Watching protesting students align themselves with the terrorist group Hamas and their Palestinian pawns, one wonders what legacy they are building for themselves. Are they – the combine of victim-oppressor social justice warriors – really acting for the greater good with their pro-Hamas and antisemitic chants? Whose interests are they serving? Will they later regret their actions and associations, or will their self-deception and moral distortion continue on the rest of their lives?
Looking back over one’s life work, one’s ruling passion, and reconciling that with what one’s dedicated service contributed to forms the basis of two of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels: An Artist of the Floating World and The Remains of the Day.
Two men – a Japanese artist in the first novel and an English butler in the second – aspired to reach the highest level in their professions. Both men were attuned to honor and dignity. Both men wanted to attach themselves to a greater worldly-good. But their singular focus, their self-constrained temporal bandwidth, shut out all else until later in life (the time period in the novels). They come to see that what they gave their singleness of mind and efforts to turned out to be not just heartbreaking and reputation damaging but devastating to the greater good.
Both men come across as guarded in their retelling of events and observations in diary-like fashion, as if they didn’t want to be too harsh on themselves. By their unreliable narration we wonder if there’s more under the surface. As things come to the fore, we learn there is a tension between how each saw the world and how the world really was. And this becomes cause for a conflicted life and one of guilt, deflection, and regret about past myopia and former associations.
Each man talks as if “you” were like them – as someone living in the same neighborhood in post-war Japan and as a butler in England. The world doesn’t extend beyond their interests. There are those – daughters, an old friend, a journalist, a housemaid, local towns folk -who try to draw them out.
The artist Masuji Ono’s narration occurs after the end of WWII in 1945 (Oct. 1948 June 1950), when Japan is rebuilding her cities after defeat. We learn that Ono is a retired printmaker who lost his wife Michiko and son Kenji during the war. His beautiful home was seriously damaged by the war as was his reputation.
The elderly Ono spends his time gardening, working on the house, with his visiting daughters and his grandson and going out at night to drink in a quiet lantern-lit bar, a remnant of the pleasure district – the “floating world” of pleasure, entertainment and drink that had at one time given him much pleasure. It’s where he escapes from his dark past.
Ono recalls his early printmaking days and his rise to be a master printmaker surrounded by adoring students in the bar. We learn of his desire to go beyond just making beautiful art. He wanted to serve a higher purpose. We come to learn of Ono’s dark past – his direct involvement in Imperialist Japan’s military rise and his work as a government propagandist.
Ono reassesses events from his past throughout the novel. He reconsiders his role in those events and his guilt. His reputation proceeds him as he enters into marriage negotiations for his daughter Noriko. He also assesses how Japan is changing since the war. He questions some of the change:
“Something has changed in the character of the younger generation in a way I do not fully understand, and certain aspects of this change are undeniably disturbing.”
“Democracy is a fine thing. But that doesn’t mean citizens have a right to run riot whenever they disagree with something.”
Does Ono admit he was wrong to be a propagandist in the deadliest military conflict in history? Does he come to terms with the mistakes he made in the course of his life? Does he attain satisfaction and dignity when all is said and done?
~~
Mr. Stevens’ narration occurs during a six-day road trip in the summer of 1956. He goes to visit Mrs. Benn, nee Kenton, in the sea-side town of Weymouth, England. During this time, he reminisces about his days as head butler at Darlington Hall after WWI and leading up to WWII.
Mr. Stevens is a prim and proper Jeeves-like butler who speaks in a measured and precise way. He values professionalism and dignity above all else.
“The great butlers are great by virtue of their ability to inhabit their professional role and inhabit it to the utmost . . . They wear their professionalism as a decent gentleman will wear his suit. . . It is, as I say, a matter of “dignity.”
Mr. Stevens’ devotion and dedicated service is focused on a man he holds in high esteem: Lord Darlington. “A gentleman through and through” and “I for one will never doubt that a desire to see “justice in this world” lay at the heart of all his actions” and “All those years I served him, I trusted I was doing something worthwhile” says Stevens.
High level meetings are held at Darlington Hall after WWI. Lord Darlington lobbies leaders from England, France and America to go financially easy on Germany.
Lord Darlington, an old-fashioned English gentleman, is much like Mr. Stevens. He can’t imagine a world different from his own. He never understands the true agenda of the Nazis even as the fascists he invites to Darlington Hall seek to turn him against the Jews. Lord Darlington, “A gentleman through and through”, becomes an appeaser and Nazi sympathizer in the name of honor, fairness, friendship, and gentlemanly conduct.
The devoted Stevens views Lord Darlington as a man who had good intentions but was led astray by manipulative diplomats. “I for one will never doubt that a desire to see ‘justice in this world’ lay at the heart of all his actions.”
The devoted Stevens goes with the flow:
“How can one possibly be held to blame in any sense because, say, the passage of time has shown that Lord Darlington’s efforts were misguided, even foolish? Throughout the years I served him, it was he and he alone who weighed up evidence and judged it best to proceed in the way he did, while I simply confined myself, quite properly, to affairs within my own professional realm. And as far as I am concerned, I carried out my duties to the best of my abilities, indeed to a standard which many may consider ‘first rate’.”
The devoted Stevens extrapolates his efforts:
“A ‘great’ butler can only be, surely, one who can point to his years of service and say that he has applied his talents to serving a great gentleman – and through the latter, to serving humanity.”
Miss Kenton, the lead housemaid at Darlington Hall, is like Stevens. She takes great pride in her work. But unlike Stevens, she has emotional latitude and an independent streak. She is intelligent, headstrong, and stubborn. She disagrees not only with Stevens at time but also with the decisions made by Lord Darlington.
Though she finds Mr. Steven infuriating – “Why, Mr. Stevens, why, why, why do you always have to pretend?” – it gradually becomes clear that Miss Kenton is in love with him. But after many years, she leaves Darlington Hall. Frustrated at Mr. Stevens’ buttoned up emotional state and lack of response Miss Kenton goes off with Mr. Benn, a footman of the house.
Years later, Stevens receives a letter from Miss Kenton. He reads it over and over believing that she might return to her post at Darlington Hall under a new owner. The letter indicates that her marriage to Mr. Benn might not be working out. Stevens’ hopes are up but well-regulated.
His new employer, a wealthy American named Mr. Farraday, tells Stevens to take some time off. He offers Stevens his car for a road trip. And off Stevens goes to see Miss Kenton.
On his way, Stevens comes into contact with several working-class characters. They challenge Stevens’ ideas about dignity. One man opines that dignity is about democracy and standing up for one’s beliefs – in other words, being attentive to what’s going on in the world and being outspoken. This, of course, is in contrast to Stevens’ conception of dignity as being about suppressing one’s own feelings in pursuit of professionalism.
What happens when Stevens reaches Weymouth and meets Mrs. Benn?
What does hindsight look like to Stevens? Does it look like not worrying oneself too much about what one could or could not have done to control the course one’s life took? Does it look like a simple butler trying to make a small contribution count for something true and worthy and sacrificing much in life in order to pursue such aspirations, that in itself, whatever the outcome, is cause for pride and contentment?
Does Stevens, as he reflects on things at the end of the day, realize the mistake he made in his lockstep devotion to Lord Darlington? Does he take the blinders off? And, does he understand the effects of his obsessive devotion to professionalism and dignity on his personal life?
Stevens gives his thoughts on the latter to a man sitting next to him on the pier as they watch the sun going down and the pier lights come on:
“The fact is, of course,’ I said after a while, ‘I gave my best to Lord Darlington. I gave him the very best I had to give, and now – well – I find I do not have a great deal more left to give.”
I return to my opening questions. Whose interests were they serving? Will they later regret their actions and associations or does willful blindness and self-deception remain?
“There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable.” ― Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day
~~~~~
This post wasn’t meant to provide a complete summary of Kazuo Ishiguro’s two novels. There is a whole lot going on in each that I haven’t touched on. They are very well written human-interest stories. The Remains of the Day won The Booker Prize.
Rather, I saw parallels between the decisions youth are making today, with all ardor, for deadly causes and the experiences and feelings of the artist Masuji Ono and the butler Stevens.
I’ve read both novels. I saw the Remains of the Day before reading the book. This Merchant Ivory film is one of my favorites (There is no murder and mayhem, no car chases, no heavy breathing, no queer theory or CRT, and no Disney twaddle.)
The cast is top-notch. I recommend reading the book before viewing the movie and listening to the podcast below (spoiler alert!).
The movie, of course, is edited way down to try and give the essence of Ishiguro’s novel. But reading the text first will provide the depth and richness of the characters and much more detail of their situations.
From parents pampering their progeny (Indulging “I-Me-Mine”) to priests and pastors preaching Progressivism (‘Inspired’ “I-Me-Mine”) to professors promulgating political propaganda (Ideological “I-Me-Mine” & Illiteracy) to the phenomenon of ‘political correctness’ (Ideological Conformity & Indulgent Illiberalism) to policies promoting pseudo pronouns (Indulgent Illusions of “I-Me-Mine”) to protestors pronouncing “Death to Israel” and “Death to America” (Indulgent Intifada), the Left’s Long Maoist/Marxist/ Marcusean March through institutions has left a trail strewn with social pathologies and pogroms. Ptooey!
The humorless Left, a product of its own Polarizing and Infantilizing Process, is self-absorbed but not self-examining. The Left refuses to learn from anything outside itself including history to account for its own dysfunctional and belligerent ways. If it did, it would turn from its deceptions – the filtering mindsets of victim-oppressor and of passion as morality – and it wouldn’t continue the Long March, inchoate, with those who have been patently processed like themselves to destroy whatever is in its path including “Democracy!”
Today’s products of the Polarizing and Infantilizing Process, disconnected from history and reality and preoccupied with self, are working diligently to take down Western civilization and its Judeo-Christian foundation. In its place they want to build sand castles, imagined communist and Islamic utopias, from the river to the sea.
Yet, as history has recorded as happening under all preceding totalitarian impulses, the season of indulging one’s passions and the rush to violence will soon pass. The revolutionary impulse inevitably turns inward, as the “I-Me-Mine” of the leaders begins to indulgently purge all dissent including thought crimes in order to impose mindless uniformity. Thus, the season of torture, torment, and tedium begins for the disconnected ones.
~~~~~
Retired prison psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple (pen name for Anthony Daniels) speaks and writes with keen insight gathered from his experience of the human condition and of its surrounding culture.
Having read several of his books, I recommend two books to start with:
The New Criterion’s Roger Kimball takes the audience through a history of America’s cultural revolution of the 1960’s and its effects on American politics and culture today.
Per Italian communist Antonio [ Gramsci] “If the Left truly wanted to win, it needed to first seize the “cultural means of production”: the culture-forming institutions such as the media and universities and even churches. He saw societal transformation coming about by a “march through the institutions.” …
“Gramsci insisted that leftist intellectuals needed to question everything, including moral absolutes and the Judeo-Christian basis of Western civilization. They needed to frame seemingly benign conventions as systematic injustices that must be exposed. This is where we got professors fulminating against everything from “the patriarchy” to “white imperialism” to “transphobia.””
“The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency — the belief that the here and now is all there is.” ― Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind
. . . because . . .
“We live in an age of full spectrum deception.” — Edward Dowd
Why I read novels . . .
“The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything. When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. The totalitarian world, whether founded on Marx, Islam, or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions. There, the novel has no place.” ― Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
~~~~~
The Way I Heard It, Mike Rowe podcast:
382: Individualism Rightly Understood with Scott Mann 1:19:03
The former U.S. Army Green Beret, NYT bestselling author, leadership consultant, and perennial storyteller talks about the division and tribal behavior that permeates our country now, the death of honor, shame, and consequence, and why Alexis de Tocqueville was right when he observed that America succeeds because she puts the individual ahead of the collective. You can preorder Scott’s newest book here.
Individualism Rightly Understood Mike Rowe with Scott Mann
The growing list of the controlled opposition’s shaming screeds promoted on MSNBC to influence voters by making them feel morally superior if they don’t vote for Trump:
Apparently, the only way to be a Christian is to be a Democrat like the author/s and to vote for all of the things that your faith disagrees with and for the continued destruction of our country. Got it.
“Teacher,” said John, “we saw someone driving out demons in your name and we told him to stop, because he was not one of us.”
“Do not stop him,” Jesus said. “For no one who does a miracle in my name can in the next moment say anything bad about me, for whoever is not against us is for us. Truly I tell you, anyone who gives you a cup of water in my name because you belong to the Messiah will certainly not lose their reward.
Mark 9:38-41
Apparently, there are people who are very ‘concerned’ about Trump being associated with Jesus because Trump “was not one of us.”
~~~~~
You realize, don’t you, that what’s going on in our country is the collapse not just of an empire, or an economy, but a comprehensive paradigm of human progress. The hallmark of post-war life in Western Civ was supposed to be a return to sanity after the mid-twentieth century fugue of mass psychotic violence. The wish for just and rational order was not entirely pretense. But that was then. Now that we are going medieval on ourselves, the not-so-ironic result will be our literally going medieval, sinking back into a pre-modern existence of darkness, superstition, and penury, grubbing for a mere subsistence in the shadow of scuffling hobgoblins, our achievements lost and forgotten. . .
The source of anguish in all that is the struggle to understand why they [the “governing apparatus”] would want that to happen. What debauched sense of history would drive anyone to such lunatic desperation? It’s a cliché now to say that the Democratic Party has turned its traditional moral scaffold upside down and inside out. It acts against the kitchen table interests of the working and middle classes. It’s against civil liberties. It demands mental obedience to patently insane policy. It’s avid for war, no matter how cruelly pointless. It’s deliberately stirring up racial hatred. It despises personal privacy. It feeds a rogue bureaucracy that has become a veritable Moloch, an all-devouring malevolent deity. And now, rather suddenly, it aligns itself with a faction that seeks to exterminate the Jews.
George Washington University @GWtweets tonight at University Yard on H Street. President Ellen Granberg & the BoT stated that this would be shut down yesterday by 7pm. It’s still going & getting more dangerous by the hour. Watch with sound on. These students & faculty don’t want… pic.twitter.com/ooeXj4eXj2
At a far-left rally for Gaza at George Washington U @GWtweets, an extremist on the microphone says: “There’s only one solution, intifada revolution. We must have a revolution so we can have a socialist reconstruction of the United States of America.” pic.twitter.com/RGJ5J1EKE5
Luke Ripley, the focal character of A Father’s Story by Andre Dubus, begins his narration with what he calls “my life” – the life people in northeastern Massachusetts know about. He then goes on to detail his personal “real life.” And later, we hear about his life without peace after an incident involving his daughter. After all is said and done, I wonder what you would think about this self-reliant guy who is comfortable with his contradictions and who refuses to sacrifice his daughter. And, who is he really protecting when all is said and done?
Luke’s publicly recognized “my life” is that of a stable owner. He boards and rents out thirty horses and provides riding lessons. The “my life” that people would see if they looked in his front room window at night is a solitary “big-gutted grey-haired guy, drinking tea and smoking cigarettes, staring out at the dark woods across the road, listening to a grieving soprano.”
Luke’s “real life” – the one nobody talks about anymore, except Father Paul LeBoeuf”- is revealed to us before the accident in the first three-quarters of the story. What do we learn?
Luke Ripley is a divorced Catholic and an empty nester with three sons and a daughter off somewhere else. His solitary existence is lived out in routine. We learn of Luke’s morning habit of prayer while making his bed and then going to feed his horses. He talks to God because there’s nobody else around.
His morning habit also includes seeing his best friend – Father Paul Leboeuf, the priest at a local Catholic church. Most mornings Luke rides one of his horses over to church where Father Paul’s officiates. There Luke hears the Mass and receives the Eucharist. During the week the two men get together for a dinner meal. With Father LeBeoeuf present and a can of beer in hand Luke verbally grieves his despair over losing his wife and his family.
At one point Luke tell us about the importance of ritual, having already told us that he is basically lazy person:
Do not think of me as a spiritual man whose every thought during those twenty-five minutes is at one with the words of the mass. Each morning I try, each morning I fail, and I know that always I will be a creature who, looking at Father Paul and the altar, and uttering prayers, will be distracted by scrambled eggs, horses, the weather, and memories and daydreams that have nothing to do with the sacrament I am about to receive. I can receive, though: the Eucharist, and also, at Mass and at other times, moments and even minutes of contemplation. But I cannot achieve contemplation, as some can; and so, having to face and forgive my own failures, I have learned from them both the necessity and wonder of ritual. For ritual allows those who cannot will themselves out of the secular to perform the spiritual, as dancing allows the tongue-tied man a ceremony of love.
The life that Luke tells the reader about is one filled with a variety of contradictions: He is a devout Catholic but divorced; he attends Mass regularly but does not always listen; he enjoys talking to his priest but casually, preferably over a few beers, and what they discuss is mostly small talk; he is a self-described lazy man who dislikes waking up early but does so each morning to pray, not because he feels obligated to do so but because he knows he has the choice not to do so. Luke Ripley is a man who lives with contradictions and accepts them.
Luke wants us to know that he lived through difficult days after the divorce and what he believed ritual could have done for his marriage:
It is not hard to live through a day, if you can live through a moment. What creates despair is the imagination, which pretends there is a future, and insists on predicting millions of moments, thousands of days, and so drains you that you cannot live the moment at hand. That is what Father Paul told me in those first two years, on some bad nights when I believed I could not bear what I had to: the most painful loss was my children, then the loss of Gloria, whom I still loved despite or maybe because of our long periods of sadness that rendered us helpless, so neither of us could break out of it to give a hand to the other. Twelve years later I believe ritual would have healed us more quickly than the repetitious talks we had, perhaps even kept us healed. Marriages have lost that, and I wish I had known then what I what I know now, and we had performed certain acts together every day, no matter how we felt, and perhaps then we could have subordinated feeling to action, for surely that is the essence of love. I know this from my distractions during Mass, and during everything else I do, so that my actions and my feelings are seldom one. It does happen every day, but in proportion to everything else in the day, it is rare, like joy.
The loss of his wife Gloria and her leaving the church and the loss of his children figured large in Luke’s life. But the “third most painful loss, which became second and sometimes first as months passed, was the knowledge that I could never marry again, and so dared not even keep company with a woman.”
Luke lets Father Paul know that he is bitter about this. And, that when he was with Gloria he wasn’t happy with the “actual physical and spiritual plan of practicing rhythm: nights of striking the mattress with a fist…”
Early in the narration we learn Luke’s thoughts about his friend Father Paul, the Catholic church, and tithing – “I don’t feel right about giving money for buildings, places.”
We later hear his reflections on Jennifer, his only daughter, becoming a woman: “It is Jennifer’s womanhood that renders me awkward.”
He relates how her growing up affected the ‘ritual’ of memories he kept of her as his sheltered little girl at home. Jennifer became an on-her-own twenty-one-year-old girl with a purse full of adult symbols including a driver’s license. Luke says that he wants to know what she is up to and he doesn’t want to know what she is up to.
And then one night, Jennifer involves her father in a life-altering incident. Luke, to manage the situation, sticks with ritual as if nothing had happened. Ritual, we learned, might have saved his marriage to Gloria. So, Luke returns to default ritual to “save” the only other woman in his life. He wasn’t about to give her up, not even to Father Paul. Luke continues his rituals but does not confess to Father Paul.
The story ends with Luke telling the reader how he justifies himself to God, in Job-like fashion each morning, for what he did: the love a father has for a daughter is different than he has for a son and he loves his daughter more than truth.
Luke’s OK with a guy being hit by the car and but not a woman. Men, like Charles Bronson and Clint Eastwood, are supposed to take the bang ups and arrests and prison time.
In the end, however, Luke must answer to God for what he does to protect Jennifer. Self-serving ritual will not save him.
I’ve read this story twice. The first time, several years ago, I felt I knew the protagonist. He was like a former father-in-law: a divorced Catholic man in his fifties who wore Old Spice, hid Playboys, had daughters, and who thought himself manly in a Hemingwayesque sense. So, it was easy to have a sentimental attachment to Luke. I could empathize with his grief about losing a spouse and children and with his ritual-managed loneliness. And especially so as he acted instinctively to protect his daughter.
After a second reading this past week, I saw Luke differently – beneath the surface, so to speak. And, I had some questions:
When all is said and done by Luke, is he really protecting himself, his “real life”, his ritualized sources of comfort, when he protects his daughter from being taken away?
Did Luke really just act out of laziness (laziness being the opposite of love) in order to maintain ritual and continue life as he knew it?
Was Luke’s manhood tied to his comfort from women?
Wasn’t it cruel, unjust, and devastating to the other family and father involved for Jennifer and Luke to leave the scene of the crime and to let things just go on without answers?
As a parent, what would I do in this situation?
A Father’s Story was first published in the Spring 1983 issue of Black Warrior Review.
I couldn’t pedal any faster. Heart and legs pumped and pumped and pumped until I threw my bike down in the front yard and heard “Wash your hands, Dennis. It’s time for supper.”
Summer, like a best friend ready to pal around, came around again before my freshman year in high school. I was ready that summer to go and do a lot of things, except for one. Did I tell you this story? After sixty years, some memories, like which stories I may have told, become muddled and others remain clear as the day they happened.
Before the start of my freshman year in the fall of ’67, I received a letter from the high school that detailed all the programs the school offered. The two that interested me were sports and band.
That summer I began cross country training under Coach Howard. I was a runner. The kids on my block called me Flash. I was always chosen first for street football and sandlot baseball. But that hot and sweaty five-and-ten-mile practice summer I found out that I was not a long-distance runner. I had only enough wind for sprints and to play the trumpet.
To play in the concert band, I had to tryout that summer. I auditioned with the band director Mr. Gilles. He had me play all the major and minor scales and sight-read several pieces. I learned a week later that I was accepted into the band. This was huge. I had played the French horn in the Junior High band.
My stint with the French horn came about when the Junior High band director Mr. Palmero decided that he didn’t like the sound coming out of my beat-up Conn trumpet. The horn was a gift from an uncle who used it, from its appearance, for anything but playing. Mr. Palmero had me switch to a rental French horn. This lasted two years.
That summer – the summer before high school – my father, bless his soul, bought me a brand-new Bach b-flat trumpet. The new horn and lots of practice paid off. And that part of my Junior High experience was behind me. But how could I forget those two years?
Junior High School had a social system of Greasers and Climbers. You were lumped into one or the other based on your appearance. Greasers, like my colorful friend Juan, wore a black leather jacket, black pants, black socks and shoes and a white tee shirt. The absence of color except for the tee was Juan’s Greaser uniform.
Climbers, like most of my friends, sometimes wore paisley shirts with white collars, bell bottoms and white socks, but mostly dressed in color. I wore simple button-down shirts and sometimes a paisley shirt with bell-bottoms and black socks. I walked around with a French horn case. I wasn’t sure of the privileges accrued to either group other than being liked for what you weren’t.
I remember Juan pestering me to become a Greaser. He even had his girlfriend Lucille tell me that she would doing anything for me if I would become a Greaser. This conversation took place one morning in one of my eighth-grade classes. Lucille, who sat in front of me, turned around and offered herself on the altar of Greaserdom. I declined the invitation. I had more than I could handle. Three girls wanted my attention – in the hallways and in the band. All three played an instrument.
Diane, who I sat next to, was first chair French horn. Mary K. was a flutist and Mary E. played the clarinet. In the social scheme of things, we were considered Climbers because we played in the band and dressed in more than black and white.
I liked the attention of Diane, Mary, and Mary, but I didn’t want to go “steady” as was their intention. I put “going steady” in the same category as having to choose to be either a Greaser or a Climber. I was an independent sort. I was wary of anyone pressuring me to do something I wasn’t inclined to do, as when I was told to play the French horn. I continued on the horn because it kept me playing music. But I should return to telling you about that summer before high school.
Several days a week I had cross country practice. I also practiced my trumpet every day and I worked a part time job at a photo store. At church, I was moved up into the Senior High Youth group.
Our teens group met on Sunday mornings and after church on Sunday nights. Those evening times included going out for pizza or ice cream. During these outings I noticed that the older girls in the group were cliquish and something of a mystery. I wondered what they were saying when they whispered to each other. They weren’t like the junior high girls. They weren’t passing me notes telling me what they were thinking. But that secretiveness, as I recall, made those times wait-and-see fun.
One of the first weekday outings for our group that summer was a picnic at a local park. When we gathered in the parking lot of the Bible church there was a lot of discussion about who was riding with whom. There were only a couple of drivers and cars. I was a freshman. I had no driver’s license or car yet. Neither did my best friend Bill, also a freshman.
A ‘63 convertible T-bird, radio blasting, pulled into the lot. The guy driving was Ken. I’d seen him in the Sunday meetings. He had said that he transferred from another area high school and would be a senior in the new high school. He asked Bill and I if we wanted a ride to the park. We agreed. I remember thinking that going my own way, in James Dean fashion, would be noticed by the girls.
After several group outings, Ken started calling me and asking me to come over. He said that he had a Triumph TR3 that he was rebuilding and that he needed some help. I told him I didn’t know anything about cars. It didn’t matter to him. He begged me to come over. I finally accepted his invitation one hot, boring summer afternoon. I thought why not learn about cars. I would be driving soon enough.
That afternoon I rode my bike across town to his parent’s house. I found the garage door open with Ken standing inside. He was holding an oily car part in his hand. The TR3 was parked in the garage with the hood up. I asked about his parents. He explained that his mother worked in a clothing store and that his father worked at the local country club in the men’s locker room. ‘They’re never home during the day’ he told me. I remember hearing this and feeling a bit uneasy not knowing the neighborhood or Ken that well. It must have shown. He immediately began talking about what he was trying to do.
As best as I can recall, he said something to the effect that the Triumph had a stock positive earth electrical system and he was trying to connect a radio. Positive earth and negative earth connections had me at a loss. I knew about magnets. They had positive and negative poles and that opposites attract and like polarities repel.
I remember becoming interested in seeing the sporty little car repaired when Ken said that he might let me drive it. To help him make the polarity conversion, I read aloud the steps in the Triumph manual as he made the changes. The first step, as I recall, was to disconnect and remove the battery.
After the polarity conversion was completed, Ken invited me inside. We washed up and Ken offered me something to drink. He handed me a glass of lemonade and we sat in the kitchen. We talked for a while and then I went home. And that is how things went the next two times I came over to work on the car. We cleaned the carburetor, worked on the engine, and talked afterward.
I learned that Ken liked golf, Edgar Rice Burroughs books, and Edgar Cayce books. All three of his likes were not in my universe. I told him about cross country practice, summer band practice, and my job. I didn’t have any time to read that summer.
When I was invited over a fourth time, we worked on the brakes. After we finished, he invited me in again for a drink. This time he offered me a Coke and some rum to put in it. I said no. Then he asked me if I wanted to play cards. I told him I didn’t know how to play cards. He said he’d show me. I thought that here was something else that I could learn, so I agreed.
Ken left the room and came back with a deck of cards. He began to tell me the different hands and their value and the rules of the five-card stud, his favorite game. He dealt the cards and I gathered them up, holding them fanned out in my hand just like in a TV western.
I quickly lost every hand I played but Ken convinced me to keep trying. After winning one hand he asked me if I wanted to bet on the next hand. I told him I don’t bet. He said it would only be for candy. So, I continued to play. When my pile of M&Ms disappeared, I said I had to get home for supper. I got on my bike and headed back across town toward home.
I should remind you that while I was meeting with Ken on free afternoons, I was still doing all the things I mentioned before.
Ken called again the following week. I came over and we worked on replacing the radiator. When that was done, we cleaned up and sat down for a couple Cokes. Again, Ken wanted to play cards. And again, we played several hands. After I won a few hands, Ken wanted to know if I wanted to play for stakes. I told him that I just like playing.
But Ken persisted, asking me if I wanted to “up the ante.” I told him no. After several more hands he asked me again and I said “what are you talking about.” He said that if I were to lose the next hand that I would have to do whatever he wanted and that if he was to lose that he would do whatever I wanted. The “stakes” as he called them sounded weird to me. But at the same time, I knew that I always had the power to say no, so I played along thinking that friends don’t mess with friends. What could he ask me to do? Buy him a Coke or an ice cream the next time the teens group went out?
I lost the next hand. He then told me that he wanted me to clean the house – sweep, vacuum, everything. I looked at him like he was crazy. He then said that I had agreed to the stakes and had lost and must do what he wanted. I told Ken that I wouldn’t clean his house.
He came back and said that I had to because I gave my word and because I am a Christian. He then left the room and came back to the kitchen with a small men’s Speedo swimsuit. He told me that he wanted me to wear the Speedo while I cleaned the house. I had no idea that Ken would impose that on me. I remember a feeling of revulsion and saying “No way!”
I would not do what he wanted. I’d pay the bet some other way. Rattled, I got up and headed for the door. I promised to come back another day and help him with the TR3. That was the best I could offer. I got on my bike and sped off toward home.
Some weeks passed. At the start of August, twenty days before school started, I got a phone call from Ken. He wanted me to come over. He said the Triumph was ready to roll. I agreed to come over, thinking that this would be a harmless way to honor my bet and be done with the whole business. And maybe I’d have the chance to drive the car, as he had said.
I headed over to his house and found the Triumph parked on the street. Ken walked out of the garage and asked me if I was ready for a ride. We got in the sports car and Ken started the engine. He shifted into first and then turned on the newly installed radio. He drove the TR3 out of the neighborhood and headed for the nearby highway. The convertible sports car responded quickly, moving effortlessly through five gears. But since I hadn’t learned to drive stick shift, he wouldn’t let me drive the car.
We returned to his house an hour later. Ken parked the car in the garage and we went in for a Coke. He asked about playing cards again. I said I wouldn’t. Then he said that he had a roulette game in his room. Ken wanted to show me. I went with him to his bedroom thinking that I would see this thing he was so interested in and then head home.
When we got to his bedroom, Ken uncovered the roulette game from a box that was stored under a bunk bed. He spun its center wheel, showing me how it worked. He handed it to me and I sat down on his bed to hold the wheel on my lap. I spun the wheel to see where the ball would land. As I did, Ken sat down next to me. I quickly moved over to make room for him. Ken then moved closer, put his arms around me, and started wrestling me down to the bed.
At this point in the story, a reader might view me as naïve or even stupid for hanging around Ken after the Speedo incident. I was both and wound up tight. In church, Ken acted one way and with me he acted so weird. I do remember feeling mortified at being attached to what happened and for not picking up what Ken was doing.
I never told my parents about Ken. I had thought that I was on my own and what would they understand anyway. And I remembered the sting of humiliation I felt once before.
My mother had asked me to do something – maybe wash the supper dishes. I said that I wouldn’t. I was being defiant. She got my father involved. He had me go into my bedroom and pull my pants and underpants down in front of my mother. Then he smacked me hard with a wooden stick.
No twelve-year old boy wants to pull down their pants. Not in the Junior High locker room. Not ever in front of their mother. I deserved the punishment but not the process. But I digress.
I would remind the reader that I was fourteen years old that summer and about to enter high school. And it was the sixties. There was no internet, no social media. I had to figure things out myself with the information that came from an eighth-grade sex education class and a birds-and-bees sit-down with my parents.
The Sex-Ed talk, the graphic charts, the film strips and the short movies made the class squirm and giggle. I squirmed again when my parents took me aside to talk about sex.
They showed me a series of prenatal pictures from the 1965 April issue of Life magazine. On the cover was a photograph called Foetus 18 Weeks and the words “Drama of Life Before Birth.”
My father talked about how a woman becomes pregnant. He talked about waiting until marriage to have sex. He told me about nocturnal emissions. He said that I should masturbate if I can’t contain myself. He told me how. And then he ended our talk saying that I should never ever let a man put his penis in my mouth. I had never had such a thought and it wasn’t mentioned in the sex ed classes. This sounded like Drama of Life After Birth and something bizarre.
Things were changing rapidly in my life and in the world. Like any teenager, I wanted to fit in and be accepted. I thought the acceptance of an older friend would be a good thing. I believed in friendship. Hanging around with Bill, my best friend, I learned to value friendship as the most important and most freeing of relationships. And I still do today. I can’t tell you why being free is so important to me. I can tell you that friendship is not suffocating.
Trying to be a friend to Ken kept me coming back one more time. But as I found out, he wanted to be a predator and not a friend. I should return to what happened that afternoon.
Ken, taller than me, leveraged himself on top of me on the bed. He used his feet against the footboard of the bed and his tall frame as a lever to pin me face down. I kept thrashing about, trying to push myself out. I was telling him to stop. He grabbed one of my legs and pulled it up onto the bed. I tried to roll out sideways but couldn’t. He kept forcing my shoulder back down. Then I saw him grab a rope from the wall side of the bed. He must have hidden the rope for a time like this.
Ken tried to loop my neck and hands to the bunk bed post. I fought to keep the rope off of my neck. Then, with his full weight on top of me, I felt Ken’s pelvis thrusting back and forth on my backside. In that moment, with Ken rubbing himself on me and me thinking that my life might end, I felt a huge surge of adrenaline.
I pushed myself straight up from the bed with all of my strength. Still face down, I put one leg on the floor and then the other. I had to forcefully wrench my head out the headlock he put on me. When I finally pulled myself free from the rope and his grip, I ran out of the room, headed straight for my bike, and fled. That summer.
How do these things I’ve told you not mess with someone’s head? If I told you that this story is true and you know me, then you know it is true.
“I’ve learned a lot in these last four years. Most importantly, I’ve learned that I’m not alone. One in six men have an abusive sexual experience before they turn 18. Secrecy, shame and fear are the tools of abuse, and it is only by breaking the stigma of childhood sexual abuse that we can heal, change attitudes, and create safer environments for our children.”
If only it was something that remained on the pages of a dystopian novel . . .the ways the anointed ones deal with us. But the stark reality is that the anointed ones have learned that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste and that a manufactured crisis affords the anointed the opportunity to wield total power for its own sake.
The fourth anniversary of “15 days to slow the spread” has come and gone. But the harm inflicted upon our lives and our country during the COVID “crisis” has not. More “public health” strategies are being developed to tyrannize us into “wellness” (See the WHO treaty below.) We will be made to follow “the science” even into hell if it suits the anointed ones.
We (the remnant) somehow lived through the “something must be done” ill-treatment by means of the public health anointed: Anthony Fauci, Deborah Birx, Rochelle Walensky, Francis Collins, and others of the anointed ilk.
And somehow, we lived through the abrogation of our freedom by the anointed ones. We came out the other side of the social experiment with the knowledge that the anointed ones conceived the abuse done to us and will do it again. What we had to endure mentally at the hands of the anointed arch-COVIDians was horrible: their fearmongering, their lies, their scientism, their silencing of contrary evidence, and their absurd mandates – clearly a test of wills as common sense was not considered “the science.”
The introduction of the anointed anxiety-soothing shot – the SOMA serum – has had devastating implications on the health and livelihoods. Many have suffered the loss of loved ones with an “unexpected death”, the loss of livelihood, and the loss of health. It has only been recently reported that the anointed of the CDC intentionally HID more than a quarter of a million adverse effects reports for the COVID-19 “vaccines.”
We continue to be subjected (via the anointed one’s talking heads) to the badgering about a (non-existent) climate “crisis.” We are told to do away with gasoline-powered vehicles and natural gas ranges and with all thought of fossil fuels as an energy source. We are told to become completely dependent on weather-dependent turbines and solar panels, and on hydropower and on their “climate science” directives for the energy to power a modern industrial economy.
(See my post Earth Day – Don’t Re-Greta Green Energy | Kingdom Venturers where I wrote about the exploitation of children and poor countries to secure the minerals needed for millions of electronic products e.g., rechargeable lithium batteries, sold year after year. The anointed ones have hearts of darkness.
“. . . cobalt, mined by the Congolese (and the Uyghurs in China), is a coveted substance in man’s conquest of earth. And we find, if we dare to look, that Green Energy-based colonialism is no different than the ivory-based colonialism talked about in [Joseph Conrad’s] Heart of Darkness.”)
The anointed of the World Economic Forum (WEF) had included “Climate-related risks” as “the biggest future threat facing the world.” The WEF have since moved on to “misinformation and disinformation” as the biggest risk near-term risk (to their narratives), followed by extreme weather events, social polarization and armed conflict.
Citing soaring energy and food prices resulting in inflationary pressures and a cost-of-living crisis, social unrest, conflicts, carbon emissions and future pandemics, the anointed of the WEF have created a new word for the cascading and connected crises they envision: Polycrisis.
For, the anointed of the WEF must make alarming predictions and announce sweeping solutions to create a demand for their services. These “Teflon prophets” (Thomas Sowell) predict that there will be future social, economic, or environmental problems in the absence of their anointed intervention.
It will be noted by those with an expanded personal bandwidth (informed common sense), that the cost-of-living crisis has been caused by the massive deficit spending and reckless energy policies of the anointed ones in our government. They also know that the shutdown of our economy during COVID was caused by the public health anointed ones. Wars are caused by the anointed ones. Carbon emissions have not risen to any threatening level except in the “acceptable” papers the anointed present to the WEF and the UN.
The WEF will not let their Polycrisis go to waste. They are conspiring to centrally plan the world because “something must be done” and done “for our own good.” Did anyone ask you about wanting a Great Reset?
Public health anointed ones are setting up for the next medical “crisis”. The World Health Organization (WHO) wants complete sovereignty (To call the shots!) over our health . . . and anything it calls a “crisis”. A “crisis” would include the climate, the water supply, gun ownership, how food is produced – basically, anything they can claim is an existential threat to humanity.
For these anointed ones to have complete say and sway over us, they must make an end run around to subvert our own physical sovereignty and the sovereignty of the U.S.
Dr. Meryl Nass explains how the WHO's proposed pandemic treaty will enable the WHO "to take over jurisdiction of everything in the world by saying that climate change, animals, plants, water systems [and] ecosystems are all central to health".
Dr. Meryl Nass explains how the WHO’s proposed pandemic treaty will enable the WHO “to take over jurisdiction of everything in the world by saying that climate change, animals, plants, water systems [and] ecosystems are all central to health”. In addition to that, it will remove human rights protections, enforce censorship and digital passports, require governments to push a single “official” narrative, and enable the WHO to declare “pandemics” on a whim.
In a nutshell, the WHO is all in for whatever it takes to promote disease-related pharmaceutical interventions, including surveillance, digital health passports, tracing, the ability to impose lockdowns, and mandating vaccines, even experimental ones like the mRNA COVID-19 shots. (Emphasis mine.)
“The COVID-19 mandates and resulting lockdowns taught us that, given the chance, governments worldwide will seek to control citizens if a pandemic emergency is declared. The World Health Organization (WHO) closed its negotiations on May 27 with the production of an accord consisting of two treaties that could meaningfully impinge on our sovereignty as Americans. The proposed WHO Pandemic Preparedness Treaty threatens to give unprecedented power in real or maybe even perceived “public health emergencies of international concern.” -Wendi Strauch Mahoney
If only it was something that remained on the pages of a dystopian novel . . .the ways the anointed ones deal with us.
Coming May 2024!!!!!!!!!
Global Health Project – Protecting the Health & Future for All Humans – The Global Health Project
You may be clutching your pearls and saying “I don’t know what to think or do.” Does Polly want a crisis so that Polly can find out what to think and do from the anointed ones?
Listen. We can’t change the past. But we can continue to learn from it and work to prevent it from happening again, so the next “crisis” doesn’t represent the death of our Constitution, our livelihood, and our freedom.
For what has happened During COVID, we must demand answers. We must demand accountability. We must demand that those who perpetrated this be tried and, as appropriate, fined and sent to prison.
The takeover of our lives “for your own good” by the anointed ones must stop now.
I am not vaxxed and not because of some partisan influence or misinformation as the Leftist media is wont to claim. I took the time to read and understand the science from various sources and I knew my own almost seventy-year old body.
I did not comply during the COVID “crisis”. I did not come to love Big Brother. I raised my voice and held strong. (See my posts since March 2020). Unfortunately, many swallowed the slogans and were like sheep led to the mRNA slaughter.
All I want from the government or any authority is information to make my own decisions. I do not want, unless authorized by me, to have decisions made for me. (One might say that a transmissible disease warrants strict compliance to “health standards” or someone might die. But there would be no evidence of such transmission, only speculation and finger pointing.)
The United States Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the First and Second Amendments are the Supreme Law of the Land – not the WEF, not the WHO, and not a warrantless FISA.
The eclipse came and went but the tax man cometh again and again to overshadow our lives. April 15th – the day when the work of our hands is conscripted into the service of the oligarchical ruling class.
Characteristics of the anointed one’s Big Brother approach:
Increasing depression, despondency, mental illness, and suicides.
Ugliness in tone, in art and architecture – beauty is deemed subversive.
Truth, facts and language are manipulated (Newspeak).
There is a militant focus on “misinformation and disinformation” (Ministry of Truth).
History is destroyed (doublethink).
Constant surveillance.
Systematic brainwashing (Ministry of Love).
There is obsession with population control and control of population.
If only it was something that remained on the pages of a dystopian novel . . .the ways the anointed ones deal with us.
~~~~~
There are those who see themselves as morally and intellectually superior to the general public and therefore superior to Democracy and its laws created by elected representatives.
Ad hoc justice, not established rule of law, is one product of their superior ways as is remaking society with inegalitarian means to create equal outcomes. Promoting the hatred of whites to promote blacks is another product of their superior ways.
“This dismissal of the American people’s intellectual, spiritual, and moral substance is the very heart of what our ruling class is about. Its principal article of faith, its claim to the right to decide for others, is precisely that it knows things and operates by standards beyond others’ comprehension . . .
“Because ordinary people will pervert reason with ideology, religion, or interest, science is “science” only in the “right” hands. Consensus among the right people is the only standard of truth. Facts and logic matter only insofar as proper authority acknowledges them . . .
“That is why the ruling class is united and adamant about nothing so much as its right to pronounce definitive, “scientific” judgment on whatever it chooses . . .
“The fact that the “hockey stick” conclusion stands discredited and Mann and associates are on record manipulating peer review, the fact that science-by-secret-data is an oxymoron, the very distinction between truth and error, all matter far less to the ruling class than the distinction between itself and those they rule.”
~~~~~
Anointed ones run our cities:
The Democratic-run city of Denver, Colorado, plans to defund its police department to pay for illegal immigrants.
Denver’s police department will be hit with an $8.4 million reduction — about 1.9% of its total operating budget, the city confirmed to the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The anointed ones who run our cities into the ground want to create new hell holes:
Hamster cages for humans, the 15-minute cities, are on city planner agendas. Soy boys and girls can walk around the city and look at their screens without a worry – “the idea is that every need is fulfilled within a 15-minute walk or short bike ride.”
~~~~~
“Democracy!” is in crisis, according to the anointed ones on the Left: Trump is on the ballot and might be elected! Anointed talking heads want to tell you what to think and do about it: “Whatever you do, Don’t Think. Accept what is said about Trump and “Democracy!””
Despotism has so often been established in the name of liberty that experience should warn us to judge parties by their practices rather than their preachings. —Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals
(Replace “liberty” with the Left’s “crisis of Democracy!” and you will understand what they are after.)
Sowell argues that American thought is dominated by a “prevailing vision” which seals itself off from any empirical evidence that is inconsistent with that vision.
Were you assigned George Orwell’s 1984 in school? I wonder if it’s being assigned in schools today.
We are living in an age that is increasingly characterized by the eerily prophetic 1984. Authoritarianism and coercion. The censoring of speech. The mandates. The propaganda. Utopia for the brotherhood elite. Dystopia for the rest.
Nineteen Eighty-Four
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Orwell’s dystopian novel where the state rewrites history, war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength – and Big Brother is watching you
1984 follows the life of Winston Smith, a low-ranking member of ‘the Party’, who is frustrated by the omnipresent eyes of the party, and its ominous ruler, Big Brother. Orwell effectively explores the themes of mass media control, government surveillance, how a dictator can manipulate and control history, thoughts, and lives in such a way that no one can escape it.
I’ve been reading a lot of realist fiction lately but I can’t ignore the grim reality of the hatred directed at Americans by the Left. This hatred is manifested with tactics no different than the “irregular warfare” used by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to impose its will:
Elsa Kania, an adjunct fellow with the Technology and National Security Program at the Center for a New American Security writes in a 2016 China Brief article about The PLA’s Latest Strategic Thinking on the Three Warfares. She says that “the application of the three warfares is intended to control the prevailing discourse and influence perceptions in a way that advances China’s interests, while compromising the capability of opponents to respond.”
She goes on to describe the three non-kinetic warfares and their functions:
2015 Science of Military Strategy:
The [2015 National Defense University (NDU) SMS] provides an overview of public opinion warfare, psychological warfare, and legal warfare and guidance regarding their implementation. According to the text, public opinion warfare involves using public opinion as a weapon by propagandizing through various forms of media in order to weaken the adversary’s “will to fight” (战斗意志), while ensuring strength of will and unity among civilian and military views on one’s own side. Psychological warfare seeks to undermine an adversary’s combat power, resolve, and decision-making, while exacerbating internal disputes to cause the enemy to divide into factions (阵营). Legal warfare envisions use of all aspects of the law, including national law, international law, and the laws of war, in order to secure seizing “legal principle superiority” (法理优势) and delegitimize an adversary. Each of the three warfares operates in the perceptual domain (认知领域) and relies upon information for its efficacy. (Emphasis mine.)
These tactics look very familiar. “Irregular warfare”, employed with aggression and deceit (“Force and fraud are the cardinal virtues of war.” –Hobbes), are at work in the Left’s attack on Americans. We are all well aware of one assault close to home.
During COVID (the spread of the China virus) we were subjected to the coordinated force of propaganda to influence and control public opinion. There was propagandizing through various forms of media in order to weaken the adversary’s “will to fight” against what we were told to believe.
There was also the psychological balkanizing that divided the nation into those who “follow the science” and “science deniers” and the “vaxxed” and “anti-vax”.
And there was the legal warfare of COVID mandates that put people in jail or quarantines and closed churches and businesses and put people out of work if not vaxxed. All done to delegitimize an adversary to what we were told to obey.
We were subjected to coordinated fraud in the messaging about the (flu-like) virus’ transmission and effects and the effectiveness of the COVID vaccine and the efficacy of Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin. Multiple doctors and epidemiologists who spoke out against the narrative were silenced in the media and elsewhere. Force was used to stifle criticism and to co-opt and neutralize sources of potential opposition to “the science” and the purveyors of “the science”, the Left’s medical-pharmaceutical industrial complex (Anthony Fauci, Francis Collins, CDC, NIH, big pharma et al.).
Each of the Left’s three warfares employed during COVID operated in the “perceptual domain and relied upon [the control of] information for its effectiveness.”
We continue to be subjected to the Left’s three-fold attack with the “force and fraud” climate crisis narrative. Public opinion is being swayed by climate crisis propaganda: “We need to act now to avoid catastrophe.” “Irregular warfare” is being used against fossil fuels, LNG, agriculture, and anyone who opposes the Left’s narrative.
The fact that nuclear power, a carbon-free and a safe energy source that can produce huge amounts of reliable electricity, is not mentioned by the Left should be an indicator that climate is not an issue – controlling you is. (There is no climate crisis. See video below.)
We continue to be subjected to the Left’s “irregular warfare” with its fraudulent narrative of Trump as a threat to “Democracy”. The apoplectic Left, desiring to influence and control public opinion, wants to put the fear of Trump into their viewers and readers. The want viewers and readers to hate Trump.
The psychological warfare element of this attack includes exacerbating internal disputes to cause the enemy – the Right – to divide into factions. Hence, the Left will showcase never -Trumpers like David French to speak against Trump.
The third element of the Left’s threefold “irregular warfare” is used to “delegitimize an adversary.” This is the reason for the lawfare being waged against Donald Trump. The Left is desperate. They have tried unsuccessfully to keep him off the ballot. They have sought to disqualify him. They are seeking to bankrupt him. The Left will use any means necessary to take down Trump through “legal warfare.”
“It’s becoming increasingly difficult to deny that we have a legal system now that is being heavily distorted by politics and you cannot look at all of these cases and see blind justice, you see the opposite,” Turley told Fox Business host Larry Kudlow, a former Trump administration official. “You see a justice that is being weaponized, and in many ways the Democrats fulfill the narrative of President Trump. He is now right. No matter what they thought about it at the beginning, they proved him to be right with this pile-on from Florida to Georgia, to Washington, D.C., to New York and most of the public gets it.”
The Left’s MSNBC and CNN and the NYT and WaPo and other media outlets of their ilk are so afraid that Trump will win in November that they are pulling out all the stops. They accuse Trump of promoting a lie (the stolen 2020 election) and calling illegals “animals” (Trump was talking about the murderer of Laken Riley). They will 24/7 you with “Trump is a threat to Democracy and our way of life. We will all become victims if Trump is elected (and blah blah blah).”
We continue to be subjected to the Left’s public opinion influence and psychological warfare via its constant fear-mongering. The Left conjures up end-of-the-world narratives, whether of COVID, climate, Trump or of people who don’t buy what they are selling.
Those who are taken in by Left don’t understand that they are targets of two elements of “irregular warfare”: influence of public opinion and psychological warfare. One reason they buy in is that the legal warfare component is directed at Trump and anyone connected with him. Another reason may be how they feel about the Left’s talking points: “I love the way you lie.”
A key component of the Left’s warfare against Americans is balkanization. The Left seeks to divide us into warring factions. There are those in the media who delight in dividing us rather than uniting us. They live for this. It is how they gain their power, their influence and their money. It is how they destroy America. As Jesus knew to be true, “if a kingdom is divided in two it can’t last.”
And so it is that the above media outlets present authors who foster division by writing that white Americans and Christian Nationalists (whatever they are) are a dangerous threat to “Democracy!”
The Left, to “delegitimize an adversary”, wants to put the fear of whites and of Christians who love their country into their viewers and readers – as if hating them along with Trump was a necessary condition for protecting “Democracy!”
Progressive Wallis was on MSNBC promoting his platitudes and inviting all who can be persuaded to reject and help dismantle a false gospel that propagates white supremacy and autocracy . . . and Christian Nationalism (whatever that is)
One Amazon commenter on White Rural Rage wrote something that applies to both books: “This book helps to explain the startling divide in America by showing just how profoundly uninterested such people are in understanding or accepting the views of anyone who does not accord with their own orthodoxy and must therefore be dismissed as anti-democratic.”
Waldman and Schaller portray rural people as passive, unthinking agents in the democratic process. Though “rage” features prominently in their title, they use the word fewer than ten times in the text, and only to belabor their claim that Republican leaders intentionally manufactured rural voters’ anger, as though these Americans would not be concerned about their situations without external manipulation.
“In an interview on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, [author Tom] Schaller gave this unvarnished assessment of the rage he sees overflowing in the heartland. Rural whites, he said, are “the most racist, xenophobic, anti-immigrant, anti-gay geo-demographic group in the country.” He called them, “the most conspiracist group,” “anti-democratic,” “white nationalist and white Christian nationalists.” On top of that, rural whites are also “most likely to excuse or justify violence as an acceptable alternative to peaceful public discourse . . .
“But the thing about rage — I’ve never found it.
“The problem with this “rage” thesis is much larger than the fact that my research, and that of others, is being misinterpreted and misunderstood. What the authors are getting wrong about rural America is exactly what many Democrats have been getting wrong for decades — and appear to be doing so again in this critical presidential election year.”
The following is my response to the red meat those authors threw to the ravenous Left:
When spoken of from the High Chairs of Hubris and Condescension, those of us who love God and our family and our country and not what proceeds from the mouths of the elites are not just called “bitter clingers” and “deplorable”. We are called “extremists.” We are called every name in the Left’s style book. And therefore, more force and fraud are needed to be applied. Hence the shaming books of the fellow traveler intelligentsia.
One would think that loving God, loving your family and loving your country would be all good. But the Left hates all that. Leftist elites love themselves and the sound of their condescension.
How far will the Left go? Students of history know. History tells us that the Left will use any means necessary, including injustice, famine, show trials, gulags, and murder to get their way. How far did the Left go this week?
JUST IN: 'Praying grandma' Rebecca Lavrenz has reportedly been found guilty by a DC jury after she briefly entered the Capitol on J6.
Glad to see our 'justice system' going after some "hard-hitting criminals."
The Biden regime just convicted a 71-year-old great-grandmother on federal misdemeanor charges for entering the Capitol more than three years ago for ten minutes.
“Without God, there’s no justice.” -71-year-old great-grandmother Rebecca Lavrenz who faces four federal misdemeanor charges for entering the Capitol more than three years ago during the Fedsurrection. She spent about 10 minutes inside.
Wearing a red scarf and a white hat to the rally, which she said she attended by herself, Lavrenz encountered a group of people praying outside the Capitol, and she joined them for about an hour and a half.
“It was a patriotic, joyful time to be around so many people who love their country,” she said. “I felt a strong presence of the spirt of God fall over me, and I started crying.”
At one point, she took the microphone to speak about a document that became known as the 1620 Mayflower Compact. Included in the agreement that pilgrims had signed before they set foot on American soil was that the country would be dedicated to the glory of God and advancement of the Christian faith.
“My mission in life is to know God and make his ways known and restore the country back to its godly foundation,” Lavrenz said. “Without God, there’s no justice.”
This post is meant to alert you to the Left’s three-pronged warfare directed at Americans. There is more that could be said, but there is enough here, I believe, for the reader to understand the hatred directed at us.
I haven’t even mentioned the Biden inflation and the cost of living or how hard it will be for our children to buy a house and property because of the human-hating financial policies of the Left.
I haven’t even mentioned that the Biden regime’s human-hating open border policy will drive wages down for minorities and put Americans out of work. It is a policy that allows in deadly fentanyl and deadly gangs and deadly terrorists and deadly diseases to kill people. You won’t hear or see any of this from Rachel Maddow. All you’ll hear from her is “orange man bad.”
The Left hates us. And so does the Satan.
~~~~~
I see the Left – its hatred and evil schemes – depicted in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo trilogy. Having control and imposing its will are essential to the Left, as in the story. Violence, mental and physical, are their means.
In the novels Dr. Peter Teleborian is the psychiatrist at St. Stefan’s Psychiatric Clinic for Children. Teleborian is a sadist who abuses his patients.
The child Lisbeth Salander was committed to St. Stefan’s after she tried to kill her evil father for beating and raping her mother. While in the clinic Teleborian kept Lisbeth strapped down each night for over a year and tried to force feed her psychiatric drugs. Salander later described him as the most evil man she ever met.
Lisbeth is later released from the clinic and put under guardianship. Her guardian suffers a heart attack and she is given another legal guardian – Nils Bjurman.
At their second meeting Bjurman informs Salander that she has to give over access to all of her bank accounts. Her first guardian Palmgren allowed her to control her own finances but Bjurman wants to control every aspect of her life.
Bjurman, to prove who’s in charge, molests her and forces her to pleasure him sexually. Because of her previous problems with the police, Lisbeth decides to take matters into her own hands. At their next meeting, she comes prepared with a hidden video camera. But, to her horror and dismay, she realizes she has misjudged Bjurman; he attacks and brutally rapes her.
Then The Section, an ultra-secret division of the government that reports to no one, tries to have Lisbeth recommitted to Dr. Teleborian’s clinic. This was to be done to protect the members of The Section. Dr. Teleborian is assigned by The Section to write a false report about Lisbeth Salander.
The Section harbored and protected the evil Zalachenko, ex-Russian spy who defected to Sweden. Alexander Zalachenko is Lisbeth’s abusive father.
We later learn that Dr. Teleborian kept thousands of child porn photos on his laptop. He is arrested during Lisbeth’s trial.
Looking at the nature of the people on the Left and their way of doing things with the caveat “for your own good”, it is easy for me to see similarities to the evil characters above.
~~~~~
They hate you. They hate your children. “Irregular warfare” is being waged in our public schools:
Public school “experts” are trashing traditional education in virtue and citizenship in favor of victimhood and dependency. The inheritance of Western Civilization has been officially discarded by irresponsible intellectuals, determined to advance their “progressive” ideologies. These ideologies, pushing kids to discover “their own truths,” are generally varieties of “subjectivism” or “relativism.” Critical theory deliberately undercuts our natural commonsense, the shared foundation of a free society, by teaching children that their homes, communities, and even their own physiology are their worst enemies, the foes of their real identities. Ideologues do this by “reducing” our natural experience of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty to “no more than” materialistic “animal instincts” (Modernism), that then give rise to oppressive “social constructs” (Postmodernism), and, presto, an epidemic of anxiety.
They hate you. The Open Border Means Open Season on You – thanks to gov’t paid NGOs like Catholic Charities and others; thanks to Mayorkas and Democrats in need of votes who ignore what is happening.
Illegals are coming, not to assimilate but to plunder.
REPORT: Chilean gangs are taking advantage of the U.S. Visa Waiver Program and are coming to the U.S. just to burglarize luxury homes.
The U.S. Visa Waiver Program allows tourists to enter America for 90 days or less.
🚨🚨BREAKING: Colombian Gang Leader Suspected of Murder and Drug Trafficking Arrested Near San Antonio.
Aderbis Segundo Pirela Pirela, a 29 yea-old Venezuelan native is allegedly second in command for the gang Satanas was most wanted in Colombia for a slew of horrific crimes,… pic.twitter.com/rcBTAKeBwP
If you allow people from all over the world to come here by the millions in violation of our laws, you make no effort to screen them for infectious diseases and you push them into our largest population centers, you are going to see outbreaks of disease. People are going to die. The health of all Americans is going to be negatively impacted.
That’s exactly what is happening now. U.S. cases of tuberculosis, a deadly infectious disease have soared to their highest level in a decade, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). After 27 years of declining tuberculosis rates in the United States, cases of the disease started to climb again in 2020. They have continued to rise every year since.
2024. What does it mean when Americans vote for the destruction of their country? For the destruction of their own children through abortion?
If you consume what is fed from the above media outlets you may be living in a bubble the Left has created for you. You won’t see the destruction of civil society and justice within our land. You will learn, instead, to blame Trump and those on the right for problems.
The following is from a statement from Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, former Apostolic Nuncio to the United States, “on the scandalous proclamation of March 31 as ‘Transgender visibility day’ by ‘president’ Joe Biden.”
All humanity is awakening from a slumber that has lasted far too long:
-the lives of the innocent are threatened by abortion, euthanasia, manipulation, and abuse;
-the health of citizens is deliberately compromised by experimental serums revealed to be a biological weapon of population decimation;
-the total moral corruption of the top echelons of civil authority, enslaved to criminal lobbies in a global coup, is now evident;
-the increasingly arrogant display of Satan worship by the media and the world of culture and entertainment show us a world awash in execrable perversions that cry out to Heaven for vengeance;
-the mad provocation of a world conflict claims lives in order to bury the horrendous sexual and financial scandals of a power that is now the enemy of its citizens.
They hate you. The Left’s medical-pharmaceutical industry’s reign of terror:
Multiple laboratory studies now confirm that Pfizer’s COVID-19 mRNA vaccine is heavily contaminated with plasmid DNA. The latest analysis finds that one dose of the Pfizer vaccine typically contains over 200 billion DNA fragments. These DNA fragments can incorporate into the DNA of the vaccinated individual and interfere with the expression of oncogenes and tumor suppression genes. This DNA contamination has cancer implications for millions of people who were manipulated to take part in this biowarfare experiment. (Emphasis mine.)
Small chains and mom-and-pop businesses simply can’t compete. Larger chains raised prices but have also been forced to reduce employees and labor costs through automation, but the layoffs are just getting started.
If your situational awareness is well-tuned, you can put together a political weather report from the swirl of events that otherwise seem to confound the degenerate simps who pretend to report the news. Events are tending in the direction of self-reinforcing, ramifying chaos, and the people running the show are obviously insane as they do everything possible to hurry chaos along.
Politics, law, and culture collide as Newsweek Senior Editor-at-Large Josh Hammer charts a path forward for American conservatism and exposes the woke Left. A voice for the New Right, Hammer delivers blistering commentary and weekly interviews with today’s top conservative thinkers.
Easter morning me and father are down in the basement brushing shoes. We put polish on them last night with a rag father keeps with his shoe shine kit on a shelf over the washing machine. I used the rag but brown polish came through on my fingers. We polish our shoes every Sunday but I know this Sunday is Easter because we went to church on Friday and we died eggs and my mother set the dining room table and there’s a lily in the front room and ham in the refrigerator and yellow jello with something in it and plastic eggs in a basket on the kitchen table and the sun shines like this only on Easter. I woke up cold this morning. I put on clean pajamas and put the wet ones in the clothes basket. Then I went into the kitchen and ate cereal. Father woke up. He got the Sunday paper off the front porch and came into the kitchen to make coffee. He waits for me to finish eating and scratches his belly and yawns. He tells me to let mum sleep in. She works too he says. After I’m done with my cereal we go downstairs to polish our shoes. We go back upstairs and father sits at the kitchen table drinks coffee. He opens the Sunday paper and gives me the funnies. We wait for mum and my brother to wake up. They wake up. My mother has coffee and my brother eats cereal. My mother says something to father in his ear. He tells us kids to go into the front room so he and mum can talk. We go. I share the funnies with my brother. We sit there for an hour. We look out the picture window and see father walking around the bushes with a basket of plastic eggs. We know what he is doing. We run to the back door. I hold the door handle and my brother bites his nails. Father comes to the door and says there are fifteen eggs hiding in our yard. See what you can find he says. We run to the front yard and look through the bushes and behind trees and in the mail box. The grass is wet and sparkly we find eggs but there are more we run to the back yard and find more. We pull up the bottoms of our PJ tops and hold the eggs there. We count them I have eight and my brother has seven we go back inside and see what’s inside Jelly beans gum tootsie rolls mother says to have only a couple she doesn’t want us bouncing around in church she says. Father is in the kitchen peeling sweet potatoes. Mother is washing goblets. I don’t know why she calls them goblets. They are not scarry to me. Me and my brother get ready for church. The clothes feel stiff but I wear them to look nice mother says. Father combs my hair and my brother’s hair. We wait in the front room and read the funnies. Finally it is time to go. We get in the car and drive to our church. I’ve never seen so many people. Mother wants to get a seat before they are gone we sit next to my friend Jeremy’s parents I smell flowers. People are talking a lot. Mothers are telling kids to be quiet. My friend Jeremy is sitting on the other side of his parents. Hes kicking the pew in front of him. The lady in front of him with a flower hat turns around looks angry but she smiles when Jeremys mom puts a hand on Jeremys knee and makes him stop. My best friend Billy isn’t here his family doesn’t go to church. We have to stand up and sit down a lot and listen a lot the seat is hard and I can’t sit still and I can’t listen a big woman is singing a high song that hurts my ears. I want to draw. I take the pencil in front of me and a card I draw Easter eggs and the face of the big woman I show it to Jeremy and he laughs. The man up front walks back and forth and then he stops and says o death, where is thy sting o grave, where is thy victory and I think about bee stings and moms gravy. Finally he stops and we stand up again and my pencil and card fall under the seat. A man behind me picks them up and gives them to me and smiles. Everyone smiles today even the woman at the organ who made a big burp sound when the music fell. Father and mother talk and talk and talk and finally we get back into the car and go home. On the counter is a strawburry pie. Mother puts on her apron and puts the ham in the oven. Father mashes the sweet potatoes. I tell them don’t forget to put marshmallows on the sweet potatoes. Mother takes a bag off the shelf and gives me and my brother a marshmallow. She tells us to go watch TV while they make dinner. We go downstairs. I turn on the TV and only Charlie Chan is on. Finally mother calls us and we go upstairs to eat we have to wash our hands before we sit down. Mother lights two candles on our table before the food comes father prays he thanks God for the food and Jesus and empty tomb abundant life heaven and earth sea and dry land family and friends those present and not present wonders great and small and mother says amen. Finally mother brings out the ham and the sweet potatoes and something green. Everything is hot she says. When the rolls come out me and my brother grab one. My mother asks me if I washed my hands. I look at them and my fingers are brown. They smell like polish it’s shoe polish soap and water and some scrubbing will take it off father says I tell them I better eat first because scrubbing is a lot of work. The end of what we did special on Easter Mrs Meyers your student Micheal M Skokram.
Our common understanding of what Peter’s betrayal of Jesus meant. Our shared history of misery and redemption. Our interrelated human experience of being guided by truth and beauty. Each of these connections are considered by a twenty-two-year-old clerical student named Ivan Velikopolsky in the very short story The Student (1894) by Anton Chekhov.
Things start out fine for hunter Ivan on Good Friday. The weather is agreeable. But when it begins to grow dark the weather turns cold and stiff winds blow. He starts to walk home.
On the path, he feels that nature itself is “ill at ease” by the change in weather and that darkness in response is falling more quickly. He senses overwhelming isolation and unusual despair surrounding him and the village three miles away where he spots the only light – a blazing fire in the widow’s garden near the river.
As he walks, he remembers what is waiting for him at home – a miserable situation that he sees as the desperation, poverty, hunger, and oppression of what people have dealt with over time and that it’s always been this way no matter the secular changes by those who come along. He doesn’t want to go home. Instead, he walks over to the campfire at the widow’s garden.
There, by the fire, are two widows – Vasilisa and her daughter Lukerya. He greets them and they talk.
Ivan relates the gospel events to the two widows. This has an acute effect on them. As he heads home, Ivan reflects on the implications of this and has an epiphany.
“At just such a fire the Apostle Peter warmed himself,” said the student, stretching out his hands to the fire, “so it must have been cold then, too. Ah, what a terrible night it must have been, granny! An utterly dismal long night!”
. . .it was evident that what he had just been telling them about, which had happened nineteen centuries ago, had a relation to the present — to both women, to the desolate village, to himself, to all people.
He returns home with a different outlook. He sees the “same desperate poverty and hunger, the same thatched roofs with holes in them, ignorance, misery, the same desolation around, the same darkness, the same feeling of oppression” differently – with an attitude of “unknown mysterious happiness”. There’s a sense of resurrection in Ivan’s attitude as he rises out of the despondency of dark winter’s return to a new life of hope based on the human connection to enduring truth and with Easter on the horizon.
Was Ivan’s new attitude born out of the women’s reaction that signaled an age-old inherent understanding of what the betrayal of truth produces?
It seems to me that Ivan is more than just a clerical student. He’s also a student of history and cultural anthropology. And he knows scripture. He is able to see our common plight and our common redemption through the broken lives of others.
I’m not going to share any more of this gem of a very short story (2 min. read). Ivan has more to say to us from his epiphany. I recommend reading the story before listening to the audio version of it with commentary at the end.
The Student was written 130 years ago. Chekhov’s realist fiction hands to readers today one end of an unbroken chain of truth.
Will the human condition improve with Progressivism or when humans stop betraying the truth and seek what is above instead of materialism?
John Donne wrote “No man is an island entire of itself”. Certainly, no man is a context entirely of himself.
And Thomas Dubay said
The acute experience of great beauty readily evokes a nameless yearning for something more than earth can offer. Elegant splendor reawakens our spirit’s aching need for the infinite, a hunger for more than matter can provide.
“Poetically translated to “golden joinery,” kintsugi, or Kintsukuroi, is the centuries-old Japanese art of fixing broken pottery. Rather than rejoin ceramic pieces with a camouflaged adhesive, the kintsugi technique employs a special tree sap lacquer dusted with powdered gold, silver, or platinum. Once completed, beautiful seams of gold glint in the conspicuous cracks of ceramic wares, giving a one-of-a-kind appearance to each “repaired” piece.”Kintsugi, a Centuries-Old Japanese Method of Repairing Pottery with Gold (mymodernmet.com)
“The aesthetic that embraces insufficiency in terms of physical attributes, that is the aesthetic that characterizes mended ceramics, exerts an appeal to the emotions that is more powerful than formal visual qualities, at least in the tearoom. Whether or not the story of how an object came to be mended is known, the affection in which it was held is evident in its rebirth as a mended object. What are some of the emotional resonances these objects project?
“Mended ceramics foremost convey a sense of the passage of time. The vicissitudes of existence over time, to which all humans are susceptible, could not be clearer than in the breaks, the knocks, and the shattering to which ceramic ware too is subject. This poignancy or aesthetic of existence has been known in Japan as mono no aware, a compassionate sensitivity, an empathetic compassion for, or perhaps identification with, beings outside oneself. It may be perceived in the slow inexorable work of time (sabi) or in a moment of sharp demarcation between pristine or whole and shattered. In the latter case, the notion of rupture returns but with regard to immaterial qualities, the passage of time with relation to states of being. A mirage of “before” suffuses the beauty of mended objects.”
“What kind of a church would we become if we simply allowed broken people to gather, and did not try to “fix” them but simply to love and behold them, contemplating the shapes that broken pieces can inspire?” ― Makoto Fujimura, Art and Faith: A Theology of Making
“There is something else which has the power to awaken us to the truth. It is the works of writers of genius. They give us, in the guise of fiction, something equivalent to the actual density of the real, that density which life offers us every day but which we are unable to grasp because we are amusing ourselves with lies.”
Simone Weil
Last year I spent several months with the Oblonskys, the Shcherbatskys, the Karenins, the Vronskys, the Levins, and a host of others. I did this, not as a foreign exchange student living in Russia, but as a mind traveler using the “guise of fiction” by a writer of genius.
Reading the 742 pages of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1878) was a way for me to experience humanity in another time and place.
In community with them, I saw how they lived. I saw what they saw. I heard what they said and thought. I learned what transpired from what they had said, thought and done. During my time with them, I became aware of the inner personality of each person and recognized matters of love and of good and evil that are timeless.
I watched Anna change from a warm and appealing person at the beginning of my stay into a small, spiteful, and self-absorbed woman at the end – all because of her vain imaginings about love and about how the world and those around her were thought to be. With ongoing self-deception, she came to think in terms of extremes and therefore made herself believe she understood everything and everyone in totality: it’s all the same and life was a Darwinian struggle for survival.
Looking back at my time with Anna, I see her narcissism, a personality disorder impacting many today, as a shrunken one-size-fits-me “temporal bandwidth” (see below). I learned a lesson from her toxic attitude: life is not about me.
Stiva, Anna’s hedonist brother, was consistently evil in an absence-of-good way. He forgets, neglects, and fails to act. He’s put his own household into chaos. He lives entirely in the present without regard for the effect he has on his family and future generations.
Dolly, Stivas’s wife, was a consistently good woman who showed self-giving love. She raised children married to such a husband.
Konstantin Dmitrievich Levin, over time, matured. He came to understand love as he watched his wife Kitty. And I witnessed Levin’s spiritual journey to faith in God.
A similar mind traveler experience occurred when I spent months in Russia with The Brothers Karamazov – Dmitri, Ivan and Alexei and their father Fyodor Pavlovich and his illegitimate son, Pavel Fyodorovich Smerdyakov. Agrafena Alexandrovna Svetlova, Katerina Ivanovna Verkhovtseva, Ilyusha, and Father Zosima, the Elder also lived nearby. Quite a cast of characters when you get to know them and quite a legacy of behavior and thought they provide.
In Chekhov’s world of short stories, I shared in the experiences of many. I laughed, cried and saw myself in the everydayness of those I met along the way.
Why read 1800s novels Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazovand learn about people with weird names when I could have spent that time watching Yellowstone and taking in a C&W vibe? Why did I read Love in the Time of Cholera when I could have watchedanother car chase scene or another mindless comedy? Why did I read Death in the Andes when I could have watched a detective series. Why did I read My Antonia or Heart of Darkness or King Lear, for that matter, when I could have been on social media amusing myself? Why did I read anything outside my context as a Christian? Isn’t there some self-help personal growth book that will give a perspective on the world so I don’t have to venture out of a theological “safe space”?
I’ll give an answer a foreign exchange student would give for wanting an out-of-context experience:
“To interact with people from different cultures and to gain a deeper appreciation of their values, beliefs, and customs. To become more empathetic and understanding toward others, even those who are very different from me. To gain a better understanding of the diverse world we live in and develop a more open-minded perspective.”
Why read great literature from the past?
To rewire my brain from a competitive judgmental either/or reactionary mindset to a more deliberative way of thinking. To train my brain to think before leaping to conclusions. To employ such reading as a dopamine-hit buffer.
To gain the wisdom of those before me.
To grow faith and love. Imagination is required for faith. Imagination is cultivated by reading the unknown. Reading requires attentiveness. Love is attentiveness
To keep in mind that the prodigal son went looking for the Now thinking that anything could be better than what came before. He found the Now and it affirmed him to be a hungry desperate slave who longed to be fed what he fed the pigs (Luke 15:11-32).
To see another point of view and how it was arrived at.
To be a humanities archeologist. Everything came before Now. And up until broadcast media came around, all we had were the lines of others – words, music, and art.
To not be a reed in the wind. To cultivate “Temporal bandwidth” – “temporal bandwidth is “the width of your present, your now … The more you dwell in the past and future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are.”” – Alan Jacobs, To survive our high-speed society, cultivate ‘temporal bandwidth’
To not live as a presentist, as someone whose temporal bandwidth has narrowed to the instant something is posted on social media.
To imagine the future using what I learned from the past. For example, I read Solzhenitsyn to understand what it’s like to live under communism.
(If your temporal bandwidth is expanded even somewhat and you are not “amusing yourself with lies”, you see what was plotted before happening now. Joe Biden, along with abetting Globalist Progressives, is implementing the Cloward-Piven Strategy first developed in 1966. That strategy seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by swarming the country with mass migration, overloading the government bureaucracy, creating a crushing national debt, have chaos ensue, take control in the chaos, and implement Socialism and Communism through Government Force.
To wit, beside the ongoing invasion of the U.S., our nation is incurring massive debt. There is the ongoing silencing of dissent by the DOJ, FBI, and social media cohorts. There is a push to impose digital IDs and digital currency along with WHO oversight to control us. The misanthropic handling of our lives should be a clarion signal to you that communist totalitarianism is coming!)
Books are safe spaces. But if you believe that words are violence (Toni Morrison in her Nobel prize address: “Oppressive language does more than represent violence. It is violence”) then you’ll stay in your “safe place” and refuse to be “breaking bread with the dead” (or listen to opposing views) where one can be an interlocuter and ask why and not just assume things and express rage.
I see going to a “safe space” as the closing in of one’s “temporal bandwidth” much like what Anna Karenina did. It has the exact opposite of a fortifying effect as one is made tenuous, anxious, and very susceptible to narcissism and Groupthink. (Ironically, that is also the effect of DEI.)
Here are two quotes from someone who championed the idea of Great Books, Allan Bloom that apply to what’s been said:
The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities, that makes it seem inconceivable that other ways are viable, that removes the sense that there is an outside.
The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency – the belief that the here and now is all there is.
Why read the realist fiction of writers such as Solzhenitsyn, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and others? To break bread with the dead and step out of my context into the lines of others.
Alan Jacobs, the Distinguished Professor of Humanities in the Honors Program at Baylor University and Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture encourages what I call “mind travel” to the past in his book Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Readers Guide for a More Tranquil Mind.
W. H. Auden once wrote that “art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.” In his brilliant and compulsively readable new treatise, Breaking Bread with the Dead, Alan Jacobs shows us that engaging with the strange and wonderful writings of the past might help us live less anxiously in the present—and increase what Thomas Pynchon once called our “personal density.”
Today we are battling too much information in a society changing at lightning speed, with algorithms aimed at shaping our every thought—plus a sense that history offers no resources, only impediments to overcome or ignore. The modern solution to our problems is to surround ourselves only with what we know and what brings us instant comfort. Jacobs’s answer is the opposite: to be in conversation with, and challenged by, those from the past who can tell us what we never thought we needed to know.
. . .
By hearing the voices of the past, we can expand our consciousness, our sympathies, and our wisdom far beyond what our present moment can offer.
. . . benefit of reflecting on the past is awareness of the ways that actions in one moment reverberate into the future. You see that some decisions that seemed trivial when they were made proved immensely important, while others which seemed world-transforming quickly sank into insignificance. The “tenuous” self, sensitive only to the needs of This Instant, always believes – often incorrectly – that the present is infinitely consequential.
The title of this post is a reference to the 2006 movie The Lives of Others. The plot involves the 1984 monitoring of East Berlin residents by Stasi agents of the East German Democratic Republic (GDR).
Stasi Captain Gerd Wiesler is told to conduct surveillance on playwright George Dreyman and his girlfriend, actress Christa-Maria Sieland. As Wiesler listens in from his attic post, he finds himself becoming increasingly absorbed by their lives. You’ll have to watch the movie to see if he is changed by listening to the lives and lines of others and becomes a “good man”.
~~~~~
Of course, the lines of others must include classical music, a rich and diverse soundscape. The soundscape of Now is constant noise.
Cherie Harder speaks with Alan Jacobs about the benefits of reading old books. Jacobs makes the compelling claim–using a phrase from Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow–that spending our time and attention on writers from the past can increase our “personal density.”
Gary Saul Morson, a Dostoyevsky scholar, writes in a Plough article about Fyodor Dostoevsky and introduces a graphic novel adaptation of “The Grand Inquisitor” from The Brothers Karamazov.
Here is an excerpt:
In Dostoyevsky’s time, numerous schools of thought, ranging from English utilitarianism to Russian populism and socialism, maintained that they had discovered the indubitable solution to moral and social questions.
This way of thinking appalled Dostoyevsky. With his profound grasp of psychology, he regarded the materialists’ view of human nature as hopelessly simplistic. Deeply suspicious of what intellectuals would do if they ever gained the power they sought, he described in greater detail than any other nineteenth-century thinker what we have come to call totalitarianism. Even in its less terrifying forms, rule by supposedly benevolent experts was, he thought, more dangerous than people understood.
. . .
For Dostoyevsky, the Christian view of life, which most intellectuals regarded as primitive, offered a far more sophisticated understanding than materialist alternatives. . .. he regarded it as a profound mistake to rely only on technological solutions to social problems, a perspective that, if anything, needs to be challenged all the more strongly today. Man does not live by iPhone alone.
Why does it feel like everything has been going haywire since the early 2010s, and what role does digital technology play in causing this social and epistemic chaos?
A recommendation: NO smartphones for your children until at least 16 years of age. They can use a simple flip phone till then.
New book:
The Anxious Generation: HOW THE GREAT REWIRING OF CHILDHOOD IS CAUSING AN EPIDEMIC OF MENTAL ILLNESS by Jonathan HaidtHOW THE GREAT REWIRING OF CHILDHOOD IS CAUSING AN EPIDEMIC OF MENTAL ILLNESS
On a cold and damp March afternoon, Maeve met with funeral director Finn Joyce to discuss final arrangements. The appointment was set up after she responded to a mailer asking if it “would give you peace of mind to plan in advance so that your family would not have to make the arrangements themselves” and after reading an article about “Unexpected Deaths in The US Are Rising at an Alarming Rate.”
Director Finn, a tall thin man with dark auburn hair, pale skin, soft hands and a whisky voice, greeted Maeve and showed her to the Arrangement Room. There, he offered her coffee and water.
Finn began their conversation by pointing to a photograph on his desk: “My wife Fiona and I have lived in the area and have operated this funeral home for twenty-five years. Fiona works with families of the deceased to arrange details of the funeral and the obituary wording. She also does the makeup and . . .”
Maeve broke in. “I was here for Eileen Delaney’s funeral. She was a friend of mine.”
“By the number who attended the funeral, she was well-loved. How long had you known her?”
“We worked together at the Evercrest Nursing Home for some thirty-five years.”
“I know the place. I been called there many times. Do you still work there?”
“Yes. I’ve taken over Eileen’s responsibilities.”
“Ah, well then, maybe I’ll see you there. My wife helped Eileen’s husband with the funeral arrangements and wrote the obituary with the help of her husband and family. We have a list of services that we can offer you and we can talk about your last wishes.” He handed her a brochure.
“We prepare obituaries, arrange clergy services and pallbearers, coordinate with the cemetery or crematory . . .” Finn stopped when he saw that Maeve wasn’t paying attention. She was looking over his shoulder at something on the wall.
“That watercolor. I know it.” Maeve said.
Finn turned around. “My wife bought it at an art show here in town. I love how the light filters through the trees.”
“That’s Summer at Blossom Grove.”
“You know the artist?” Finn got up from his chair and looked at the corner of the painting. “You know M. Monahan? Wait. Is that you?” He looked at the application on his desk. “Well Maeve, you’re quite an artist.”
Maeve blushed. “I painted the same scene at four times of the year. I wanted to show the greening and flowering and the fading and falling of leaves and the limbs in winter.”
“You know, Maeve, people have brought watercolor portraits of the deceased to the wakes here. The portraits are a beautiful memorial. They have a graceful ethereal quality to them. I provide an easel next to the casket for the portrait.”
“I paint them. I paint portraits of the people in the home. When they pass, I give the portrait to the family. I got the idea when I attended my Irish grandfather’s funeral. Family and friends came to look at his dead body the night before he was buried. They drank and shared stories about his life. When a person dies at the home, the funeral home is called and the deceased is abruptly taken away. With my portraits, I give the family a corporeal reminder so they can share stories about the person’s life.”
“The portraits are well done. You’ve must have been doing this for a long time.”
“Thank you. Yes. I started as an oil painter years ago when I worked as an ER nurse. I wanted to depict the actual strangeness of the real world I encountered every day with surrealism, in a Frida Kahlo kind of way. But over time, the work and my life were becoming too dark. So, I decided to make a change and work in a nursing home where there is a less tragic and more of a long-suffering realism. And, that’s when I became a watercolor portraitist. I like the medium. Watercolors have a life and a flow of their own when you brush them on the paper. You let go and see what happens. They are kind of unruly to a certain degree as are the subjects I paint.”
“From the comments I overhear at the wake, you certainly capture the essence of the person,” Finn remarked.
He went on to explain his services and then invited Maeve to the display room where several different caskets were showcased. He then showed her the Reposing Room where the prepared body rests until the funeral takes place. He went on to show her a Reception Room where memorial services are held.
“There will be a wake in this room tomorrow. A tragic story,” Finn shared. “A 46-year-old man – a husband and father and founder of an investment firm – was killed in a car-jacking. The newspaper said the killer got away.”
“How terrible. The sudden loss of a husband and father must be devastating for that family.”
“Yes, it has been. I met with his wife this morning. She is having a hard time . . . How does one reckon with the out-of-the-blue senselessness of what happened?”
At that moment, Fiona walked up and introduced herself to Maeve. She recognized Maeve from the art show and praised her work. She then mentioned to Finn that a call had come in. She gave him the name and location.
“I’ll walk you to the door,” Finn said. “Feel free to call if there are any questions. Maeve offered her hand. Finn took her hand and put his hand on hers.
“Sorry to share that with you. I am deeply saddened by what happened. After all my years as a mortician, I have never become accustomed to such unforeseen tragedy. And, sadly, there will be no watercolor portrait to place by the casket tomorrow.”
Maeve nodded her understanding and then thanked Finn and went on her way.
~~~
The next morning, after working a night shift at Evercrest and then making a stop, Maeve drove home to Valley Mobile Home Park and found two cars parked out front of her mobile home. She parked next to her trailer, grabbed the mail from the mail box, and then ran to the door and walked in. Sitting at the kitchen table were her younger sisters Molly and Morren and her niece Maisie. Duffy, Molly’s Pomeranian, began barking wildly when she walked in. Maeve put her purse and the mail on the counter and looked at all three.
“Who died and why is Duffy carrying on like that?” Maeve asked, taking off her rain coat. The three women sitting before her reminded her of nesting dolls – Molly the largest of the three and Maisie the smallest.
“Duffy doesn’t like that black cross running down your face.” Molly replied.
“It’s raining.” Maeve grabbed a napkin form the table and began dabbing her face.
“And Duffy doesn’t like that guy next store.” Morren added.
“My neighbor?” Maeve asked. “Why? What’s wrong with him?”
“He’s a disgusting creature, Molly blurted. “Those tattoos, that yellow skin, his scarred-up face and watery eyes. He looks like a carny who runs the Tilt-A -Whirl. He was out in front of his trailer and gave us a nasty look when we got out of the car.”
“Well,” Maeve asked the group, “was Duffy barking at him and did you give him a nasty look when you saw him?”
Molly sighed loudly. The other two just looked at their hands.
“I don’t know him, “Maeve said. “He stays to himself. There’s something sad about the guy – like he’s had a hard time of it.”
“Maybe so. He is what he is,” remarked Morren.
“We’re here to check on you,” Molly declared.
“Check on me?” Maeve laughed. She poured coffee for herself and the others and sat down.
“Yeah, Moreen and I are wondering why you’ve been so quiet lately.”
“I’ve had things on my mind. Last things things. Do something about Duffy.” Maeve replied.
Molly had Duffy come up on her lap.
“Is that why you went to church this morning?” Morren asked.
Maeve looked at the three of them. “I thought I should become a familiar face around there. I want to be recognized by the gate keepers when I go the way of all the earth.”
“I see that you’ve been reading the obits,” Molly held up the open newspaper.
“My co-worker Eileen died suddenly. Cardiac arrest. I wanted to see what they wrote about her,” replied Maeve.
Molly looked through the obit page. “Let’s see what it says . . .
“Eileen Delaney passed away on . . . at her home aged 68. She will be greatly missed by her family who adored her, friends who loved her, and many people whose lives she impacted in such a beautiful way at Evercrest Nursing Home. Eileen was along-time member of such and such Church. Eileen was born . . . married William Patrick Delaney. . . celebrated a beautiful 42-year marriage. Bill passed away . . . Eileen greatly missed him. She and Bill had many adventures together . . . traveling to Europe and Caribbean and Alaskan cruises. Ballroom dancing and hiking were their favorite pastimes.They are survived by two children . . . three grandchildren. Sadly missed by brothers . . . brothers-in-law, sisters-in-law, aunts, uncles, cousins, nephews, nieces, relatives and a wide circle of friends. Eileen stayed active throughout her life . . . she was a member of the American Needlepoint Guild. Eileen Delaney’s’ family invites you to join them in celebrating her life. Please attend with your best Eileen stories. The funeral service and burial will be held . . .
“How long have you been working at that nursing home,” Morren asked Maeve.
“About thirty-five years. Since the divorce.”
“Maeve, you could’ve gone on to get your doctorate in nursing like me,” Molly said. “Then you could write papers, have them peer reviewed, and published in journals. You would be recognized for your work, make better money, and move out of this trailer park.”
“Recognized?” Maeve replied. “I see myself doing what I’m doing. I don’t see myself doing anything else or living anywhere else.”
“Maybe not. But do you hate life? Morren badgered. “I mean, c’mon, you haven’t remarried and you haven’t gone anywhere and now you’re thinking about death. What about life?”
Maisie spoke up. “Aunt Maeve, do you have a bucket list?”
“A bucket list?” Maeve got up and walked over to the kitchen window and looked out. She was surprised to see her neighbor looking back at her from his kitchen window. How strange, she thought.
“Yeah, you know, things you want to do before you die.” Molly said.
“I had an appointment with a funeral director yesterday to talk about funeral arrangements,” Maeve pointed at her sisters, “so you two won’t have to bother with them – and I have an appointment with Father Flannery tomorrow after work to talk about the art of dying.” Maeve took the Joyce Funeral Home brochure out of her purse and placed it on the table.
“What brought on all this morbidity Maeve?” Molly prodded. “Is it because you are with the dying five six days a week? What about living a little?”
“It’s not morbid to plan one’s death. And besides,” Maeve smiled, “I am thinking outside the box.”
“Not too would be a grave mistake,” Molly came back.
“The funeral director blamed the cost of living as driving up the cost of dying. He said I could pay now or pay later with a payable-on-death bank account accessed by my family.” Maeve sat down and waited for a reaction.
Morren looked at Molly and then at Maisie. She wasn’t sure if that was a joke.
Maisie laughed. “Now I know where I get my weird sense of humor. Aunt Maeve, I meant doing things like travel. You could. . . go see the world, see the pyramids.”
“You want me to go look at tombs? No, thanks. And no, I don’t have a list like that.”
“You could go to Barcelona or Rome and meet some dashing foreigner and be swept off your feet.” Molly urged.
“You know,” Maeve replied. “I listen to the stories of seniors in the home. Their stories are better than romance novels and what’s on TV. The things they’ve seen and done . . . you’d be surprised.”
“I just want to see you broaden your horizons,” Morren pleaded. “You have work. You have a hobby. But with all that that the world has to offer, why not live a little.”
Molly looked at her watch. “Well, Maevy, we came to check on you. My TV program starts in twenty minutes. We better get going. If you suddenly decide to take off to parts unknown let us know.”
Maeve picked up the coffee cups and put them in the sink. She saw her neighbor again standing in the window. But this time he had a gun in his mouth. Maeve yelled “Oh God!” and ran out the door. Molly, Morren and Maisie ran to the kitchen window.
“What’s that creature doing?” Molly scoffed. “If he offed himself there would be one less freak in the world.”
“What’s aunt Maeve doing?” asked Maisie.
Maeve was standing in the rain between the two mobile homes in her blue nurse scrubs. She was saying something to her neighbor but his window was closed. He kept shaking his head. Maeve pleaded with him, “Open your window! Open your window!” Finally, with one hand, he pulled up the kitchen window.
“Talk to me, “Maeve begged, “I’m listening.”
The man took a swig of something and then wiped his mouth with his arm.
“Lady, my best girl died in January been together for fifteen years she was on dialysis my dog Biscuit hell I think some of those mean kids around here ran off with her I lost my job at the steel mill I’m about to lose my trailer.” The man held up a piece of paper. “I find myself in the impossible position of being who I am right here and now.”
“I’m listening,” Maeve replied.
“What are you looking at?” The man jerked his head angrily toward Maeve’s kitchen window where Molly, Morren and Maisie were watching. He waved his gun at the window and the three women disappeared from it. Molly called the police.
“I’m here . . . for you,” Maeve pleaded with her neighbor. “I don’t know your name. What’s your name?
“Esau.”
“Esau, don’t die like this.”
“Is there a better way to go about it?
“You could die holding someone’s hand. Can I call Father Flannery?”
“What’s he gonna do throw holy water on me and make it all better hell I was baptized as a little tiny baby and look at me now I done some stupid things in my life but I paid all my debts I am good people labeled not good enough to attend my own daughter’s wedding can you picture that?
“Yes! I can paint you,” Maeve offered.
Esau laughed. “Paint me?”
“Yes. I paint portraits.”
“Lady don’t you see I’m already painted.” The man pulled off his tee shirt. “My cross hain’t bleeding like yours is I got this in Nam.” The man pointed the gun at the cross tattoo. “I got a lot of things in Nam that’ll change a man forever.” He put the gun back in his mouth.
Maeve dabbed her face with her sleeve. Overhead, the sky was growing darker. A sudden crack of thunder and its rumbling off had Duffy howling. Large drops of rain were falling.
“I’ll paint a portrait of you, right now Esau. So your children can remember you.” Maeve said this to buy more time.
“Lady, they want nothing to do with me.” Esau scowled.
“They never will if you shoot yourself,” Maeve replied.
He took another swig from the bottle. “You’ll stand in the rain and you’ll paint me?”
“Yes! Or inside if you’ll let me in.” Maeve replied. “Do you have family?”
“Yessss I havvvvve family,” the man howled. “My best girl has family but you know NO ONE wants to see you until you’re dead.” He put the gun back in his mouth.
“I can call them. Hold on. I can paint your portrait for them. Hold on Esau,” Maeve yelled. “I’ll get my phone and paints.”
As Maeve turned to run back inside, she heard a loud pop. Esau was gone from the window.
“We have entered, as I see it, a spiritual limbo. Our educational institutions are no longer the bearers of high culture, and public life has been deliberately moronised. But here and there, sheltered from the noise and glare of the media, the old spiritual forces are at work” Roger Scruton
*****
“When a common culture declines, the ethical life can be sustained and renewed only by a work of the imagination.”-Roger Scruton
*****
“Jesus prayed, “This is eternal life, that they may know You . . .” (John 17:3). The real meaning of eternal life is a life that can face anything it has to face without wavering. If we will take this view, life will become one great romance— a glorious opportunity of seeing wonderful things all the time. God is disciplining us to get us into this central place of power.” Oswald Chambers
*****
“No power on earth or in hell can conquer the Spirit of God in a human spirit, it is an inner unconquerableness.” Oswald Chambers
*****
To those who have had no agony Jesus says, “I have nothing for you; stand on your own feet, square your own shoulders. I have come for the man who knows he has a bigger handful than he can cope with, who knows there are forces he cannot touch; I will do everything for him if he will let Me. Only let a man grant he needs it, and I will do it for him.” The Shadow of an Agony,Oswald Chambers
*****
“If we wish to erect new structures, we must have a definite knowledge of the old foundations.” John Calvin Coolidge
*****
Atheism is a post-Christian phenomenon.
*****
If social justice looks like your hand in someone else’s pocket then you are stealing.
*****
“In Sweden, giving to charity, absurdly, came to be considered a lack of solidarity, since it undermined the need for the welfare state.” – Roland Martinsson
*****
“…to love democracy well, it is necessary to love it moderately.” Alexis de Tocqueville
*****
Capitalism seeks to help others through a servce or product it provides. Free Market Capitalism is the most moral and fair economic system available to man. Capitalism augments personal growth, responsibility and ownership. Charity flourishes under capitalism. Charity dies under subjective “fair share” government confiscatory policies. Socialism redistributes ambivalence and greed.
*****
“We are to regard existence as a raid or great adventure; it is to be judged, therefore, not by what calamities it encounters, but by what flag it follows and what high town it assaults. The most dangerous thing in the world is to be alive; one is always in danger of one’s life. But anyone who shrinks from that is a traitor to the great scheme and experiment of being.” G.K. Chesterton
*****
Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent.
It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in the opposite direction. Albert Einstein
*****
“You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.” Flannery O’Connor
*****
“There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.” C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce
*****
“Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him” (Job 13:15).
*****
God’s grace is not about the allowance for sin. God’s grace is about the conversation God allows regarding sin.
*****
From the book of Proverbs: We are not to favor the rich or the poor. We are to pursue justice.
*****
“Always keep in contact with those books and those people that enlarge your horizon and make it possible for you to stretch yourself mentally.” Oswald Chambers
*****
One goldfish says to another, “If there is no God who keeps changing the water?”
*****
“The truth is always there in the morning.”
From Cat On A Hot Tin Roof script – playwright Tennessee Williams
*****
God blesses those who hunger and thirst for justice, for they will be satisfied.
*****
“America’s greatness has been the greatness of a free people who shared certain moral commitments. Freedom without moral commitment is aimless and promptly self-destructive.” John W. Gardner
**
“Men of integrity, by their very existence, rekindle the belief that as a people we can live above the level of moral squalor. We need that belief; a cynical community is a corrupt community.” John W. Gardner
*****
“In the world it is called Tolerance, but in hell it is called Despair, the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and remains alive because there is nothing for which it will die.” Dorothy L. Sayers
*****
“Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.”
G. K. Chesterton
*****
“The battle line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.” Alexander Solzhenitsyn
*****
This is what the LORD says:
“Stand at the crossroads and look;
ask for the ancient paths,
ask where the good way is, and walk in it,
and you will find rest for your souls.
But you said, ‘We will not walk in it.’
-The prophet Jeremiah, 6:16
*****
“…our common task is not so much discovering a truth hiding among contrary viewpoints as it is coming to possess a selfhood that no longer evades and eludes the truth with which it is importunately confronted.” James McClendon, Ethics: Systematic Theology, Vol. 1
*****
Cindy Wity 
The Disconnected Ones
May 5, 2024 Leave a comment
From parents pampering their progeny (Indulging “I-Me-Mine”) to priests and pastors preaching Progressivism (‘Inspired’ “I-Me-Mine”) to professors promulgating political propaganda (Ideological “I-Me-Mine” & Illiteracy) to the phenomenon of ‘political correctness’ (Ideological Conformity & Indulgent Illiberalism) to policies promoting pseudo pronouns (Indulgent Illusions of “I-Me-Mine”) to protestors pronouncing “Death to Israel” and “Death to America” (Indulgent Intifada), the Left’s Long Maoist/Marxist/ Marcusean March through institutions has left a trail strewn with social pathologies and pogroms. Ptooey!
The humorless Left, a product of its own Polarizing and Infantilizing Process, is self-absorbed but not self-examining. The Left refuses to learn from anything outside itself including history to account for its own dysfunctional and belligerent ways. If it did, it would turn from its deceptions – the filtering mindsets of victim-oppressor and of passion as morality – and it wouldn’t continue the Long March, inchoate, with those who have been patently processed like themselves to destroy whatever is in its path including “Democracy!”
Today’s products of the Polarizing and Infantilizing Process, disconnected from history and reality and preoccupied with self, are working diligently to take down Western civilization and its Judeo-Christian foundation. In its place they want to build sand castles, imagined communist and Islamic utopias, from the river to the sea.
Yet, as history has recorded as happening under all preceding totalitarian impulses, the season of indulging one’s passions and the rush to violence will soon pass. The revolutionary impulse inevitably turns inward, as the “I-Me-Mine” of the leaders begins to indulgently purge all dissent including thought crimes in order to impose mindless uniformity. Thus, the season of torture, torment, and tedium begins for the disconnected ones.
~~~~~
Retired prison psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple (pen name for Anthony Daniels) speaks and writes with keen insight gathered from his experience of the human condition and of its surrounding culture.
Having read several of his books, I recommend two books to start with:
Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass (Start with this book. It will change how you look at the world.)
Admirable Evasions: How Psychology Undermines Morality
Here’s Theodore Dalrymple’s address at the London National Conservatism Conference on May 15, 2023.
Theodore Dalrymple | Historiography and the State of the Western Mind | NatCon UK (youtube.com)
~~~
The New Criterion’s Roger Kimball takes the audience through a history of America’s cultural revolution of the 1960’s and its effects on American politics and culture today.
The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960’s Changed America by Roger Kimball (youtube.com)
~~~
Per Italian communist Antonio [ Gramsci] “If the Left truly wanted to win, it needed to first seize the “cultural means of production”: the culture-forming institutions such as the media and universities and even churches. He saw societal transformation coming about by a “march through the institutions.” …
“Gramsci insisted that leftist intellectuals needed to question everything, including moral absolutes and the Judeo-Christian basis of Western civilization. They needed to frame seemingly benign conventions as systematic injustices that must be exposed. This is where we got professors fulminating against everything from “the patriarchy” to “white imperialism” to “transphobia.””
Marx at 200: Cultural Marxism’s Long Happy March Through the Institutions
Expand your temporal bandwidth . . .
“The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency — the belief that the here and now is all there is.”
― Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind
. . . because . . .
“We live in an age of full spectrum deception.” — Edward Dowd
Why I read novels . . .
“The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything. When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. The totalitarian world, whether founded on Marx, Islam, or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions. There, the novel has no place.”
― Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
~~~~~
The Way I Heard It, Mike Rowe podcast:
382: Individualism Rightly Understood with Scott Mann 1:19:03
The former U.S. Army Green Beret, NYT bestselling author, leadership consultant, and perennial storyteller talks about the division and tribal behavior that permeates our country now, the death of honor, shame, and consequence, and why Alexis de Tocqueville was right when he observed that America succeeds because she puts the individual ahead of the collective. You can preorder Scott’s newest book here.
Podcast – Mike Rowe
LAST OUT (lastoutplay.com)
~~~~~
Controlled Opposition
The growing list of the controlled opposition’s shaming screeds promoted on MSNBC to influence voters by making them feel morally superior if they don’t vote for Trump:
Tim Alberta and The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism, published December 5, 2023
Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman with White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy published on February 27, 2024
Jim Wallis: The False White Gospel: Rejecting Christian Nationalism, Reclaiming True Faith, and Refounding Democracy, published April 2, 2024
Apparently, the only way to be a Christian is to be a Democrat like the author/s and to vote for all of the things that your faith disagrees with and for the continued destruction of our country. Got it.
“Teacher,” said John, “we saw someone driving out demons in your name and we told him to stop, because he was not one of us.”
“Do not stop him,” Jesus said. “For no one who does a miracle in my name can in the next moment say anything bad about me, for whoever is not against us is for us. Truly I tell you, anyone who gives you a cup of water in my name because you belong to the Messiah will certainly not lose their reward.
Mark 9:38-41
Apparently, there are people who are very ‘concerned’ about Trump being associated with Jesus because Trump “was not one of us.”
~~~~~
You realize, don’t you, that what’s going on in our country is the collapse not just of an empire, or an economy, but a comprehensive paradigm of human progress. The hallmark of post-war life in Western Civ was supposed to be a return to sanity after the mid-twentieth century fugue of mass psychotic violence. The wish for just and rational order was not entirely pretense. But that was then. Now that we are going medieval on ourselves, the not-so-ironic result will be our literally going medieval, sinking back into a pre-modern existence of darkness, superstition, and penury, grubbing for a mere subsistence in the shadow of scuffling hobgoblins, our achievements lost and forgotten. . .
The source of anguish in all that is the struggle to understand why they [the “governing apparatus”] would want that to happen. What debauched sense of history would drive anyone to such lunatic desperation? It’s a cliché now to say that the Democratic Party has turned its traditional moral scaffold upside down and inside out. It acts against the kitchen table interests of the working and middle classes. It’s against civil liberties. It demands mental obedience to patently insane policy. It’s avid for war, no matter how cruelly pointless. It’s deliberately stirring up racial hatred. It despises personal privacy. It feeds a rogue bureaucracy that has become a veritable Moloch, an all-devouring malevolent deity. And now, rather suddenly, it aligns itself with a faction that seeks to exterminate the Jews.
James Howard Kunstler at https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/pep-talk-on-a-dark-day/
~~~~~
As of 5-5-2024, we are 22 days away (May 27th) from the WHO approving One Health One World control of countries and of our health and freedom.
Find out more and how to act>>>
Exit the WHO, Take 2! – STAND FOR HEALTH FREEDOM
WHO and global health update – STAND FOR HEALTH FREEDOM
49 Republican Senators REJECT Pandemic Treaty From WHO | WLT Report
~~~~~
Citizen Free Press on X: “Babylon Bee presents Woke Jesus. This is really well done. https://t.co/RWA5KYMp5o” / X (twitter.com)
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Filed under 2024 Current Events, cultural Marxism, Culture, Israel, Political Commentary, Progressivism, social commentary, totalitarianism Tagged with antisemitism, culture, Gaza, history, Israel, Marcuse, Marxism, Palestine, philosophy, politics, progressivism, WHO