What happens when you give a distractible autodidact a blog to play with?
Author: readerjohn
I am a retired lawyer and an Orthodox Christian, living in a collapsing civilization, the modern West.
There are things I'll miss when it's gone. There are others I won't. I tend to write about both.
[T]o believe that wealth is the only significant measure of the worth of an individual, a family, or a community is to reject the teaching of nearly every religion and wisdom tradition that ever was.
Mark Mitchell and Nathan Schlueter , The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry
Divinity, then, was for the very greatest of the great: for victors, and heroes, and kings. Its measure was the power to torture one’s enemies, not to suffer it oneself: to nail them to the rocks of a mountain, or to turn them into spiders, or to blind and crucify them after conquering the world. That a man who had himself been crucified might be hailed as a god could not help but be seen by people everywhere across the Roman world as scandalous, obscene, grotesque.
Tom Holland, Dominion
I believe that I am not mistaken in saying that Christianity is a demanding and serious religion. When it is delivered as easy and amusing, it is another kind of religion altogether.
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.
I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.
There is no American Orthodox Church. It’s going to take centuries for there to be an American Orthodox Church. It took centuries for there to be a Russian Orthodox Church. There was a metropolitan of Kiev … who was appointed by the patriarch of Constantinople, who was a Greek for a long time, the metropolitan of Kiev. Because Russian Orthodoxy didn’t exist yet. It took centuries for it to come into existence.
Gentile Christianity took a long time to come into existence. The core of every church St. Paul founded was Jewish Christians, and he argued vehemently that that did not mean the Gentiles did not need to become Jews to become part of the community. So the fact that we have— Well, there have been attempts, but the fact that the Orthodox Church has not tried to boot-strap an American Orthodoxy is a very good thing, because the thing that would be produced by that would be a nightmare. It would be American in all the worst ways. There are forms of Christianity in the United States that are very, very American in all the worst ways: consumerism, obsession with entertainment culture and celebrity, this men’s conference this week that was like: “Saturday, Saturday, Saturday, monster trucks! UFC fights…” Like, it’s pathetic. It’s a distortion of Christianity in favor of Americanism.
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[T]he Orthodox Church [in the USA] is still very close to its immigrant roots. That’s a good thing. That’s one of the things that’s protected Orthodox Christianity in this country from the way that American culture colonizes everything and corrupts it, frankly, with consumerism and these other traits, these other negative traits. It’s not just consumerism either. It’s pornification; it’s all kinds of things in American culture … But those immigrant ties have protected the Orthodox Church from that, and those immigrant ties are not going to last forever. My concern is less with how do we make the Orthodox Church more American; my concern is how do we stop it from becoming too American too fast and becoming some weird chimera.
Our goal has to be preserving what’s been handed down to us, preserving it intact, preserving it free from corruption, and then presenting it to people because it will bring about their salvation. But it’s going to challenge them. It’s going to be difficult.
One reason I became Orthodox is that the heart of this faith is not to be found in the legacy of Imperial Byzantium but in the spirit of the Desert Fathers, the hesychasts and the saints of the prisons. I don’t think many of my critics really understand Orthodoxy; but the life and teachings of, say, St John Chrysostom, St Isaac the Syrian, St Moses the Black or modern saints such as St Porphyrios or St Nektarios are more than enough to refute some of the cruder arguments for a ‘muscular Christianity’ that the Internet is currently coughing up.
My morning prayers used to include “thwart our meddling in traditional cultures, teaching them acquisativeness and perversion as the new White Man’s Burden.” If you have no idea why I would pray such a thing, go back and read this week’s news stories about some of the liberal groin pieties that USAID has been funding of late. Or this distilled version:
I doubt that it was necessary (not to mention legal) to feed USAID to the wood chipper to stop that crap, and I strongly suspect that some very meritorious work that enhances our image in the world will be collateral damage of Elon and his band of snot-nosed barbarians.
But my prayer for thwarting has been answered — a reminder to “be careful what you pray for.”
What’s better than joy?
‘Milton was right,’ said my Teacher. ‘The choice of every lost soul can be expressed in the words “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.” There is always something they insist on keeping even at the price of misery. There is always something they prefer to joy—that is, to reality.
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce
Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.
George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs
[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
[I’ve already quoted a very pungent Nick Catoggio distillation, but I keep returning to it.]
Insofar as I thought Trump marked mostly a populist realignment of partisan political boundaries, I think I was wrong — or at least that Trump 2.0 is a bigger deal than Trump 1.0. I think he’s now leading us into a post-liberal/illiberal world (that may be inevitable).
2015 me would have gazed around at the first nine days of Trump’s term, taking each policy in isolation, and concluded that the individual trees look pretty good. 2025 me stares around at the forest Trump is planting and shudders.
Many are freaking out about this.
The post-liberal/illiberal world is ominous for a lot of reasons:
Liberal democracy has been very good materially to me, and mine, and most of the U.S. (But some have been left behind relatively because they didn’t register as Important People.)
There’s a decent case to be made that liberal democracy represents our best chance to live together peacefully despite deep differences. Trump’s zero-sum mentality requires winners, losers and chaos, not co-existence.
Postliberalism/Illiberalism in America feels alien, and how tolerably it’s implemented will depend on those implementing it. Trump, a toxic narcissist with authoritarian impulses and a taste for lethal retribution, is a terrible person to implement it. I’d be more comfortable with an Orbán than with Trump, but I cannot identify any American Orbán.
Donald Trump has millions or tens of millions of supporters for who lethal retribution is a feature, not a bug, and they’ll turn on anyone he turns on. He’s an antichrist heading a new toxic religious cult, and since the failed assassination attempt, he may actually believe that he’s anointed (in contrast to his former cynicism toward his Christian enthusiasts).
Bottom line: it’s probably the end of a world, but not the end of the world. And I can’t do much about it except, possibly, take personal and familial protective measures. Some of those are in place; others we’ve ruled out as a matter of principle.
Good People
[I]t is impossible to overstate the conformist power among elites of being seen as a Good Person. This is why no Republican leader ever pushed back against this stuff prior to Trump. They were terrified of being seen as a Bad Person by the media and other elites. Trump is the Honey Badger of politics: he doesn’t care. (That’s a link to the megaviral Randall video from some years back; he drops some profanity in it, so be aware.)
Niall Ferguson on the bipartisan assault on the rule of law
Let me add two more big drops of rain on the Promenade parade. Since Adam Smith, economists have mostly seen free trade and the rule of law as beneficial for growth. Not only have we now entered a period of extreme uncertainty about the future path of U.S. trade policy (does Trump really mean to jack up tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China on February 1, or are the threats just a negotiating tactic?), but we also appear to have jettisoned the rule of law in the euphoria of the monarchical moment.
It is not just Trump’s executive order suspending a law to ban TikTok that was passed by Congress, signed by his predecessor, and upheld by the Supreme Court. Trump has also issued a blanket pardon to all those convicted of crimes—including assaults on police officers—committed on January 6, 2021. And he has issued an executive order overturning the birthright citizenship most people had long assumed was enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment.
But the truly disturbing thing to my eyes is that the assault on the rule of law has been bipartisan. And it is at least arguable that the Democrats began the process. It all started with their hounding of Trump in the courts, at least some of which was politically motivated, and continued in the final days of Biden’s presidency with his preemptive pardons of family members and political figures (they’re all here, including the one for his son Hunter), and a wild attempt to declare a constitutional amendment ratified (the Equal Rights Amendment) that hadn’t been.
“I believe in the rule of law, and I am optimistic that the strength of our legal institutions will ultimately prevail over politics,” Biden said in a statement justifying his actions. “But . . . ” You can stop reading right there. Because if you believe in the rule of law, “but,” then you don’t believe in the rule of law at all. It’s the same as those people who say they believe in free speech, but . . .
To be clear, I begin to fear we may be living through the death of the republic—the transition to empire that historical experience has led us to expect—but it’s not all Trump. It’s a truly bipartisan effort.
I am just fine with a vibe shift that gets us away from ESG, DEI, and the strangling regulation and ideologically motivated incompetence that lies behind the Los Angeles inferno, not to mention Chicago’s less spectacular descent into insolvency and criminality. If Davos Man needed Trump’s reelection to point out that if Europe went woke, it would go broke, then fine.
But trashing the rule of law is another matter.
And note how perfectly the phenomena coincide: the erosion of the laws and the imperial aspirations—Greenland; the Panama Canal; Canada (just kidding); the “Gulf of America;” and Mount McKinley ….
Take the word fascism, properly applied to Franco’s Spain or Mussolini’s Italy, and to some extent beyond. The fasces were the bundles of rods carried by Roman lictors: symbols of punishment and magisterial authority, but in modern times also of a tightly unified society controlled from above, and organized in corporate form. The desire of totalitarians everywhere is to achieve harmonization, with all of society marching in military cadence under the guidance of an omnipresent government.
But the Trump administration is more interested in blowing up the state than in extending its power. Its ideologues, such as they are, are reacting to what they think of as government overreach. They will abuse executive power to do it, but they want to eliminate bureaucracy, not grow it.
Trump himself is not Mussolini, or Hitler, or Orbán—two of them soldiers with creditable war records, the third an activist against a dying Communist regime. Trump was a draft dodger by choice and a grifter by trade, and more important, he does not read. Unlike others in his orbit, he does not have ideas so much as impulses, whims, and resentments. He is, to be sure, cruel and malicious, but unlike the others, has no real governing vision.
My simple thought: that in our politics now we consistently go too far and ask too much. It has become a major dynamic in the past 20 years or so. It manifests in a kind of ideological maximalism. You must get everything you want and grant your foe nothing. In terms of the issue above, you don’t ask society to give you something you deserve—good and just treatment of all transgender folk. Instead you insist that others see reality exactly as you do—that if a man experiences himself as a woman, then you must agree that he is a woman, and this new insight must be incorporated into all human activity, such as sports.
Reaction to the Trump executive order from those who disagree with it has been curiously absent. The reason is that they know they went too far.
The biggest and most politically consequential example of going too far, in the past generation, has been the Democratic Party and illegal immigration. Everyone knows this so I’ll say it quickly. If you deliberately allow many millions to cross the southern border illegally, thus deliberately provoking those who came here legally or were born here, Americans will become a people comfortable with—supportive of—their forced removal, certainly of those who are criminals.
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Jump to what has been going on the past few weeks in Washington, with the unelected Elon Musk reorganizing, if that’s the word, the federal agencies. Here I pick on him, in part to show fairness. He is surely a genius, a visionary, a titan, but there is something childish and primitive about him. He has wild confidence in his ability to engineer desired outcomes, but unstable elements have a way of exploding in the beaker, and like everyone else from Silicon Valley he lacks a sense of the tragic. They think human life can be rationally shaped and perfected, that every problem just needs the right wrench, and in any case they all think they’re God.
My fear, here we switch metaphors, is that Mr. Musk and his young staffers and acolytes are mad doctors who’ll put 30 chemo ports in the sick body. They’ll not only kill the cancer, they’ll kill the patient.
But they are up against, or trying to reform, a government whose agencies themselves were often maximalist and went too far.
Of all the agencies being batted about the one we will remember first when we recall this period in history is the U.S. Agency for International Development, so much of whose line-item spending was devoted to cultural imperialism. You have seen the lists. USAID produced a DEI musical in Ireland, funded LGBT activism in Guatemala. It spent $426,000 to help Indonesian coffee companies become more climate- and gender-friendly, $447,000 to promote the expansion of atheism in Nepal, and on and on.
When you look at what they were pushing on the world you think: They’re not fighting anti-American feeling, they are causing anti-American feeling.
Who is defending these USAID programs? Nobody. Obviously not Republicans, but not Democrats either. Everyone knows the agency went too far.
[O]n Wednesday afternoon, when I visited the essential Live Updates feed at The New York Times to check in on the latest barrage of Trump administration hyperactivity, I found literally the entire feed devoted to Trump’s bullshit “plan” for the U.S. takeover of Gaza. Breaking news stories. Reactions from around the world. Chin-scratching analysis from experts. All taking the suggestion, which Trump’s own senior staff hadn’t been expecting prior to its announcement during his press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with utmost seriousness. As if it was a real proposal that could conceivably become a reality.
I admit, this made me want to throw my laptop at the wall. Can’t you see he just fucking with us? But that’s unfair to the hardworking journalists at the Times. The American president’s words matter. They have to cover it as if it’s real. Which, of course, takes attention away from the things happening that are real. That illustrates quite vividly the horrible bind in which journalists, reporters, and news organizations find themselves at this maximally harrowing moment.
Thank god for James Carville: While the entire Dem establishment seems committed to losing at every opportunity they have, one James Carville is screaming into the void. “We ran a presidential election. If we were playing the Super Bowl, we started our seventh-string quarterback. . . . You can’t address a problem unless you’re honest about a problem.”
When the glowing orb of Carville pops up on the TV, you know you’re about to be yelled at. You know there’ll be spit on that table. Carville said people would be shocked to know that there are Dem candidates that “can actually complete a sentence, that actually know how to frame a message, that actually have a sense of accomplishment, of doing something.” Where are they hiding? Maybe in Governor Phil Murphy’s attic. Maybe somewhere in South Bend. But it’s time, guys: We need a complete-your-sentence–level politician, and we need one ba (sic)
I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.
Oh, I could quibble and say the LARPing Anglicanism without a bishop is sort of Baptist-adjacent. But when it includes an organized vestry and infant baptism, I wave the white flag.
Dechurching
[T]here are more people who dechurch into a kind of right-wing political religion than into a left-wing political religion.
The problem with race and the Bible was far more profound than the interpretation of any one text. It was a problem brought about by the intuitive character of the reigning American hermeneutic. This hermeneutic merged three positions: (1) The Bible was a plain book whose meanings could be reliably ascertained through the exercise of an ordinary person’s intelligence; (2) a main reason for trusting the Bible as true was an intuitive sense, sealed by the Holy Spirit; (3) the same intelligence that through ordinary means and intuitions could trust the Bible as true also gained much additional truth about the world through intuitive processes that were also deliverances of universal common sense. The first position was a traditional Protestant teaching intensified by the American environment; the second was historically Protestant and Reformed; the third was simply a function of the American hermeneutic.
Just as colonial officials and missionaries, travelling to India, had imposed the concept of ‘religion’ on the societies they found there, so did agnostics colonise the past in similar manner. The ancient Egyptians, and Babylonians, and Romans: all were assumed to have had a ‘religion’. Some peoples—most notably the Greeks—were also assumed to have had ‘science’. It was this that had enabled their civilisation to serve as the wellspring of progress. Philosophers had been the prototypes of scientists. The library of Alexandria had been ‘the birthplace of modern science’.26 Only Christians, with their fanatical hatred of reason and their determination to eradicate pagan learning, had prevented the ancient world from being set on a path towards steam engines and cotton mills.
Tom Holland, Dominion
Belonging nowhere
Yesterday my family and I went to a wedding in Dublin. We got up in the dark, lit the candles, heated water on a gas stove I’d set up in the garden and washed in a plastic tub in the bath. Then we put our best duds on and drove out of the darkness. [They were in a storm-caused power outage of several days’ duration.] There was light in the city, of course. The wedding was beautiful. I’d never been to an Orthodox wedding before. Our friend, the groom, was lit up from within.
After the ceremony I got talking to another guest, a Romanian woman now living in Ireland. ‘When I go home now’, she said, ‘I feel like a stranger. It doesn’t feel like home, really. But I am not Irish either. I don’t belong anywhere.’ It could have been the familiar lament of the immigrant, but it was not that. ‘Except here,’ she went on, gesturing about her. ‘In the Church, there are people from all sorts of countries, but we all come together and everything makes sense. Nothing seems to make sense outside it any more.’
I nodded my head and agreed. I feel the same these days. My secular friends, my atheist relatives: I love them, but some of them think I’ve gone mad, or already was. This journey of prayer takes you away from the world, lifts your feet slightly above the ground, away from the electric spectacle, with its currents that drag you down. They can’t see that. How could they? It can’t be accessed through argument. It’s nobody’s fault, but the river that runs between us is real.
Later, my wife and I got talking to a priest we know around the dinner table. Here we were, an English Christian convert to the Eastern Church, a British-Indian Sikh, a Romanian Orthodox priest, all of us talking about religion in the capital of Ireland, and all of us agreeing on one thing: that we could understand and connect much better, on some deep level, with each other, and with other religious people, whatever their faith, than we could with people from our own culture who had no religion at all.
The English, said the priest, seem to be a very irreligious people. I told him he was right. It makes me sad, but there it is. I could talk more easily now, I think, to an African Christian, an Indonesian Muslim or an Indian Hindu than I could to a secular British atheist immersed in what passes for culture in my homeland. I’m not judging. I’m just laying it out.
You can aim towards God, I think now, or you can aim somewhere else. You can open up all of your inner rooms and say, come on in, Father, clear out all the crap I have stored in here, and fill these rooms with light. You can say that in a lot of different languages, in a lot of different dialects, with a lot of different approaches. Or you can keep the doors closed.
“We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in,” Richard Dawkins has argued. “Some of us just go one god further.” The idea behind this aphorism is that every serious religious worldview is a closed system and that to really practice and believe in one is to necessarily reject all the rest as incredible and false.
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Dawkins is simply wrong about the requirement for believers to disbelieve in every other faith. The bookstore of all religions isn’t necessarily a library of total falsehoods with one lonely truth hidden somewhere on the shelves, and embracing one revelation doesn’t require believing that every other religion is made up.
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Consider the story of religious pilgrimage offered recently by the British novelist Paul Kingsnorth. Raised to experience his isle’s Christianity as a hopeless antiquarianism, he found that spiritual interests grew naturally out of his environmentalism, which led into a commitment to Zen Buddhism, which lasted years but felt insufficient, lacking (he felt) a mode of true worship.
He found that worship in actual paganism, and he went so far as to become a priest of Wicca, a practitioner of what he took to be white magic. At which point, and only at that point, he began to feel impelled toward Christianity — by coincidence and dreams, ideas and arguments and some stark mystical experiences as well.
But it would have been unimaginable to him at the start of the journey that the Christian faith imparted to him weakly in his childhood — that “ancient, tired religion” as he put it — could have possibly been his destination in the end. Only the act of questing delivered him back to the initial place, no longer old and tired but fresh and new.
“We shall not cease from exploration,” wrote T.S. Eliot in “Four Quartets.” “And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.” That’s a nice encapsulation for Kingsnorth’s journey. But for the general obligation imposed upon us all, as time-bound creatures in a world shot through with intimations of transcendence, a different Eliot line is apt: “For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”
Ross Douthat, excerpted from his forthcoming book Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.
Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.
George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs
[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican and Independent families, some who fear for their lives.
But why should any gay, lesbian, or trans child be afraid for their lives? Who is trying to kill them? No one. The only reason some kids are scared is because the adults who have been brainwashing them in critical gender theory are scaring them, and Budde is joining in. If anything, a pause on medical experiments on children should be a cause for relief, not fear. And fear-mongering, in any case, is not a Christian message.
The spirit of Voltaire lives!
Voltaire, according to whom “the people is between man and beast,” wrote that “I want my attorney, my tailor, my servants, even my wife to believe in God, and I think that I shall then be robbed and cuckolded less often.
Here is House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries this week with aBraveheartcry for DEI initiatives: “Diversity, equity, and inclusion are American values. . . . Never surrender.” Right. Never surrender. Technically, you didn’t surrender, you just lost every major election and the popular vote. But I guess we can blame Liz Cheney, which, fair.
Meanwhile, the Lincoln Project guys are still just going on about January 6: “What happened to the Republicans? They once stood for law and order. But today, the party has taken their position: standing with violent insurrectionists over the people who keep us safe from them.” Please, I beg you, move on from January 6. It’s been done! Democrats see themselves as the January 6 Remembrance Party. And I’m telling you, that’s cool, but it can’t be the whole thing. You have to have one other thing! Many people (me) want to be proud Dems. Just give us one policy. Do one infrastructure bill. And no, it cannot be January 6–related.
New Yorkmag crops out all the black MAGA folks:New York magazine covered MAGA inauguration parties and mentioned more than once that almost everyone at the party was white. And I’m sure that’s true-ish, truth-adjacent. But to get that to be Fully True, the magazine cropped out all the black attendees from their own picture of one of the parties, and the magazine neglected to mention the host of the party was black. There’s certainly a neo-racist, neo-Nazi scene coming up on the right, but when you’re trying to say an event was a white supremacy rally, well, you gotta shoot to kill.
We try in vain to teach our children love of the true, the good and the beautiful if our actions reward bullshit, transgression and power.
Weird things: the little homily before protestant baptisms explaining to people that baptism doesn’t actually do anything.
Political fundamentals: don’t run on boutique issues in a Walmart nation
Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth. (Allan Watts)
What if they gave a war and nobody came? (A favorite bumper sticker from my youth.)
The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits. (Mis-attributed to Albert Einstein; probably from a French equivalent by Alexandre Dumas)
It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have. (James Baldwin)
The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions. (Susan Sontag via The Economist)
You truly possess only what you cannot lose in a shipwreck.(Sufi saying via Pico Iyer)
The Episcopal Church used to be “the Republican Party at Prayer.” Now it’s NPR at Prayer.
The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it. (George Orwell)
Ridicule is the only honourable weapon we have left. (Muriel Spark via the Economist)
I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.
I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.
In The Rutland Herald, of Vermont, an unsigned editorial summarized our new president’s fusillade of executive orders: “Donald Trump just decided to slam the nation up against the locker and demand that we all play his game — or else. That’s not leadership. That’s a shakedown.”
2015 me would have gazed around at the first nine days of Trump’s term, taking each policy in isolation, and concluded that the individual trees look pretty good. 2025 me stares around at the forest Trump is planting and shudders.
“What we are witnessing is nothing short of a revolution inside the U.S. government,” Politico announced on Tuesday in response to Trump’s latest personnel purges. That’s the right word.
Only two presidents in my lifetime have been truly visionary, I wrote a few weeks before the election. One is Ronald Reagan, the other is Trump. But while both treated the federal government as a beast to be broken, their goals in subduing it were all but directly opposed. Reagan believed that a weaker government would mean greater individual liberty for Americans. Trump believes that a weaker government will be less able to prevent him from consolidating power and dominating American life.
Policy by policy, he’s trying to bring about a postliberal revolution in which all meaningful federal authority ultimately rests with him. If you’re judging his daily executive actions in isolation, without regard to that fact, you’re missing the forest for the trees.
I usually read Catoggio for laughs. This time, he’s spot-on about a matter of vital national interest. Like Catoggio, I see a lot of nice trees; my list of them is up to seven so far. But the forest is “Mafia Don.”
Of all the links in this post, this one is the one I most hope you’ll follow, devour, and digest.
The Softest of Targets
One of the problems with Donald Trump is that he doesn’t … know stuff.
My own theory of the case, following Sherlock Holmes’ advice—“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”—is that Trump is exactly what he appears to be: an ignorant buffoon who has been carried to the presidency twice on the winds of resentment, romanticism, and nihilism. Trump is a weird combination of Chauncey Gardiner and the Bizarro World version of Pope Celestine V, the naïve hermit who was dragged out of his hole in the ground and plunked down in the Chair of St. Peter when exasperated cardinals decided that what the sclerotic papacy needed was a political outsider … who could be easily manipulated by insiders.
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[T]hreatening to take away Putin’s access to U.S. markets is like threatening to take away Donald Trump’s library card—it’s not like he’s using it a whole heck of a lot.
… I’ve been to Ukraine and seen some of the damage done. On July 8 of last year, Putin’s forces bombed a children’s hospital in Kyiv. Putin knows a soft target when he sees it, and there are few targets in the geopolitical theater right now softer than Donald Trump.
Trump 47 signed an Executive Order on sex that I appreciated for its refusal to pussy-foot around. There has been some pushback (maybe a lot of pushback) that much prefers pussy-footing. Jesse Singal is on it:
What’s going on here, as usual, is that left-of-center thinkers are trying to squeeze a scientific argument into the clothes of a moral one. They have foolishly accepted the framing that we should only treat trans people with dignity and grant them certain rights if they are really the sex they say they are.
(Bold added) Isn’t that really what’s going on with the pushback?
If I only treated people with dignity and as rights-bearers when I agreed with all their delusional ideas, I’d have suffered a lot more broken bones and black eyes in my life.
Abusing the Courts
Donald Trump has sued election pollster J. Ann Selzer for “consumer fraud” and “election interference” for incorrectly projecting Kamala Harris to win Iowa by 3 points:
Efforts to prohibit purportedly false statements in politics are as old as the republic. Indeed, our First Amendment tradition originated from colonial officials’ early attempts to use libel laws against the press.
America rejected this censorship after officials used the Sedition Act of 1798 to jail newspaper editors for publishing “false” and “malicious” criticisms of President John Adams. After Thomas Jefferson defeated Adams in the election of 1800, he pardoned and remitted the fines of those convicted, writing that he considered the act “to be a nullity, as absolute and as palpable as if Congress had ordered us to fall down and worship a golden image.”
Trump’s allegations against Selzer are so baseless that you’d be forgiven for wondering why he even bothered. That is, until you realize that these claims are filed not because they have any merit or stand any chance of success, but in order to impose punishing litigation costs on his perceived opponents. The lawsuit is the punishment.
In fact, Trump has a habit of doing this. He once sued an architecture columnist for calling a proposed Trump building “one of the silliest things anyone could inflict on New York or any other city.” The suit was dismissed. He also sued author Timothy L. O’Brien, business reporter at the New York Times and author of TrumpNation: The Art of Being The Donald, for writing that Trump’s net worth was much lower than he had publicly claimed. The suit was also dismissed.
But winning those lawsuits wasn’t the point, and Trump himself said so. “I spent a couple of bucks on legal fees, and they spent a whole lot more,” he said. “I did it to make his life miserable, which I’m happy about.” Back in 2015, he even threatened to sue John Kasich, then-governor of Ohio and a fellow Republican candidate for president, “just for fun” because of his attack ads.
This tactic is called a “strategic lawsuit against public participation,” or SLAPP for short, and it’s a tried-and-true way for wealthy and powerful people to punish their perceived enemies for their protected speech. It’s also a serious threat to open discourse and a violation of our First Amendment freedoms.
Lawsuits are costly, time-consuming, and often disastrous to people’s personal lives and reputations. If you have the threat of legal action hanging over you for what you’re about to say, you will think twice before saying it—and that’s the point.
Greg Lukianoff of FIRE, which is doing the free speech work that no longer interests the pathetic ACLU since it discovered LGBTetc. issues. (Bold added)
I’m going to say what is said too rarely: the lawyers who file these suits for Trump are acting unethically and should be personally sanctioned.
That’s not only a huge imbalance but also an unprecedented one.
In fact, Democrats’ 57 percent unfavorable rating is their highest ever in Quinnipiac’s polling, dating back to 2008, while the GOP’s 43 percent favorable rating is its highest ever. (Sources: washingtonpost.com, poll.qu.edu)
[A]s the teens drew to close, punctuated by the COVID pandemic and the George Floyd summer of 2020, the left was both larger than it had been in a long time and very different from earlier iterations. This was a left that believed America was a white supremacist society, fully bought into climate catastrophism, prized “equity” above social order, good governance and equal opportunity and thought “no human being is illegal” was a good approach to immigration policy. And they were perfectly willing to shout you down if you didn’t believe all this stuff or even if you didn’t use the right language when referring to these issues. Not coincidentally this was also a left with almost no connection to the working class, in stark contrast to the 20th century left’s origin story.
[O]n the eve of the 80th anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation, [Elon] Musk beamed into a meeting of Germany’s right-wing, populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party to urge them to stop feeling guilty about the Holocaust, I wondered if building a “doomsday machine” might not be in his future after all.
“There is too much focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that. Children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone their great-grandparents,” Musk said, seeming to reference the country’s history when the Nazis rose to power.
“You should be optimistic and excited about a future for Germany,” said Musk, as the crowd applauded.
Elon Musk is correct, of course, that one generation should not be deemed guilty of the sins of another. No one should want to see German Chancellor Olaf Scholz hauled off to the Hague to answer for the crimes of the S.S.
But no one does want to see that, as far as I know. It’s a red herring. In his address to the German far right, Musk conflated personal responsibility with cultural responsibility.
Personal responsibility says “you, personally, committed this sin and should pay for it.” Cultural responsibility says “you are capable of committing this sin, as you belong to a culture in which it was once widely and flagrantly committed, and that fact should inform your understanding of your culture and yourself.”
German children should not be made to feel responsible for the Holocaust. But they should be keenly aware of the fact that their culture, within living memory, barfed up a government of degenerates so depraved that it literally industrialized murder.
We all know the Santayana quote about remembering the past and being condemned to repeat it. Musk would do well to think on it a while. If your condition for feeling “optimistic and excited” about Germany’s future is everyone “moving beyond” Auschwitz, you’re not ready to move beyond Auschwitz.
I am not prepared to wave away Musk’s alleged Nazi salute. I don’t really do social media, and I don’t follow Musk on X (pronounced “shitter”), but I have reliable reports of him repeatedly boosting truly extreme and racist tweets of others. That’s some of the context for what Catoggio calls “spaz.”
I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.
I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.
The aged president of the United States and the young midwestern senator he’d chosen as his second-term running mate were having a private, late-night discussion. The commander in chief wanted to share his plan to make America greater than it’s ever been. He flung an arm toward one end of the room as he explained the most audacious idea in the history of the republic.
“Canada! Canada!”
The senator, a veteran of America’s most recent war, was dumbfounded. “A union with Canada?” he asked.
“Right. A union with Canada. … Canada is the wealthiest nation on earth … Canada will be the seat of power in the next century and, properly exploited and conserved, her riches can go on for a thousand years.”
Not only did the president want to annex Canada, but he then declared the need to bring Scandinavia—with populations ostensibly blessed by genetics—into a new Atlantic union. “Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland, to be specific. They will bring us the character and the discipline we so sadly lack. I know these people … I’m of German extraction, but many generations ago my people were Swedes who emigrated to Germany.”
Other NATO members would be frozen out, especially Great Britain, France, and Germany, nations the president believed had faded as world powers. He assured his running mate that eventually they would become part of the new union one way or another—even if that meant using force against former American allies to compel their submission to his plans for greatness. “Force?” the incredulous young senator asked. “You mean military force, Mr. President?”
“Yes, force,” the president said. “Only if necessary, and I doubt it ever would be. There are other kinds of pressure,” the president continued, “trade duties and barriers, financial measures, economic sanctions if you will.” In the short term, however, the president’s first move would be to meet with the Russians—and to propose a nuclear alliance against China.
These exchanges are—believe it or not—the plot of a 1965 political thriller, a book titled Night of Camp David.
The author Fletcher Knebel (who also co-wrote the more widely known Seven Days in May) came up with these plans as evidence that a fictional president named Mark Hollenbach has gone insane …
I went to a funeral on MLK Day (when there were unrelated festivities going on in Washington DC as well). I hadn’t seen the deceased probably in more than a quarter century, but I always liked him.
Apart from being dead, Tom looked good. Apart from her hair haven’t gone white, his wife looked great. It was good to see them again, though it does eventually get tiresome when you only see your old friends at funerals, especially when one is the guest of honor.
His daughter’s Remembrance dwelt at some lengths on Tom’s piety, and deservedly so in my experience. We got acquainted at our former Reformed church. When our church split planted a sister church with guitars and drums and plexiglass and repetitive praise songs and such, I think he went with the sister church instead of staying with us stick-in-the-muds. Eventually, he moved out of state, to a warmer and trendier place, to start his own business in a field he knew from 30 or so years’ experience. He remained firmly in the Reformed tradition, though he switched in his new home to the Presbyterian side rather than the continental.
And soon enough, the Orthodox Christian faith caught my serious attention and I, too, left — in an opposite direction from Tom.
Which brings me to my topic. Why me? Why did I get lucky? Why don’t more people like me find the Orthodox Christian faith?
I don’t really have an answer, but I have largely gotten over my convert-itis, my urge to harangue people about looking into Orthodoxy. I’m just not prepared to say that the world would be a better place if every pious Protestant was forever wringing his hands and anxiously poring over books to see if maybe he hadn’t picked (or been born into, or married into, or whatever) the true/best Church. There’s something to be said for settling down and practicing your faith, especially since the alternative of searching, searching, searching just might be unhealthier than settling down in the wrong place.
Or so it seems to me. I don’t mean to be cavalier about extra Ecclesiam nulla salus or to fudge the borders of Ecclesiam, but if I can hope for the salvation of all, and can get out of my left brain about distinctions, surely I can hope for the salvation of heterodox Christians.
Settling is what I had done 30-plus years ago. As I can attest, God knows how to unsettle you when you need it. So if you are feeling unsettled in your Church, come and see what’s up in your nearest Orthodox Church. Otherwise, stay put and be the best [fill in the blank] you can be.
And may God have mercy on me if this is the advice of a squish.
Before we forget the stunt …
Of Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde’s National Cathedral sermon (which turned to direct admonition of Donald Trump):
I must be one of the only people other than those actually in the cathedral to have listened to the entire thing. It was dry, high-minded, and Christ-light, and it built on a theme of “unity” in which all people drop their political differences and embrace a generalized, feel-good, Esperanto-like uni-faith, with everyone directing their prayers to Whom It May Concern.
Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.
George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs
[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
What is the honorable way to oppose while hoping for the best, to oppose while being as quick to recognize progress as to see failure, to oppose while appreciating any outcomes that are healthy for and helpful to the United States of America? And without forgetting why you oppose? We’ll find out. This is our goal. History is long and our moment within it short. Play it straight and say what you see.
…
He is going to utterly dominate our brainspace. He is a neurological imperialist, he storms in and stays. In his public self, Joe Biden asked nothing and gave nothing. Mr. Trump demands and dominates: Attention must be paid. It was said years ago that Fox News viewers were so loyal that they never changed the channel and the Fox logo burned itself into the screens. Donald Trump won’t be happy until he’s burned himself into the nation’s corneas.
… let me tell you what happens when you pardon virtually everyone who did Jan. 6: You get more Jan. 6ths. When people who commit crimes see that their punishment will be minimal they are encouraged. It was a wicked act. Conservatives are tough on crime because of the pain and disorder it causes. In that case it pained an entire nation. Jan. 6 too shamed us in the eyes of the world. This pardon was not a patriotic act.
The effect — and I believe purpose — of these pardons is to encourage vigilantes and militias loyal to the president, but unaccountable to the government. Illiberal democracies and outright dictatorships often rely on such militia groups, whose organization and seriousness can range widely, from the vigilantes who enforce Iran’s hijab dress code to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia that have killed government opponents.
Here in America, lynch mobs and the Ku Klux Klan bolstered a racial caste system with violence that state governments, for the most part, were unwilling to commit themselves. But for decades, we had little reason to fear that vigilantes or militias would enforce the will of the state.
Mafia Don, by pardoning or commuting the sentences of violent felons who support him, says “hold my beer.”
I fear we’re in for vigilante justice.
Moral equivalency? Not if you think threats of violence and death are worse than threats of regulatory harassment. But it’s not unprecedented.
The day I became politically homeless
Monday, inauguration day, was the 20th Anniversary of my declaring an end of my loyalty to the GOP.
George W. Bush, for whom I’d voted in 2000 because of his promise of a humbler foreign policy, announced a 180-degree reversal:
So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.
(Italics added) He immediately added “This is not primarily the task of arms,” but I knew that the policy was delusional and that arms would be required in the folly.
I was right.
I wish I could say I quit because I foresaw something like Donald Trump as the eventuality of, say, the GOP’s “southern strategy,” but that would be a big ole lie.
Ms. Hemphill, 71, who was called “MAGA Granny” in some news headlines, has said that she no longer supports Mr. Trump or believes his lie that the 2020 election was stolen. She said that a therapist had helped change her view of the attack by telling her she was “not a victim of Jan. 6; I was a volunteer.”
“I lost my critical thinking,” she said on Wednesday, reflecting on her involvement in the riot and the “Stop the Steal” movement. “Now I know it was a cult, and I was in a cult.”
Would that this were not a man-bites-dog story! Would that most of the rioters had come to their senses!
Over-interpreting
Episcopal Bishop Mariann E. Budde pointedly challenged President Trump from the pulpit this week:
President Trump, seated seven feet below and some 40 feet to her right, made eye contact. One representation of American Christianity began speaking to another, and the most powerful man in the world was arrested by the words of a silver-haired female bishop in the pulpit. Until he turned away.
…
“Let me make one final plea, Mr. President: Millions have put their trust in you. And as you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican and independent families, some who fear for their lives. And the people, the people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings, who labor in poultry farms and meatpacking plants, who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals, they — they may not be citizens or have the proper documentation, but the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away, and that you help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here, Mr. President.” …
For everyone watching, the vastness of Washington National Cathedral compressed, in one stunning moment, into a sudden intimacy. And with it, all the existential fights not simply of politics, but of morality itself. In a flash, the war over spiritual authority in America burst into a rare public showdown.
The Canterbury Pulpit confronted the bully pulpit on the greatest possible stage.
For nearly a decade, American Christianity has been torn apart in every possible way. Christians have fought over whether women should be allowed to preach. Over the place of gay people. The definition of marriage. The separation of church and state. Black Lives Matter. And at the heart of much of it has been Mr. Trump’s rise as the de facto head of the modern American church, and the rise of right-wing Christian power declaring itself the one true voice of God.
I deny that Donald Trump is any representative of American Christianity; I don’t even think his Christianish supporters any longer claim that he is a Christian of any sort. I deny that he is “the de facto head of the modern American church.” This is highly tendentious reporting, notwithstanding the author’s credentials.
I remain scandalized that Trump gets so much enthusiastic Christianish support, but I have come to understand, at least a little bit, why voters, Christianish or not, preferred him to the senile, corrupt, manipulative, gaslighting and extremist alternative.
Honey Badger
A fairly short paragraph that packs a big claim. Speaking of a panel at Davos:
[O]ne of the panelists said she has been talking to CEOs there, and they all promise that they are not going to roll back DEI, despite the criticism. I believe she’s telling the truth. Whether those CEOs were just telling her that to calm her down, or whether they really believe it — only time will tell. I would bet that most of them really believe it, because DEI is held to with religious fervor by that elite class. As I’ve written here before, it is impossible to overstate the conformist power among elites of being seen as a Good Person. This is why no Republican leader ever pushed back against this stuff prior to Trump. They were terrified of being seen as a Bad Person by the media and other elites. Trump is the Honey Badger of politics: he doesn’t care. (That’s a link to the megaviral Randall video from some years back; he drops some profanity in it, so be aware.)
the lesson I have learned from the writers of my father’s generation is that those who resisted the life of doublethink then are the one who keep influencing us now.
Garth Hudson, the last surviving member of The Band, has died at age 87. Alan Jacobs mourns, and in doing so points out what was so special about The Band:
Robbie Robertson once said that — when they were all living in and around the house in West Saugerties, New York they called Big Pink — Dylan would play them songs he was working on and they couldn’t tell whether he had just written them or found them under a rock. The Band’s best music is like that: it feels old, time-worn and seasoned, and yet is also a brand new thing.
Yeah, that’s how it felt.
Healthy Society, Sickly Society
The quality that sets the true elites apart—that bestows authority on their actions and expressions—isn’t power, or wealth, or education, or even persuasiveness. It’s integrity in life and work. A healthy society is one in which such exemplary types draw the public toward them purely by the force of their example. Without compulsion, ordinary persons aspire to resemble the extraordinary, not superficially but fundamentally, because they wish to partake of superior models of being or doing. The good society, Ortega concluded, was an “engine of perfection.”
In a sickly society, the force of exemplarity is reversed. Elites seek to flatter and imitate the public. They make a display of popular tastes and attitudes, even as they retreat behind barricades of bodyguards and metal-detecting machines. This, of course, is what I meant by distance: a moral alienation felt even more keenly than the structural divide.
I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.
[T]he heroic presidency runs the persistent danger of becoming craven or abusive, as Vietnam and Watergate taught. This is what so many critics worry about with Mr. Trump — that his transformations will be more resonant of Richard Nixon than of our most esteemed presidents.
Yet there is a complementary question that should concern supporters of Mr. Trump: Can he succeed? He has amassed enormous power in his party and is building an intensely devoted administration. Those factors will bring him wins in the short run.
But it takes extraordinary skill to wield executive power successfully throughout an administration. If past is prologue, Mr. Trump lacks the acumen to carry out his ambitious agenda.
The first problem is management style. In his first term, Mr. Trump was a poor administrator because of his mercurial, polarizing style and a general indifference to facts and the hard work of governance. …
Second is the question of whether Mr. Trump knows where he wants to go. … Mr. Trump has a powerful slogan, “America first,” a robust agenda, and many discrete and often insightful political instincts. But he lacks a coherent sense of the public ends for which he exercises power. …
Third, personal gain was neither a priority of the great presidents nor a guide to their exercise of power. …
Fourth, Mr. Trump is unlike any previous president, even Jackson, in broadly delegitimating American institutions — the courts, the military and intelligence communities, the Justice Department, the press, the electoral system and both political parties. This will do him no favors when he needs their support, as he will.
…
Fifth, Mr. Trump’s obsession with hard executive power and an extreme version of the unitary executive theory will be self-defeating. If his stalwart subordinates carry out his every whim, as he hopes, bad policies will result. If the loyalists Mr. Trump is putting at the top of the Justice Department do not give him candid independent advice that he follows, he will violate the law and often lose in court, as happened in his first term.
The great presidents … understood that hard power could go only so far and that persuasion and consent were surer tools to achieving lasting presidential goals in our democracy. This idea is lost on Mr. Trump.
Finally, as Mr. Schlesinger noted, the great presidents all “took risks in pursuit of their ideals” and “provoked intense controversy.” And, except for Washington, they all “divided the nation before reuniting it on a new level of national understanding.”
Mr. Trump is a risk taker and a divider. But it is hard to see how his approach to the presidency ends in national reunion.
What runners they were, round and round the arena in their expensive armour
like that other runner from Marathon, his time unsurpassed until the arrival of steroids. We cover the ground faster, but what news do we bring?
Excerpt from Postcard, in R.S. Thomas, Collected Later Poems 1988-2000
The neutering welcome
Merkel, when she insisted that Islam belonged in Germany just as much as Christianity, was only appearing to be even-handed. To hail a religion for its compatibility with a secular society was decidedly not a neutral gesture. Secularism was no less bred of the sweep of Christian history than were Orbán’s barbed-wire fences. Naturally, for it to function as its exponents wished it to function, this could never be admitted.
Tom Holland, Dominion
If this makes no sense to you, read it again. And again. If it still makes no sense, you need to read some history, and Dominion wouldn’t be a bad place to start.
What is truly “self-evident”?
So yes, the equality of all humans seemed staringly obvious (at least in theory) to Franklin and Jefferson. But that was because their culture was saturated with Christian assumptions―so much so that the concepts and phrases they used were taken from Locke, who had got them from Hooker, who had got them from Scripture.”
Franklin’s brief, scribbled correction is a marvelous metaphor for the ex-Christian West. His replacement of the words “sacred and undeniable” with “self-evident” echoes what was happening across European society as a whole in 1776, at least among elites. It was an attempt to retain Christianity’s moral conclusions while scrubbing out its theological foundations: keeping the fruits while severing the roots, if you will. And it resulted in the insistence that JudeoChristian convictions on anthropology and ethics were now to be regarded as universal norms on which all reasonable people would agree.
Andrew Wilson, Remaking the World
See my remark in the prior item.
Oblivious
On this bitter-cold January morning in the American midwest, my thoughts turned to hot, hearty soup, and this quickly led to a reflection.
There is a catering service in my fair city that used to be open to the public for sit-down lunch. Its kitchen included a soup genius.
I’d go there on a wintery day, and once I learned of it, I would invariably check their freezer before leaving, buying as many as four quarts of frozen, leftover soup.
Then one day the proprietress approached me: “Did you realize that a lot of people on fixed incomes come here to buy soup?” Crestfallen, I answered “No, I didn’t. I’m sorry. Thank you for telling me. I’ll leave the soup for them.”
God never said “Thou shalt not buy leftover soup.” He didn’t say “Thou shalt think twice or thrice about the indirect consequences of buying leftover soup.” And, since this was a rather upscale eatery (albeit in a downscale neighborhood), I’m not sure that the proverbial “moment’s reflection” would have revealed the indirect consequences to me; I just saw it as “I get good soup and this caterer gets more money.”
But I was, quite obliviously, snatching food from the mouths of poor pensioners. Greater awareness might have prevented that, and the proprietress’ consciousness-raising was welcome.
Proof
Woozle Effect
When a source makes an unproven claim and it’s then cited as proof by another, which is cited by another, and so on, until the chain of citations looks like evidence. This is common because, while many writers check their sources, few check their sources’ sources.
A recent example: evidence that puberty blockers are safe and effective was overestimated because institutions were circularly citing each other.
…
Hitchens’s Razor
“What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.” ― Christopher Hitchens. If you make a claim, it’s up to you to prove it, not to me to disprove it.
Love the quick profit, the annual raise, vacation with pay. Want more of everything ready-made. Be afraid to know your neighbors and to die. And you will have a window in your head. Not even your future will be a mystery any more. Your mind will be punched in a card and shut away in a little drawer. When they want you to buy something they will call you. When they want you to die for profit they will let you know. So, friends, every day do something that won’t compute. Love the Lord. Love the world. Work for nothing. Take all that you have and be poor. Love someone who does not deserve it. Denounce the government and embrace the flag. Hope to live in that free republic for which it stands. Give your approval to all you cannot understand. Praise ignorance, for what man has not encountered he has not destroyed. Ask the questions that have no answers. Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias. Say that your main crop is the forest that you did not plant, that you will not live to harvest. Say that the leaves are harvested when they have rotted into the mold. Call that profit. Prophesy such returns. Put your faith in the two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years. Listen to carrion — put your ear close, and hear the faint chattering of the songs that are to come. Expect the end of the world. Laugh. Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts. So long as women do not go cheap for power, please women more than men. Ask yourself: Will this satisfy a woman satisfied to bear a child? Will this disturb the sleep of a woman near to giving birth? Go with your love to the fields. Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head in her lap. Swear allegiance to what is nighest your thoughts. As soon as the generals and the politicos can predict the motions of your mind, lose it. Leave it as a sign to mark the false trail, the way you didn’t go. Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction. Practice resurrection.
“Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front”from The Country of Marriage, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. 1973. Also published by Counterpoint Press in The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry, 1999; The Mad Farmer Poems_, 2008;_ New Collected Poems, 2012.
I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.
I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 