- Mene mene tekel upharsin.
- Our most conservative President.
- Safety in time of turmoil.
1
This may not be very tasty, but it’s powerful and important:
The invisible hand has been writing on our wall of late, and the message is scaring the markets. The markets should be scared; there is real trouble afoot, and the world’s political and economic leaders are terrifyingly out of their depth ….
Walter Russell Mead at The American Interest blog. (HT Mike Bennett on Facebook) Read the whole article. My quote is just the opening.
I would add that it’s not so much the case that our current political and economic leaders are out of their depth. It’s more that our leaders have been out of their depth — making or reaffirming impossible-to-fulfill promises — for decades, but it’s the current crop that got to be there when the merde hit the air mover. Thomas Carlyle:
Great is Bankruptcy: the great bottomless gulf into which all Falsehoods, public and private, do sink, disappearing; whither, from the first origin of them, they were all doomed. For Nature is true and not a lie. No lie you can speak or act but it will come, after longer or shorter circulation, like a Bill drawn on Nature’s Reality, and be presented there for payment, — with the answer, No effects. Pity only that it often had so long a circulation: that the original forger were so seldom he who bore the final smart of it! Lies, and the burden of evil they bring, are passed on; shifted from back to back, and from rank to rank; and so land ultimately on the dumb lowest rank, who with spade and mattock, with sore heart and empty wallet, daily come in contact with reality, and can pass the cheat no further.
Mead laments the character defects that make our leaders inadequate. C.S. Lewis, in The Abolition of Man, foresaw something like this as a result of how school was being taught even 67 years ago:
[W]e continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more “drive”, or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or “creativity”. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.
Read The Abolition of Man, too. It may be Lewis’ only popular work that isn’t clearly Christian — that’s the point of his extended discussion of the Tao.
As Fr. Thomas Hopko said in a podcast commending Lewis’ book (again), Lewis’ vision has come about. We have been reduced to “calculators, consumers and copulators,” unworthy of the name “human.”
I’m not even sure that “the worst are full of passionate intensity;” it seems more like shrewd, reptilian calculation to me.
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In some important ways,* Jimmy Carter was the most conservative President of my lifetime. (HT Distributist Review) Affable Ron Reagan rode this Carter speech to the White House — one of my few grudges against him. It probably wasn’t too late back then.
* In other ways, Carter was a typical post-McGovern Democrat idjit, but that’s another topic.
3
He who dwells in the help of the Most High shall lodge in the shelter of the God of Heaven. He shall say to the Lord, “You are my protector and my refuge, my God; I will hope in Him. For He shall free me from the snare of the hunters, and from every troubling word.” He shall overshadow you with His shoulders, and under His wings you shall hope.
Psalm 90:1-4 (91: 1-4 in Western Bibles)
Be of good cheer! Surely you knew you weren’t “taking it with you” anyway!
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 