The Little Red Blog

Bluster & Bravado 2024

{This commentary is belated, and the presidential race has changed, but what difference, at this point, does it make? I foolishly ventured into the CNN transcript of the Biden v. Trump debate; I warn you, do not go there. It should be labeled ‘Abandon hope, all ye who enter.’ I know this is a painfully long read but imagine how painful it was for me to write it.}

“I never knew a man could tell so many lies.” (Neil Young, “Ambulance Blues”)

Consider this a Public Service Announcement: adjectives are not facts, bluster and bravado are not evidence. ¹

I make this announcement because a substantial number of Americans are enthralled, it seems, by the alleged accomplishments of a man whose actual accomplishments are all but nil. This man—let us call him “Klump”—praises himself to the skies while heaping abuse on his opponents. That in itself is neither novel nor noteworthy, but what is striking about Klump is that his self-praise is a litany, not of facts, but of adjectives. If you removed descriptors from his statements—words like “best,” “worst,” “greatest,” “beautiful,” “powerful,” “strong,” “weak,” etc.—you would find no evidence, no statistics, nary a fact in sight: nothing but a thesaurus’s worth of meaningless adjectives attached to unproven assertions. “I have all the best words.”

How did the American economy do under President Klump? “We had the greatest economy in the history of our country. We had never done so well. Every – everybody was amazed by it. Other countries were copying us. We did a great job. We got a lot of credit for the economy, a lot of credit for the military, and no wars and so many other things. Everything was rocking good. It was the greatest economy that we’ve ever seen.”

Foreign policy? “What’s happened to our country in the last four years is not to be believed. Foreign countries – I’m friends with a lot of people. They cannot believe what happened to the United States of America. We’re no longer respected. They don’t like us. We give them everything they want, and they – they think we’re stupid. They think we’re very stupid people. What we’re doing for other countries, and they do nothing for us. What this man has done is absolutely criminal.”

Border security? “We had the safest border in the history of our country. Now we have the worst border in history. There’s never been anything like it. And people are dying all over the place, including the people that are coming up in caravans.”

Since Klump belittles, mocks, and lies about anyone who stands against him, his “successes” seem that much greater. Under Obama, for instance, America was a “disaster,” struggling through the “weakest economic recovery” in its history. Crime was rampant, the border was porous, terrorists were everywhere (including on the roof of a building in New Jersey on 9/11), America’s infrastructure was crumbling, the airports were at a third-world level, and the military was out of ammunition (“Sir, we have no bullets.”).

Magically, Klump turned it all around. He secured the border (“the safest border in our history”), he rebuilt the military (“I made our military the strongest in history”), he cowed our enemies (and, when necessary, our friends)—"If we had a real president, a president that was respected by Putin, he would have never – he would have never invaded Ukraine. Russia would’ve never attacked if I were president.” Imagine the very stable genius required to undo the disaster that was Obama’s America and to restore the nation to greatness—in three years! “The country was going like never before.” Alas, now “we’re like a third world nation,” just as we were under Obama. Apparently, Klump’s successes, impressive as they were, were not sturdy enough to withstand the assaults of the Biden regime.

Klump is and always has been a publicist, inflating his net worth (except when it’s time to pay taxes) and exaggerating the grandeur of his properties, while wiping the public slate clean of his many failures (Klump University, Klump Steaks, several bankruptcies, failed marriages, etc.). “I’ve been a success at everything I’ve ever done,” insists the man who managed to lose money running a casino in Atlantic City. The key to understanding Klump is the “Principle of Persistent Prevarication”: if you just keep lying, repeating the same lies over and over again while adding new lies on top of the old, many people will come up to you and say, with tears in their eyes, “Sir, you are the only politician who tells us the truth.”  

His mentality is Manichaean: black and white. He is the best; his opponents are the worst. His policies are the greatest; their policies are taking us down the drain. America is either great (again) like it’s never been before (again) or it’s a disaster, a third-world country (“We’re literally an uncivilized country now”). There is no middle ground, no shades of gray in his rhetoric. Nuance is beyond him. He speaks exclusively in world-historic terms: there’s never been anything like it, no one’s ever seen anything like it, people are amazed we could do it, people can’t believe how bad it’s gotten, best in our history, worst in our history, worst in the history of the world. “Nobody’s been worse than him. I had the highest approval rating. The secretary general of NATO said I did the most incredible job he had ever seen.”

Capable of reasoned criticism? “Biden’s presidency, his – without question, the worst president, the worst presidency in the history of our country. He’s become like a Palestinian. But they don’t like him, because he’s a very bad Palestinian. He’s a weak one…He is the worst president. He’s the worst president in the history of our country. He’s destroyed our country. If he wins this election, our country doesn’t have a chance. Not even a chance of coming out of this rut. We probably won’t have a country left anymore. That’s how bad it is. He is the worst in history by far.”

Able to engage in serious policy analysis? “Biden caused the inflation and it’s killing black families and Hispanic families and just about everybody. It’s killing people. They can’t buy groceries anymore. They can’t. You look at the cost of food where it’s doubled and tripled and quadrupled. They can’t live. They’re not living anymore. He caused this inflation. I gave him a country with no, essentially no inflation. It was perfect. It was so good. All he had to do is leave it alone. He destroyed it with his green new scam and all of the other – all this money that’s being thrown out the window. He caused inflation. As sure as you’re sitting there, the fact is that his big kill on the black people is the millions of people that he’s allowed to come in through the border. They’re taking black jobs now and it could be 18. It could be 19 and even 20 million people. They’re taking black jobs and they’re taking Hispanic jobs and you haven’t seen it yet, but you’re going to see something that’s going to be the worst in our history.”

A friend of the environment? “I want absolutely immaculate clean water and I want absolutely clean air, and we had it. We had H2O. We had the best numbers ever. And we did – we were using all forms of energy, all forms, everything. And yet, during my four years, I had the best environmental numbers ever. And my top environmental people gave me that statistic just before I walked on the stage, actually.” ²

A truly decent, admirable human being? “I am the least racist person you have ever met.” “I have the biggest heart on the stage.” “There’s my African-American!” “I prefer heroes who don’t get captured.”

Self-awareness? “I’ve never seen anybody lie like this guy. He lies – I’ve never seen it. He could look you in the face. So – and about so many other things, too. And we mentioned the laptop, we mentioned “Russia, Russia, Russia,” “Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine.” And everything he does is a lie. It’s misinformation and disinformation. It’s a disgrace.”

Coherence? “We’re doing very well at addiction until the COVID came along. We had the two-and-a-half, almost three years of like nobody’s ever had before, any country in every way. And then we had to get tough. And it was – the drugs pouring across the border, we’re – it started to increase. We got great equipment. We bought the certain dog. That’s the most incredible thing that you’ve ever seen, the way they can spot it. We did a lot. And we had – we were getting very low numbers. Very, very low numbers.

Closing statement, sir? “The only reason I’m here is he’s so bad as a president that I’m going to make America great again. We’re going to make America great again. We’re a failing nation right now. We’re a seriously failing nation. And we’re a failing nation because of him. His policies are so bad. His military policies are insane. They’re insane. These are wars that will never end with him. He will drive us into World War Three and we’re closer to World War Three than anybody can imagine. We are very, very close to World War Three, and he’s driving us there.

For three-and-a-half years, we’re living in hell. We have the Palestinians and we have everybody else rioting all over the place. You talk about Charlottesville. This is 100 times Charlottesville, 1,000 times. The whole country is exploding because of you, because they don’t respect you. And they have to respect their president and they don’t respect you throughout the world. What we did was incredible. We re – rebuilt the military. We got the largest tax cut in history, the largest regulation cut in history. All of the things that we’ve done, nobody’s ever – never seen anything like – even from a medical standpoint. Right to Try, where we can try Space Age materials instead of going to Asia or going to Europe and trying to get when you’re terminally ill.

Postscript:

Best exchange of the debate: Klump: Let’s not act like children. Biden: You are a child. ³ Lincoln-Douglas this was not.

Most memorable line ever in a presidential debate: “I didn’t have sex with a porn star, number one.” As Bill Clinton might have said, it depends on what the meaning of ‘star’ is.

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Most of the above quotes are taken verbatim from the CNN debate transcript: READ: Biden-Trump debate transcript | CNN Politics I have here and there spliced together separate transcript quotes; in a few instances, I have recycled Trump quotes from the past.

¹ “Bluster and Bravado”: band name or law firm?

² Technically, claiming to have “the best numbers” is not itself “a statistic”.

³ Neil Young shouts at his TV screen, “I am a child!”

Biden's America: Cities on Fire with DEI

Wednesday with Pascal: SCOTUS to Democracy, "Drop Dead!"

{The country seems to be in, or at least approaching, a 'state of exception,' and yesterday's Supreme Court ruling which granted our President plenipotentiary powers--i.e., put him or her above the law--has only made the situation worse. Pascal the existential Russian blue cat is so exercised about this (and it is not easy to get a cat to exercise) that he requested permission to post his usual Wednesday op-ed a day early; I have granted the request but kept ‘Wednesday’ in the title even though today is Tuesday.}

“Well, when the President does it, that means it is not illegal.” (Richard Nixon)

“The powers of the President will not be questioned.” (Stephen Miller)

“I have the Article Two privilege to do whatever I want.” (Donald Trump)

There is no need for me to comment on the latest ruling issued by the Supreme Court. I am but an existential Russian blue cat, whereas the greatest legal minds of our day have already weighed in with their, um, weighty opinions, which have ranged from (MSNBC) “WTF?” to (Fox News) “All hail the once and future king!” Some spoke of death squads and others of the death of democracy. Not a few hailed the ruling as “brilliant,” while one commentator opined that it represented “the unsouling of America,” despite the fact that “unsouling” is not a word or that nations have no souls (“souls,” whether individual or national, do not exist, but that is an issue for another time).

Led by Chief Justice John Roberts, SCOTUS today came out in favor of “bold and decisive action” (as opposed to “wise and thoughtful action”) on the part of our Chief Executive. Such action would undoubtedly be hindered by the possibility of legal repercussions; the President might hesitate to order the torture of suspected terrorists or to intimidate a state elections official into “finding” a certain number of votes. Just imagine, in the absence of absolute immunity, trying to shoot someone on Fifth Avenue!

Both Left and Right routinely complain, of course, when unelected judges rule against them, but their dismay is expressed in very different tones. On the Right, the usual outcry is for “Second Amendment remedies” and/or for civil war; on the Left, the lesson to be drawn is, to paraphrase Rachel Maddow, that Americans need to be very careful never to elect a sociopath for President.   

Arguendo, as my good friend the Professor would say, the Court’s decision changes nothing. The American people—with their innate common sense, their basic decency, and their grasp of the salient facts—will return President Biden to office, where he can rest in peace continue his stalwart Presidency for another four years while the Grim Reaper Kamala Harris hovers anxiously over his shoulder.

I am not usually disposed to look for, much less to find, silver linings, but the good news here is that President Biden is now free to declare martial law, to cancel the November election, and to authorize Seal Team Six to conduct operations on American soil. We will have SCOTUS to thank when the tanks roll into Mar-a-Lago!

Don't blame me for this.
It was my cat's idea.

 

We Are Doomed (Part Whatever)

“More people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for.” (Viktor Frankl)

It was St. Paul, I believe, who famously lamented, “I’ve got nothing, Ma, to live up to.” Centuries later, St. Augustine would echo, “There’s nothing at the end of the rainbow. There’s nothing to grow up for anymore.” The present times are always the worst of times, even when they are the best of times. We are always doomed, it seems; the sword of Damocles hangs over our head, though it never drops. Man is the creature described by Jesus as “always ill but never dies.”

If you are not worried about the human condition, and particularly about the American condition, you have not been paying attention. Decades ago, John Lennon implored us, “Come, let us worry together.” Legions of worriers have responded. To my embarrassment, however, I have misplaced my list of sources for the following dire observations. I therefore cannot identify which was written by Henry David Thoreau or by William James, by Oswald Spengler or by Reinhold Niebuhr, by Herbert Marcuse or by Christopher Lasch, by Genrich L. Krasko or by Gertrude Himmelfarb.

In any case, and whatever their origin, these quotations together form a powerful American jeremiad. I will withhold comment (for now) and let the authors speak for themselves:

This is the situation in America today: catastrophically, in a significant segment of American society, people have lost the meaning in their lives.

The most acute problems of today—crime, drugs, greed, gender polarization, disintegration of family, decay in morals, racism, and so on—are, to a great extent, the direct consequences of this crisis of meaning.

People do not want to acknowledge that the origin of these problems is deep within our everyday lives, that it has to do with the deepest core of our existence as human beings.

Today, we find ourselves sick. Society is unprepared to meet the dawn of a new era. People are lost, wandering in darkness. The American Dream, which has been the pillar of life for generations, seems not to lead anywhere.

Robert Kaplan gives a vivid picture of the existential vacuum that has engulfed America: ‘When voter turnout decreases to around 50 percent at the same time the middle class is spending astounding sums in gambling casinos and state lotteries, joining private health clubs and using large amounts of stimulants and anti-depressants, one can legitimately be concerned about the state of American society. We have become a nation of voyeurs and escapists. Our willingness to give up self and responsibility is the sine qua non for tyranny.’

An important factor that has allowed our lives to become devoid of meaning has been the degradation in education. The majority of Americans are getting more and more estranged from the nourishing spring of our inherited culture. Instead, an ugly mass pseudo-culture is striving to subvert that culture, like a cancer, metastasizing racism, drugs, violence, and sexual promiscuity throughout the whole society.

A new kind of ignorance has emerged: the ignorance of the educated professional. Though these professionals have mastered the skills of their fields, their lives are devoid of almost any connections with the humanitarian culture of Western civilization. Education today has given way to training, which focuses on providing a person with specific skills useful in getting a good or better job, rather than enhancing one’s sense of connection to (and identity within) our civilization. Unwittingly, rather than helping to develop strong personalities, our education system prevents people from acquiring maturity. Hence, the loss of direction in people’s lives.

We have abandoned our children. Nobody cares any more about their intellectual and spiritual health. Our culture is fundamentally anti-intellectual and entertainment-oriented, for children as for adults. Our children’s existential misery is unbearable; their lives are empty, they are lost, they are desperate.

If tomorrow the government succeeds in completely sealing our borders from imported and smuggled drugs, domestically manufactured drugs will fill that vacuum. We are spending billions of dollars to stop the supply of drugs, but it is the demand for drugs that is the problem.

Americans do not respect their government. People believe in all kinds of theories of the government’s involvement in wrongdoings, cover-ups, and secret covert operations at home and abroad.

The general irresponsibility of our politicians (on both sides of the aisle) is an obvious sign of what Walter Lippman called ‘political Jacobinism,’ a gradual shift from representative government to populist democracy. This is extremely dangerous given the lowering of the education level of our populace and its consequent inability to understand how a developed society, and its institutions, functions.

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Postscript #1: I have located my list of resources. It turns out that the above quotes are all taken from Genrich Krasko’s The Unbearable Boredom of Being: The Crisis of Meaning in America. The book, published in 2004, is a compilation of essays written by Dr. Krasko between 1994 and 2003. Dr. Krasko, who emigrated to America in 1980 from the Soviet Union, died in 2020.

Postscript #2: We should note that Dr. Krasko's complaints about America are from twenty to thirty years ago, before the advent of Wokeism, Cancel Culture, DEI, CRT, SEL, BLM, Antifa, or the weaponized Biden DOJ. Any fair-minded observer can only conclude that we are doomed yet again, the silver lining being that we are too far gone at this point to notice or even to care.

I mean, what does 'meaning' even mean, anyway?

Wednesday with Pascal: The Katechon (Part Two)

{Is it possible that Pascal the existential Russian blue cat thinks that the Katechon is, well, a literal cat? There seems no other explanation for his fascination with this obscure Biblical figure whose identity and significance have never been made clear.}

As we have previously discussed, the apostle Paul (and, arguably, Jesus himself) expected the world to end in his lifetime. “The time is short,” he famously counseled. He also declared, “Salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed,” which suggests a similar expectation, as does “The night is nearly over, and the day has drawn near.” Despite Paul’s missionary zeal and eschatological urgency, however, he did not live to see the eschaton, which, two thousand years later, still has not arrived.

What went wrong with the early Christians’ eschatological timetable? Did they simply misread the signs of the times? Paul, hedging his bets, offered a cryptic explanation for the delay; the eschaton could not take place until the Antichrist (“the man of lawlessness”) was revealed, at which time Jesus would return to smite him and to put the entire cosmos in order. And why was the Antichrist still unrevealed? Because, said Paul, he was being held back by the mysterious and to this day unidentified Katechon.

While one might assume that forestalling the apocalyptic end of the world would be a good thing, the issue is more complicated, at least for Christians. The eschaton, for all its world-historic turbulence, would also see the second coming of Jesus, on the clouds, for his salvific encore (“Parousia”), after which a last judgment would sort out sheep from goats, the blessed from the damned, and the world would be restored to its original pristine glory. Thus, the Katechon, by restraining the Antichrist, also prevents Jesus from returning and the dead from being resurrected. The question then becomes, is the Katechon serving humanity by keeping the world going, or is it serving God in some way, or is it, paradoxically, serving the Antichrist by preventing his final (and, inevitably, fatal) showdown with Jesus? The corollary question is, do we or do we not want the world to end? ¹ Our answer to that determines our feelings about the Katechon.

Paul’s invocation of the Katechon was ambiguous at best. He did not say by whom the Katechon had been deployed, or who would (eventually) remove it. At least in his letters, he did not instruct the Thessalonians to pray for its continuation or to pray for its destruction; he signaled neither gratitude nor resentment towards it.

Reflecting on this, Roberto Esposito writes that “In delaying the explosion of evil, the Katechon at the same time delays the final victory of the principle of good. The triumph of evil is held in check, true, but the divine Parousia is also delayed by the Katechon’s existence. Its function is positive, but negatively so.” Or, in the words of Tim Howles, “There seems to be an ambiguity about the deferral that the katechon enacts. The threat of violence that is associated with the eschaton is certainly held in abeyance. But as a corollary, the future is denuded of its power to infuse the present, inspiring a sense and a direction in time. The contemporary moment becomes one in which nothing can really happen because the sense of historical becoming, that has its truth only in the eschaton, is indefinitely deferred.”

Perhaps if we could identify the Katechon, we might better discern which side It, or He, is on. Unfortunately, as Yohanis Wakuma explains, “The identity of ‘what restrains’ and ‘he who restrains’ remains controversial. Some identify these with God and divine providence; others see the restrainer as a force hostile to God, yet one which remains under God’s control.” Throughout the centuries, the most common suspects for Katechon-hood have been the Roman emperor (or the empire itself); the Catholic Church (or individual popes); the Holy Spirit; the logos; Russia; the United States military; and, less often, Donald Trump. ²

For centuries after Paul invented the Katechon, it remained an obscure and enigmatic notion, a forgotten bit of scriptural minutiae in which not even scholars took an interest. It was rehabilitated after World War II by an unlikely figure: Carl Schmitt, a German political theorist (and influential jurist in Hitler's Third Reich) who believed that the Katechon was both the key to history and mankind’s only hope for survival.

I bet you did Nazi that coming.

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¹ Most Christians are not aware that the “Lord’s Prayer” (the “Our Father”) expresses the desire for the eschaton to arrive; that, after all, is the meaning of “Thy kingdom come…”

² Seriously—Rod Dreher (The American Conservative), now living the good life in Viktor Orban’s Hungary, remarked in 2020 that “In an entirely non-theological sense, I see Trump as a Katechon. I do not believe that the political forces he holds back can be restrained for much longer, simply because they are growing in popularity. It is self-deceiving to think that any politician, even a charming Philosopher-King (which Trump is not), could turn back a vast cultural tide. The best small-o orthodox Christians and other cultural traditionalists can hope for is that our political leaders (in whose number I include federal judges) can hold back enough of it, for long enough, to give us an opportunity to build institutions and other structures that will allow us to ride out the deluge ahead. If Christians like me vote for Trump, it is only because of his role as Katechon in restraining what is far worse.” I think it far more likely that Trump is the "Man of Lawlessness" than that he is the Katechon.  

There must be a Katechon in here somewhere...

Saturday Lecture: The Panopticon

{Jeremy Bentham’s notorious ‘Panopticon’ was intended as a humane reform of prisons and asylums; it was also aimed at making hospitals better at containing the spread of infections. Its proposed application to schools would have, in Bentham’s estimate, curbed cheating, identified students in need of more assistance, and prevented affluent but lazy youngsters from riding on the coattails of their less affluent peers. None of which is to endorse Bentham’s program, merely to point out that he never envisioned 20^th- and 21^st-century surveillance states. We all live today in a vast Panopticon which tracks, analyzes, and even anticipates our every move, not to mention requiring two-factor authentication before we can access even our own information.} 

Jeremy Bentham (from The Panopticon: The Inspection-House):

Whether the purpose be that of punishing the incorrigible, guarding the insane, reforming the vicious, confining the suspected, employing the idle, maintaining the helpless, curing the sick; in a word, whether it be applied to prisons, or work-houses, or manufactories, or mad-houses, or hospitals, or schools; the principle will be found applicable, I think, without exception, to all establishments whatsoever in which, within a space commanded by buildings, a number of persons are to be kept under inspection.

It is obvious that, in all these instances, the more constantly the persons to be inspected are under the eyes of the persons who should inspect them, the more perfectly will the purpose of the establishment have been obtained. Ideal perfection, if that were the object, would require that each person should actually be in that predicament during every instant of time. This being impossible, the next thing to be wished for is that, at every instant, seeing reason to believe as much, and not being able to satisfy himself to the contrary, he should conceive himself to be so.

The essence of the plan consists in the centrality of the inspector’s situation, combined with the most effectual contrivances for seeing without being seen. The persons to be inspected should always feel themselves to be under inspection, or at least of standing a great chance of being so; but it is also important that, for the greatest proportion of time possible, each man should actually be under inspection.

The fundamental advantages of the plan are the apparent omnipresence of the inspector, combined with the extreme facility of his real presence.

I come now with pleasure, notwithstanding the sadness of the subject, to an instance in which the application of the principle will be of the most lenient cast: I mean, that of the melancholy abodes appropriated to the reception of the insane. Any buildings that may be erected in the future for this purpose should be made according to the inspection form. The powers of the insane, as well as those of the wicked, are capable of being directed either against their fellow creatures or against themselves. In all instances where only the former danger is to be apprehended, separate cells, exposed, as in the case of prisons, to inspection, would render unnecessary the use of chains and other modes of corporal restraint.

A hospital built and conducted upon a plan of this kind, accessible to the patients’ families and friends, would lose, it is to be hoped, a great part of those repelling terrors which, along with poverty, deprives so many from medical relief or drives them to seek it in much less helpful ways.

Will parental feelings allow at last the application of the principle to the schools? Will the observation of its efficacy in preventing undue hardship even to the guilty be sufficient to dispel the apprehension of its tendency to introduce tyranny? Concerning the hours of study, should the plan be limited to them, there can be but one wish: that students be involved in study. All play, all chattering, every distraction of every kind, is effectually banished by the central situation of the master, seconded by partitions or screens between the scholars, as light as you please. The different measures and casts of talents, rendered distinctly discernible by this scheme, will indicate the different degrees of attention and modes of instruction most suitable to each student. No longer will incurable and irreproachable dullness or imbecility bring punishment for the sins of idleness or obstinacy. That species of fraud called ‘cribbing,’ a vice hitherto thought congenital to schools, will never creep in here. That system of premature corruption, in which idleness is concealed by opulence, and the honor due to talents or industry is let out for hire, will be completely done away; and a nobleman may stand as good a chance of learning something as a common man.

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Jeremy Bentham - Wikipedia

"Every breath you take, and every move you make, every bond you break,                    every step you take, I'll be watching you."

 

Sunday Sermon: "He Was a Friend of Mine"

He Was a Friend of Mine

He was a friend of mine
He was a friend of mine
His killing had no purpose
No reason, or rhyme
Oh, he was a friend of mine

He was in Dallas town
He was in Dallas town
From a sixth-floor window
A gunman shot him down
Oh, he died in Dallas town

He never knew my name
He never knew my name
Though I never met him
I knew him just the same
Oh, he was a friend of mine

Leader of a nation for such a precious time
Oh, he was a friend of mine

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Source: LyricFind

Songwriters: Roger Mc Guinn

He Was a Friend of Mine lyrics © Reservoir Media Management Inc

(109) The Byrds - He was a friend of mine (Remastered) - YouTube

Sunday Sermon: The End of the World

{Religious believers regularly work themselves up into a holy lather about the gloomy prospect of a world that does not acknowledge their god and his/her rules. Having convinced themselves that their god is all that stands between mankind and annihilation, they understandably panic when their god is ignored or, worse, mocked. I find it salutary now and then to sample their histrionics, if only to remind myself never to get caught up in apocalyptic enthusiasm of any kind.}  

“It is of no consequence where you are in the world—you who are not of it.” (Tertullian)

Dennis Engleman, from Ultimate Things (1995):

The ‘religion of man’ in its various permutations is sweeping civilization like an epidemic. Faith in humanity has at last rendered faith in God nearly impossible, or at least heretical. ‘Christianity,’ writes Archimandrite Constantine, ‘is outrightly declared to be a historical category that has outlived itself.’ Man now views himself not as an integral (though lowly) member of the heavenly plan, but as one standing alone and accidental in a totally material cosmos. He does not believe in God, so he neither entertains hope of heaven or fear of hell. Furthermore, he considers his secular and atheistic attitude to be the best evidence of maturity, as Thomas Molnar has noted: ‘The conviction has grown that man has entered the period of mankind’s maturity when the concept of God may be discarded.’

Yet God has not been discarded so much as co-opted. Man is no longer content to be merely man (even though he has conspicuously failed to meet the high demands of the job)—he wants to be God! Considering himself inherently divine, a god-in-the-making, he now tolerates no restriction to his will and pleasure. Through science and magic he forces the doors of the universe, especially those which were formerly barred by faith. Everything is possible; he will do as he pleases, for he has adopted Nietzsche’s nihilistic credo: ‘All is false; everything is allowed!’

Father Seraphim Rose lamented, ‘Man is now unable, or unwilling, to think in terms of ends, of ultimate things. The thirst for absolute truth has vanished; it has been swallowed up in worldliness.’ A great chasm looms ahead and the light which had guided man’s previous steps does not extend into the void. Suddenly, from the dread darkness, the distorted monster he so carelessly and shamelessly enticed begins to emerge…

‘What we see terrifies us,’ wrote historian William Irwin Thompson, ‘for we see the end of the world, an apocalypse; and this is an apocalypse, for it is the ending of ourselves and the old world we made for ourselves to be comfortable. Church and university, government and art, all those institutions that were once pillars of civilization and carriers of the Divine Word no longer seem to be filled with the holiness, wisdom, and power they once had.’ Like a sun sinking into feverish dusk, the world we made for ourselves is collapsing into the greatest of nights. For, as the record of history testifies, man’s creation, when devoid of the light of Christ, is a horror of unmitigated darkness.

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Wow--I guess the Sleep of Reason really does produce Monsters!

Wednesday with Pascal: A Marxism State of Mind

{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat all but begged me to assign him the task of commenting on the latest demagogic rant from ex-President Dunning-Kruger. I agreed, but I can see now I should first have asked Pascal exactly what he planned to say.} 

At CPAC 2023, perpetually cranky former Toddler-in-Chief Donald Trump spoke these words:

I said it many times that we would never be a socialist country, I shouted it out loud and I was right, because that train has passed the station, long ago, of socialism; it never came close to stopping, frankly. We’re now in a Marxism state of mind, a communism state of mind, which is far worse. We’re a nation in decline; our enemies are desperate to stop us because they know that we are the only ones that can stop them. They know that.

We had a Republican party that was ruled by freaks, neocons, globalists, open border zealots, and fools, but we are never going back to the party of Paul Ryan, Karl Rove, and Jeb Bush. We have no choice. If we don’t do this, our country will be lost forever. People are tired of RINOs and globalists; they want to see ‘America First,’ that’s what they want, it’s not too complicated.

We’re not a free nation right now. We don’t have free press; we don’t have free anything. In 2016, I declared, ‘I am your voice.’ Today I would add, I am your warrior. I am your justice, and for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution, I am your retribution—not gonna let this happen, not gonna let it happen. I will totally obliterate the Deep State, I will fire…[applause stops him mid-sentence]

If only he had added, “I am become Shiva, destroyer of worlds!” this would have been a speech for the ages; as it stands, it’s a speech for ages approximately 5—8.

Surprisingly, a fitting response to President Person, Woman, Man, Camera, TV can be found in the scriptures (the Book of Job) with only a slight revision. Rather than “Job laments that he was ever born,” it is now “America laments that Donald Trump was ever born”:

Let the day perish on which he was born,
and the night that said, ‘A man-child is conceived.’ ¹
Let that day become darkness;
may God not seek it from above,
nor may daylight shine on it.
Let darkness and deep shadow claim it;
let clouds settle on it;
let them terrify it with the blackness of day.
Let darkness seize that night;
let it not rejoice among the days of the year;
let it not enter among the number of the months.
Look, let that night become barren;
let no joyful song enter into it.
Let the stars of its dawn be dark;
let it hope for light but let there be none,
and let it not see the eyelids of dawn
because it did not shut the doors of his mother’s womb.

Why did he not die at birth? ²
Why did he not come forth from the womb and expire?
Why were there knees to receive him
and breasts that he could suck?
For now he should lie down, and we would be at peace;
He would be asleep; and we would be at rest.
Or why was he not hidden like a miscarriage,
like infants who did not see the light?

I am but a mere cat ³, but even I shudder to imagine how long it will take America to live down the ignominy of having elected such a buffoonish, petulant man to the highest office in the country—not to mention the further ignominy of having to explain how 75 million Americans voted to give him a second term in office. To avert further national disgrace, I propose that the Environmental Protection Agency declare former President Dunce Cap a pollutant and a public health hazard, and quarantine him immediately.

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¹ “Man-child” could also be translated as “big baby” or “overgrown infant”.

² Seriously—why? Why did the heavens not darken? Why did the angels not cry themselves a river? Why did the earth itself not swallow him up? Why did Satan’s triumphant laughter fail to awaken God from His long sleep and alert him to the fact that something had gone terribly wrong! Why did the patented “Antichrist Early Warning” system fail to function? 

³ Not really; I am, as has been clearly and frequently stated, an existential Russian blue cat. Besides which, meerkats aren’t even cats; they are mongooses, which I am not.

CPAC 2023

Education for the Eschaton

{Apropos of nothing, our quote for today is from Senator Rick Scott (R-FL): “Democrats want to destroy America.” Curses! How did he manage to decode our platform?}

I’ll make this quick: the time is short, the end is near, and we are doomed.

According to Molly Olmstead (at Slate), Christian publishers are currently churning out “survival guides, books about current events, and prayer manuals all oriented around a rapture, a second coming of Christ, or an otherwise cataclysmic event at the hands of God.” How does one account for “this spate of end-times books”? One consults an expert—in this case, “Tommy Ice, a retired theology professor and the executive director of the Pre-Trib Research Center.”

Professor Ice explains “the rising interest in end times”:

“The reason it’s happening is the totalitarianism in the United States. It’s because of the seemingly overnight decline of America, from our perspective. It’s a huge shift, the stealing of an election. When has that ever happened in the United States?”

For him, the “stolen presidential election”—along with, he believes, stolen elections in the two 2020 Senate races in Georgia—clarified the depths of the nation’s degeneracy. (All of the election fraud claims that Ice cited as signs of totalitarianism have been thoroughly debunked.) That, he said, was “lining up with what it is going to be like after the rapture of the church, where you have the Antichrist coming from Europe, who’s going to be the world ruler.”

Don’t say you weren’t warned.

The rapture, apocalypse, and end times are sweeping Christian books, with a Trump connection. (slate.com)

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At the Acton Institute Powerblog, Auguste Meyrat reflects on a new book, Don’t Go to College, in which co-authors “Michael J. Robillard and Timothy J. Gordon not only cover the familiar problems plaguing colleges but also perceive something deeper corrupting an institution that was so fundamental to Western civilization. The real problem is more than the financial cost, the coddling, or even the abuse the writers themselves suffered—it’s the philosophy stupid.”

It seems that a specter is haunting American universities: the specter of “neo-Marxism,” which, alas, Meyrat doesn’t bother defining or explaining. Instead, he simply quotes Robillard and Gordon: ‘[Traditional education] is meant to advance actual knowledge, neo-Marxism is meant to advance propaganda, which is true to Marx’s goal of putting change (revolution) above understanding (wisdom).’ Whereas one philosophical system espouses the intellect and reason, the other system emphasizes feeling and action. It’s no mystery which one is the easier sell to young adults.”

Meyrat goes on to explain that “ideas have consequences, and the damage done by the capture of neo-Marxism cannot be underestimated.” [He means “overestimated,” of course, unless he means “should not be underestimated”.] “Neo-Marxism has fundamentally warped the whole goal of college. According to Robillard and Gordon, students who are now charged with ‘changing the world’ have taken this to mean ‘changing mankind,’ which explains the current rush to embrace transhumanism. Citing more than a few authorities on this topic, the writers explain:

‘Transhumanists believe that human beings are reducible to data points; technology can deliver secular utopia; tech gurus should lead society (and globalist technocrats manage it); and depopulation, anti-natalism, extreme life extension, vegetarianism/veganism, alternative sexual lifestyles, New Age spiritualism (but not Christianity), wokeism, and new urbanist, “smart-city” living are all unquestionably good things.’ 

To paraphrase Richard Nixon, we are all transhumanists now, data points existing in virtual reality—at least, that’s how Robillard, Gordon, and Meyrat see things. I, on the other hand, have never met a transhumanist, an anti-natalist, or anyone who believed in a technological utopia; perhaps I have led a sheltered existence.

Auguste Meyrat’s only complaint about Don’t Go to College is that the authors offer no useful solutions; all they advise is either to become an autodidact (easier said than done) or to go to college and troll the woke professors and the sheeple who follow them. As Meyrat sees it, we should not throw out the baby of higher learning with the bathwater of neo-Marxist transhumanism. He agrees that the present situation is untenable; “bad education and bad philosophy,” after all, “ultimately lead to an unfulfilling, impotent kind of life. It’s no surprise that our society has decayed politically and culturally; this is the inevitable result of its having rejected the West’s, and Western education’s, founding principles.” Still, Meyrat does not want to bury the universities, only the woke faculty and the postmodern curricula. “It’s critical,” he concludes, “that we either restore the university from the ground up or design a plausible alternative, one that’s unafraid to recover the great books of the past and that can assist and inspire us in our lifelong pursuit of wisdom.”

As someone who dropped out of college as soon as the bursar's office cashed the tuition check from my parents, I am sympathetic to the "don't go to college" movement. However, there ought to be better reasons to quit school than woke faculty and transhumanist indoctrination. How about this: don't go to college because the eschaton is about to arrive, and you will either be Raptured into the clouds with Jesus or caught up in the battle against Antichrist here on earth?  

Does College Get in the Way of Education? – Acton Institute PowerBlog

       Either the end times have arrived, or Spring Break has gotten out of hand...

We Have Met the Enemy, and It Is Teachers and Democracy

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

The President of Hillsdale College and the Governor of Tennessee walk into a private reception being held in their honor. Larry Arnn looks at Bill Lee and says,

“Teachers are trained in the dumbest parts of the dumbest colleges in the country, and they are taught that they are going to go and do something to those kids. My wife is English, and she’s a gardener, and she doesn’t talk about what she is going to do to these plants. She talks about what they need, because if you give them what they need, they will grow. It’s not a manufacturing operation.”

Funny stuff, amirite? Kudos to the alert fan who recorded the hilarious exchange!

Now the usual snowflakes suspects (e.g., Nashville’s News Channel 5) are up in arms about Larry Arnn and his impolitic remarks, even though Joy Pullmann, writing at The Federalist, insists that “Teachers and research agree: educations schools are garbage.” Ms. Pullman is not just talking out of her, um, well, she knows what she’s talking about:

In 2006, 62 percent of teachers told researchers their training didn’t prepare them well for their jobs. In general, education colleges not only do not prepare teachers to succeed in the classroom; the teachers have been so thoroughly corrupted by cultural Marxism that what they learn in the typical preparation program actually degrades their skills. 

These are well-reinforced, longstanding empirical findings bolstered by many forms of evidence. As I wrote 10 years ago, “Teachers tend to have below-average SAT, ACT, LSAT, and GRE scores, and statistics show their college coursework is among the least challenging available. Education majors must take more remedial college coursework than their counterparts in humanities and social sciences. Traditional teacher preparation programs emphasize education and social theories, which research has demonstrated are ineffective teaching methods.”

No wonder Johnny and Janey can’t read! No wonder our kids is not learning! No wonder Hillsdale’s President Larry Arnn is lobbying Governor Lee to use (for free!) Hillsdale’s patented (and free!) “high-quality curricula” in Tennessee public schools. What part of “high-quality curricula” does Nashville’s News Channel 5 not understand?

Joy Pullmann concludes her report with the thoughtful, reasoned rhetoric for which The Federalist is famous: “Very powerful interests,” Pullman writes, “want to keep truth away from Americans, thereby keeping Tennessee’s children and teachers at their mental and institutional mercy. Liars like these can’t be trusted to watch your laptop when you go to the bathroom, not to mention to educate your child. Their hold on power must be broken.”

Such sophisticated argumentation is irresistible, especially coming from a woman who calls herself a “grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs,” a distinction Ms. Pullmann modestly chooses not to mention in her article.

Hillsdale President Tells Truth About Teacher Training, Media Goes Nuts (thefederalist.com)

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At In These Times, Hamilton Nolan ¹ explains that “when the world is burning,” pragmatism, caution, and prudence are for losers. “On a normal day,” writes Nolan, “you wouldn’t dive out of a fifth-floor window into the river below — but if your building was on fire, that would become the most reasonable choice.  Diving from that window into the river below sure seems terrifying, but not as terrifying as staying put and burning to death.” 

Scolding the political moderates, centrists, and “realists” among us, Nolan continues, “The failure to understand that solutions must match the scale and severity of our problems leaves us, inevitably, with problems that never get solved. Problems that never get solved, in these cases, translate to the mass immiseration of millions of people for generation after generation.”

Is that what you want, America? I should hope not, especially when the solution is so obvious: The obvious solution is to change the structures that are constricting our ability to build a functioning democracy. Obviously! Yet ​“structural reform” is perceived by the majority of people in power as a step too far. We can’t even get the filibuster out of the way with a Democratic Congress. Joe Biden has already proclaimed that he doesn’t favor expanding the Supreme Court. Despite the elections of both Bush and Trump, who lost the popular vote, there has not been any sustained push to scrap the Electoral College. And ​‘abolish the Senate’ is not even discussed enough to enter the pantheon of fringe positions. Recognition of the fact that our entire system was designed by humans and can be changed by humans and, furthermore, must be changed by humans remains mystifyingly absent from mainstream discourse. ² We are like the drivers of a car accelerating towards a brick wall, unwilling to take our foot off the gas pedal and hit the brakes, because we don’t want to disturb the passengers in the back seat.    

What a perfect description of our plight: trapped in a burning building, we are driving headlong towards a brick wall, trying not to disturb our passengers as we prepare to dive out the fifth-floor window into the river below.

Michael Anton himself (“The Flight 93 Election”) could not have said it better, or even Admiral David Farragut: Damn the backseat passengers, ditch the cumbersome ballast of democracy, and full speed ahead!  

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¹ Full disclosure: Hamilton Nolan describes the American founding thusly: “Nearly a quarter of a millennium ago, a small group of wealthy white men in a fledgling colonial nation wrote a constitution that seemed, to them, the best they could do, with their accumulated wisdom at the time, and in light of all of the necessary political compromises.” Nolan is clearly an unpatriotic fellow and not to be trusted.

² Re “our entire system was designed by humans”: please see footnote above for Nolan’s estimate of the humans who did the designing.

Radical Is Now Rational - In These Times