We Choose to Save

“In the face of those who would visit death upon innocents, we will choose to save and to comfort and to heal.” Barack H. Obama, President of the United States of America, at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, Boston, MA, April 17, 2013

On September 5, 1935 the Laws for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour, the Nuremburg Laws, became the law of the land in Germany.  The effect of the passage of these laws was to make Jews, Gypsies, and a number of other racial or ethnic groups added later administratively to the original two, un-persons who really had no rights.  They paved the way for the death camps that followed only a few years later.

In her book “Eichmann In Israel”, which carries the subtitle “A Report on the Banality of Evil”, Hannah Arendt devotes some small part of her time explaining how the Nazis got the Jewish people to cooperate in their extermination.  One reads the sections so devoted with a sense of incredulity only “looking back” can give.  There actually were some Jews who believed they were better off living as a people apart in the middle of the rest of the Reich.  Jews had been treated as second class citizens since January 1933 when Hitler beacme Chancellor of Germany.  From April to October, laws barring Jews from holding positions in the civil service, in legal and medical professions, and in teaching and university positions were pushed through. Boycotts of Jewish-owned shops and businesses and book burnings of writings by Jews and by others not approved by the Reich took place.

While Nazi antisemitic legislation and propaganda against “Non-Aryans” was a thinly disguised attack against anyone who had Jewish parents or grandparents, still there was a certain haphazard and uneveness to it all . Arendt writes about the growing awareness that more organization, tighter control was needed.  Things needed to be tightened up.  All of the many laws and regulations about race, racial purity, inferior types and racial protection, and the various agencies regulating such things needed to be consolidated.  Soon enough, it happened.

Arendt writes that after the Nuremberg Laws were issued in 1935, and Jews had been stripped of political but not civil rights, the situation was felt to have been stabilized.

Now, at least they knew what the situation was, Arendt explains.  There had long been Jewish organizations, civic clubs and fraternal groups, and a thing called a Reichsvertretung, an umbrella group of all the Jewish organizations in Germany, which had not been ordered int0 existence by the Nazis.  They set about accommodating the Jews to the “facts on the ground.”   Even as a second class citizens, one could be quite comfortable in Germany.  That was the feeling.  When the Nazis began to force Jews to emigrate, these organizations and their members willingly cooperated in the program and the policy.  They “generally believed that a modus vivendi would be possible; they even offered to cooperate in the ‘solution of the Jewish question’.”

Arendt goes on to say with no little irony, I think, that when Eichmann became the center of that “solution” Jewish leaders of all kinds, “assimilationists” and Zionists alike, talked “in terms of a great ‘Jewish revival’ and a great constructive movement in German Jewry.”  There were, she says, “still quarrels among themselves in ideological terms about the desirability of Jewish emigration.”  She concludes this sentence ominously by adding a short phrase: “as though this depended on their own decisions.” (Arendt, “Eichmann in Jerusalem”, Viking Press, 1967, p. 40)

We know that very soon these same Jewish leaders were fully cooperating with their Nazi masters in the murder of millions; assembling them by the trains and preparing them for death.

On Januray 22, 1973, the US Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade and announced their decision to the nation.  Its effect was to declare the unborn child in its mother’s womb to be not a person, with no rights, and thus give pregnant women the right to abort theese non-persons if they so chose –  at any time and for any reason.  Since that time more than 50 million people have been killed.

I went looking for Arendt’s book and comments when I became aware of the news blackout regarding Kermit Gosnell, the “doctor” on trial in Philadelphia now, charged with the murder of at least one of his patients and of at least seven infants born alive.  In fact there were more, many more, casualties of both kinds.  These were simply the ones which could be easily proven in court.

From what I have been able to read about Gosnell and his practice, such as it was, filth is too good a word to describe the conditions in which he operated, cruelty too soft a word to describe the kind of treatment he provided, and victims too kind a word for the poor people who came within his grasp.

Yet he was respected.  He enjoyed a certain popularity.  He was looked up to in the community he “served”.  Himself an African-American, the vast majority of his victim-patients were African-American. The way he operated reminds me of Rudolph Hoess, Commandant of Auschwitz, who also had the law behind him.

Of course you know that his medical “practice” was in the area of “Women’s Health”, a code word for abortion.  And, except for one or two stories lately in perhaps a half dozen major newspapers and TV news outlets not a word has been said about what Gosnell is charged with doing, how he did it or why.  Those few words that have been said, have been said in self-defense by the major news machines, and, not too very subtly, to blame the atrocities Gosnell committed on his pregnant victims and the living, defenseless “products of conception” that fell victim to his malevolence, to blame it all on those who want to end legalized abortion.  In a sense, they seek to blame the victim for the crime.  Had really good care been available they argue and bloviate, then women would not have had to submit to Gosnell’s cruetlies.

Well, “really good care” was available from Planned Parenthood within an hour’s drive of Gosnell’s Mengelian death clinic.  That clinic, too, was recently closed and prosecutors are preparing charges for operations that sound chillingly gosnellian.

There is nothing new about that.  Planned Parenthood clinics are regularly shut down because of their slipshod practices, their filth, their unlicensed personnel, their lack of care.  But who, in Hell, would expect to be treated well or with compassion?  One goes there to kill.  Kindness and killing don’t mix well.  Care and killing are opposed.  Sooner or later kindness and care leave, are pushed aside for the pleasures of killing, the need to kill.  Care costs, takes time.  Killing is easy.

Besides, why waste care on those unworthy of it, the under classes.

This last is, really, the reason that Planned Parenthood exists, despite all their rhetoric about women’s health.  The people who founded Planned Parenthood are, likethe Nazis, perfecters of the breed.  “Bring us your poor, your weak, your defective, your congenital idiots and deformed, and we will kill them for you.  Often we will kill you in the bargain.  Then we will be perfect and free.”

You will understand my confusion, I think, when I learned a few days ago that the wife of the US AG, owns a building which houses an abortion clinic.   “What!!??” I exclaimed to the empty room when I came across the article on the internet.  From the ether came the answer, “Don’t you see, Peter, how necessary this is?”  Well, no, I was a little doubtful why the US Ag, who is black, and his wife, who is black, should be hosts to an abortion facility which caters primarily to black women.  Do you doubt the last statement?  Then please look at the picture in the ad for the Old National GYN and come to your own conslusions.  I was interested to find out from spending a little time there at the site that no one is named.  You wouldn’t know anyone even worked there, except something called board certified physicians.

Here is a link to an excellent article article about Mr. and Mrs. Holder’s Little Wayside Abortuary.  As the article says, it explains a lot.

The place looks nice on Google, so I can’t tell if it’s been decorated with gosnellian attention to decor; if baby bits and precious bodily fluids and cat crap are artfully placed and displayed.  But I was interested to know that Eric and the Mrs. are in on a place whose last operator has been indicted in by the feds in Atlanta for going south with 300 large in medicaid funds he fraudulently billed.  That is felony weight anywhere.  And, Eric has the case.  I’m sure he’ll do a good job, aren’t you?

I cannot remember if Eichmann In Jerusalem mentions at all the millions of dollars, the jewels and art work, the fillings and hair, that the SS and all the other nazi murderers harvested from the Jews they killed all those years ago.  “What does it matter, now?” a recent Secretary of State might angrily squawk.  Indeed.  But, I do know that Gosnell has gotten rich killing babies and the occasional poor woman.

Please don’t get the wrong idea, here about Eric and Kermit the Impaler.  I don’t want anyone to think they are the same kind of fools as were the leaders of the Jewish communities in Germany who cooperated with their Nazi killers.  Those tortured souls really had their backs against the wall, though that is no excuse for their actions.

No, there is no government or any of its agencies, no maniacal ruler here in these Untied States intent on eradicating a whole race, and whole classes of people.

What we have is Barack H. Obama, for at least the next three some odd years,  Oh, and Kathleen Sebellius, the token white woman.  With friends like these, black folks don’t need enemies.

In order for me to make some sense of that statement I’ll return to Arendt and her wearisome story of evil in a crisp uniform.  But before I do that, allow me to get rid of this little factoid I stumbled across.  For every 1,000 black children born in this country, 1400 are aborted.

Anyway, Arendt tells the story of one of these Jewish officials, a fellow named Kastner in Hungary or one of those eastern European countries whose cooperation was needed by Eichmann.  She mentioned that Eichmann liked most to deal with Zionists, they were idealists, and Kastner was a Zionist.  According to Arendt, Eichmann himself was an “idealist”, which for him meant a person who would do anything in service of his “ideal”, no matter what was required.  This Jewish fellow was a man like that.

Eichmann wanted a nice orderly removal of Jews to Auschwitz.  This fellow cut a deal with him.  In exchange for a trainload of a couple of thousand of the right type of Jews in one direction out of the country…safe passage…the guy guaranteed a docile herd of a few hundred thousand Jews waiting patiently for the one way trip to Auschwitz.  The people given a ride out of hell were all Zionists; Eichmann’s right kind of Jew, the ones who didn’t want to be there.  For them, though Arendt doesn’t say it, what’s the loss of a few hundred thousand lower class no accounts.

It is a fact that Obama, a black man, is fervently “pro-choice”.  In other words he believes in abortion.  He has said as much regarding his own children, and he has spoken against laws which would restrict abortion; especially late term abortions, the kind of abortions tailor made for gosnellian horrors .

It is a fact that though they account for 13% of the population, black women make up nearly 40% of those who have abortions.  It is a fact that Planned Parenthood abortion facilities are predominently located in or near black and lower class neighborhoods.

One might reasonably conclude from his words and actions that our president is an Eichmannian idealist regarding abortion as an agent for change in the black community particularly and throughout the country.  Abortion at any time and for any reason advances his agenda because it erodes family structures and makes for a population ever more dependent on government, and supportive of its policies and positions.  Certainly, he has not used his considerable influence among the leaders of the abortion industry and within the black community to diminish either abortion’s popularity or its availability.  His Obamacare, is obviously designed to further increase the ease with which black women abort.  And, everyone else, too.

Among a lot of other distasteful “changes” being put into place, that’s race hatred by another name! But it stinks just as much.

Holder??  He’s a Renfield to Obama’s Dracula.

“In the face of those who would visit death upon innocents, we will choose to save and to comfort and to heal.”

When the lights are on, and the cameras rolling.

The New Dhimmitude

A Reflection on an Article by R.R. Reno

“When people talk about religion in America they almost always mean
Christianity. The desire of many on the left to restrict religious freedom
reflects their commitment to limiting the influence of Christianity over
American society, especially in the area of sexual morality, which has
become a preoccupation of contemporary liberalism.

Today elite institutions can be relied upon to provide anto-christian
propaganda. Steven Pinker and Stephen Greenblatt at Harvard publish books
that show how Christianity pretty much ruined, and ruins, everything, as
Christopher Hitchens put it so bluntly. The major presses put out books by
scholars like Elaine Pagels at Princeton that argue that Christianity is for
the most part an invention of power hungry bishops who suppressed the
genuine diversity and spiritual richness of early followers of Jesus.
Journalists like Garry Wills reprocess and reassemble this sort of
scholarship to show that Christianity is a tissue of lies. They can count
on the New York Times to praise their books.

We can dispute the accuracy of these works, and generally there’s a great
deal to be criticized on scholarly grounds. This is necessary, but unlikely
to be effective in altering the influence of someone like Greenblatt, whose
recent book The Swerve was panned by scholars but nevertheless received the
National Book Award for nonfiction. That’s not surprising, because he and
others serve an important ideological purpose. Many liberals today want
Christianity to be discredited, because Christianity and Christians are in
the way. This is clearest in fights over abortion and gay marriage, but we
can see it elsewhere.

We’re in the way of medical research unrestricted by moral concerns about
the use of fetal tissue. We’re in the way of new reproductive technologies
and genetic experimentation. We’re in the way of doctor-assisted suicide.
In other words, we’re in the way of liquifying traditional moral limits so
that they can be reconstructed to accord with the desires and needs of the
powerful people who don’t like being hindered.”
R.R. Reno, “The New Dhimmitude”, First Things, April, 2013, p.5

How come I took the time to type this and then send it to you? Well, I was
struck by Reno’s mention of this guy Garry Wills, who has only recently
risen above the horizon for me. He was once in a Jesuit seminary. When I
was a kid he would have been called a “failed priest”. He was recently
praised, and his ideas and writing applauded in all the right places, and
among all the “smart” people; the ones for whom the inside of a church is
most likely only viewed when it has become the venue for a nice evening of
music, and then praised for its acoustics. But others too have been
generous in their praise of the man, and see merit in his ideas, and hope
for a better day which they are sure will come if things were just a little
bit easier; only just a little bit, after all.

Many of those who write books, folks like Pagels and Greenblatt, would have
been called what they are years ago too, heretics, and not scholars, they
and their works condemned. Certainly, what Reno mentions, here, as being
the reason for their ascendancy may strike some who read this as being just
a little paranoid. I mean who, really is in favor of creating human animal
chimerae? They would be the fools who rush in where angels fear to tread,
the “useful idiots” Vladimir Ilyich loved so much.

Who is in favor of such wild and dangerous science, such crazy
experimentation with the human race? Very crudely, Hitler’s Third Reich
was, and millions thought nothing of it. They were filthy Jews, Poles,
Russians, Gypsies, subhumans all whose sacrifice in the name of science was
merely the moral equivalent of mixing reagents for a chemical reaction; if
morality is a term that applies to anything the Nazis did except in the
negative. Today, I could probably produce a rather impressive list of
“scientists” who are embarked on the same Mengelean madness, and of their
supporters in the wide world from a short Google search. We know how many
millions just “love” reproductive rights. We have a president who probably
has a vigil light before a picture of Margaret Sanger on his bedroom wall.
Is he not powerful? And, has he not been more than ready to show in his
actions that Christianity, and particularly the Catholic Church, is “in the
way” ?

Reno’s is a piece of prophecy, a sort of warning of what is coming. And, it
doesn’t look good. He ends on a hopeful note, in a minor key, a paragraph
or two about a faithful remnant which he precedes by thise ominous words:
“…I think many powerful forces in America would like to impose a soft but
real dhimmitude upon religious people, especially Christians, that severely
limits the public influence of religion. To some degree, they want to do so
by legal means. But the larger project involves cultural intimidation.”

“Church? Oh, yes, ” she said,  “I went to church a couple of months ago, when Tony and Tina got married. It was a scream! You should really see it. Very campy.”

(This appeared in a slightly altered form on the Facebook page of The Christian Book Corner.  Visit them for great discounts on good books and other things.)

Blood, Blossoms, Buildings and Babies

It was still only half bright at a little before six in the morning when the pain became too much to ignore; the pain in both hip and knee that would not allow sleep to continue.  As if to sweeten the “alarm’s” steady pulse down my leg, a little wren began to pipe morning aboard at about the same time so insistently that, having rolled this way, that way and back around to this way again, I simply gave up.  My first long look told me God had done a good work on dawn whose red lips opened wide in bright song and welcome, whose blue eyes smiled at me through my bedroom window.

Tea, strong and hot, was just the thing when I had fired up the kettle and measured out the sugar.  Settling into one of my favorite chairs I decided to read a little from the latest issue of Touchstone magazine.  A letter from Dr. Peter Kreeft, the philosopher and professor from Boston College caught my eye.  He wrote about the sure and certain – and soon – arrival in our sad midst of legalized infanticide.  This, Dr. Kreeft argues, is inevitable because the reasons advanced for abortion’s legality, it’s right, can be used point for point for legalizing infanticide.  He tells of two young women, pro-choice students in one of his classes, with whom he had this argument, asking them to refute his claim if they could.  After the class the two women approached him and said they were convinced.  “So, you are now pro-life,” he asked them.  “No,” he wrote that they replied, “we are pro-infanticide.”

Somehow what first came to mind after reading this little letter was another thing I had read while waiting for my haircut yesterday.  This was a little story in Smithsonian about some scientist who had “created” what he called a “planimal”.  (The story is on page 71 of the current issue.) His “new creation” is the result of mixing some of his own DNA with that of a petunia.  There is a picture of this New Thing that illustrates this accomplishment.  It shows a bright little blossom.  Since I am a man and can therefore name only three colors, I’ll merely say that the photo showed a red flower.  The petals were a lighter red than the veins in the petals.  It was a nice looking flower.  The fellow whose “flesh” was now a part of the flower was particularly pleased with the dark red veins.  Can you figure out why he is pleased?  It is because they remind him of blood, and it was that part of his DNA, the part that colors blood red, that he put into the flower.  The reaction is very favorable to this new thing from artists and scientists eager to try their hands at “creating” fluorescent frogs and flashing flowers.  I caught myself wondering why God hadn’t thought…  But, then.  Good Saint Mary Shelley, pray for us I thought, shuddering.

Reading further in Touchstone I came across an article by Ken Myers whose work appears there regularly.  He writes about a book he’s been reading called “Foolishness To The Greeks”, by Lesslie Newbigin, who died in 1998.  He was a missionary in India for a long time, and when he “retired” from the work in India took up the same work in England.  And, found it difficult.

Why?  Myers quotes the author: “From the point of view of our contemporary culture, the claim that God raised Jesus from the dead is irrational.  It cannot be incorporated into the existing plausibility structure….  It must be regarded as the esoteric belief of a community that is living in a world of make-believe rather than the world of facts.”  A little further on, Myers himself writes this in explanation of Newbigin’s observation: “Modern science is crippled by a materialistic reductionism that eliminates the category of purpose in explaining reality.”  In other words the question, “Why?” need never be asked.  There is, really no answer for someone so crippled, and by a self-inflicted crippling, too.  Myers next sentence explains the two ladies of Dr. Kreeft perfectly: “Modern social and political institutions promote a depersonalizing individualism that renders the pursuit of the common good precarious if not impossible.”  Is there a reason to care?  Well, no, really.  Why care about anything when all that really matters is your own self?

I put down what I had been reading as I finished the second sentence just quoted, and began to wonder about them.  It was early, and no one was up.  Over in the corner of the room I noticed that the hibiscus had just put forth its first blossom, a big red thing that immediately reminded me of the “planimal” I’d looked at just yesterday.

Below the hibiscus an African violet bloomed in blue, another color I could name.

I remembered reading a book long ago, a science-fiction novel by a fellow named Larry Niven called “Ringworld”.  Wikipedia will tell you all you need to know about the book, which entertained me.  To my mind, the “star” of the book is a vast engineering triumph, a world as big as a million earths strung out like a ribbon around its sun, and built by man.  But, it failed.  It had become in the book essentially a ruin by the time the ‘characters” had reached it.  The cause of the ruin was a collision with a meteor which punched a hole in the “ribbon”.

Wow!   Fancy that, a meteor hitting a planet and ruining a civilization. Here, though, it’s just a plot device.   It happened to a world “created” (that word again!) out of hundreds of other worlds to be a perfect place which is destroyed by a random encounter thousands of years before the time of the novel and become a ruin millions of miles in circumference in the desert of space.  (Fellows like Larry Niven, an engineer, really do think this can be done.  They have it all worked out, and look longingly at places like the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter to give it a try.  They call it “terraforming”.)

So was Babel, the next thing I thought about, essentially a ruin.  Someone wrote this about the reason Babel failed: “The evil is in their desire to “make a name” for themselves (cf. Gen. 12:2) rather than in the attempt to build a tower “with its top in the heavens” . . . Human smallness, not divine impotence, is emphasized in the Lord’s descent (vs. 5). … The great city and its (implied) defeat thus becomes synonymous with man’s revolt against God and its consequences.” (http://www.catholic.com/quickquestions/what-was-the-sin-of-the-tower-of-babel) 

I am not smart enough to draw a straight line through all of these things.  They make me just a bit dizzy to be honest when I think about them.  But I think there is a line that can be drawn, a line from Babel to dead babies, a line from blood in flower blossoms to the death of worlds that cannot fail, a line from “materialistic reductionalism” and “depersonalizing individualism” to that attitude which proclaims that my right is right and your right is negotiable or doesn’t exist, and “Why?” need never be asked.

The sky has clouded over.  It is much colder.  A storm will come.

NOTE: Another version of this story appeared a day or so ago on the Facebook page of The Christian Book Corner

Businesses, Brotherhoods and Babies

It is snowing outside.  We’ll get three to six inches today if the liars at Weather Central (All Disaster, All the Time) can be believed.  So, instead of going over to the gym to get ready for the beach this summer, I am sitting here in The House With No Heat, myself rapped in buffalo skins reading stuff on the internet and occasionally saying a prayer for people who have neither homes nor buffaloes to robe them.

I’ve done what I usually do when bound up inside by the weather.  I have read.

So far this morning I’ve read that our goofermint, as someone I know refers to it, wants the new president of Egypt to say he was a jerk a couple of years ago when he told folks over there to raise their children to hate everyone not them.  So far, it looks as if no one over there in sand castle land is listening.  But, when they do hear the whispers, perhaps Mousi (no relation to our kinder, gentler Mickey) will grunt something or other.  The guy deserves at least a dope slap for what he said.  But, what  can you expect from someone who hangs around with a bunch of cruds who think strapping a dozen or so pounds of dynamite on a kid and sending them into a crowd of weekend shoppers is the Muslim Brotherhood equivalent of Little League?  Over here the Big Brothers try to teach a kid to be a good person.  Over there, you’re a kid and you get one of Mousi’s friends for a big brother, you’re sure to be taught how to be one of two things, a murderer or a “martyr”  (which is the same thing for those whackos); probably both.

Then, I happened on an article about my favorite women’s organization, Planned Parenthood.  Now the first time I heard the name, which was a long time ago I have to confess that I thought it was some kind of place, maybe like Triple A, where they give you helpful travel trips, make reservations and stuff,  sell you plastic water bottles.  You know, stuff you never thought you needed, but can’t live without now that you know it is there, and cheap.  I figured you walked into a Planned Parenthood store and got deals on bassinets, formula, diapers, stuff like that; and there were these nice ladies with shawls on and wire rimmed glasses sitting around knitting booties and little blankies ( a different kind of B&B) the place painted in shades of pink and blue.

“Divil a bit of it!” my Grand-Mother Kate Fanning Gallaher might say, her lips curling and a curse against them forming.  I found out it was another kind of place.  Scary, really.  Well, you know.  It’s the last place someone wants to be when planning their parenthood.  Planning for Un-parenthood?  That’s a horse of a different species.  They got, umm, slicers, dicers, choppers, hoovers, pills and potions and are ready for you 24/7, with, I bet Early Bird specials:  In by eight, out by ten anytime before little Janey or Junior’s  ten weeks along.  Or, something like that.  Maybe, if they get your e-mail, they send you coupons and 2 for 1 specials, and you can like ‘em on Facebook.  It’s good marketing, you know.  And, if you don’t know yet, Planned Parenthood is a business, just like some of those big deal sausage factories, like Jones and those others.

And this smoothly segues into the second article I glanced at this morning, the one that explains in sordid detail just how Planned Parenthood is a business, perhaps the bloodiest business this side of an abbatoir (a fancy French word for a slaughterhouse).  Only they deal in killing kids, not cows.  Last year they set a record, the article says, and manage to kill more than 300,000 little human beings, none of whom asked for it.  In a really cool concatenation of events and circumstance those of you who read the article (have strong drink at hand…or anti-nausea meds) will learn that that number matches almost perfectly the dollar figure for their daily profit.  And, mirabile dictu, both numbers are all time universe wide records!  Imagine, most babies killed in a year and most money made per day for a year, and they occurred together!  There’s a pair that’ll beat a full house anytime.

But, it gets better, because 45% of this loot comes from you and me, the American taxpayer.  Yep, we gave the country’s busiest and biggest house of death about a million samoleans a day between June, 2010 and June 2012.

After I had finished in the bathroom and washed out my mouth, I came back here and found something different to read, a short essay on something called The Catholic Education Resource Network by a fellow named Anthony Esolen.  The essay has a very simple title.  Its title is “The Child”.

Now, in all fairness I have to say that I have been in the same room as has Anthony Esolen at least once.  I know that because I heard someone say his name and , at the same time, point to him.  But I have never met him.  I would like to, and the first thing I would do is ask for his autograph.  I know that this frosts a lot of peoples’ pumpkins out there, but the guy is a good Catholic, and a good teacher, to boot.  And what he writes and what he says, and, I have no doubt, what he teaches about is thoroughly Catholic from the first word to the last.  So, if you are the kind of person whose goat is got by the things Catholics say and believe you may want to save yourself some agida, and maybe a trip to the ER, and not read the article.

Because, you see, Dr. Esolen’s article starts off in an entirely Catholic way, an authentically Christian way.  It starts off in the kind of way which I know grates on folks who think Planned Parenthood, even if it is a lousy business, is a good thing; the way sewers, I suppose, are a good thing…only a child isn’t supposed to be in a sewer.  It starts in the kind of way which I know ticks off people who think that Mousi and his fellow Muslim brotherhood members, and every other person who wants kids to grow up hating, are just teaching kids the facts of life, and that’s a good thing…like suicide bombers are good things.  Only a child has a life before him.

Here are the first couple of sentences  from Dr. Esolen’s article,  “Everywhere outside of Christianity, wrote Hans Urs von Balthasar, the child is automatically the first to be sacrificed. Only for Christians is the adult the imperfect child. Everywhere else the child is the imperfect adult, and falls subject to our lust for domination.”

I Will Make You Ready

Read it.  And, maybe shed a tear for children all over the world, children who are  sacrificed every day to Moloch, perhaps more alive today than ever and closer to us than we think.  Which way shall we go?

Julia In Dublin

And after you read it come back here and listen to the music below.  I used to play it sometimes and remember a little poem set to the opening theme that I sang to my daughter when she was a child:

When at night I go to sleep,
fourteen Angels watch over me.
Two my head are guarding,
two my feet are guiding,
two are on my right hand,
two are on my left hand,
two who warmly cover my head
and two who will guide me toward Heaven.

Much better, so, don’t you think than businesses and brotherhoods?

WHY NOT THE MOUSE NEXT TIME???

Somewhere around this time last year, as Mitt Romney was in the third year of his second run for the presidency, and the Republican field had been narrowed to the population of several states from a number just a few short of infinity I decided that it might be necessary actually to vote for someone who existed, who was a real person.  And so, I thought about voting for Mr. Romney, tall, handsome, smart and honest.

I had not voted for a human being in the last two elections; choosing instead to vote for Michael Mouse.  I had even dreamed up a slogan for the little fellow’s campaign: MY MAN IS A MOUSE!  I spoke to my friends, and may have convinced one or two of them (which would have been, possibly, more than I had of friends) to join in with me and promote MM’s run for the highest office in the land.

But, then, I listened to other voices, people whose powers of persuasion moved me to reconsider my position.  “It is silly,” they said, “you are just throwing away your vote by going into that booth and writing in the name of a cartoon character.  It is a senseless and meaningless gesture.”  I tried to argue that given the man occupying that office (who still occupies it) , and the fellow who had occupied it during the previous eight years, and the line -up of opponents/prospective candidates available, voting for someone who was a cartoon character seemed to me to make more sense than anything else.

Still..

In the end I caved, flipped a coin, sort of, and settled on Mr. America.  I guess I was thinking of that old song by the Coasters, “Along Came Jones”, and hoping he would get elected and rescue Sweet Sue (that’s us) from the gunslinger.

Little did I know that I should have stuck with Mickey.  At least I wouldn’t feel as if I had wasted a vote.  Because the word filtering out from the folks who know is that Old Mitt didn’t want the job anyway.  He tanked it.  And, we know from sad experience that the guy who has the job really doesn’t exist.  Oh, I mean he is there, all right, but he really has no idea about running a country, or doing much else than “chooming”, organizing a community (whatever in God’s name that is) or body surfing; or standing around while Ambassadors and other guys get murdered…and then not saying word one about it because the “investigation ” is still going on.  I mean his most common vote anywhere was “present”.  Well brain dead people are “present” too.  So are ghosts according to some folks.

Turns out they both stink.  If fact, they all stink, from Chicago Slim in the White House right down to the most junior jerk in the House of Representatives;  where about the only thing they represent is their own wallet, I think.

Anyway, I’m back on The Mouse’s bandwagon and there I intend to stay.  This morning I was having a cup of Joe with the Little Lady down at the local Dunkin’ Donuts.  There were a couple of old guys over in the corner jawing about the, how many, damn near 500 stupid and selfish men and women we send down to DC  to do nothing much good to or for anyone, and one of them says, “I’m 73 years old and I don’t think I am ever going to vote for another person for anything again.  I’m just going to go into the booth and scribble down a name, any name.”

My heart leaped!  If two old and nearly useless guys like him and me can have the same idea, what would it look like if 30 or 40 million of us went behind the curtain and did the same thing; if no one was elected, if the country actually followed the predictions of the polls and said, “None of the above?”  For anything, even School Board President, Dogcatcher, Registrar of Probate, President?

Because, you know, none of the folks there now seem to want to do anything at all about anything, and the guy we just sent back to the Oval Office hasn’t got the faintest idea about what needs doing, except that we need more money to do it.

Actually, I take that back.  It seems that one person does have a good idea, which idea won’t see the light of day down there.  The junior Senator from New Hampshire, Kelly Ayotte says all of those dopes don’t deserve a pay raise because they haven’t done anything for it.  That’s the first bit of sensible thinking I’ve heard come out of that swamp in about 12 years.

Now, if only they would return all the rest of the money we’ve given them for the past 12 years I might reconsider my support for The Mouse.  I know all of that dough might make our fall from the cliff just a little bit softer, turn it into a kind of velvety “smoosh” rather than a granite hard “SPLAT” when we hit bottom.

One thing that can be said for The Mouse is that at least he works cheap; a couple of nibbles of cheese now and then and he’s good for a week.

Do Ya Think?

Yesterday I read a short article in a British paper: The Telegraph.  The article was a report on a study conducted on the life, and the prospects for life, of Christianity in the Middle East.  Those few of you still familiar with the word, Christianity, comfortable in its presence, inclined to use it favorably and with some affection and loving attachment will know what I have reference to.  For the growing majority of people whose understanding of and connection with the word and its meaning is arguably much less than their knowledge of the leading actors in The Walking Dead or the line on next week’s NFL games let me try to place it for you; to contextualize it.

Tomorrow is Christmas Day.  You will immediately see there is a similarity between the words Christianity and Christmas.  I will not belabor the thing, but simply point out that the first syllable is, itself, a word: Christ.  And the word signifies a man.  Tomorrow is, despite the amazing amount of evidence to the contrary, the celebration of the birthday of that man, the annual observance of that event by the dwindling few who happen to believe in the man and the stories told about him; what he said and did.  Simply put that is the astounding fact that Christ is at one and the same time God incarnate and the savior of the World and a man “born in time, born of a virgin.”  No, I mean it, really.  (Actually His name is Jesus, and Christ is, more or less, a title.)  I happily count myself among the remnant who think this way about Jesus Christ; that He is truly God and truly Man.  And, that is just the beginning of the amazing facts about Him.  But, let us not get ourselves involved in that.

For those who know it is not necessary to do so; for the rest, they will be made aware sooner of later, here or there.

The prognosis is not good.  That is, the prognosis for Christianity, that system of beliefs and practice, that way of living that grew from the testimony of some few people who knew and lived with this man Jesus about what he did and said so many years ago in Palestine, in the Middle East.  It is dying, they say in The Telegraph; dying in the place where it was born and where it has lived longest.  The prognosis for the “rest” I have reference to above; that they will be made aware of certain “amazing facts” at some time is certain: they will.

The study reported on in The Telegraph did provide a cause for the imminent demise of Christianity in its homeland, may it rest in peace.  Militant Islam (MI) is infecting Christianity in the Middle East, and the disease, so says the article, is likely to cause its quick death.  “Sic transit gloria coeli et terra” to corrupt a phrase.

How is this being accomplished, and how, better yet, is it so being done right under the eagle eyes of our many media snoops?  Does no one have any idea except some old rag in Blighty? And, finally, why have not those in powerful places and positions, guardians of freedoms, protectors of widows and orphans, weak and underprivileged the world over raised even an eyebrow at this rather depressing (to say the least) bit of news?  Well, I have my ideas about who might have gathered a rumor here and there, and why they haven’t whispered a word, but then, I am a suspicious type.  I’ll leave it to more rational folks to explain why the imminent death of Christianity in the land of its birth means simply nothing here in the West which owes simply everything to it.

What interests me, just as much, is this little fact; call it a sidebar.  It, too, will never appear anywhere soon.  Maybe it is simply too boring?  That fact is this: 150,000 Christians a year are killed for being Christians.  What, some editor might reasonably ponder is newsworthy about that, or a burnt village in Africa when compared to Our Dear Leader bodysurfing in Hawaii?  Many, many more are imprisoned without trial, little girls raped, women raped, churches blown up or burned to the ground, homes burned, villages burned, neighborhoods attacked by armed fanatics and , well, sad to say, more schoolchildren, murdered in Muslim countries simply because they are Christian than are murdered by our own madmen.  Again, one wonders about the silence, the the lack of interest.

Tertullian was an early Christian Father, a theologian whose work helped form what was becoming Christianity.  He was from Carthage, part of the Middle Eastern world where Christianity is now dying of that disease called MI, also known to be fatal to Ambassadors and people in tall buildings in places like New York City.  Among other things he is famous for having said is this, “The blood of martyrs is the seed of the church.”  Now that might scare a good atheist or modern day secularist in a corner office somewhere.

And now, before I leave you to turn on your Santa Claus lights, your reindeer with their red noses, your Frosty the Snowmen in their hats, to fill your living rooms with wrapping paper and your bellies with rich foods and rare vintages, and to taste deeply all of the other signs of our winter holiday, may I ask you to wonder this.  Will there be more to mourn over the death of the last winged cardinal at your feeder or the death of the last Christian once from some place west of the Indus and east of Eden?  I do not think so, because you will not know.  Few are those in any position to let you know who hazard saying a word about it.  Fewer still are those who think anything should be done.  Many, I suspect rather hope that nothing will be done.  Ever.

We are being flooded with the blood and the bodies of the dying victims of militant Islam as the story in The Telegraph has it.  The dead are the seed.  The raped and beaten and dispossessed are the soil, the field and the planting where will grow anew the the fruit of their sacrifice.  It has suddenly occurred to me that “they” are afraid of what this way comes when , some day, the once and future Christianity appears.  I can think of no other reason for such a black curtain over this news, a holocaust across a third of the world.  As Special Agent Gibbs often says, “Do ya think?”

Merry Christmas!

The Light and The Dark

You know, I should know better because I am part of the tradition.  So are about 95 percent of the folks who inhabit these great Untied States of America, whether or not they care to admit it.  I suppose saying that I am a part of the …oh, let’s make it a title…”Tradition” make me a little bit smug.  But, I really have no right to be smug, don’t you know.  What with all that’s happening around me now and for the next couple of weeks I am once more going to be torn between what I find myself doing and the nagging feeling that I should be doing something more.

Every year at this time the Christmas rush starts gathering momentum like a great avalanche.  (Aside:  Do I notice a trend, in keeping with everything else about this time of year to change the name of what we “do” to something called the “holiday shopping season”?) During the next few weeks until December 24^th we’ll be unable to turn anywhere without being assaulted by reminders in the form of advertisements in every kind of media, crowds of people, impossibly clogged roads and a sort mania that one has a duty, in this world, to consume, and to do it on a vast scale.   (Good Saint Aldous Huxley, pray for us!)

Or else?  Well, or else financial and economic ruin will result for the nation; ruin greater than cliff jumping.  The business sections of papers and journals like the New York Slimes regularly carry stories on how fingers are being crossed and brows knit in hope and worry in corner offices all over the land.  They want us to spend and are afraid we won’t.

And so, we must shop.  It amounts to an obligation of good citizenship, I think, more important than voting often (and early); especially in light of the utter failure of anyone we elect to do anything at all constructive anywhere at any time.  It is as if we are solving our own mess by buying more and putting it all on the card.  And, it seems to me to be a responsibility we have assumed with unrivaled determination and a kind of manic joy akin to the feeling madmen might get by hitting themselves over and over with large pieces of wood.  One asks: to what good end, aside from the positive one of staving off another recession if one believes the grim forecasts from those bean counters and entrail readers?

Well, so that us and the kids (It’s always the kids, isn’t it, the little Darlin’s?) can have a good Christmas we always answer.  Really?

Now, don’t get me wrong.  This won’t be another of those “Put Christ Back in Christmas” exhortations; another foam flecked, fist shaking, roof raising rant.  That horse has left the barn long ago.  Nah, I’m, sure you already have every answer you’ll need, the best one being, “Huh?”  But, if we shop till we drop will that save us from hobo camps and bread lines next summer?  Must we exhaust ourselves in the interests of our fellow citizens and little Contemptua and the twins, Aspergone and Lubricious who just won’t be happy until they awaken and see $2,000.00 apiece worth of shiny plastic and metal things made in Indonesia, Bangladesh and China by kids their age, kids who eat one meal a week, scattered all over the play room?  Have we really an obligation to go out and spend hundreds on that new AIKIDO coffee pot that is also a flat screen TV, a poncho and a fly rod?  Is it the right thing to do if you love your country?  Is it?

I guess I don’t love America enough, or in the right way, because I’d like not to do that.  Yet, in spite of myself I enter the lists, and do battle with my fellow consumers in the interests of “truth, justice and the American way.”  Sometimes  when I am in the middle of this civic minded frenzy I hear a voice deep inside me, a small whisper.  “Whoa,” says the little thing, weakly.  “Wait a minute.  You know better.”  It asks, “Is this the “spirit” of Christmas?  Are you lighting a light in the darkness?”  But, then, the next flyer from Wal-Mart arrives full of stuff everyone doesn’t need but can’t do without.  There’s no escape from the exhortations, the temptations, to buy.  There’s no release from the obligation to get the next thing, the “new” thing, because it really is our duty so to do.  Fail in that and the lights will go out, the whole tinsel covered structure will come crashing down.

I’m torn because I know something else is going on.  I came of age in a time and place among people who seemed to intuit this isn’t all there is.  They lived with an understanding that something more exists both beyond and mixed in with what we can see and experience with the small bundle of only five senses we possess.   And, that fact set limits on them.  They gave over to the “mystery” of the things greater than them.   They knew that they were not the measure of all things, that no matter what they did, how hard they tried they would…on their own..never be the best they could be.

But, that’s a subject for another day.

This market madness which affects us more or less all year long, but especially so at this time of year, has about chased that sense of there being more to life than a time share in the Colorado Rockies so far down the road it just don’t count no more for many if not most of us.  And, poor kids, Clytemnestra and Rubicon will never even suspect it exists, plugged in as they will have been since age two.  Too bad.

We spend now, what is it, close to three months buying and getting and the day formerly known as Christmas begins when the kids wake up on December 25^th.  It begins right around Halloween, and is really over when all the toys are opened, the videos take and the lights on the camcorder shut off.  Gorging, drinking, football games and bouncing girls in fur trimmed bikinis have more to do with blood sport in Coliseums than anything a civilized people would engage in.  When the day ends, when Uncle Grumpus, Aunt Morbidia and the cousins have driven off (Thank God!) all we have left is the feeling Miss Peggy Lee used to sing about: “Is that all there is?”  The lights are out.  Actually, despite the dancing reindeer and descending Santa out on the lawn, they never came on.  The lights never really came on.

The Feast of Christmas used to take a while to get ready for: four whole weeks.  It had a name, Advent, which meant something, someone, was coming.  I’ll leave you to wonder who or what that might be.  The way one got ready was to engage in a little interior house cleaning, practice being nice to each other and that jerk across the street, and clean up one’s act, generally.  Then Christmas came, the long awaited and welcomed time, and the celebration lasted for twelve days.  Some even kept it for forty days.  Imagine that!  By that time the year had turned and light was growing.  The world of sense mirrored that of the spirit.  How odd, that those ignorant ancestors of ours had a better idea?

I should know better, all right.  For crying out loud I do know better.  All that buying and all that getting, all those lights on all those trees and dancing blow up dolls on lawns can’t hold back the night.

Only one Light does that.