith is led by an overt socialist who considers all traditional teachings negotiable in the light progressive revisionism.  The Muslim community, true, is scarred by the presence among its members of such barbarities as “honor killings” and female genital mutilation… but the Christian (and especially Protestant) community finds itself, in its “blanket tolerance” caricature of Christ’s example, unable to condemn any trespass or atrocity of any kind—except, of course, intolerance.  “Fake Christianity” has played no minor role in our surrender to the Vandal: it has, indeed, repeatedly unbolted gates for him.  Can you confidently affirm that your priest or pastor does not regard the faith as a) an ideological framework for redistributing worldly possessions rather than for combating worldliness, b) a vehicle for ushering in a “better” society rather than for saving individual souls, and c) and inherited body of quaint tropes effectively modernized by Marxist formulas rather than a metaphysical fortress raised against the measurements of manmade value systems?

If your spiritual guide is not of this toxic sort… good for you.  God be praised!  Yet it remains a raw statistical truth that institutions posing as the Christian Church have hazed us into the slaughterhouse of Xi’s Maoist worldview.  In our sick society—in our defunct United States—the Muslim is sometimes a better Christian than the Christian, and the black or Hispanic American is beginning to resent the Herd more than does the white pillar of virtue who has designed privileged pens for all “dark people”.

I abhor the tactic known to advertisers as “teasing”, and it was certainly not my intent to skirt a full explanation of my “friendship” with “Vlad” a second time.  Yet I’ve once again more than filled up my allotted space.  Just as well.  I will need a full post just to present my case for why the freedom-loving fragments of our shattered union would be very wise to court a closer relationship with… Vladimir Putin.  I’ll end with this very condensed, slightly melodramatic observation, then: we can be insects on Xi Jinping’s ant farm, or we can offer strategic advantages to Russia’s nationalist leadership.  We have no other play on the board.  Under the Vandal’s administration, we are useful idiots serving the needs of Communist China.  That’s all we are.  We’re not the children of the Greatest Generation, and all that.  No, we shoveled our “Americanism” into the bonfire of the vanities.  If some of us are to preserve life on this earth under the United States Constitution, we shall need the help of an earthly power not traditionally friendly to constitutional values.  We shall have to dine with one devil or be eaten by the other.

Or, of course, we can all just consent to die, like a massive holocaust of Christian martyrs.  A respondent to my video, Must a Christian Be a Doormat?, wrote me, “Christ made a doormat of himself, and we are called to do the same.”  Yes, we can do that: the millenarian Doormat Cult, that stands by and sings hymns while children are abused and innocents are butchered.  Yes, we can do that.  Just spare yourself any further visits to my column, would you, if that’s the nature of your conviction?

Pessimist’s Progress: Congressional Incompetence Lets a Ray of Hope Slip Through

On the one hand, a pessimist is constantly beset by the feeling that apologies are in order, as if he had pulled everyone into the ditch during a serene walk in the countryside.  On the other hand, I can’t pretend that a train hasn’t jumped the track and that I don’t see it barreling straight toward our scenic lane.  A couple of weeks ago, an Iowa judge sentenced a Hispanic youth to 16 years of jail for burning an LGBTQ flag… and this atrocity from the bench was reported almost nowhere.  I heard of it through Michael Savage: the one print source I’ve tracked down suppresses the offender’s age and ethnicity.  I’m not entirely sure which is worse, according my pessimist’s handbook: the insane verdict and penalty (for even the verdict was insane) or our news media’s conspiratorial silence on all such stories, and especially on “perpetrator details” that conflict with other narratives.  If a gun-loving white male Southerner had drawn the sentence….

And, yes, the outrageous serial-suffocation of the truth practiced by our mainstream news media is a conspiracy—and, yes, that word still has both a meaning distinct from “lunatic fantasy” and a presence in everyday events.  Yet the operatives of George Soros can dictate vocabulary to the Fourth Estate with such effect that, in the EU, the non-compliant are deprived of their livelihood (cf. Michelle Malkin’s comments about the Rome Charter Association and Hope Not Hate, both Soros-hatchlings, in Open Borders Inc).   Over here, merely dropping the name “Soros” draws charges of “anti-Semitism” after a psychedelic demolition-derby of unconnected dots.

Meanwhile, one-time conservative superstar Mike Lee is joining the congressional chorus of baboons who smell leopard because the president used his powers as commander-in-chief after a fashion just approved by both houses; and the real danger faced by us all—attack from terrorists or cartel-hirelings that nestle abundantly in all our major cities, is ignored by virtually every member of Congress while we debate whether Iranian rockets might start a war if they actually hit a target.  As if we didn’t have a war on low-but-rising simmer right here on our front door….

Ironically, I registered my first burst of optimism since well before Christmas when I heard Dr. Peter Pry reveal (on Frank Gaffney’s Secure Freedom Radio broadcast of 1/8) that our congressmen had accidentally done something useful while rubber-stamping the 3000+ page National Defense Authorization Act read by none of them (and authorizing, by the way, the President’s power to wage war).  Secreted in the NDAA were three provisions that greatly advance the hardening of our frightfully vulnerable power grid.  Indeed, if there’s one reason to dread the aftermath of Qassem Soleimani’s elimination that has more nightmare-potential than a Hezbollah/MS-13 alliance, it’s our susceptibility to blackouts lasting for months.  Of course, said alliance could exploit our insecure grid rather easily… but it’s already a ticking time-bomb without the ingredient of human evil.  Just add a major solar flare pointed in Earth’s direction.  A potentially catastrophic flood of ionized particles narrowly missed us in March of 2014.

I call the Congress’s final green-lighting of energy protection—after about two decades of criminal negligence—ironic (in addition to moronic) because it’s probably a result of… well, of nobody’s having bothered to read the damn bill.  Any damn bill.  Are you getting that?  The single greatest cause for rejoicing we’ve had so far this year has been Congress’s runaway incompetence.  Sometimes you can get to the watering hole unmolested while the baboons are slinging excrement at a rug with spots that fell out of a garbage truck.

Now, exactly why Congress has shown such contempt for, if not hostility to, the concern over EMP raised by figures like Dr. Pry is a mystery that must draw more speculation than clear fact.  Republicans, at least, seem to have been sufficiently bribed by power companies to keep the shadow of a virtual extinction-event stubbornly to their blind-eye side.  (Every Republican has at least one blind eye: Dan Crenshaw just happens to wear a patch.)  But Democrats?  Can you imagine an issue better tailored to their conventional narrative?  “Evil private-sector monopolies bet the deaths of nine in ten Americans against the opportunity to make a marginal profit in a game of existential blackjack!”  What’s up with Democrats?  They’re alarmed that plants enjoy carbon dioxide, apparently—which composes less than a half of a hundredth of one percent of the atmosphere (and of that, less than two percent is manmade).  Their hair is on fire because California and Australia are burning… but the cause is always too much CO2, never idiotic environmental regulations prohibiting the culling of deadwood, never careless human populations wandering hither and yon nomadically.

Well, what about a genuine threat to human survival supported by hard science (as opposed to Michael Mann’s hockey-stick graph compiled from medieval measurements that he retrieved via Ouija board)?  If our civilization is to be hanged for a lamb, how about hanging it for a sheep?  You can hang us for both, you know, guys—the mother of all necktie parties.

But no: Democrats and their shills in propaganda-outposts like The Weather Channel are as insistent that the EMP threat is pure hoax (that’s right: conspiracy theory) as they are dead-red certain that fish will swim down the streets of Nashville and Kansas City by 2030.  Why is the former anathema while the latter is rigid orthodoxy?  Why?

I would observe that both positions have a critical element in common: the promotion of a Soros-like one-world government (euphemistically called “the open society” in a phrase hijacked from libertarian Karl Popper).  What’s the solution to climate change/global warming/global climate irregularity?  Massive doses of atmospheric Ex-Lax?  How about we just drive less by disposing of over-aggressive zoning laws and combining residential and commercial functions within neighborhoods, as was done for 99.9% of human history (or so say 99.9% of “scientists”)?  No, no—none of that.  The only possible answer is to create massive national-tending-toward-global bureaucracies that minutely decree what you eat, where you vacation, how you travel, how many cows you can raise, where your thermostat must sit… and this while banishing your source of employment from the face of the earth and confiscating any loot you may have saved to bequeath to your children.  Period.

And how does hostility to securing the power grid dovetail into this maniacally statist program?  President Obama told Dr. Pry explicitly upon shelving the report of the latter’s EMP Commission—well, almost explicitly.  Read between the lines.  The explanation offered for inaction was that, in paying attention to our exposed grid, we would make the Russians and the Chinese suppose that we considered them enemies.  This would turn down the thermostat of international diplomacy and send a chill through the room.  Ergo… no defenses.

Now, such numbskull sensitivity makes sense if your ultimate objective is, in fact, to fuse the United States government with those of other nations that might wish to destroy us.  As Diana West has lately chronicled (with painfully irrefutable accuracy), our elite has been kissing up to communist totalitarians since FDR used Lend-Lease to shuffle Stalin the tools needed to murder about forty million Russians and East Europeans (oh, yeah… and defeat Hitler).  The difference then was that we actually had the nuclear materials that we were passing under the table to Uncle Joe.  Now we do not have a secure grid, unlike Russia and the PRC.  We’re not sharing our trump cards with them, because we have none; we’re discarding everything in our hand higher than a five.

That, at least, is the game we were playing until Congress—Democrats and Republicans—entertained visions of dancing sugar plums in their heads as the NDAA was ramrodded through.  Now we’re in the survival game again… just barely.  Securing the grid may take years, even without the Soros/utopian Deep State seeking to ambush the initiative at every turn.  Our government, let us never forget, continues to be composed approximately half of ideological traitors: fools, that is, who aren’t necessarily on the take, but who really believe that the world will be a much better place when just a chosen few such as they are allowed to micro-manage everyone else’s life.  And of the remaining half, at least half are on the take.

Our judiciary is utterly out of control; our cities and towns are deeply infused with terrorist cells allowed through our porous border that merely await a signal; our news media tell lies with pride and conviction in the virtue of their project; our “science” establishment is largely and increasingly funded by advocates of the socialist agenda; our universities promote handling opposition to “science” with prison time; our “representatives” hawk their race and sexual preference when they should be explaining how they plan to protect us; our young children are taught that all was sweet on earth until white Europeans appeared… the little Dutch boy hasn’t enough fingers on his two hands to stanch the leaks in this dike.  When something good happens, the happy event is owed to the rampant incompetence, laziness, and cocksure stupidity of those who wield power.  Mr. Hannity has rapid-fire exchanges with Mr. Jarrett and Mr. Gowdy about what the Constitution permits and what “history” will say; but, alas, we have no Constitution.  The Constitution is dead, murdered by five hundred knives in the back and several hundred feet trampling from comfy benches.  History?  There is no history!  History is the product of thoughtful, informed, fair-minded people casting a careful eye back over the past.  We have no such people in a position to have their labors published.

After about two months of traveling a dark tunnel during the so-called holidays, I begin to see a small prick of light… or else the neurons are firing randomly as carbon dioxide suffocates them!  But, since ‘tis the season to wax prophetic, I will dare to share a few “grimly optimistic” thoughts next time.  Don’t say you haven’t been warned.

2020: Will the Awful Horror Be a Silver Lining?

My son is gone again, a thousand miles away… safely back in his sanctuary city.  That is to say, safely on the ground, as in no longer airborne on the jetliner of a nation that has allowed hundreds of Al Qaeda and Hezbollah to penetrate its wide-open border.  On the ground of a southwestern city overrun by drug cartels whose coffers have probably already bought off substantial numbers of local politicians and law enforcement personnel….

Happy New Year!  And many, many thanks to our president and our Republican representatives for rubber-stamping a spending bill that will count illegal residents on the next census, thereby awarding perhaps three dozen more seats to Democrats around the country… in return for 700 miles of border wall.  I think I’ve seen this year before, and it wasn’t pretty.

But are there silver linings?  Well, of course!  One just has to know where to look.  The Chinese, for instance, will surely be uninterested in prodding us into outright war, or even in taking advantage of our unprotected power grid, as long as we continue to make such haste toward their own system of government.  They’re already working hand in glove with the cartels; and if ninety percent of us should starve or freeze in a protracted blackout, who would buy their poisoned drugs and trashy electronics to keep their military dictatorship afloat?  Come to think of it, maybe Xi Jinping should secure our grid after the fashion of his own, lest a purely natural solar flare should neutralize the strategic gun held to our heads.  Losing nine customers out of ten isn’t a spot he wants to be in.

And as for the rise of the managerial state, voted into perpetual power by blue-collar drones who can’t speak the language and need massive public assistance to negotiate every aspect of life… bring that on, too.  The sooner we all look like California, the better.  Seriously.  The dollar will collapse, no more money will be pouring from the public spigot, people will stop coming here, those who are stuck here and on the public pap will riot in the streets, our elected gun-grabbers will have no more remotely defensible “mandate” to disarm law-abiding citizens, some of the personnel we pay (now in funny-money) may actually be freed by the courts to defend us….

Or they may do so on their own—forget about the courts.  We’re already seeing the “sanctuary movement” break out of its originally subversive bounds and nose its way in neo-constitutional directions.  The Virginia response to invasion-and-occupation has been genuinely heartening.  I have long puzzled over just how secession might realistically take place.  It hadn’t occurred to me that the Left would point the way by shredding rule of law through the fiats of radical metropolitan city councils.  But that door is now wide open, along with our national border-in-name-only.  It’s Wild West time.

Back to the “People’s Republic” of China… do we really need an aggressive policy to contain the Taliban, now on the rise again, when the Chinese oligarchs have made it so clear in Xinjiang Province that they intend to exterminate Islam?  Iran has buddied up with them for the moment because sadistic totalitarian oligarchs tend to flock together… for a while.  A brief while.  But the mullahs, too, will be “re-educated” by the Chinese in a few short years if they should somehow manage to cling to power.

And that leaves Putin.  I have more respect for this man’s political acumen than for that of any other head of state on the planet (though I wouldn’t like to be sharing his soul when the Death comes a-knocking).  The Russian plutocrat has to know that his ravenously insatiable neighbors will want Manchuria in the not-too-distant future… as well as, oh, any other little pieces lying about the chessboard.  He has to know, as he plays with the other devil for his soul, that this one has designs on all his worldly accomplishments.  Sometimes the best policy is to hunker down and let the killers slaughter each other.  (I wish that had occurred to Churchill eighty years ago… but then, FDR was already deep in Stalin’s pocket.)

I’m sorry to be such a grumpy old man as 2020 slouches toward Hollywood to be born.  My wife and I passed an unforgettable week with our son.  Maybe the thought of what he and his generation will face after I’ve fled this world has left me bitter… or maybe I’m just a bit angry at his insistent self-insulation from all the threats around him, which he denominates “politics” and waves away as silly distraction.  That’s one of the leftist machine’s most brilliant achievements: anesthetizing vast segments of the population to bored indifference as humane society is destroyed for decades to come.  I’m sincerely joyful that my boy has discovered religious faith and is progressing by leaps and bounds in spiritual understanding.  He gets the “salvation” part.  Now he and his peers are steaming full-speed-ahead into the Awful Horror part.

The joy is real, and it doesn’t disappoint… but it’s also not of this world, and we have to get from here to there.  Fasten your vests and limber up the lifeboats.

 

Sometimes the Only Alternative to “Conspiracy Theory” Is Lobotomy

I believe I have found an appropriate synonym for the unwieldy phrase, “engaging in conspiracy theory”. Let’s just call it “thinking”.

Say that a young man’s date for Friday night cancels on Friday afternoon, pleading that an intense migraine has overtaken her. Disconsolate, he wanders into the local watering hole later that evening… where he spies his girlfriend absorbing cocktails and laughing in brave defiance of the famous headache as a tall, dapper stranger whispers in her ear. Our young man thinks… what? That he’s been misled? That he’s been played? Why, he deserves to be jilted if that’s what he’s made of! Conspiracy theorist!

Your high-school-senior son says he’ll be out late on Saturday night—not to wait up, that he and his friends have formed a study group to ace all of next week’s final exams. You take him at his word and go to bed. The next morning, you find his book bag just where he left it upon returning from classes Friday afternoon. Out in the garage, you discover his hand-me-down car wedged in at a very odd angle and notice empty beer cans knocking around in the back seat. And you conclude… what? That he didn’t spend the night studying? I hope they come arrest you, you… you conspiracy theorist!

John Stossel dared to point out last Wednesday that our 23 trillion debt hasn’t faded away, despite what appears to be a rip-roaring economy.  Indeed, the debt continues to mushroom, and Mr. Stossel notes that a day of reckoning must come. These facts can hardly come as a dazzling revelation to elected representatives of either party, yet neither Democrats nor Republicans have the stomach to carve a dime from our entitlement programs. That’s by no means shocking, and the major fault for their paralysis lies with us. Every politico on either side of the aisle knows that fiscal responsibility is the kiss of death, so both wait for the other side to make the fatal move in a game of “chicken”….

Or so one might have said fifteen years ago, when the looming catastrophe was already fully visible. These days, however, Democrats are not simply waiting for Republicans to cave in and show an understanding of elementary arithmetic. No: every Democratic candidate for president is trying to outbid the others in exorbitant offers of “free stuff”—free health care, free college, free annual income. Free citizenship, even—a free right to vote on how much of other people’s money you want to pocket, freedom from prosecution when you break the nation’s laws, freedom to vote (once again) when you’re clumsy enough to get yourself sent away to prison for lawbreaking too spectacular to be ignored.

And… and is there no endgame here, beyond getting elected? Is that what we are to think—that every single Democrat in office or seeking office nowadays is so incredibly stupid as not to understand that we have no cash for such palaces of fantasy? Some, to be sure, are stunningly challenged by basic addition (especially those with economics degrees from Ivy League institutions). But all of them?

Well, yes, that’s precisely what we are to think, what we must think… unless we wish to descend into the vile, malodorous realm of conspiracy theory!

We must assume, furthermore, that no Democrat has a plan for what to do when Social Security and Medicare checks dry up, when rioting breaks out in the streets, when the nation from coast to coast begins to look like San Francisco. For if such a plan exists, counting on a crisis which must not “go to waste”… wouldn’t that be a conspiracy?

Bestowing the right to vote upon felons and foreign nationals begins to look like a plan of some particularly dark design, especially when you factor in the Democratic Party’s zeal for denying legal citizens their Second Amendment rights. Is this merely a matter of adding the criminal vote (and the child vote, if Pelosi had her druthers) to the dead vote in order to ensure permanent Democrat hegemony… or is massive civil unrest being courted to justify calling out the National Guard, transforming it into the National Police Force dreamt of by Barack Obama, suspending elections, and settling into a true socialist oligarchy in the grand old Soviet or Maoist style? The whole thing begins to look like… but, nah! Pull yourself up short and take several steps back! You know where that kind of thinking leads!

Now, Republicans don’t open the border to terrorists while taking defensive weapons at gunpoint from legal citizens. They don’t invite Israelis to vacation by the thousand in Chicago during the first week of November and bestow upon them the right to vote as pro tempore residents. They actually resign if caught having sex with the cleaning lady’s underaged daughter, and they hold the Constitution in highest regard… except that, you know, the President is the Commander in Chief, and waging war in that capacity is sometimes a bit hampered by the need of a formal declaration from the Senate. It’s important to whisk around this small planet like Superman and stay the raised hand of the evil-doer… so important that parliamentary procedure sometimes gets trimmed at the edges. Islamo-fascism has to be nipped in the bud wherever its dark flower breaks the surface; the Religion of Peace has to be given a chance to nourish new democracies and marketplaces.

Although… one would think that, with such a keen interest in defense, the Republicans would address themselves to seeking an alliance with Putin’s Russia instead of driving her closer and closer into the embrace of Red China, the one nation on earth aggressively, openly gobbling up its neighbors or commandeering their resources while conducting campaigns of ethnic cleansing and instituting Orwellian monitoring of ordinary people. One would think that continuing to feed Wall Street by allowing the PRC to take over vast portions of our industrial sector and purloin all of our intellectual property of value would stir Republican indignation.

One would think, most especially, that Republicans would have been clamoring to have the national power grid secured against electro-magnetic pulse attack and solar flares during the Ryan/Boehner years of enjoying substantial power in Congress. After all, if ninety percent of the North American populace would die in the wake of a catastrophic nation-wide power outage, if this has been understood since the late twentieth century, if the cost of hardening the grid is relatively minuscule, and if Republicans are such valiant hawks in the matter of providing our military with tanks (as opposed, say, to modernizing the nuclear arsenal)… well… well, what?

One of my Republican senators responded last week to my letter expressing concern about the unsecured grid with an assurance (and I’ve no doubt that this was an auto-responder’s assurance) that he cared about “climate change” and, to that end, was doing his all to advance the construction of a nuclear power plant. Fine. Thanks for listening.

Perhaps we witness here a mere greasing of conventional pockets in the energy sector, just as we see in Democrats a mere pandering to the “what’s in it for me?” crowd with endless offers of free stuff from other people’s closets. Perhaps there really is nothing to see here, on either side. One doesn’t like to be a… you know: a conspiracy theorist!

But as I mused at the end of my just-published essays collected over a period fifteen years, Nightmare Made of Dreams: A Conservative Scholar Assesses Our Nation’s Declining Taste for Self-Sufficiency, there’s something really odd going on under our noses. The phenomenon now popularly known as the Phoenix Lights occurred over twenty years ago. It was seen by thousands (including Governor Fife Symington of Arizona) and photographed or videoed by dozens, perhaps hundreds. Strange craft were silently executing maneuvers over a major southwestern metropolitan area that any Physics or Engineering professor at any public university would denounce as patently impossible. Somebody did that… and somebody in our government knows who the somebody was. I have a feeling—not an articulated theory, just a feeling—that our off-budget defense programs are vastly more advanced than most of us believe (whether or not the craft over Phoenix were built at Area 51 or on Alpha Centauri b). That hunch consoles me. It would be nice if our defenses were indeed much more sophisticated than they appear to the casual eye. I can also muster little outrage at the utterly covert nature of such projects (though why one of them went overt on March 13, 1997, is a puzzler). If you reckon for a moment how leaky our “security” agencies have been around the Trump Administration, and if you then consider the premier importance of projects like these, you’d want another blanket of secrecy thrown over them rather than more sunlight penetrating to them.

Yet there remains that deadly sunlight—those solar flares against which our grid is not secure. How can a nation whose elite engineers have refined the ability to defy gravity not have built Faraday cages around its power generators? That’s like asking how a nuclear submarine cannot have a protocol to see that someone shuts the hatch before a dive.

What’s the game? As a citizen, I say to my representatives, “I don’t want to know all your secrets. I shouldn’t know them… because if such a one as I knows them, then the Chinese surely will. I don’t even want to write a futuristic novel wherein you happy few retreat to Dr. Strangelove’s bunker, let the rest of us rioting rabble die of starvation and self-slaughter, and then climb out in eight months to repel the Red Guard with flying saucers. But is something like that really the plan? Does the plan really require that we and our children and grandchildren die like rats on the Flying Dutchman? Is something like that in store for us? No? Then why won’t you secure the damn grid?”

Let Freedom Ring… Where? How?

This roundabout discussion begins with a strange “revelation” that struck me earlier in the month.  Question: why does almost nobody in either house of Congress appear concerned about a 23-trillion-dollar national debt (not counting unfunded liabilities that would run up the tab at least fourfold)?  Some of our elected representatives can’t count, granted; and some are so deeply mired in graft and corruption that their interest in their fellow citizens’ future is equivalent to Marie Antoinette’s.  Yet I consider it obtusely cynical to consign virtually every member of both parties to one of these two categories.  What about the members who can do addition without their fingers and toes and who have also graduated to a modicum of normal adult responsibility?  How can they sit by and watch the dollar’s purchase power overheat and explode?

Answer (revelation): they must genuinely believe that the dollar’s collapse will be a good thing.

How can they believe this?  Because in such calamitous circumstances, the nations of the world would have to become—in a word much beloved of President Clinton whenever he discussed economic issues—interdependent.  All nations having grown equally insolvent, various political rivals around the planet will have to patch up their differences and create a single worldwide system.  Though I understand pitifully little about banking, it seems to me (based upon my limited research) that the world banking industry has already taken large strides toward assuming control over everybody’s finances, thanks to digitalization and other “initiatives”.  Baron Rothschild et al., for example, have a very clever plan for transforming “carbon credits” into a single world currency, centrally controlled by… Baron Rothschild et al.

All the same, would that be such a insufferably bad thing—I mean, one big clunking system?  The truth is that we haven’t yet seen a World War III, with over half a century having been run off the clock since the Cold War’s first dark days.  China, for all her saber-rattling, obviously knows that she can bring us to our knees just by standing back and watching us collapse under the effects of our own moral flabbiness.  No need for her to push buttons that may envelope the planet in radioactive dust for centuries: just let the Yanks continue to forget how to procreate, to snarl at each other because of skin color, and to medicate themselves with gateways to what Baudelaire aptly called “artificial paradises”.

Okay… I can see how some worldly-wise attorney whose understanding of human nature and history hovers at imbecilic levels would buy into this vision enthusiastically.  No more war.  No more borders.  No more doctors for some but not for others.  We know that Congress’s membership now includes several genuine, outspoken socialists—and many, many more on the Republican side have imbibed of Socialism Lite and decided that they can get used to the slightly sickening aftertaste.  Besides… well, I no doubt drew too heavy a line earlier between the principled and the corrupt.  You can endorse the “no more wars, no more borders” scenario in principle and also calculate, in the back of your mind, how you and your children are bound to enjoy certain privileges as members of the governing elite.

For the rest of us, though… I ask sincerely: what would be the disadvantages of living under a one-world government whose citizens are now forced to settle their differences without mushroom clouds?

I suggest that we can effectively prophesy daily life in such a “terminally safe” world just by looking closely—or, even better, viewing distantly for enhanced perspective—the beams and joists rising all about us right now.  Let this picture settle into focus. We would be fed constantly the “soma” of the broadcast media to sustain our state of contented ignorance and somnolent amusement.  We would be disarmed to ensure that the rare individual who went off his meds wouldn’t pose much of a threat.  We would be watched around the clock by indefatigable electronic eyes.  If we strayed into a public expression of “unproductive” criticism (and all criticism of the Unit, of course, would be classed as unproductive), Nanny Google would send us into time-out.  (In the classic BBC serial, The Prisoner, the extreme form of time-out—utter social ostracism—follows the Village Council’s verdict that one’s behavior is “unmutual”.)  Intrusive oversight wouldn’t stop at utterances, either. Our very facial expressions and body language would be monitored and graded.  The “People’s Republic” of China is already blazing the trail with ubiquitous surveillance cameras and a system of “virtue points”.  Those detected in moody or uncooperative attitudes would see their “credit score” docked sufficiently to deny them travel rights, perhaps, or to thwart their children’s entry into a good school. (Egalitarianism notwithstanding, the “right school” will remain a secret passage into the oligarchic elite’s corridors of power.)  I believe the Trump Administration has nodded in the direction of allowing similar surveillance to influence Second Amendment rights.  Nothing to worry about just yet, just now… but if you pay attention to the sand vibrating under the soles of your shoes, you can indeed discern the thump-thump-thump of some rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem to be born.

So… there’s your choice.  Option One: life without fear of nuclear holocaust or immolation in Walmart’s bread aisle when a psycho’s girlfriend splits, at the cost of having your brow movements monitored as you brush your teeth.  Option Two: risk of all the fears eliminated in Option One, but with minimal cost of invisible surveillance and moralistic lecturing from Super-Nanny.  The more elderly of us will resist the first choice as its popularity swells, and we’ll probably end up in a mass grave after we flunk out of Re-education Camp for the third time.  The younger of us will be right at home with two-way mirrors everywhere they go, since they actually invite such constant universal exposure into their lives already with their “devices”.

Die, then, old warhorses!  Ye shall not by much precede the generation of asses who win but a few more years before the Committee on Social Harmony euthanizes them as they wait for a hip or knee replacement.

But is there really no alternative?  Are not our so-called “sanctuary cities” in fact pointing us in its direction?  What if we created discrete communities wherein people could live by their own rules—what if we went in that direction rather than transforming the entire human race into robots with uniform behavioral programming?  Let the West Coast, for instance, have marriage of species to other species or of one to three, five, or ten; borders that appear only on paper; one school curriculum, one income, one housing module, and one doctor with one bag of meds for all and sundry; free weed; and elections modeled after Major League Baseball’s All Star Game, where you vote as many times as you like.  Let those happy campers become a province of China, for all I care: they already are, for all I can make out.

On the other side of the continent, let the Southeast insist upon postings of the Ten Commandments in all public places.  Let her citizens be required to carry self-defensive weapons upon exiting the front door.  Abolish school districts: let each school teach that curriculum which concerned parents approve.  Let marriage exist only between a man and a woman, and let vandals who deface monuments cool their heels for a few months in the calaboose.

Let residents of one area who flee its “horrors” to a more congenial space be required to have settled in for five years before they enjoy full voting rights; and let regional legislatures be required to approve new law in two sessions with an intermission of at least two years between confirmations.  Build in some stability, some “drag”. Give customs and manners a fighting chance against George Soros and Mark Zuckerberg. Let cultures separate out according to their preferred values… and let surrounding cultures honor the shift of ethos that accompanies crossing a boundary marked on paper.

Why is this vision a pipedream?  Idealistic critics will say, “We went through all this Tenth Amendment crap with slavery.  If higher moral principle had not trumped regional special interests, human beings might still be laboring under the whip in the Deep South.”  Well… the rude release of illiterate and unskilled slave populations into “freedom” was in fact responsible for much of the misery that descendants of freedmen carried well into the next century; and the considerable opposition to slavery within the South would have expelled it even before the Civil War, perhaps, if national politics hadn’t introduced a complex friction of economic interests (cf. Marc Egnal’s Clash of Extremes).  May I point out, too, that many of our idealists who would raise this protest make no such noise when Muslim immigrants insist upon introducing the brutality of Sharia into their new neighborhoods?

The real obstacle, of course, is practical.  What will keep regional equivalents of the insatiably power-hungry Chinese elite—or the Chinese themselves—from occupying Alabama if New Mexico becomes a convenient launching point? Should states (and I mean all political states, not just the late-great “united” ones) solemnly undersign a treaty that will require each to come to the rescue if a bully invades a weakling? But we know this won’t work. Our current domestic politics show us nothing if not that progressive ideologues treat promises with contempt—and why wouldn’t they? Since reality is “evolving”, the circumstances involved in the promise you made yesterday are already irrelevant tomorrow.

The Chinese will lie, as they always do (unless truth proves more expedient in specific instances); and their ally states from California to Washington will connive at the lying, since their governing elite is more Machiavellian than that founding father of calculated duplicity. I see no alternative but for more principled states to bend their principles—near the breaking point sometimes—in the formation of effective counter-alliances. The Southeast, for instance, could team readily enough with Israel… but to muster the muscle necessary for browbeating China into retreat, it might also have to pact with Putin. India is another obvious friend; but Indonesia? Some of the more stable, adult-friendly Islamic republics?

This is a new pair of unsavory options. Do you lock arms with a neighbor who beats his wife as the pirates come streaming off their ship… or do you board up your own doors and windows, hoping for the best? The survival of states where the individual may still be free to grope his way toward God will almost certainly depend upon alliances with other states whose god is not ours.

Putin at least claims to be Christian, and at least makes an outward show of valuing the nuclear family and a modest level of public decency. He sent the obscene Pussy Riot crew to prison for a year: not an act that sits well with an American constitutionalist, but vastly preferable to Ted Wheeler’s allowing Antifa to bludgeon harmless bystanders. Aleksandr Litvinenko was probably poisoned on Putin’s nod… yes, and Vince Foster probably didn’t commit suicide. Putin seized Crimea—after a public plebiscite overwhelmingly approved the annexation. Putin silences dissident reporters, we hear; minister’s daughter Angela Merkel silences them at least as well with the help of former East German propagandists policing the Internet and wielding “hate speech” like a Stasi thug’s choke-hold. Our Pythoness, Wikipedia, warns that Putin’s trusted advisor, Aleksandr Dugin, is a fascist—but Dugin seems very confused himself about his pedigree: an anti-communist who admires Lenin and a Russian nationalist who treasures culturally diverse traditions.

When the most important thing is at last to have co-signatories in the mutual defense pact who keep their word, it may be that belief in God—some immortal god, any creator-god—is the only relevant factor in resisting the aggressive holy war of Secular Utopians, whose god is tear-it-all-down Whimsy. Societies whose members hold something immutable and sacred beyond this world’s terms are under vast attack. (I’m not keen on the Koran—but we “Islamophobes” should notice what the Chinese are doing to the Uighurs.) While not all such “believing” societies encourage the individual search for the divine, the alternative is an annihilation of the divine in bursts of individual petulance that soon settle into an animal sameness (lust, fear, envy, and the rest).

Of course, if our critical requirement for alliance is a belief in a higher power that postpones utter joy and perfect justice to another dimension, then a good many of our “Christian” ministers and priests will have to ally themselves with our adversaries. We would have to banish them to California, if they aren’t already there.

In summary, I would dare to say that a realistic hope for humane civilization is possible… but only if we don’t hope for too much humanity from our military back-up.

Polarization Can Be Good… But Not in Cases of Magnetic Fraud

My wife insists that the whippoorwill fond of cranking it up every dawn outside our window isn’t the real thing—that she recalls the song’s full range from her childhood, and that this strident alarm clock doesn’t have it down properly.  Interesting.  You can believe me or not… but cardinals no longer sound the same as they once did.  I realize that we’ve moved much farther east, and that birds have dialects; but even when we yet lived in Texas, and even for years before I was married, the cardinal’s repertoire had been much reduced from what I distinctly recall as a boy.  For some reason, I have a very good aural memory (to compensate for my poor retention of faces).

What could explain this phenomenon of the bird world—the equivalent of great-great-grandfather Feathers handing down the line, “The wind, it bloweth where it listeth,” only to have the contemporary generation produce, “Wow, breeze comin’ from everwure today!”  We humans (or those few of us who remain alert to such things) understand that cultural impoverishment occurs when a population disperses over too much area too rapidly.  I dimly recall that Ortega y Gasset wrote an essay about how badly the Latin language decayed around the Empire’s peripheries during the second and third centuries.  Is it so far-fetched to suppose that bird populations have been similarly stressed by human activity?  They’ve had to spread out rapidly and resourcefully, just to survive.  In the process, the songs that they transmitted to the next generation were truncated, simplified, and—in a word—impoverished.

This doesn’t mean that our world will end in twelve years, or that we can stabilize the avian repertoire if we will only drive hybrid cars.  Yet I find in it a measure of how risky our high-tech, progressive, ever more urbanized habits of living have become.  We’re mutilating a quality of life constantly whose former richness we don’t begin to suspect.  I used to observe to students that Edgar Allen Poe’s Monsieur Dupin (the forefather of Sherlock Holmes) could direct a friend’s gaze to the Andromeda Galaxy from the streets of Paris without drawing a cry of “foul” from Poe’s readership.  These days, you’d need a pair of binoculars to locate the same one-degree swirl of stardust out in the boondocks.  Now, Poe never actually traveled to Paris… but the point is that his claim seemed plausible a little less than two hundred years ago. Our skies were once incredibly clean.

Am I somehow being a “defector from conservatism” to volunteer such concerns?  That would be an odd association of ideas, inasmuch as I’m speaking on behalf of conserving our natural environment from tasteless, needless, often poisonous artifice.  Yet so it is, in our lunatic present.  Because the Green movement has been kidnapped by One World Order types who want a central government to peer into every facet of our daily routine, any protest against commercialist exploitation that leaves forests or plains in ruins (such as wind turbines, may I say) is a kind of closet-Marxism. At least that’s what I’m given to understand in certain quarters that consider their right-wing bona fides irreproachable.

I’ve recently been “tweeting” (in notes far less lyrical than a cardinal’s) with a veteran of the armed services about the extreme inadvisability of the Pompeo-Bolton campaign of saber-rattling in Iran’s face.  Our own border is under assault—and we’re trying to ignite a powder keg halfway around the world because… because we wish to preempt the evil influence of Islam on global peace and create a terrestrial paradise.  I thought we’d worked—or I thought the putative Right had worked—through such utopian delusions during the two terms of the junior Mr. Bush.  Yet I’m a traitor, in some eyes, for not wanting to send Xenophon into Persia with ten thousand Spartans.  Wasn’t Mr. Trump supposed to have been elected in large measure because our society had had quite enough of such adventurous meddling in foreign affairs under Bush and Obama?  (And, for that matter, isn’t a solidifying of relations with Russia, drawing her away from our real and ultimate enemy—the PRC—a much more rational path to world peace?  And how will stirring up things in Iran extend an olive branch to Russia?)

About a month ago, I posted a piece about my change of heart on capital punishment.  I initially thought it a rather boring scribble—but few things I’ve ever published have drawn more fire… or, I should correct, “spirited exception”.  I’m of the opinion that the sore spots I apparently mashed exist because those opposed to the death penalty don’t mince words about what ravenous animals their adversaries are.  The discussion on this issue, as on most other national issues, has grown so polarized that a flag of truce soliciting a conference is immediately mistaken for the battle flag of a charging phalanx.

This past week, my adoptive state of Georgia and her immediate neighbor Alabama have drawn the ire of various Hollywood ghouls and media darlings for pushing back the highly permissive limits surrounding legal abortion.  My position is pro-Tenth Amendment.  Since abortion isn’t a right guaranteed to all Americans under the Bill of Rights (and, no, there is no Abortion Amendment implied in the Fourteenth’s ban of slavery, contrary to Hollywood analysis), let individual states set the boundary where they deem it appropriate.  Similarly, why may not the marriage ceremony be purged of any civil (read “tax/insurance”) significance and returned to its pristine religious dimension?  Faiths or denominations that choose to bless the union of two men or two women—or a human and a dog—may do so.  I don’t have to subscribe to them.  I shouldn’t even be required to say pleasant things about them in public… but the law prevents me from hurling rocks through windows or delivering dead cats to doorsteps.  That’s the nature of a liberal (i.e., free) society.

How “right-extremist” is the previous paragraph, and how “left-anarchic”?  I wouldn’t say that it was any of either… but it depends upon whom you ask, doesn’t it?  Invisibly, imperceptibly, a checklist of necessary positions appears to have evolved for either “side”—and I must throw quotes around “side”, because I myself see no very coherent line separating the rows of boxes, but only an insane zigzag.  If the Left’s hyperventilating hysteria over the “Trump Phenomenon” has any degree of validity, it must center upon the abject devotion registered by the man’s followers… you know, like that pledged so often on the Left to their endless stream of Peerless Leaders, Big Brothers, and Dear Friends.  Yeah, that worries me, too: wherever I see it, it worries me.  I very much doubt that Mr. Trump himself has ever before thought deeply about some the crises suddenly confronting him (hence his being persuaded to trust people like Pompeo and Bolton).

I’m not going to finish by writing, “Maybe we can all just calm down a bit.”  I’m not calm.  I have a son living in Denver, whose space-cadet town council seems intent on legalizing every hallucinogen known to shaman or rockstar.  I wish we could be “uncalm” in a consistent manner, however.  People of principle get worked up about behaviors that shred their principles; people of uncomposed mind get worked up about anything whose appearance in their peripheral vision startles them.

Spiritual Rebirth: The Contemporary Mind’s Arch-Enemy

The scribble I had in mind for today will keep for another week.  I’ve decided to offer something more appropriate to Easter Sunday, 2019.

It is difficult to sense an infusion of new life when one casts one’s eyes about the current scene.  Debate has long been terminated on the subject of abortion.  It is considered gauche, or sexist, or racist, or some such reason-throttling chunk of mud-sling, to observe that most women really needn’t get “notably pregnant” at all against their will.  They may abstain from sex; they may abstain a mere three days each month from sex; they may patronize any one of a dozen cheap, accessible varieties of contraception; or, all of the above having failed, they may at least discharge their loathsome burden in the first trimester.  What we have before us, instead, appears to be a species of woman that has sex at least once a day with no regard for the consequences and despite hating males categorically and on principle.  Briefly, the “debate” shifted this year to whether or not one might actually murder a baby already born… but now the air is once again as thick with slung excrement as Gulliver’s Forest of the Yahoos.  A significant portion of our neighbors refuses to have a civil discussion about the impropriety of infanticide.

Paris is burning… well, part of it has been burning, anyway.  I don’t believe even Adolf Hitler had designated Notre Dame Cathedral for demolition as his occupying troops withdrew—but let us cede the point, for argument’s sake, that the conflagration was accidental.  It remains nonetheless undeniable that the “religion of peace” continues to make huge, heavy strides through Western Christendom.  One must observe, in fairness, that Islam does not condone abortion: it certainly has the diseased relics of “Christendom” beat on that and a few other fronts.  Similarly, one should not attribute directly to Koranic teaching the hideous practice of Female Genital Mutilation, which is morally superior to the Aztec manner of female-body-part excision—but only just.  Yet neither are Islamic leaders outspoken in their condemnation of the ritual sadism to which young girls in their faith are often submitted. In that regard, their “tolerance” has a disturbingly Western/postmodern odor. I read yesterday that nineteen states—approximately two-fifths of our union—permit these degraded, barbaric operations to proceed unmolested by the law.  That’s pretty typical of the Christian caricature which we have become.  Christ didn’t “judge”; therefore, we mustn’t “judge”, either.  Slice away.  God bless you… and how long will racist members of Congress oppose funding FGM through Medicare?  How dare they?  If they were really Christian…

I think I prefer my Yahoo excrement straight in the face rather than kneaded into my bread. To be impassive to atrocity is to be “tolerant”; to be indifferent to the outrage of fundamental decency is to be “Christian”. Nowadays, every word of the English language is apt to have a value diametrically opposed to its original intent.  One can no longer utter the simplest sentence without its leaving the taste of the latrine in one’s mouth.  Our words have been stolen from us, or in some cases (the worst cases) returned after mutilations as nightmarish as the mad scientist’s who grafts wings onto a rabbit.  To write nada or loco is cultural appropriation if your skin isn’t the right color.  (I’ve never been able to determine just what that color is: even the original Spaniards were part Moorish in many cases—and it turns out that Portugal is home to a particularly high concentration of Neanderthal DNA!)  To employ a “gendered” pronoun is to risk professional termination, fines, and perhaps incarceration not just in our ally nations, but in our own topsy-turvy academic world.  To protest against the idiocy of it all is to manifest the deplorable “white privilege”, suspicion of which crime precludes any effort at defense and carries a minimum mandatory sentence of social ostracism for a day.  “The baby beats the nurse, and quite athwart goes all decorum,” as a white-privileged patriarch once opined.  Did that bard, prophetically, diagnose our abortion culture, perhaps?  Too many babies… the twenty- and thirty-somethings are unwilling to surrender their diapers to new arrivals that might compete for attention.

In the midst of such lunacy, Hope appears to have retreated to the Moon, left vacant by the descent of our dominant ideologies.  What does the dawn of this day in 2019 promise, other than a deeper plunge into disgrace and inhumanity?

I will attempt just a very brief answer.  As I age, I grow more aware that virtually all of our spiritual confusion arises from an intellectual (or pseudo-intellectual) confidence that we understand time.  Specifically, time in all of our constructs is linear: a “timeline”.  The times are suffocatingly depressing because, for those of us with sufficient memory, they so clearly describe a nosedive into arrogance, petulance, self-absorption, self-indulgence, absurdity, and outright stupidity.  The “Darwinian staircase” scaling upward on the shoulders of Homo Erectus, Cro-Magnon, and Homo Sapiens has now reversed its motion as precipitously as an amusement-park slide.

Yet why do we suppose that the image of time forced upon us by our human understanding is ultimately valid?  We should know, thanks to the operation of our same faculties, that we are incapable of fathoming the utter truth of things.  We are compelled by “logic” to believe both in a First Cause and in the dependency of every cause upon a previous cause as its effect.  We are compelled, likewise, to believe that every event contains causative events within it and also that no event could possibly happen if there were not an atomic, irreducible, “buck stops here” micro-event at the bottom of it all.  (Twentieth-century science latched on to the speed of light in order to keep the system from collapsing upon itself—but “C” is a mere conceptual convenience whose truth is under serious question in current physics.)

What, then, if all of our timelines are indeed illusions?  What if “then” is also “now”?  Frankly, I feel crucifixion happening all around me every day.  Why not resurrection, as well?  For the ascent from death is as inescapable as the terrestrial impact of a falling apple—or as the germination of the fallen apple’s seeds: they are all held together by an inviolable metaphysical force in a single expanding time.  Our linear timelines are constantly bombarded from right angles by the pressing reality of this superior, immutable time.  Our “progress” is constantly being knocked off course by inklings that our imagined destination is illusory—that we are “here and now” in an ultimate truth whose focal gravity our silly designs vainly struggle to resist.  What good is a promotion if we buy it with lies and betrayals?  What good is a glistening new palace erected with dollars extorted from the meager savings of our dupes?  We fight and fight against the winds blowing contrary to our “advance”, the wind that bloweth we know not whence.  We detest that interference.  We curse it.  Yet it draws us and draws us back to the simplicity of the child—the dwelling in the “here and now” which we abandoned when we decided to “make something of ourselves”.

Do not, please, misread my remarks in the light of a recent piece I dedicated to “the power of now”.  “Now” is not a renunciation of past and future: it is a reclaiming of the past and future as properly belonging to the Real, the Right, the Good.  As we fight to postpone the reign of goodness over our daily compromises and calculations, we fight ineffectually, futilely.  We may resist rebirth into the light of the true day; but to do so, we shall have to suffocate our soul, willfully and persistently, after it is already drawing breaths on its own.  Souls don’t die in the womb.  Only suicide kills them.

Remembering 9/11: A Cold Case File

I had utterly different thoughts in mind when I sat down to begin this ramble.  The combined effects of retirement and living atop a remote, forested hill do not leave one keenly clued in to the calendar’s vagaries.  But as soon as I realized that 9/11 had rolled around again, I couldn’t suppress a stream of memories.

I watched the first World Trade Tower smoke on the TV of a print-shop operator who was working up one of the first issues of Praesidium for me.  (We still published printed editions in those days, whose contents I myself would laboriously bind by hand.)  My son had been safely deposited in his first-grade class, it was a beautiful Tuesday morning (I believe) in East Texas, and my own professional status was so very part-time that Tuesdays and Thursdays were entirely free for tinkering with my ambitious Center for Literate Values.  The smoking tower on the screen across the counter was certainly out of harmony with the day’s prevailing mood.  My knee-jerk reflection was likely on the order of, “Too many planes, too many skyscrapers… too much progress.”

I think I may have returned home and powered on my own TV by the time the second tower was struck.  I won’t pretend that the events are indelibly etched in my memory; but I do recall two things clearly.  One is that I knew instantly upon the second impact that we were not watching a series of accidents play out, and that something much more consequential than another passenger jet downed by wind sheer—with hundreds of fatalities—was occurring.

The other recollection is of Peter Jennings’ pitifully inept commentary as Tower I came sliding down like an accordion.  “And… what’s happening there?” he mused into his mic.  “There’s a lot of dust…”.  “The tower’s falling, idiot!” I grumbled uncharitably to myself.  For some reason, I was annoyed that his sense of possibility was impeding him from seeing the event’s obvious, atrocious progress right before our millions of eyes.

That resistance to the obvious, as we know now, would paralyze the tongues of a lot more professional commentators than the late Mr. Jennings.  The attitude of working (or semi-employed) stiffs like me, in contrast, could probably be well encapsulated in thoughts such as mine: “What do you need—a neon sign?  It’s Islam in action—and, yes, they hate us.  They hate each other, and they hate us, too.”

Of course, it was President Bush, the Thundering Avenger (or the son of Thundering Avenger), who would incongruously urge us in his mush-mouthed drawl (please believe that all Texans don’t talk that way) to recognize in Islam a religion of peace.  We were to remember always that we were going in pursuit only of “turrurrrrishts”.  Yeah, whatever.  And the government bureaucracy which had done such a crackerjack job of screening suicide-killers from the passenger list would be entrusted with exacting our surgical revenge.  Already in the early going, I was beginning to register a certain moody dissatisfaction with the smell around all that televised dust.

But, like everyone else, I was confused, most of all.  I would need years to begin asking myself questions which remain unanswered for me today.

Now that I’m retired, I assure you that thoroughly reading the Popular Mechanics piece about how the three towers collapsed is working its way up my “to do” list.  I should have done this years ago.  The picture nags me and nags me.  A missile enters a tall, slender structure about three-quarters of the way up its height, creating a gaping hole on one side but scarcely penetrating the far surface.  It dumps a terrific amount of super-heated fuel into the chasm—but unevenly, of course, since the point of entry cuts in much lower and draws the flaming liquid down to its side.  Yet metal fatigue occurs concurrently throughout a perfectly horizontal cross-section of the building, which soon proceeds to collapse floor by floor: boom, boom, boom.

Then precisely the same physical impossibility happens in the companion tower.  Hours later, for good measure (why go light on impossibility?), the far more squat WTT 7 does the same accordion-collapse several blocks away and without even any super-heated fuel to cause instant conflagration.  An ember is supposed to have ignited some furniture… cushions made of coagulated nitro-glycerin, I suppose.  Boom, boom, boom.

If I have been retrograde in running to consult the PM article, which is said to be the last word on the subject, then it’s because I know that I won’t really find any closure there.  No, I’m not an engineer, let alone a physicist—but every human being who has manipulated heavy objects in work or tossed about projectiles in play acquires a sense of how things move.  If I push in one of your knees from behind, you don’t come down evenly on both knees.  A house of cards from which one is quickly drawn doesn’t fold into a neat deck on the table.  If a select body of engineers tells me otherwise and smirks at me for scratching my head… then I conclude that the select body of engineers is trying to feed me garbage and bully me into swallowing because… because they’re a select body of engineers.  We all hate to put our ignorance on public display.  What I hate more, however, is to be finessed into an ignorant position by someone who exploits my fear of seeming ignorant.

“But what are you saying?  Are you saying that Dick Cheney deliberately slaughtered 3,000 innocent Americans to elevate Haliburton’s market value?”  I hate that, too: being at once crowbarred into an unsavory or insane conclusion because I have questioned a shaky premise.  I’m not a fan of Stalin, or even of socialism, just because I think that capitalism tends to erode taste and self-control in certain ways.  Yet to the Thundering Avenger’s hordes of fire-breathing volunteers (virtually all of whom breathed their fire into microphones and never touched a trigger), writing what I have just written of how compromised structures collapse is tantamount to treason.  “Oh, so you’re one of those… a truther!”

(Sidebar: nobody who cares about the truth would ever assist in circulating an analysis-shutdown word like “truther”.  Another pejorative moniker in the Yahoo’s bag of sling-ready excrement: “conspiracy theorist”.)

I don’t suspect Dick Cheney of being a mass-murderer… but I do not for an instant believe that the whole truth about 9/11 has been divulged.  And I would like to know why.  I have no motive for the crime, and I’m not going to project one from my fancy upon the all-too-inadequate evidence.  That’s exactly what Bush’s inveterate political enemies—his take-no-prisoner opponents in the culture wars—did on reflex; and, yes, it made them look like wackos and discredited their whole case.  But establishing the fact of their wackiness does not clear up the dense film of incoherence still drifting about the evidence, seventeen years later.

This is a cold case now, and I don’t see it getting any warmer in an era when “investigative reporters” have given themselves over wholly to proselytizing and propagandizing.  For me personally, though, 9/11 must remain a major reason for my inability ever again to trust “my government” (meaning any government) implicitly.  I did some unpleasant but necessary growing up after those three towers came down.

The Weaponizing of Hurt Feelings (Part Two)

I have entitled these two pieces “the weaponizing of hurt feelings” because the aggrieved “snowflake” turns out also to serve on a kind of SWAT team.  Once you’re accused of being insensitive to race or gender or an alien culture, you have no defense, no recourse, and no opportunity even to present your side of the issue.  You are instantly guilty as charged.  (Sexual harassment law is indeed written in these terms.) The mere perception by one of the “offended” class—a person of color, a woman or gay or transgender, a Latino, a Muslim, an atheist—that you may not be one hundred percent “down for the struggle” suffices to convict you of major thought crimes.  Now you can only go belly-up and present your throat to the predator’s teeth.  Perhaps your life will be spared after your body is mildly savaged… but the terms of such clemency require that you remain forever more in a default position of worthless, despicable offender caught red-handed and shame-faced.

That the female enjoys particularly ready access to these weapons is obvious to anyone who has recently picked through the mine fields of Academe—but detonations may be heard far beyond the hallowed halls of ivy.  The #MeToo movement has already terminated many a career.  Most of the condemned deserved the firing squad, from what I can tell; yet the method of trial and execution remains disturbing to me.  The candidacy of Herman Cain was picked off a few years ago by dubious accusations that were never verified—and the Anita Hill attack on Clarence Thomas was a kind of sniping-school rehearsal for the ambush several decades earlier.

These cases were especially interesting because the sex of the accusers appeared to trump the race of the accused.  As much rhetorical ammunition as the Left has expended in arguing that we gun-and-Bible clingers continue to practice our old-time racist ways unrepentant, it is yet more invested in the notion that women are constantly abused and enslaved.  Judge Thomas was charged with having stacks of Playboy Magazine awkwardly displayed in his apartment, and Cain with having suggestively offered a job-applicant a ride to her hotel: such “horrors” (if they ever really happened) were supposed to concern us more than a black couple’s not being able to secure a home loan.

So who am I to undervalue the magnitude of such atrocities? The male has no right whatever to rate the trauma created by offensive incidents; their victims may be veritable Auschwitz survivors in their own minds, for all he knows.  Assume the supine posture, present your jugular, and shut the **** up.

If this isn’t the equivalent of being visited by the thug-enforcers of a “protection” racket in a Thirties ghetto and having your storefront rearranged, then I’m at a loss for a better parallel. Those men whose reputations and careers lie in ruins beneath the #MeToo movement’s juggernaut would probably have preferred to get off with a broken arm or a few shattered ribs. And while I do not condone their behavior—while I of all men, who lived my youth holding doors open, surrendering chairs in crowded rooms, and declining offers of one-night stands, have earned a title to deplore and condemn male coarseness—I also smell the rat of self-serving manipulation in certain cases. Women who don’t want their fanny pawed shouldn’t wear tight-fitting dresses into crowded ballrooms full of egomaniacs. Women who don’t want eyes leering at their breasts shouldn’t sport low cleavages where alcohol is liberally flowing. Women who don’t want to be chased around the furniture shouldn’t retreat with the producer to his bachelor penthouse. To call forth a man’s baser impulses and then sue him for a quarter of his net worth because he failed to resist… is that so very unlike snapping a photo of some politician in a compromising position with a “plant” and then blackmailing him for a crucial vote? Do you see how these indignant protests can uncomfortably approximate the tactics of the Mob?

If today’s woman is indeed so readily offended, maybe she should make the burqa part of her wardrobe. As a matter of fact, while pondering these issues, I have begun to discern a prickly similarity between the passive aggression of the “hurt feelings bomb” smuggled into our classrooms and boardrooms and the suicide bomber of radical Islam. How else to explain the seemingly nonsensical solidarity that leftwing causes like avant-garde feminism manifest for proponents of Sharia law… how else, but by recognizing the ambition of both to blow up stable, rational social structures?

For there is much passive aggression in most terrorist acts, too: this is another paradox that has nagged at me for years. I could almost agree with the smattering of ill-advised Democrats who professed admiration for the “courage” of the 9/11 murderers: they did, after all, kill themselves as well as thousands of innocents. Yet suicide isn’t so very gutsy, especially when you force others through the exit along with you. I myself knew plenty of alienation as an adolescent. My school days were a daily hell—and, in what would activate a flashing red alarm today, my budding masculinity sought a significant refuge in black-powder revolvers. I learned not only to become a fairly good shot, but also to melt lead and mold Minié balls. Never for the fraction of an instant, however, did I so much as idly fantasize about turning a muzzle on the rudest of my classmates. To my mind, such an act would have justified their contempt for me. I would have demonstrated that I was truly the lowest of the low: a spineless, murderous coward. If I entertained any silly adolescent fantasy at all, it was that I would step up and save the lives of those who would happily have watched me drop dead, they cringing and sniveling and I advancing to meet the threat head-on.

So how could these young men of our new century who crave a manly exit have hit upon such a vile means of defying the world and commemorating their misunderstood lives? How can suicide bombers be such loathsome, wimpy back-shooters—and how can the mass-murderers of Columbine and the authors of all subsequent campus atrocities, slaughtering helpless targets with the ease of snuffing out fish in a barrel, have supposed that they were leaving behind a manly mark? Are these not “feminized boys” seeking vainly a brief and final passage to manhood? With their irremediably hurt feelings and their one-way vengeance upon offenders without any defense, they seem to me a very odd and late development in our global epidemic of moral chaos. These boys aren’t acting at all like men. Why don’t they understand that?

Why don’t young women understand that it’s not sensitive to be over-sensitive—that obsession with one’s own feelings, almost to the exclusion of allowing anyone else to feel, is the very opposite of sensitivity and, indeed, the emulation of uncivilized masculinity?

Is the objective of the progressive female to transform herself into the worst kind of male? Is the destiny of progressivism’s haphazardly produced males to imbibe the most untutored qualities of a primitive femininity?

And as for suicide, as I wander back to that worst single hour I ever passed in a classroom… is it not significant that the very word is now the subject of a taboo, and that to scorn suicide as cowardly is no less forbidden and anathematic than denouncing abortion as human sacrifice?

White Male Bourgeois Capitalist: Bad Guy in Perpetuity

For my half-dozen faithful readers in this quadrant of the galaxy, I’m going to undertake a partial translation of a Deutsche Welle article published online last Wednesday (May 25).  My German is far from perfect, yet I don’t think I’ve missed the mark on any significant detail.

The German press is leftwing times ten; Peter Holmes has often and aptly remarked the number of formerly East German hacks who have found their way into contemporary German corridors of power (including Merkel’s inner circle).  The German press, likewise, is pretty much what one might expect of a Fourth Estate essentially run by the Stasi.  Unless a volcano is erupting in Indonesia, its stories are nothing but spin and propaganda.

In this case, I found the ideological contortion-act uproarious.  We’re already familiar with it on our side of the pond.  If you or I uttered in the most discreet privacy a comment containing five percent of the racism or sexism with which Rap music is laced, we’d lose our jobs pronto.  But when someone of the right DNA profile makes exponentially worse remarks than anything we’ve ever imagined, not only is all forgiven at once—the fault for the infraction is attributed to us because we have created such a hostile environment for the dear.

Read this:

Today Gangsta Rap is about rebellion above all else, according to Kathrin Bower, Professor of German Studies at the University of Richmond and an expert in German Rap [naturally].  The “Gangsta-Rapper”, clarified Bower in an interview with Deutsche Welle, presents himself ostentatiously as an outsider, a rebel, someone who deliberately ignores the rules and thereby becomes celebrated.

“The crude flaunting of material possessions, the hostility to women, and the violence in Gangsta Rap are a veiled expression of general rebellion against the worth of the middle class, established society, and political correctness.  The fact that the music publisher Echo’s award primarily reflects lofty sales numbers—and thus popularity—points to a disturbing reality, continued Bower: that “the hypermasculinity and provocation of Gangsta Rap are pleasing to young people of extremely diverse backgrounds.”

The most curious thing about that little meditation is how political correctness appears to be identified with the middle class.  I wonder if Professor Bower, expert in German Rap and the Modern World generally, really thought that one through.  PC orthodoxy is supposed to be aimed at the vicious, greedy, racist tendencies of the squalid capitalist bourgeoisie… but the rapper has both targets in the sites of his weaving (and mostly metaphorical) Glock, so some scuffing up of logical boundaries in pursuit of a brilliant insight must be forgiven.

Then we have the case of a paradoxically successful artiste-critic of the system:

Bushido’s turbulent objectives indicate a broad—and altogether contradictory—target audience: on the one hand, Muslim youths with an immigrant background, and on the other, youths who style themselves “white nationalist” or neo-Nazi.  These latter have embraced Bushido even though the rapper’s father is a Tunisian.

This time it is DW, and not one of its professorial interviewees, who’s attempting a barrel-roll that would have made the Red Baron vomit.  If Caucasian Germans who cheer on rappers are potential Nazis, then they shouldn’t be standing shoulder to shoulder with Muslim lads… should they?  Hmm.  A contradiction.  Of course, these young males aren’t nearly as bright as the DW staff and its panoply of academic contributors… so another interview can probably explain their pathetically irrational—but not contemptible (never that!)—behavior.

It wasn’t always so.  In Berlin-Kreuzberg, young people of Turkish origin have identified themselves with Hip-Hop and Rap since the Eighties in order to address their role as the “other side” in Germany, writes Ayhan Kaya, Professor of Politics and Director of the Europa Institute on Bilgi University’s campus in Istanbul.

In this early form of Rap, the objective above all else was the search for identity.  Today, writes, Kaya, that isn’t so much the case.  At the moment, he is working on a project about Gangsta Rap whose focus is how the genre has come to serve “the disillusioned Right as well as being an outlet for Muslim youth.”

“This is actually a positive development,” said Kaya in an interview with DW.  A possibility for radicalization exists in both groups, and both are similar “victims of globalization, the departure of local industry, socio-economic frustration, alienation, and humiliation.”  Hip-Hop is an escape valve for youth who otherwise might have joined radical groups like the so-called Islamic State or the National Socialist Underground (NSU).

Personally, I don’t think Professor Kaya is far off base.  I see daylight (if not exactly a Golden Dawn) in this odd marriage, as well.  As I have conjectured for some time, people raised in fundamentalist Islam and the disenfranchised “young white male” of the West who only ever hears about his “privilege” must eventually converge upon the recognition that they share significant values.  They don’t want to be lackeys to females, their masculinity disparaged and their intelligence derided.  They have a suppressed (and sometimes very distorted) but nonetheless powerful desire to serve something beyond themselves rather than eke out a sybaritic postmodern existence of chasing after animal pleasures.  They’re not very eloquent on the whole, and so they are apt to counter criticism of their crude behavior by doubling down on it: “Okay, so I’m a pig!  Oink, oink!  Better keep your distance, or I’ll splash mud on you!”  And, yes, they’re largely unemployed; and in a world increasingly fond of fusing humans with machines, their attraction to manual labor and their pride in honest sweat merely draws sneers.

The Left doesn’t want to brand these bad boys as irredeemable, at least when they’re not Caucasian: they’re too patently eligible for victim status.  Yet to suggest that they aren’t all wearing pink vagina hats only because some strange mixture of capitalism and PC fascism has nudged them into the margin is to dwell in a fantasy.

Well… where else would you expect to find the denizens of Leftworld?