"Keep clear of the dupes that talk democracy,
And the dogs that bark revolution.
Drunk with talk, liars and believers.
I believe in my tusks. Long live freedom and damn the ideologies!"
(Robinson Jeffers)
It isn’t often that I read anything anywhere that makes me re-examine fundamental convictions. I’m sure that’s partly because I’m old. Nevertheless, it’s disturbing to think that even in old age, a professional thinker could be so “set in his ways” that he never inspects his intellectual foundation for cracks. And after all, a professional thinker is what I am.
Yes, I’ve just read something that shook me, and I recommend it to you:
I knew a woman in Montana whose eyes never changed when she laughed.
We didn't notice it at first.
She and her husband took us in when we first moved there. We were living in an old Air Force base that had been converted into a boys home, they worked there as counselors. We had… pic.twitter.com/sH1skSbL5Y
— The Biblical Man | 4 AM Field Notes (@SlayStupidity) October 8, 2025
I hope you did read it all, Gentle Reader. Give it a few moments to percolate before continuing on.
First, to set the mood, a fine old tune from sixty years ago:
Many of our relationships are colored by grants of authority. If you work for a living, you probably have a manager or supervisor of some sort. Inasmuch as we haven’t yet rid ourselves of that pestilential, infinitely aggravating parasite, The State, there are authority relationships there, too – and sometimes they involve the use or threat of force. Then there are family relations: husband / wife, and parent / child. Those too have aspects of authority embedded in them.
It’s in the nature of authority that the subordinate has incentives to please his superior. The superior is in a position to award rewards and penalties. The subordinate knows it. His conduct must take that into account. That doesn’t mean that the subordinate will always be “acting,” but questions such as “What does he want me to say / do?” are frequently in his thoughts.
Even relationships that have no authoritarian aspects involve those questions. One’s membership in a social or commercial circle may depend upon saying / doing “the right things.” That’s the basis of the power of “political correctness.” (Don’t preen yourselves, conservatives; your social and commercial circles behave much the same way.) Losing such a membership can be as traumatic as a major setback in business; indeed, the former often entails the latter.
I think the man who is never moved to “perform,” in the sense of that embedded tweet, is likely to be very rare. While the woman of whom the narrator speaks is an especially dramatic case, we’re all in the “What should I say / do to please him / them?” mindset under certain circumstances.
Is that terrible? Does it illustrate some tragedy indelibly written into our natures? I can’t say. I only know that I’ve both witnessed it and lived it.
I’m not here to rail against “performing,” in the sense of that embedded tweet. Neither am I here to exhort anyone to be “authentic,” much less “real.” I’m just noting a pattern that arises from human relationships and our desire to manipulate others’ opinions of us.
Most of us have a desire to be liked, at least when we’re in certain company. And most of us are in positions where someone else’s opinion of us can have a material bearing on our lot in life. So we learn what would please and displease those others. We “perform for them.” And those of us who are employees go through an annual “performance review” in which we’re told how well we “performed,” sometimes even sincerely.
It’s the same in our noncommercial relationships, except for those damned performance reviews. We learn the preferences of those whose good opinion we seek, and if it’s possible and not too expensive, we “perform to them.” This is just as applicable to romantic and domestic relationships as to any other sort.
This is what constitutes role-playing:
Select the role you want to perform;
Learn your lines;
Deliver them, with matching expressions and intonations, at the proper moments.
The woman in the tweet didn’t get the expressions right. That was her giveaway. Still, she learned her lines and delivered them. One might even say she “lived her role,” whichever one was “on the boards” at the moment. Was she happy? I could never say. It’s possible that she couldn’t, either. It’s just as possible that the question never occurred to her.
A vignette to close.
Some months ago, I met a woman through the Net: a retired actress who’d been prominent in a “sitcom” of an earlier decade. Our conversation prospered for a while, until she did something I didn’t expect: she asked me for financial help. This, after telling me in some detail about her several businesses and how involving they were.
No, I didn’t send her money. And yes: that was pretty much the end of the conversation. It was disappointing, as I’d come to like her quite a lot, but such is the World Wide Web in this age of ours.
Just yesterday, I noticed her on X, and “said hello.” She responded, but within two sentences it became clear that she didn’t know me. The woman I’d conversed with months ago was an impostor. That impostor had apparently employed artificial-intelligence programs to play the role she’d chosen. She’d been utterly convincing, too.
Is the second encounter any more to be trusted than the first one? Or is my more recent acquaintance just another impostor? One more unidentifiable role-player who’s assumed the same persona and is reading from the same script, or perhaps a slightly different one?
And now, Gentle Reader, I must bid you adieu, for it’s time for me to change roles. I must doff this Curmudgeon Emeritus persona and don that of a storyteller whose tales enthrall... well, a few people, anyway. There’s an unfinished novel awaiting his / my / our attention.
Do have a nice day. And remember: While Sybil was fiction, there are other, similar tales that aren’t. Perhaps you’re living one yourself. So be kind to your fellow players. A noted talespinner of yore, Henry James, has said that it’s all that matters. He might have been performing when he said it, but it’s good advice anyway.
...and it put me in mind of one of my favorite bits of wisdom from the Great Lawgiver:
There are many human achievements, including some of the finest, which need more than a single lifetime for completion. The individual can compose a symphony or paint a canvas, build up a business or restore order in a city. He cannot build a cathedral or grow an avenue of oak trees. Still less can he gain the stature essential to statesmanship in a highly developed and complex society. There is a need for continuity of effort, spread over several generations, and for just such a continuity as governments lack. Given the party system more especially, under the democratic form of rule, policy is continually modified or reversed. A family can be biologically stable in a way that a modern legislature is not. It is to families, therefore, that we look for such stability as society may need. But how can the family function if subject to crippling taxes during every lifetime and partial confiscation with every death? How can one generation provide the springboard for the next? Without such a springboard, all must start alike, and none can excel; and where none can excel nothing excellent will result.
If you’re familiar with the work of Cyril Northcote Parkinson, your acquaintance with him probably started with his First Law: “Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.” It was a potent insight, gleaned from Parkinson’s scrutiny of the behavior of British bureaucracies. Yet it’s a pity that so many stop there, and never become acquainted with his later oeuvre. In total, they mark him as one of the master-intellects of the Twentieth Century. He deserves the same stature and worldwide recognition as any other more frequently praised genius. The citation above is one example – one of the most penetrating yet overlooked observations of the tragedy of the Nightmare Century.
I’ve written in other places that the family is the indispensable building block of the free and stable society. A society largely made up of intact, cohesive families will be highly resistant to attacks on its values and norms. That might be called the horizontal-in-time view of the family. But if we rotate the time-axis ninety degrees for a vertical-in-time view, we see something at least as important and probably much more so: the steady growth of family dynasties, each of which conserves and nurtures its family’s greatest strengths. Hearken to Hope’s foremost sociologist:
“Families are the fundamental building blocks of a stable society. Extended families—clans—are the best conceivable environment for the rearing of children, the perpetuation of a commercial forte, and the germination of new families and their ventures. A clan like yours, Miss Albermayer, conserves a brilliant genetic line and a priceless medical specialty at the same time. A clan like yours, Mr. Morelon, makes possible a benign agricultural empire and produces natural leaders one after another while connecting Hope to its most distant origins. And all healthy families, which cherish life and bind their members to one another in unembarrassed love, can find far more to occupy and amuse them than they need.”
“When Earth’s regard for families and their most fundamental function deteriorated, her people ceased to enjoy the sorts of ties that had held them together throughout the history of Man. Without families, and especially without children, they groped for other things to fill their time, whether to give them a sense of purpose, or to distract them from the waning of their lives. Some invested themselves in industry or commerce, but without the sense of the family line to be built up and made prominent, those things failed to satisfy. Others immersed themselves in games, toys, fripperies, and increasingly bizarre forms of entertainment, which palled on them even faster. Still others made a fetish out of sex; there was a substantial sex industry on Earth, though it tended to operate in the shadows and was seldom openly discussed. They needed emotion and substance, but all they could contrive was sensation and novelty, and they pumped an ever greater share of their effort and wealth into seeking them.”
[Arne Stromberg, holder of the Edmond Genet Chair of Sociology at Gallatin University, the foremost center of higher learning on Altus, the northern continent of Hope.]
Proceeding from Professor Stromberg’s insight, I have come to regard the aim to create a numerous, well-tutored family dynasty as one of the most praiseworthy of all ambitions. But how does one do that? With what sort of structure does he begin?
It’s almost childishly simple: He begins by accepting and honoring one of the free society’s greatest strengths: the division of labor. He “hires:”
A “breadwinner:” usually himself.
A “procreation and nurturance expert:” a wife / mother / homemaker.
A squad of “perpetuation engineers:” their kids.
Moreover, he refrains from insisting that any of those “specialties” take on the labors of any of the others. Each dedicates himself to the refinement of his particular specialty and practices it assiduously, deaf to outside critics.
And over several generations, a cathedral or an avenue of oak trees just might result.
The above probably looks a bit facetious to my Gentle Readers. It’s not; it’s how the great ones of our society were produced. Ironically, the mighty family dynasties that produced them are seldom studied; all the attention goes to the “great man.” But he is a resultant. He didn’t spring forth fully formed from conception, like Athena from the brow of Zeus. It probably took three, four, or five generations of families, each building upon the legacy of its predecessors, to produce him.
The Founding Fathers had a better grasp of this than contemporary Americans:
“The science of government it is my duty to study, more than all other sciences; the arts of legislation and administration and negotiation ought to take the place of, indeed exclude, in a manner, all other arts. I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.”
[John Adams, Letters of John Adams, Addressed to His Wife]
Young readers (if I have any): Give it some thought.
There’s a strong argument America peaked around 1999. Everyone pretty much got along. Most people didn’t have cell phones. And if they did they had no cameras on them. https://t.co/5XH4fiNSPZ
(Note in particular that cell phones were not yet common. Hm. If Clay is right, it’s time to look at the correlation between cell-phone proliferation and our more recent miseries. Maybe the radiation from cell-phone towers really does cook the brain. “They” have been talking about it for a long time, but I’ve persistently dismissed it.)
For myself, I remember significant tensions between the races in 1999. I remember the ceaseless anti-capitalist agitation of the environmentalists and their BANANA (“Build absolutely nothing anywhere near anybody”) campaigns. I remember that the media were relentless promoters of government activism. I remember that taxes were high and getting steadily higher. And of course, Black Tuesday, September 11, 2001 was drawing near.
Yet in some ways it was a better time. America wasn’t enmeshed in foreign wars. There was no open rioting in the cities. The explosion of several destructive themes in politics was still in the future. Interracial and homosexual couples weren’t yet obligatory in TV dramas. Microprocessors hadn’t yet taken over our toasters. White babies weren’t being vaccinated against dengue fever and schistosomiasis. And I was only 47, relatively fit, and relatively healthy.
And this joke was still being told:
Joe the COBOL Programmer
There was once a COBOL programmer in the mid to late 1990s. For the sake of this story, we'll call him Joe. After years of being taken for granted and treated as a technological dinosaur by all the UNIX programmers and Client/Server programmers and website developers, Joe was finally getting some respect. He'd become a private consultant specializing in Year 2000 conversions. He was working short-term assignments for prestige companies, traveling all over the world on different assignments, and making more money than he'd ever dreamed of.
Joe was working 70 and 80 and even 90 hour weeks, but it was worth it. Soon he could retire. But several years of such relentless, mind-numbing work took its toll on Joe. He had problems sleeping and began having anxiety dreams about the Year 2000. It reached a point where even the thought of the year 2000 made him nearly violent. He must have suffered some sort of breakdown, because all he could think about was how he could avoid the year 2000 and all that came with it.
Finally, Joe decided to contact a company that specialized in cryogenics. He contracted to have himself frozen until March 15th, 2000. This was a very complex process, but totally automated and utterly reliable. He was thrilled. The next thing he would know, he'd wake up in the year 2000; after the New Year celebrations and computer debacles; after the leap day...nothing else to worry about except getting on with his life. He was put into his cryogenic capsule, the technicians set the revival date, he was given injections to slow his heartbeat to a bare minimum, and that was that.
The next thing that Joe saw was an enormous and very modern room filled with excited people. They were all shouting, "I can't believe it!" and "It's a miracle" and "He's alive!" There were cameras unlike any he'd ever seen and equipment that looked like it came out of a science fiction movie.
Someone who was obviously a spokesperson for the group stepped forward. Joe couldn't contain his enthusiasm. "It is over?" he asked. "Is 2000 already here? Are all the millennial parties and promotions and crises all over and done with?"
The spokesman explained that 2000 had gone, but that there had been a problem with the programming of the timer on Joe's cryogenic receptacle - it hadn't been year 2000 compliant, and it was... well... a few years past that. But the spokesman told Joe that he shouldn't get excited as someone important wanted to speak to him.
Suddenly a wall-sized projection screen displayed the image of a man that looked very much like Bill Gates. This man was Prime Minister of Earth. He told Joe not to be upset, that this was a wonderful time to be alive--that there was world peace and no more starvation--that the space program had been reinstated and there were colonies on the moon and on Mars--that technology had advanced to such a degree that everyone had virtual reality interfaces which allowed them to contact anyone else on the planet, or to watch any entertainment, or to hear any music recorded anywhere.
"That sounds terrific," said Joe. "But I'm curious. Why is everybody so interested in me?"
"Well," said the Prime Minister. "The year 10,000 is just around the corner, and it says in your files that you know COBOL.”
Regular Gentle Readers know that I write fiction as well as the tirades that appear here. I do so for several reasons:
I’ve been a lover of good stories well told since I was very young;
I appreciate the power of stories to convey important truths;
Mine are stories that most storytellers would never tell;
I have some skill with the English language;
And above all, it’s fun.
For those reasons, I think of myself as a storyteller rather than a writer. The story is what matters: not the style in which it’s told, nor the images and devices used to illuminate it, nor the inclinations and proclivities of the author. The storyteller must serve the story, not the other way around. A writer who seeks to glamorize himself at the expense of the story is beneath (my) contempt.
At this time I’ve completed nineteen novels and over a hundred short stories. A twentieth novel is approaching completion. It was badly stalled, for a while. It took some unexpected events to get it moving again. Or perhaps that should have been “to get me moving again.”
Just as with a priest, a storyteller can have a crisis of faith, especially if his sales are poor. “Why do I spend my free time on this? What’s the point if so few people are interested in it? Am I really any good at it?” One who has elected to tell stories that other storytellers spurn is unusually vulnerable to such a crisis.
Science fiction writer John C. Wright has penned an unusually illuminating piece about such crises. I recommend it to everyone; you don’t have to be a writer to benefit from it. He notes that one of the all-time great, hugely seminal pieces of fiction, David Lindsay’s magnificent A Voyage To Arcturus, sold fewer than 600 copies when it was published. As Lindsay died in poverty, alone and forgotten, the sense of tragedy is hard to avert.
My stories are not popular. While I’m unlikely to die in poverty, I might be forgotten. All the love and labor that have gone into my tales could be wasted. My awareness of those things is a millstone around my storyteller’s neck. Now and then it drags me to the ground, and I stop writing.
But I mentioned unexpected events above, didn’t I? Mostly, they’re emails from readers: people who’ve been affected by one of my books and were moved to let me know. That’s valuable reinforcement. I doubt that any writer, however prodigious his sales, could do entirely without it. Money fills the oil tank; it doesn’t warm the soul.
Now and then another kind of unexpected event arises: an in-the-flesh encounter with a reader who’s loved one or more of my books. That’s like a shot of adrenalin. However, it’s only happened twice. One of those readers has passed away; the other continues to devour my pabulum as I produce it.
Last but most powerful of all is an encounter with another storyteller through one of his stories. That’s happened a few times, though such contacts must be treated delicately. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec has warned us: “The man is always less than the work.” A fair number of great writers have been persons I’d cross the street to avoid.
The heart of the thing is that precious sense that someone else has understood. If it’s another storyteller, the emotional lift is beyond description. It once propelled me to write a whole novel I hadn’t even contemplated writing: Shadow of a Sword. If you liked that book, thank Martin McPhillips, author of my all-time-favorite thriller Corpse in Armor. It was he who convinced me that I should write it.
I’m droning on like this because of a story I read just the day before yesterday. You probably haven’t heard of it, much less read it. It belongs in the category of romantic fiction, subcategory “harem fiction.” In that regard, it’s moderately unrealistic: very few women would agree to share a man with other women, at least in America today. (Yes, it does happen, but how often, really?) But it’s beautifully told in every respect. Even the several sex scenes, though explicit, are relatively tasteful.
Here is the snippet that perked me up. (I hope the author will forgive me for such a long citation.)
The citation is from Book Cafe Sisters, by Kohen King. In some ways, it’s just a specimen of erotica, but for me the passage above stands out. Protagonist Dave is a self-published writer doing a reading at an indie bookshop. The shop’s owners, Chloe and Zoe, are Dave’s “harem.” Stuffed-shirt Ben, a professor of literature, was once engaged to Zoe.
I don’t have a harem. I haven’t been asked to do a reading from one of my novels at an indie bookstore, though there’s a prospect of such in the foreseeable future. But as a self-published writer who experiences frequent lapses of confidence and the will to continue, the above was a reminder.
First and foremost, the storyteller must entertain. He’s not there to please “critics,” or professors of literature, or prize juries, or the producers and promoters of that contemporary abomination “message fiction.” He must write to please the reader. The reader seeks entertainment, diversion, and perhaps something to fantasize about in his private moments. The storyteller can only deliver those things by serving the story: that is, by telling it as it deserves to be told, without albatrossing it with irrelevancies or stylistic arabesques.
Being reminded of those truths by another storyteller, through that man’s own creation, was a greatly refreshing experience.
Just yesterday, I did something I’d never before contemplated. I went to Book and Mortar, an indie bookstore near me. I sought the manager – a delightful young lady named Krista – and asked her if she had any interest in carrying the works of a local, self-published writer. Krista surprised me by showing me to a bookcase filled entirely with the works of local writers: all self-published. So I gifted her three of my novels in paperback, which are now on that store’s shelves. At home, I set to work on Dreams of Days Forsaken once again.
It probably won’t come to anything. I’m unlikely to contend with Nelson DeMille for the title of Long Island’s Best Loved Writer. But the lift I got from the above passage in Book Cafe Sisters made it irresistible. Besides, who knows what the future will bring?
I’ve been saying this for a while – well, yes; I’ve been saying many things for a while – but it seems to need repeating more often than most of my other spoutings:
The Curmudgeon’s Carbohydrate Aphorism:
Keep Thine Eye Fixed Upon The Doughnut,
Lest Thou Pass Unaware Through The Hole.
Sounds silly, doesn’t it? The sort of farcical toss-off a no-status blatherer would emit solely for its memorability, right? So having chuckled over it, my Gentle Readers can forget it and move on to something that matters. Maybe putting pants on lamb chops or sifting the cat box.
But no. It’s a reminder that there are reasons for things, especially the things people say and do. When a man says or does something that appears to defy all reason, we mustn’t simply dismiss it as a “brain fart.” It’s imperative that we grant him the presumption of rationality. We must probe for his reasons, not assume that he had none.
Two days ago, a pompous ass who goes by the name of Thomas Chatterton Williams – many pompous asses sport a family name as their middle name; it suggests a pedigree the rest of us lack – penned an opinion piece for that most self-important of all East Coast publications, The Atlantic:
“Today, like five years ago, a controversial man has been transformed overnight into a one-dimensional saint, marshaled in a culture war that precludes measured thought. Once again, Americans are being asked to genuflect before an idol.” pic.twitter.com/CC1d8FG1Ll
— Thomas Chatterton Williams (@thomaschattwill) October 2, 2025
The column is behind a paywall. However, the mite of it quoted at Fox News should suffice to convey its substance:
"In the feverish weeks since Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the MAGA right is undergoing its own religious ferment, animated by a new martyr. Just as the left used Floyd’s death to justify and hasten all manner of political ends, the right is invoking Kirk’s name to advance illiberal aims and silence opponents," The Atlantic's Thomas Chatterton Williams argued. "In death, Kirk has become a cudgel."
The writer claimed that Kirk, like Floyd, was a "controversial man" who had been "transformed overnight into a one-dimensional saint" — being used to fuel a culture war that defies reason.
"Once again, Americans are being asked to genuflect before an idol," he added.
Fox contributor Marc Tamasco notes that Williams’s column “sparked online fury.” No doubt. But ought we to stop there?
The Carbohydrate Axiom suggests that we shouldn’t. It’s only reasonable to assume that Williams foresaw the furor. It’s equally reasonable to assume that he desired it. We should assume that a man intends the foreseeable consequences of his actions, shouldn’t we?
That’s not to say that we shouldn’t be angry about Williams’s paralleling of a violent career criminal with a decent young man whose “crime” was to talk to college students. Anger is appropriate. But let’s not let that anger stall our thinking processes. Why did Williams set out to provoke us? What was his aim? Even a pompous ass must be assumed to intend what he can easily foresee.
Anger is a consuming thing. It wears us out, depletes our energy for other undertakings. It also deflects our attention. The combination makes it a lot easier to “pass unaware through the hole”... and a lot more likely.
Leftist opinion-mongers don’t expect to influence their own devotees all that much. They’re already compatibly aligned. No, it’s much more likely that Williams wrote that column and The Atlantic published it, for the effect it would have on us.
It’s worth remembering the advice D’Artagnan gave to Louis XIV’s twin brother Philippe, who was intended to replace the Sun King on the throne of France:
“If you are to rule this great nation, you must learn restraint. Keep cool in battle or in sports. Be angry—but in cold blood.” [Alexandre Dumas, The Man in the Iron Mask]
Don’t give the Left’s pompous asses what they want from us.
“[I]t is not real, you know. It is not stable, not solid—nothing is. Things change, change. You cannot have anything. . . . And least of all can you have the present, unless you accept with it the past and the future. Not only the past but also the future, not only the future but also the past! Because they are real: only their reality makes the present real.” [Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed]
Probably the most important fact, in a space-time continuum filled with facts of every kind, is that things change. Everything. Le Guin’s insight above is fundamental to all kinds of thinking. The past is real; we experienced it, we remember it, and we can see its consequences around us. The future, too, is real; we plan for it, however ineptly, and work to achieve it according to our values, priorities, and understanding of cause and effect. But the present is more ephemeral than the mayfly. It’s gone before we can finish pronouncing its name.
(I’m not endorsing the Anarrestis’ hostility to property here. That was Le Guin’s fictional device to create the contrasts and clashes that animated the novel. It’s a fine tale, but an anarcho-syndicalist society in which property is completely abjured would be less stable than communist egalitarianism. History has spoken on this subject. So have I.)
Yet everyone seeks stability. Stable homes, stable incomes, stable relationships, and stable societies with stable laws and customs. It seems to be a consequence of Man’s nature as a “project pursuer.” (Cf. Loren Lomasky.) For every project aims at an end state, with all that implies. Yet upon the instant that end state is achieved, it begins to change. There’s no escaping it.
If any kind of stability is achievable, it must be one in which the dynamics of time and change actually work to preserve it. However, while we can theorize about such a dynamic stability, we haven’t any idea about how to produce it. Among other things, we cannot answer the question “Just what would that variety of ‘stability’ actually stabilize? What aspects of it would not change?”
The freedom advocate faces an unpleasant reality:
Free Societies Don’t Remain Free For Long.
Freedom in these United States lasted roughly until 1900. For the century-plus from the Founding to the Oklahoma Land Rush, there was a frontier to which people unsatisfied with the constraints of “civilization” could escape. The availability of that frontier was critical to freedom elsewhere, for politicians and their hangers-on had to remain aware that they were escapable. Once America’s land frontier was closed, the State could advance upon us, gradually whittling away our supposedly guaranteed rights.
Today, freedom is only a memory. All human action is hemmed in by laws, regulations, taxes, and the efforts of busybodies everywhere to compel us to conform. As C. S. Lewis put it in Screwtape Proposes a Toast:
Hidden in the heart of this striving for Liberty there was also a deep hatred of personal freedom. That invaluable man Rousseau first revealed it. In his perfect democracy, you remember, only the state religion is permitted, slavery is restored, and the individual is told that he has really willed (though he didn’t know it) whatever the Government tells him to do. From that starting point, via Hegel (another indispensable propagandist on our side) we easily contrived both the Nazi and the Communist state. Even in England we were pretty successful. I heard the other day that in that country a man could not, without a permit, cut down his own tree with his own axe, make it into planks with his own saw, and use the planks to build a tool-shed in his own garden.
Do not imagine that any society, however organized, can escape the State’s best friend: the busybody.
A means of escaping the busybody is the best guarantor of a tolerable degree of freedom. It is not permanently stable; nothing is. But it’s the best-enduring chance we have. That implies that until we regain a frontier:
That’s reachable by common men;
That provides access to places where the State does not rule;
Such places being habitable, perhaps with technological help, by those who go there;
...freedom will only be a sound we make from time to time. A word in the dictionary whose meaning has no referents in objective reality.
Just now, that frontier does not exist. Yet it existed in the past. It might exist again in the future. But whereas its past form was a feature of terrestrial geography, its future form will be harder to bring about, and for a time will be accessible only to a fortunate few. Elon Musk had better find some inheritors who share both his vision and his passion for it.
Success breeds emulation. If there are advantages to be had from the ruthless exploitation of a class privilege, over time more and more members of the class will be drawn into doing so. Thus, the coloration given to the class by its privileges will become stronger and more inclusive over time. [From here.]
And also:
She scowled. “My mentor liked to say that success breeds failure. You tend to repeat your old, successful moves because they worked, while your enemy is developing a new one to clobber you with.” [From here.]
Both are true. The successful are attractive. People will tend (if not prevented) to emulate the behavior that made them successful. Initially, that means an increasing number of people doing the “successful thing.” But the more people do so, the greater the pressure becomes for a countermeasure. Eventually a countermeasure will emerge that thwarts the earlier behavior and establishes a new pattern for success. As has been said entirely too often: lather, rinse, repeat.
Which explains how both “The trend is your friend” and “Contrarians always make money” are both true as well.
I think I first saw the image that contains the title phrase in Kurt Vonnegut’s early novel God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. It speaks of a Money River known only to a privileged few. Those privileged are entitled to slurp from it. When a candidate for entitlement is approved, those already along the bank make a spot for him. He thus becomes entitled to slurp from the river, but is given a caveat: “Keep the racket down.”
"It's still possible for an American to make a fortune on his own."
"Sure -- provided somebody tells him when he's young enough that there is a Money River, that there's nothing fair about it, that he had damn well better forget about hard work and the merit system and honesty and all that crap, and get to where the river is. 'Go where the rich and the powerful are,' I'd tell him, 'and learn their ways. They can be flattered and they can be scared. Please them enormously or scare them enormously, and one moonless night they will put their fingers to their lips, warning you not to make a sound. And they will lead you through the dark to the widest, deepest river of wealth ever known to man. You'll be shown your place on the riverbank, and handed a bucket all your own. Slurp as much as you want, but try to keep the racket of your slurping down. A poor man might hear.'"
Vonnegut, be it plainly said, was no fan of capitalism. Nevertheless, his image has an important application. For Vonnegut’s Money River, substitute “government.” As the Birchites have told us, there are “insiders” who collaborate to keep themselves in power, and therefore with the wealth and other perquisites that power can bring. These days, we usually call them “the Establishment.” They’ve made arrangements to protect themselves and their places along the Riverbank.
No one is permitted to rise to power without methods being put in place to keep other powerful men safe from him. There will be levers that can bend him; other powerful men will know what they are. Such levers would only be used in extremis, should a maverick threaten to upset The System, and only if nothing else could curb him. They constitute politicians’ variety of “mutual assured destruction.”
Among the reasons Establishmentarians feared Donald Trump is they could not find a lever that could daunt him. He, wealthy by his own efforts and widely admired for his accomplishments, is a maverick they could not threaten. Note how many attempts, of how many different kinds, have been made to bring him down. All have failed. With each failure, the anxiety among the Establishment has increased.
Places along the Riverbank are sacrosanct. No one shall be permitted to endanger them. Especially not an elected upstart like Donald Trump. Or so the Establishmentarians believed.
“Have you ever heard the name William Graham Sumner, Miss Weatherly?”
She shook her head. “A relative of yours?”
“An ancestor. Distant in time, but not in convictions. Among the things my ancestor wrote–his writings were rather well known, at one time–was that the concentrating tendencies of power will, over time, bring to the seats of power men ever less suited for them. Recent years have proved him correct. We have raised to high office men of ever more dubious skills and character. Men whose principal talent has been assembling coalitions of special interests, who would bankroll their campaigns and maneuver them into office, and subsequently expect them to steer the ship of state as their thralls. Men and interests entirely unconcerned with the Constitution’s quite explicit limits on federal power. In consequence,” he said, “today America is nearly twenty trillion dollars in debt. Our economy is faltering. Our military is no longer feared by other nations. Our extra-territorial possessions are under assault. Our dollar has ceased to be the world’s reserve currency. Our constitutionally guaranteed rights as individuals are treated as being suspensible at the whims of judges, policemen, and unelected bureaucrats. Washington and the state capitals take six of every ten dollars we earn to spend as they please. Our inner cities resemble nothing so much as free-fire zones. Our society has been shattered into competing interest groups that strive ceaselessly to out-thieve one another in an unending game of beggar-thy-neighbor. And our national identity and confidence are weaker than ever before in history.”
Sumner had ticked his points off on his fingers. As he concluded, all ten of his fingers stood raised before the cameras.
“That, Miss Weatherly, is what comes from the dynamic my ancestor perceived: the forces that elevate wealth, privilege, family prestige, and the backing of other powerful men and their little clubs to qualifications for high office. The pattern of devolution it has brought us can be broken in only one way: outsiders must force their way into the halls of power. But the major parties are part of the pattern. They have little interest in fixing what I and, hopefully, you and your audience see as severe problems that urgently require redress. So one who would oppose the devolutionary dynamic must operate outside them as well.”
...Stephen Graham Sumner was only a fictional character. I had no idea that a maverick would arise whom the Establishment could not control. I would not have guessed that that maverick would be a real estate mogul from Queens. Nor would I have guessed that he would succeed in bending a major party, a huge contributor to the Establishment, to his will.
Donald Trump didn’t need nor want a place along the Riverbank. He holds those who line it in contempt. He has defied them more effectively than any president since Grover Cleveland. Which is why the big guns of Establishmentarian privilege have been blasting him from the Left, and working to undermine him from the Right.
Sundance’s article provides a look at some of the details. Give it some of your time and attention.
My Gentle Readers won’t be surprised to learn that my favorite discretionary activity is reading. Yet it’s a rare thing to encounter a devoted reader today. Getting rarer, too. And that’s not entirely because most of what's published today isn’t fit to line a cat’s litter pan.
I routinely ask new acquaintances if they like to read. More often than not, the answer I get is “I don’t have the time.” Ponder that for a moment. Reading has been called the key to knowledge. Indeed, for most of human history, it was the only route to knowledge beyond whatever one’s elders could convey. But today it’s in a state of desuetude.
I submit that that’s not because there are other, preferable avenues to knowledge available to us. Rather, it’s because the preconditions for reading have been all but eliminated from our lives... in many cases, with our cooperation.
The preconditions for reading are time and silence.
Yes, yes, I know that a lot of people claim that they must have music on “to concentrate.” Don’t believe it for a minute; I don’t. Music worth listening to commands one’s attention. But then, most popular music isn’t worth listening to, is it? Maybe its consumers use it to block out the other sounds around them... or to “fill the silence.”
As I noted above, time is something a lot of people claim to lack. It isn’t so. The typical American’s life is filled not with obligations but with discretionary activities. Those activities may be rationalized as “important” or “good for you,” but that doesn’t change their discretionary nature. No one forces you to go to the gym, or the yoga class, or the library’s latest lecture on contemporary knitting practices.
One of the consequences is that when time unallocated to any activity is upon us, we immediately look for distractions with which to consume it. There are plenty such available, of course. A little time on Facebook, or X / Twitter, will provide them in bushelfuls.
Anything but read, or enjoy the silence and think.
As it’s been a while, let’s have a little C. S. Lewis:
Music and silence—how I detest them both! How thankful we should be that ever since our Father entered Hell—though longer ago than humans, reckoning in light years, could express—no square inch of infernal space and no moment of infernal time has been surrendered to either of those abominable forces, but all has been occupied by Noise—Noise, the grand dynamism, the audible expression of all that is exultant, ruthless, and virile—Noise which alone defends us from silly qualms, despairing scruples, and impossible desires. We will make the whole universe a noise in the end. We have already made great strides in this direction as regards the Earth. The melodies and silences of Heaven will be shouted down in the end.
That’s Lewis’s devil-protagonist Screwtape speaking, of course. Lewis characterized the demonic as insatiability, a lust to consume without limit. That hunger embraces all things. Just as Ungoliant demanded that Melkor release the Silmarils so that that ever-hungering spider might consume them, the demonic seeks to consume all that is good. That includes ourselves, whatever we have made that is good, and silence.
Note especially Screwtape’s observation that noise “defends us from silly qualms, despairing scruples, and impossible desires.” He didn’t say thought, but it’s inescapably implied. A noisy environment prevents concentration. Thought demands concentration. If there are any blessed souls who can think effectively despite all-embracing noise, I haven’t met them. I know I can’t.
It’s no coincidence that the preconditions for reading are also those for thought. To read profitably – that is, to make sense of the material and integrate it into one’s store of knowledge – demands that the reader think, even if the process seems distant from the more conventional notion of thought as a deliberate process applied to the solution of problems.
A delightful young woman on X / Twitter, whose moniker is “Barefoot Pregnant,” said just today:
🧵(1/5) "The ability to simply THINK is the best gift we can give our children — and ourselves.
We can’t do it when we’re overstimulated, when we have too much to do — it really only happens through “boredom” and stillness.
Note the sarcasm-quotes around boredom A lot of people conflate stillness and silence with boredom. No abstract notion more destructive has ever been expressed. Stillness and silence are the womb of thought! Without those preconditions, human existence reduces to motion alone. Whether patterned or random, motion devoid of thought is barren.
From thought are all good things born.
One more quote and I’ll close for today:
Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth -- more than ruin, more even than death. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habits; thought is anarchic and lawless, indifferent to authority, careless of the well-tried wisdom of the ages. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid ... Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man. – Bertrand Russell
And it is so. Why else would we so relentlessly seek distractions? Once the obligations and distractions are shoved aside and the noise quenched, we begin to think – and no one, be he a millennial genius or a dunce suited only to shoveling shit, can predict what will emerge.
Thought is our creative capacity in motion. The universe itself is only a thought in the mind of God. It is when we think that we are most like God.
Give those you love the preconditions for thought: stillness and silence. Help them to find those things. Especially provide them to your children. You’ll be astounded by what will come of it.
People have been writing to ask what happened to Liberty’s Torch V2.0. They’ve also been asking where to go for all the essays that were posted there. The first question is easily answered: Hosting Matters, which was recommended to me as a Web host by a friend – “You’ll love it, Fran!” – rendered the site inaccessible in the process of some back-end maneuver that was never explained to me. After several exchanges of emails with their “support” personnel, I became enraged and decided to terminate my account with them. Frankly, it was overdue; Hosting Matters had provided me many reasons to dislike their services over the not-quite-five years I’d dealt with them.
The second question is also easily answered: At this time, those pieces are unavailable. There were a lot of them: more than four thousand. As I’m mortally weary of this business of changing hosts and reposting old material, they’ll remain unavailable unless something highly improbable should occur.
For the time being, whatever I write will appear here at Liberty’s Torch V1.0. Blogger, whatever else might be said about it, is a reliable Web host. I’ve never had an outage here, nor any loss of material. So when the Spirit moves me, here is where any new pieces will appear.
But I’m tired and sorely tried. I don’t have much left in me. I got up this morning, poured my coffee, perched before this computer, and asked myself, “What will today’s piece be about?” And in contemplating that question, I realized that I’ve come to dread continuing as I’ve done.
After three decades of regular posting – usually at least one piece per day – I think I’ve shot my wad. It may have been the disaster with Hosting Matters that precipitated the realization, but it’s accurate nonetheless.
So posting will be irregular henceforward. Apologies to those Gentle Readers who’ve enjoyed the fare here. Unless someone with a better compass than Ponce de Leon should discover the Fountain of Youth, that will be the way of things from here on.
Yes, I’ll still be writing fiction, though that, too, will slow down. Once again, my apologies to anyone disappointed by these announcements. Be well.
From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no life lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.
The world of Internet acronyms moves much faster than I can track it. Just a few days ago, I learned about DARVO: “Deny And Reverse Victim and Offender.” It’s easier to pronounce than many of the others, which is a blessing. The tactic to which it refers is a strictly Leftist thing, well exemplified by Leftists’ insistence that the murdered Charlie Kirk was a “fascist” and that assassin Tyler Robinson is merely a “troubled kid” who needs “help.”
Owing to the rise of popular fury over that assassination and other attempts to gun down Republicans and conservatives, the DARVO gambit isn’t getting much traction lately. So the Left’s spokesmen are trying another, which – so far as I know – doesn’t yet have its own acronym. The new mantra is “Both Sides Are Responsible.” (BSAR, anyone?)
Given the reported acts of violence of recent years, that’s more than a little disingenuous. At least, I can’t name a conservative who’s targeted a Leftist. While the initial attempts to characterize Tyler Robinson as a MAGA fan failed miserably, the attempts themselves are a giveaway of the Left’s rhetorical desperation. “Racist,” “fascist,” “homophobe,” “Islamophobe,” and “xenophobe” haven’t been carrying their weight lately. The first two have been brutally overused, whereas the other three simply haven’t gained traction.
Political polemicists have to work with what they’ve got. On the Left, that’s precious little. They’ve striven to equate the murder of a popular conservative by an AntiFa-aligned killer to an intemperate statement from the chairman of the FCC. If that doesn’t suggest desperation, I can’t imagine what would. Still, the chant has gone up that “both sides are responsible” for political violence in the Twenty-First Century United States.
As the major channels of communication continue to be far more friendly to the Left than the Right, there haven’t been many prominent slapdowns of the BSAR assertion. One must stand for many: Greg Gutfeld’s evisceration of Jessica Tarlov yesterday night. A choice snippet:
The left calls Trump a hate monger. They’ve called me a hate monger because I ridicule the left. I ridicule protesters. I ridicule academia, Hollywood, the news media. I make fun of The View every day. I make fun of the UN. Guess what? No one acts on the things that I say because my side doesn’t do that!
We say people are stupid, we say people are wrong, but we don’t say they’re evil. That is YOUR game!
And then you come and you say, ‘This is a mentally ill loner.’ Well, who do you think does this stuff? It’s not Ben Affleck, it’s not Tom Brady…People who do this stuff are always that way.
The question is, who points them in that direction? Why pick ICE? Why pick Charlie Kirk? Why target TV stations and put bombs under FOX trucks? Why vandalize memorials? Why kill kids in Catholic schools?”
And indeed, both the vicious rhetoric and the consequent violence are emitted solely by the Left. The Right has produced no James Hodgkinsons or Tyler Robinsons. But even one act of violence from a conservative against a popular Leftist could provide BSAR the grounding it seeks. The Right must be careful not to provide even the slightest substantiation for the Left’s calumnies against us. Else BSAR’s ceremonial tune will resound from coast to coast. The Right, with its far lesser media presence, will be hard pressed to counter it.
Long, long ago, in a suburb not too far away, I had a teacher for American history who started the year with a striking proposition: specifically, that American history education has been forced into a “good guys versus bad guys” model. (Henceforward, the Model.) He could have named names, but he didn’t. Instead, he presented the Model to us and asked us whether it accurately summarized the way we’d been taught to view American history in our earlier school years.
It did. It does. It continues to dominate the teaching of American history to this day. It will come as no surprise to my readers that the Model proposes that the “good guys” are on the big-government / international-interventionist left.
Now, that teacher had a screw or two loose. He thought compound interest on mortgages (especially his) was “unfair.” He felt it was entirely acceptable to belittle those of us who sought careers in science and technology. And he was an ardent, evangelistic political conservative, one of the very few I encountered in my school years. I shan’t describe his idiosyncrasies any further than that. But he did capture the prevailing Model of American history accurately. (Needless to say, he taught from the opposite perspective.)
One of the implications of the Model is, of course, that those administrations opposed to big government and international meddling are therefore bad. A teacher presenting American history to his students under the Model faces certain challenges. For example, he must reconcile the admiration of the administrations of Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and Grover Cleveland – three Democrat presidents – with the Left’s disapproval of limited government / noninterventionist sentiments. Preserving the Democrat label from association with limited government and noninterventionism can be a chore, especially when the first genuinely “progressive” president, in the contemporary sense, was Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican.
To that end, American history before the Wilson Administration is glossed over rather than treated as a serious subject worthy of detailed attention. When the teacher presents details for study, they’re the ones that run counter to the sentiments that prevailed in those years: Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase; Jackson’s support for slavery; Cleveland’s intervention in the Pullman strike. The rest is wrapped in murk, lest the young mind be drawn to the limited government / noninterventionist way of thought.
The Model can follow the young person into his adult life, and often does. It can warp his perception of social and political developments. It can predispose him against public figures identified with the small-government / America-First ideology. That the big-government / globalist model is antithetical to the principles on which the country was founded doesn’t get his attention, much less serious study.
This comes to mind this morning for reasons disconnected from most current events. However, it does explain the Left’s sanctification of Democrat administrations starting with Woodrow Wilson, America’s first openly globalist president. It also explains the Left’s vilification of the administrations that have run counter to the big-government / globalist pattern. If the former is Good, the latter must be Evil, regardless of any other considerations.
A little while ago, I encountered a poster on X / Twitter who claimed, quite barefacedly, that it’s been Republican administrations that have been responsible for America’s involvement in foreign wars. I couldn’t quite believe my eyes, as that poster has said many intelligent and observant things. But she had not paid attention to the details of history since 1900:
World War I: entered by Woodrow Wilson.
World War II: entered by Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Korean War: entered by Harry S. Truman, concluded by Dwight Eisenhower.
Vietnam War: entered by John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, concluded by Richard Nixon.
Only the grip of the Model can explain that degree of historical ignorance in an otherwise intelligent, generally erudite person.
If you’re the parent of a young American in high school today, watch for the effects of the Model. Chat with Junior about what he’s being taught about the history of his country. If you sense the Model in operation, do what you can – gently, of course – to correct its influence. Introducing your child to the facts, and to other historical perspectives, is critical. In this regard I heartily recommend the late Clarence Carson’s six-book series A Basic History of the United States, which is suitable for teenaged readers.
Historical literacy is among the things the Left fears most. Consider only the effects of the Model on contemporary left-inclined Americans. How many fewer would there be, were it not for the tendentiousness of juvenile education in American history?
Just in case you’ve spent the month of September on Ganymede, Charlie Kirk’s memorial was held yesterday. It overfilled a giant stadium. It included the president and vice-president of the United States, most Cabinet secretaries, and a number of other notables. The estimates of the crowd in attendance, both inside and outside State Farm Stadium, hover around 300,000. That makes it the largest scheduled event to have occurred in America in the Twenty-First Century.
One must conclude that it drew some interest.
I shan’t go on about Charlie Kirk. Plenty has been said about him by people who actually knew him. I didn’t, so my opinion counts for little. But his murder has proved to be a galvanizing event. Various people have said it’s sparked a revival of Christian faith. That’s notable in a nation that’s been trending secular for some decades.
How? Why?
I could go on about that, too, but I’ll spare you. If you’ve been reading my crap for any length of time, you know I’m a serious Catholic. You also know that I’m an unabashed promoter of the Christian faith. Denomination matters less than the acceptance of the Resurrection. That underpins everything else.
There’s a book on my shelves by a certain Richard Rubinstein, titled When Jesus Became God. It’s about the doctrinal conflicts within early Christianity that eventuated in the Council of Nicea and its proclamations. It makes fascinating reading. But what I have in mind at the moment is a passage from the very beginning of the book, when the author is talking to a Catholic priest about the various notions that circulated in the late Roman Empire about Christ. Rubinstein says point-blank that except for the assertion that Jesus of Nazareth was divine, he could become a Christian himself.
That’s the impact the life and teachings of Jesus have on people today, quite apart from Christian doctrine that He is the Second Person of the Divine Trinity.
Unfortunately, Christianity today is in the hands of conservators and promulgators who are at best inept. Many of them act as if they’re embarrassed by their faith. Nearly all of them seem reluctant to talk to non-Christians about it.
From what I’ve read about Charlie Kirk, he was the reverse of reluctant. He took pride and pleasure in his faith. It was the foundation of his identity. It pervaded his marriage and family. He would talk about it with anyone who would listen.
It made Kirk the most effective evangelist for Christianity since Aimee Semple McPherson. Forget the televangelists and the revival-tent preachers. Their events are attended almost exclusively by the already persuaded. Kirk was the real deal: a speaker who could bring even a lifelong atheist to Christ.
Never mind the politics. Kirk was first and foremost a Christian and an evangelist for Christ. His words reached open ears, not because of the words themselves – plenty of preachers have said the same things, sometimes more eloquently – but because those who listened to him knew at once that he was wholehearted and sincere. Admirable.
An admirable man draws admiration. That brings about emulation. But the emulator realizes at once that the admirable one’s foundation is utterly vital. He must start from there, for all else is built upon it and would collapse without it.
If there is to be a revival of Christian faith and adherence in the United States, Charlie Kirk must be credited with a great part of it.
The world will miss Charlie Kirk. We needed him more than anyone knew. It doesn’t matter that not everyone will accept all of his prescriptions and proscriptions. The Christian denominations vary somewhat, too. But all of them accept the Resurrection.
Accepting the Resurrection is the key to all the rest. Lee Strobel learned that by trying to refute the Resurrection... and failing. His book, not long ago dramatized in an exceptional movie, tell a compelling tale of a man’s transformation from atheist to believer. Yet Strobel, a well-regarded journalist, was unexceptional in any way but this: he was willing to look at the evidence.
It’s the evidence that transforms the unbeliever into a believer. From that all else follows: Christ’s teachings, His miracles, His combined human-divine nature, and what follows from them.
And it is exactly what we need today.
Rather than belabor this still further, herewith please find a piece from Liberty’s Torch V2.0 that first appeared there on May 19, 2024. It’s mostly about another young Christian who experienced a great deal of vilification for daring to express his faith and its teachings in a forum much smaller than State Farm Stadium. Concerning the predicted revival of American Christianity, let’s hope Charlie Kirk’s memorial is only the beginning.
Births And Rebirths
Happy Pentecost, the birthday of the Church. On this day two millennia ago, the Apostles were granted the gift of the Holy Spirit, which emboldened and equipped them for the mission with which Christ had charged them:
Then the eleven disciples went away into Galilee, into a mountain where Jesus had appointed them. And when they saw him, they worshipped him: but some doubted.
And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. Amen.
[Matthew 28:16-20]
Christ’s final promise to His Apostles was that He would send the Holy Spirit to them, that they might fulfill that mission. That promise was kept ten days after His Ascension. That was also how the Apostles finally gained the courage to leave their refuge and begin their public ministry.
They needed courage. They had seen Him crucified. Were they to reveal themselves as His Apostles, would not the same fate befall them? And indeed, all but one of the Apostles were martyred in the course of their ministry. Only John, youngest of the Twelve, escaped that fate.
And two millennia later, we confront a new age of disdain for Christ’s teachings and persecution of those who follow Him. It sometimes seems we have learned nothing from our trials and the sorrows of our forebears. But our enemies have learned something. They no longer crucify. Today they wield weapons far more formidable: ridicule and deceit.
***
We were warned:
Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you. [Matthew 5:11-12]
You don’t need to look very hard, or very far, to see that Christ spoke truly. Some of the abuse even comes from within our own number. Note what’s happened to Harrison Butker. You’ve heard about the talk he gave at Benedictine College’s graduation ceremony, haven’t you? Well, just in case you haven’t:
I didn’t know the first thing about Butker before the contretemps over that talk erupted on the Web:
I didn’t know he’s an NFL placekicker;
I didn’t know he has two Super Bowl rings;
I didn’t know he’s a Catholic, or a married man, or the father of two children.
Today I know all those things, and that he’s an admirable speaker as well. I also know this: he is currently experiencing exactly what Christ predicted:
Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.
The sisters of Mount St. Scholastica do not believe that Harrison Butker’s comments in his 2024 Benedictine College commencement address represent the Catholic, Benedictine, liberal arts college that our founders envisioned and in which we have been so invested.
Instead of promoting unity in our church, our nation, and the world, his comments seem to have fostered division. One of our concerns was the assertion that being a homemaker is the highest calling for a woman. We sisters have dedicated our lives to God and God’s people, including the many women whom we have taught and influenced during the past 160 years. These women have made a tremendous difference in the world in their roles as wives and mothers and through their God-given gifts in leadership, scholarship, and their careers.
Our community has taught young women and men not just how to be “homemakers” in a limited sense, but rather how to make a Gospel-centered, compassionate home within themselves where they can welcome others as Christ, empowering them to be the best versions of themselves. We reject a narrow definition of what it means to be Catholic. We are faithful members of the Catholic Church who embrace and promote the values of the Gospel, St. Benedict, and Vatican II and the teachings of Pope Francis.
We want to be known as an inclusive, welcoming community, embracing Benedictine values that have endured for more than 1500 years and have spread through every continent and nation. We believe those values are the core of Benedictine College.
I could hardly have believed it, were it not an official, public statement from the Daughters of St. Scholastica. That it misstates Butker’s speech in the sole objective criticism it makes is merely icing on an already distasteful cake. Clearly, that order of nuns has “gone woke.”
Isabelle Butker stands staunchly behind her husband. You can read about her at several places on the Web. Her faith is as joyous as his, and just as undisguised:
Much like Harrison, Isabelle was also a college athlete, playing women’s basketball at Rhodes College in Tennessee. According to her player bio, Isabelle played in 26 games and averaged seven minutes per game.”
During his controversial speech, Harrison revealed that Isabelle converted to Catholicism after she began dating him. “I had a moment one day where I was asking God, you know, ‘OK, can you just show me what is the right path? Do I go this way or do I go with what Harrison’s doing? And it was weird in that moment, I actually felt like I was physically being embraced,’” Isabelle shared in a May 2019 interview with EWTN. “And we were at Mass at the time, and that was kind of the moment when I decided, ‘I want to be Catholic. This is real, this is the truth.’”
Harrison and Isabelle tied the knot in 2018. “I will continue to pray for the strength and perseverance to sacrifice for you everyday [sic] of our marriage,” Harrison captioned photos from their big day via X in April 2018. “I love you Izzy!”
The couple went on to welcome their son, James, in January 2019, followed by their daughter, whose birthday and name have not been publicly revealed. The couple are currently expecting their third child.
The Butkers stand above all of the Sturm und Drang. They have something their attackers don’t: the gift the Apostles received on that first Pentecost, two millennia ago. In every individual who prays for and receives that gift, the Church is reborn.
***
I’ll say it again, and in large font so that there’s no mistaking it:
We don’t need governments. We need Christ.
That’s what Harrison Butker and Isabelle have: a genuine, undisguised, Holy-Spirit-powered faith and the courage to live and proclaim it.
What do their detractors have? What do they have to show that compares at all to the Butkers’ unconcealed joy in their marriage, their children, or their faith? What if they were to succeed in destroying him utterly? What joy would that bring them? Wouldn’t they just go hunting for new victims – more of Christ’s people to denigrate and destroy?
C. S. Lewis called them “those who have not joy.” He was quite accurate in that, possibly more so than even he knew. Their pleasures come from destruction, like the apotheoses of O’Brien’s vision in 1984:
“The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy everything. Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution. We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always — do not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever.”
If you ever yearned to know toward what end, what ultimate satisfaction, the enemies of Christ are aimed, there it is. The label doesn’t matter. Socialist? Communist? Humanist? Atheist? Pagan? Satanist? Muslim? Environmentalist? Feminist? They all have that one thing in common: they want absolute and unbounded power over you: what you do, what you say, even what you think. Because it’s the firmest barrier against them, they hate the Church that was born on the Pentecost. And they will do anything whatsoever, including things no decent man could imagine, to tarnish and damage it.
***
Today of all days, let the Church be reborn in you. Profess Christ. Embrace Him and His Gospel. Denominational differences fade in importance if you can do that one indispensable thing. For as He said to the Pharisees:
“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” [Matthew 22:37-40]
Let the Pentecost come upon you as it came upon the Apostles two millennia ago. And may God bless and keep you all.
Having reviewed the various topics I have in mind for new pieces, I’ve decided to take the rest of today, September 21, 2025, off to read and reflect. Enjoy your Sunday.
The following tweet offers a penetrating analysis of what happens when migrants from low-trust societies enter a high-trust society:
What I call “The Candy Bowl Problem” is the reason why Indians, who almost no one in the our country thought about 25 years ago, are increasingly hated.
During Halloween, kiddos go door-to-door saying "trick or treat" and receive candy. Sometimes, a person isn't home and so they…
Please click through and read it all. Then extend the reasoning to domestic exploiters: those who, owing to unnatural and unjustifiable restraint on the part of law enforcement, justice authorities, and decent persons generally, have concluded that they can violate the norms of a high-trust society with impunity.
In yesterday’s piece, I suggested that we should get off the Mishnory Road when it comes to the education of our young. Most “educational reformers” concentrate on curricula, discipline, and the purging of teachers who indoctrinate rather than teach. They seldom contemplate the truly dramatic step I have in mind.
Government-run schools are a total disaster just about everywhere in this country. They produce the lowest-quality graduates in American history: not merely ignorant, but functionally illiterate, innumerate, and uninquisitive. The parents of school-age children agree on this by an overwhelming margin. Yet the system continues. It acquires more “responsibilities” with every passing year. The amounts of money being poured into the schools, already torrential, are regularly criticized as “not enough.”
Clearly someone must be benefiting from all this. Or perhaps we’ve wedged ourselves into a metastable state, such that even small changes could topple the whole edifice. So for a first step, let’s retreat to a comfortable distance. Perhaps the change in perspective will improve our understanding of what we see.
Schooling is one of the largest “industries” in America. It employs millions of teachers, aides, counselors, administrators, and maintenance staff. It requires tens of thousands of buildings and a proportional number of acres of land. It expends nearly a trillion dollars per year to do... whatever it is that it does.
So the system provides a great many jobs. The people who hold those jobs would be as unhappy about losing them as you or I would be about losing ours. And of course, they want their incomes to increase over time. They constitute a formidable political force – so formidable that when he campaigned for the presidency, Jimmy Carter had to sway them to his side by promising them a federal Department of Education.
Now let’s look at the “customers” of the public-schooling “industry:” the school-age children and their parents or guardians. Ultimately, the system must satisfy them to some extent; the public schools are funded mainly at the state and local levels, where they can be (partially) defunded by community votes. So what are those customers getting from the system?
Parents are getting a reduction of their responsibilities. Schoolchildren get access to facilities and activities they might not have otherwise. The kids don’t feel the direct impact of the system’s cost. The parents certainly do. Many families wouldn’t need a second income, were school taxes and other schooling-related expenses to vanish.
Schoolchildren pay a kind of price for the system, too. They pay through their enforced endurance of things they could otherwise avoid. Indoctrination. Hostility. Violence.
No overview would be complete without taking note of the third parties that benefit from the schooling system: labor unions, bureaucrats, and the vendors of “educational materials.” With nearly a trillion dollars per year being spent on the schools, they have a powerful incentive to keep it going – and growing.
Taxpayers routinely find themselves outmaneuvered politically by the system’s beneficiaries. At any rate, the costs keep increasing. Teachers, aides, and administrators want more money. Special interests clamor for the schools to take on new activities. Sometimes school districts float bonds to fund the mounting costs, which only increases them. The special interests, of course, will always push for more.
At the center of it all is the public school: a building, or a cluster of buildings, perched somewhere near the center of the district. Each day ten months of the year, hundreds of individuals of all ages trudge in at an early hour and trudge out at a later one. And the system rolls merrily along.
Now imagine that a hand reaches down from the clouds, plucks the public schools out of our reality, and removes them to some unknown realm. It may be the hand of God. Or perhaps it’s the collapse in birthrates. In either case, what would come next?
First, school taxes would vanish. As they constitute one of the largest expenses families face, the economic relief would be considerable. Mandatory-schooling statutes would lose force, and would probably be repealed.
Some parents would seek a private school for their kids. Without the school tax burden, that would become much more affordable. In response to the demand, private schools would increase in number. Whether their quality would improve is debatable, though the market incentives would favor it.
But some parents would homeschool.
Many working mothers are unhappy with the demands of the working world. They’d rather be with their kids while the kids are young. Once the school taxes are gone, a good percentage of them would calculate that they could leave their jobs without depriving the family of what it needs. These would take the responsibility for their children’s educations onto themselves, whether alone or in combination with some of their neighbors. Home education has proved superior to schooling in nearly every known instance.
Not all mothers would opt to do that, of course. But the sense that American women are made unhappy by the combination of child-rearing and contributing to the family income suggests that many would find it an attractive course.
There would be negative effects as well. A great many persons whose incomes depend on the public schools would need new jobs. The educational labor unions would lose many members. Vendors who sell to the public schools would need to find new markets. Other interest groups would shrink as their participants decreased. Bureaucrats, no longer charged with responsibility for overseeing American education would... well, honestly, who cares what would happen to bureaucrats?
With parental choice in education restored, the homeschoolers would be in direct competition with the private schools. Over time, the more successful model would be revealed. The less successful one would diminish, though probably not to zero.
And that’s just the view from thirty thousand feet.
It won’t happen, of course. “Too many rice bowls,” and so forth. But it’s a very appealing scenario. Among its most attractive aspects would be the diminution of opportunities for political and social indoctrinators to work their wills on our kids. Parental choice would put a severe clamp on such things.
While the public schools are the worst in that regard, private schools are affected by it as well. The parents of privately-schooled children can be as contentious as those of public schoolers. Many political or social axes to grind. Schools, being inherently collectivizing institutions, are always attractive to persons with that agenda.
I suppose that’s enough fantasizing for a Saturday morning. Please add your thoughts in the comments section. And do have a nice day.
