The Dearest Currency

     If you’ve been wondering why I bothered to repost this 18-year-old piece, it’s because of this superior essay, posted today:

     “Men still don’t do enough housework!” The headlines shout it every few months like clockwork. Another viral study, another think piece, another round of finger-wagging at husbands who supposedly leave too many socks on the floor. I’m sorry, but it’s getting harder and harder for me to muster outrage over laundry when things like the Selective Service System is still at play, registering only men for a potential draft.
     We live in a culture that demands “gender equality now!”—but only in the arenas where it benefits women. The moment real danger knocks, the script flips. Suddenly, biology, history, and cold necessity remind us that men and women are not interchangeable. And nowhere is that truth starker than when war arrives.
     Look at Ukraine in 2022. A nation that had been marching toward progressive gender policies slammed the brakes the second Russian tanks rolled in. Every man aged 18 to 60 was barred from leaving the country. Wives, mothers, and daughters could flee to safety across the border; fathers, sons, and husbands had to stay behind to fight, die, or wait for the call-up. I tweeted that day in raw frustration: “I never want to hear anyone complaining about ‘manspreading’ ever again!” The replies were predictable—some cheered, some seethed—but the point landed. When the gender war meets real war, the gender war loses.

     Please read it all.

     War has a clarifying effect. It compels us to ponder our priorities against a scale whose poles are life and death. That doesn’t make war desirable, nor the appropriate yardstick for all comparisons. But as regards the badly strained relations between the sexes, it makes plain how trivial are feminist whines about men.

     Yes, there are women in America’s armed services. One of them is a young friend whom I’ll call Jane. Jane has been a soldier for barely six months, yet she’s already overseas and functioning in a dangerous, high-stress environment. Her courage and sangfroid are remarkable, the more so as her detachment was hit just yesterday, with multiple casualties and extensive destruction. Her reaction? “I'm a soldier. I signed up for this.”

     So I’m not denigrating our female warriors. Nevertheless, Lisa Britton’s point stands: When war is in prospect, it’s the men that governments round up to be thrown into the furnace. We expect our men to “step up” – and they do:

     If World War III ever breaks out—and the way the world is trending, with proxy conflicts, great-power rivalries, and crumbling alliances, it no longer feels impossible—it will be our sons, brothers, husbands, and boyfriends who receive the call first. They will leave our homes, our beds, our futures, and step into the elite’s power battle. And when they do, the same voices that spent years calling masculinity problematic will suddenly post heartfelt memes about our “real men.”
     We can’t keep doing this. We can’t keep devaluing, blaming and shaming men for everything. It doesn’t look like the expectation of male sacrifice is ending anytime soon, so we must honor, love, and respect our men in peacetime, not just when the sirens wail. That means rejecting the cheap shots—the endless articles blaming men for every social ill, the cultural sneers at “toxic masculinity,” the refusal to acknowledge that male sacrifice still underpins our safety. It means teaching our daughters that a good man’s desire to protect is not oppression but a gift. It means telling our sons that their strength is needed, valued, and worthy of gratitude.

     God bless and keep you, Lisa. What you’ve said has needed to be said for some time now. But don’t expect the promulgators of militant feminism to agree. They’ve made the war between the sexes into an occupation, an income. We can’t expect them to overturn their rice bowls for the sake of honesty.

     Peace is purchased with men’s blood. No other currency will serve. Decent Americans of both sexes – yes, there are two and only two – should keep that firmly in mind, after the conflicts in progress today are a receding memory.

"Moderately Bad Men"

     [This piece first appeared at Eternity Road on August 28, 2008 – FWP]

* * *

     This extraordinary bit of whining by Ellen Tien has been getting a fair amount of play in Blogdom:

     I contemplate divorce every day. It tugs on my sleeve each morning when my husband, Will, greets me in his chipper, smug morning-person voice, because after 16 years of waking up together, he still hasn't quite pieced out that I'm not viable before 10 a.m.

     It puts two hands on my forehead and mercilessly presses when he blurts out the exact wrong thing ("Are you excited for your surprise party next Tuesday?"); when he lies to avoid the fight ("What do you mean I left our apartment door open? I never even knew our apartment had a door!"); when he buttons his shirt and jacket into the wrong buttonholes, collars and seams unaligned like a vertical game of dominoes, with possibly a scrap of shirttail zippered into his fly.

     It flicks me, hard, just under the eye when, during a parent-teacher conference, he raises his arm high in the air, scratches his armpit, and then --then! -- absently smells his fingers.

     It slammed into me like a 4,000-pound Volvo station wagon one spring evening four years ago, although I remember it as if it were last year.

     He had dropped me off in front of a restaurant, prior to finding a parking spot. As I crossed in front of the car, he pulled forward, happily smiling back over his left shoulder at some random fascinating bit (a sign with an interesting font, a new scaffolding, a diner that he may or may not have eaten at the week after he graduated from college), and plowed into me. The impact, while not wondrous enough to break bodies 12 ways, was sufficient to bounce me sidewise onto the hood, legs waving in the air like antennae, skirt flung somewhere up around my ears.

     For one whole second, New York City stood stock-still and looked at my underwear.

     As I pounded the windshield with my fist and shouted -- "Will, Will, stop the car!" -- he finally faced forward, blink, blink, blink, trying, yes, truly trying to take it all in. And I heard him ask with mild astonishment, very faintly because windshield glass is surprisingly thick, "What are you doing here?"

     In retrospect, it was an excellent question, a question that I've asked myself from altar to present, both incessantly and occasionally. What am I doing here?

     Don't misunderstand: I would not, could not disparage my marriage (not on a train, not in the rain, not in a house, not with a mouse). After 192 months, Will and I remain if not happily married, then steadily so. Our marital state is Indiana, say, or Connecticut -- some red areas, more blue. Less than bliss, better than disaster. We are arguably, to my wide-ish range of reference, Everycouple.

     Nor is Will the Very Bad Man that I've made him out to be. Rather, like every other male I know, he is merely a Moderately Bad Man, the kind of man who will leave his longboat-sized shoes directly in the flow of our home's traffic so that one day I'll trip over them, break my neck, and die, after which he'll walk home from the morgue, grief-stricken, take off his shoes with a heavy heart, and leave them in the center of the room until they kill the housekeeper. Everyman.

     Still, beneath the thumpingly ordinary nature of our marriage -- Everymarriage --runs the silent chyron of divorce. It's the scarlet concept, the closely held contemplation of nearly every woman I know who has children who have been out of diapers for at least two years and a husband who won't be in them for another 30. It's the secret reverie of a demographic that freely discusses postpartum depression, eating disorders, and Ambien dependence (often all in the same sentence) with the plain candor of golden brown toast. In a let-it-all-hang-out culture, this is the given that stays tucked in.

     There's lots more, but this is about all your Curmudgeon can stand. It's your turn, Gentle Reader:

• Do you think it likely that Miss Tien is a stunningly perfect woman, sterling of character and exquisite of manner, who would never upset her husband Will with a poor choice of words or a poorly timed remark?
• Do you envision Will as a neglectful, abusive cad, who confines her to their home, deprives her of all but the bare necessities of life, and barks menacingly at her slightest hint of displeasure? Would you find plausible the suggestion that Will has even worse character flaws and behaviors than the ones Miss Tien has described here, or do you think it likely that she's "shot her wad?"
• Might it be possible that Will has a few criticisms to make of Ellen, but is too much the gentleman and dutiful husband to voice them in public?
• Were Will the writer of this article, and Ellen its subject, would it be received as readily by the Oprahfied audience to whom it was first presented?
• If Will were to sue Ellen for divorce, presenting her rant as evidence of spousal abuse, do you think the court would free him of all obligations to her, or is it more likely that he'd be tied to her by bonds of alimony for years to come?

     But enough about poor Will. Will, by the Gospel According To Ellen Tien, isn't a Very Bad Man, just a Moderately Bad Man: "like every other male I know." Your Curmudgeon doesn't go in for a lot of self-disclosure, but he will say this: if Will's worst faults are on record in the column above, the C.S.O. would trade your Curmudgeon for Will in a heartbeat. She'd probably throw in some cash, a couple of draft picks, and a player to be named later, at that.

     But enough about that benighted woman. It's her shrieky column that matters -- and not because it's particularly unusual of its kind. It's standard fare in Oprahfied Women's America. That's the truly disturbing thing about it.

     Oprahfied Women have been taught, mostly by innuendo and implication, that men are low creatures by nature, that the very best of them barely deserves a woman's attention, much less her respect, and that anything and everything men do for their women, or for women in general, is either a move in an exploitative game or a stroke in a campaign to "keep them oppressed." A fair percentage of American women have internalized that message. Because the sexes need one another, it puts a lot of men in a quandary about how to deal with the women in their lives, and renders a lot of women so badly conflicted that they cannot be happy no matter what they do.

     Whatever happened to the old motto, "To his virtues, be kind; to his faults, a little blind" -- ? Like most good advice, it doesn't really matter whether the advisee is male or female; the "his" pronouns could as easily be "her." We are none of us perfect, at least not in one another's eyes. No, not even your humble Curmudgeon; he snores, procrastinates about the yard work, and is provoked to profanity by the perversity of inanimate objects. (Customer-assembled furniture, anyone?) No marriage can be tolerable if one spouse insists that the other must conform to his standards at every waking moment.

     Yet American women have been fed large doses of Utopianism about romance and the married state. Many have come to believe that it's possible to find a "perfect" man. More, they believe a "perfect" man is their due...that if they don't get their due, they've been cheated and have a right to redress.

     Now and then, a commenter here or elsewhere will extol the superior femininity and agreeability of Asian women. Your Curmudgeon knows a few, and they do impress him. Given the porous state of the borders, American women had better look to their levees; the "coyotes" could as easily import Asian brides as unskilled Mexican laborers.

Promises, Fulfillments, And Discoveries

     Happy Easter, Gentle Reader. “For He is risen, as He said.” He didn’t make a big, showy deal about it, though. His final Gift to Mankind was delivered quietly, almost without any ceremony whatsoever. For the Christ had no need to trumpet I-told-you-sos all over Creation. He simply did as He said He would.

     I have a few thoughts for you this morning. First, have a piece from several Easters ago.

* * *

     The Feast of the Resurrection is the very heart of Christian faith. Without the Resurrection, there would be only the accounts of Jesus’s miracles to stand as evidence for His authority to proclaim the New Covenant. That Covenant is infinitely more important than any other statement in the history of religious faith. Let’s review it a moment:

Now a man came up to him and said, "Teacher, what good thing must I do to gain eternal life?" He said to him, "Why do you ask me about what is good? There is only one who is good. But if you want to enter into life, keep the commandments." "Which ones?" he asked. Jesus replied, "You shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not give false witness, honor your father and mother and love your neighbor as yourself." [Matthew, 19:16-19.]

Now when the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they assembled together. And one of them, an expert in religious law, asked him a question to test him: “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” Jesus said to him, "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]

     Christ’s New Covenant replaced – indeed, it displaced – the Levitical Covenant of Moses and the years of Exodus. The significance of this event is seldom appreciated even by the foremost Christian writers and thinkers. They fail to ask the critical question, which, as it so often proves to be, consists of a single word: Why?

     [A brief but hopefully enlarging tangent: In episode VI of Patrick McGoohan’s brilliant series The Prisoner, the keepers of the Village build a computer intended to ferret out the secrets McGoohan’s character was immured there to discover. McGoohan’s character destroys it with a one word question: the one above. Patrick McGoohan was a lifelong, devout Catholic. Think about it.]

---

     The Levitical Covenant, despite the endless repetitions of “I am the Lord” in the Book of Leviticus, went far beyond the will of God. It was Judaic Law as set forth by Moses, and it attempted to embrace virtually the whole of life of a man of pre-Christian times. Moses seems to have believed that the many dictates of his Law were necessary to discipline the Hebrews in preparation to fulfill their destiny as the Chosen People. Perhaps he was right...but his Law had some unintended consequences, as laws so often do.

     When there are many, many laws, people will naturally choose to adhere to some and ignore the rest. Not everyone will choose to adhere to the same ones. In accordance with this dynamic, life among the Jews of Judea changed greatly over the millennium-plus between the Exodus and the coming of Jesus. The laws which men believed to be in their individual interests were the ones they chose to obey; the rest were regarded as “suggestions.” This was compounded by the rise of a priestly caste that saw the Judaic religion as a source of status and profit, and used it, and the place of the Temple at Jerusalem as the heart of the creed, to those ends.

     Christ’s parables often told of men who had decided that commandments such as “Thou shalt not murder” were mere suggestions, and what would follow in retribution. His New Covenant stripped away the rituals and extra disciplines that surround Mosaic Law and left the irreducible core of God’s Will. He promised that those who would keep His commandments – the ones He gave to the “rich young man” of Matthew Chapter 19 – would know eternal life.

     We who believe take Him at His word, for His Resurrection made clear that He had full authority to proclaim the New Covenant...and that we could trust in His promise.

     The Theological Virtues follow by direct implication:
     We know that faith follows from such a decision: faith in the authority of the Lord.
     We know that hope is its necessary concomitant, for no mere mortal can conclusively prove that Jesus was the Son of God, nor that His promise was more trustworthy than that of any other man.
     We attend to one another in a spirit of charity because it’s the principle at the core of the New Covenant: to “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

     We practice the Cardinal Virtues – prudence, temperance, justice, and fortitude – because they alone are capable of both preparing us to meet the requirements of the ones above and sustaining us and our neighbors in our times of trial.

     And we wait, and pray, and repose our trust in His promise.

* * *

     Just last Friday, I wrote about anticipation as an integral part of an expected event. Now, that particular rumination was about Jesus’s anticipation of His suffering on the Cross. His human nature quailed before the thought, as His prayer at Gethsemane made plain. But His divine nature accepted it as the path He must travel: His Father’s will, and so His own as well.

     But we anticipate joyous things as well as sorrowful ones. We anticipate His Resurrection, which we commemorate today. We anticipate His Ascension in forty days’ time, and the miracle of Pentecost, which equipped His Apostles to convert the world:

     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 28:18-20]

     Those events fulfilled His ministry, just as the Resurrection fulfilled His earlier promise.

* * *

     There are many directions I could go from here, but one stands out above the others, for it pertains to the First Great Commandment:

     “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.”

     Love is a heavily overloaded word. We use it freely to label attachments that have little or no relation to love between humans. The use above is among the most difficult of all. What does it mean to love God? Does it have any relationship to our temporal loves?

     Our difficulties are compounded by mysteries. We have little insight into the nature of God. We can be fairly confident that He is eternal and stands above time, and therefore has no needs as a man would understand them. If He has desires, those too are mysterious, for His omnipotence implies that they could be fulfilled with a Word. Given those things, how does one go about loving Him?

     The overload becomes more comprehensible in light of yet another overload: that of the word fear.

     Many passages in the Bible speak of “fear of the Lord” as a necessary component of a righteous life. And in more recent decades, a great many silly preachers have taken that to mean actual, temporal fear, as we might fear enemies, calamities, suffering, and death. But the Jews of Judea didn’t use the word that way in that context. For them, it was a synonym for awe. “How great Thou art!”

     Well that it is so, for it’s supremely difficult to love that which one fears in the temporal sense. The human inclination is to flee or destroy the feared entity. But neither of those are possible when the feared one is divine.

     I think our understanding of the love of God harmonizes with what the First Century Jews meant by the fear of God. They dovetail in that sense of awe, and the human response to awe: adoration. Note that etymologically, adore means “to pray to.” And we do. In recognition of His supremacy over all things, we worship Him and pray to Him. Our prayers are our acknowledgement of His as what He is. Even the least of them connotes gratitude that He is God, and that all things are subject to His will. They are our expression of love as God must be loved.

     I’ve written on other occasions of the importance of gratitude. Gratitude alone can make us happy. Gratitude is the fulfillment of all blessings: the acknowledgement that we have been blessed and know it. And it goes to Him who blesses, as it should:

     Teresza found that she could remember her transcendental experiences with perfect clarity. There was power in the words from Maria’s book, a beneficent power that emanated from a strong place outside the world she knew. It did not threaten; it entreated. Be like this, it pleaded, that you and the world shall be whole with one another.
     “Like this” isn’t so far distant from what I am...what we are. We give and take in our turn. We raise no hand unprovoked. We honor our forebears and our promises to one another. To the extent we’re aware of it, we’re even grateful for the gift of life.
     All we lack is awareness of where that gratitude should go.

     In that discovery we learn what it really means to love God “with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” For all that we are and will ever be flows from Him.

     Happy Easter on April 5 in this Year of Our Lord 2026. May God bless and keep you all. Be grateful.

The True Bastion Of Liberty

     I hadn’t planned to write anything today, despite it being “1984 Day:”

     April 4th, 1984. Last night to the flicks. All war films….

     George Orwell had important things to say about liberty, despite being socialistically inclined. Nevertheless, he omitted mention of one thing that, sadly, a great many Americans have failed to appreciate. Indeed, the majority of us squirm to escape involvement with it. And for that reason among others, we’re losing its protection:

     The jury functioned as a localized check on state power, granting the common citizen the authority to temper the rigid application of the law with communal common sense. The historical power of jury nullification, whereby a jury refuses to convict a defendant despite overwhelming evidence of guilt, was historically celebrated as a triumph against state overreach. Cases such as the 1735 trial of John Peter Zenger, who was acquitted of seditious libel against the Royal Governor of New York, cemented the jury’s role as a bulwark of liberty. The jury possessed the ultimate veto, ensuring that the laws enacted by the sovereign could only be enforced if they aligned with the moral intuitions of the populace.
     As detailed in the University College London (UCL) academic paper, “Decline of the ‘Little Parliament’: Juries and Jury Reform in England and Wales” by Sally Lloyd-Bostock and Cheryl Thomas, the jury was vigorously defended as an ancient right and a bastion of liberty, a mechanism whereby the ordinary person’s moral compass could inform legal decisions and contain the powers of government.

     If you follow the news from the United Kingdom, you’re probably already aware of how badly the right to a trial by jury has been abraded:

'So judges are just better at finding facts?'
'They're experienced at it.'

Sir Brian Leveson, who led the criminal courts inquiry, explains why he thinks Lammy is absolutely right to scrap jury trials. pic.twitter.com/qDTQFw7acY

— LBC (@LBC) December 2, 2025

     But Celina’s essay, quoted above, makes a shattering point about the preconditions required for trial by jury to exercise its protections:

     Nonwhite jurors display clear ethnocentric bias against white defendants and in favor of their own. The data is undeniable. The elites know it. That is why they are quietly abolishing peremptory challenges, gutting jury trials, and now planning to scrap them for almost everything except murder and rape. Demography is destiny, and if the English, Americans, or Australians become a minority in their own courtrooms, there will be no justice left.

     From here, I could light off in several directions, but I’ll content myself by quoting an earlier tirade:

     The combination of the Constitution plus the Common Law, which we inherited from England, had a consequence few persons have openly articulated. Under their combined principles and terms, and from the then-customary definition of a government, the United States was an anarchist nation. The argument is simple: A State must have the recognized authority to decree punishment. But under the Constitution's requirement for a jury trial for all penal offenses, plus the Common Law's traditions concerning the jury's freedom to nullify any law it finds noxious, only a jury of private citizens can do so. Therefore, U.S. governments lack an essential qualification for being States -- and therefore, we are an anarchy by the strict meaning of the word.

     Now consider what would follow the abolition of the jury trial. No longer would a jury’s assent be required for the State to punish a defendant. Thus, defendants irritating to the State would be at great hazard, for an indictment would guarantee a subsequent conviction. Worse still, jury nullification would vanish. The State could proclaim arbitrary laws that would not have survived a jury’s veto. The worst features of feudal systems would be laid atop our advanced, information-oriented societies.

     But let’s not stop there. Let’s ask about the driving influence Celina has cited:

     When a society is fractured along ethnic and cultural lines, the jury ceases to be a microcosm of a unified nation. Instead, it becomes a contested battleground for competing tribal loyalties. Historical nullification, which used to be a noble tool against state tyranny, has mutated into ethnic nullification, where jurors refuse to convict members of their own in-group regardless of the evidence. This weaponization of an ancient right paralyzes the state’s ability to maintain basic order and shatters the epistemic foundation of the legal system.

     Juries have stood in the way of unbounded State power since John Peter Zenger. They who seek unbounded power would naturally be averse to the right to a trial by jury. Were our “elites” aware that unlimited immigration from the Third World would destroy the jury trial as an instrument of justice? Was it part of their planning?

     The U.K. is already far gone toward the abolition of the jury trial. Given travesties of justice such as the acquittal of O.J. Simpson for his murders of Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman, and the willingness of a largely nonwhite jury to convict Donald Trump of a slew of felonies even if they had to invent them, Americans’ right to a trial by jury cannot be deemed safe from demolition.

     And I have no doubt that, whether or not this demise of an ancient, liberty-preserving right was a planned consequence of open immigration, our “elites” will find the outcome to their tastes.

Anticipation

     Much of the power of the Catholic liturgical calendar flows from its regularity. We know each season, each celebration, and each commemoration. We can see them coming. And though they are the same as last year, a host of factors freshen them as they return. Despite their regularity, the cycle renders them new.

     Part of that is the anticipation of each liturgical event. Anticipation, we are told, is itself a component of the thing anticipated, inseparable from it. With some of the feasts this is obvious, Christmas being the best example. Today’s commemoration is preceded by the sacrificial practices of Lent and is driven home by the contemplation of the Cross.

     But there’s an aspect to the Passion that’s seldom pondered. We aren’t the only ones who see it coming.

* * *

     Jesus of Nazareth, at once fully human and fully divine, was not unaware of the fate He faced. He told His followers that it was coming. During the episode of the Transfiguration, He conversed with Moses and Elijah about it:

     And it came to pass about an eight days after these sayings, he took Peter and John and James, and went up into a mountain to pray. And as he prayed, the fashion of his countenance was altered, and his raiment was white and glistering. And, behold, there talked with him two men, which were Moses and Elias: Who appeared in glory, and spake of his decease which he should accomplish at Jerusalem.
     But Peter and they that were with him were heavy with sleep: and when they were awake, they saw his glory, and the two men that stood with him.

     [Luke 9:28-32]

     And later on, He prayed at Gethsemane to be spared:

     And he came out, and went, as he was wont, to the mount of Olives; and his disciples also followed him. And when he was at the place, he said unto them, Pray that ye enter not into temptation. And he was withdrawn from them about a stone's cast, and kneeled down, and prayed, Saying, Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.
     And there appeared an angel unto him from heaven, strengthening him.
     And being in an agony he prayed more earnestly: and his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground.

     [Luke 22:39-44]

     His anticipation of His impending torture and death was inseparable from the agony thereof. It was a single Passion, unitary and complete.

* * *

     The Passion is too solemn a commemoration to be burdened with a long, sententious exposition. Let me close with one more thought.

     Jesus, though divine, never referred to Himself as the Son of God. Those words came from the mouths of others. He called Himself the Son of Man, a title whose significance is unappreciated by many. It served to humble Him in others’ eyes, but it also carried a subtext: I am here because of you.

     For even the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many. [Mark 10:45]

     He had not come from His own need, nor from His Father’s need, but from ours. He lived, preached, traveled, suffered, and died for us. We needed Him. And so He gave Himself to us.

     May God bless and keep you all on this Good Friday in the Year of Our Lord 2026.

A Little Peace On The Side

     [The following first appeared at the old, much lamented Eternity Road site on September 12, 2006. I’m reposting it as a memory refresher, for everything discussed below still pertains to political discourse and the Left’s tactics today.
     The Left’s approach to hammering its lunacies into the public mind has been highly consistent. It’s had remarkable success, especially at inducing decent persons to self-censor. Yet all its tactics are founded on lies and vilification. We must challenge them on everything they say, especially their absurd notions about “social justice.” Nonsense has no place in serious discourse. – FWP]

* * *

     In its attacks on the Right, the Left frequently employs the notion of "code words:" phrases of innocent appearance that conceal sinister intentions. For instance, we have this from two prominent Embarrassments-at-large to the United States Congress:

     Politicians know this trick well. In 1994, Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., likened tax cuts to racial epithets, saying, "It's not 'spic' or 'nigger' anymore. They just say, 'Let's cut taxes.'" Later that year, Rep. Major Owens, D-N.Y., used similar language to describe the Republicans' Contract With America: "These are people who are practicing genocide with a smile; they're worse than Hitler." [statements made during the debate over the Contract With America]

     Ann Coulter, the great conservative provocateuse, characterized such rhetoric thus:

     When arguments are premised on lies, there is no foundation for debate. You end up conceding to half the lies simply to focus on the lies of Holocaust-denial proportions. Kind and well meaning people find themselves afraid to talk about politics. Any sentient person has to be concerned that he might innocently make an argument or employ a turn of phrase that will be discerned by the liberal cult as a "code word" evincing a genocidal tendency....

     Vast areas of public policy debate are treated as indistinguishable from using the N-word (aka: the worst offense against mankind....The spirit of the First Amendment has been effectively repealed for conservative speech by a censorious, accusatory mob. Truth cannot prevail because whole categories of thought are deemed thought crimes. [From Slander: Liberal Lies About The American Right]

     This use of the "code word" notion as a sword is generally understood among persons of conservative and libertarian inclinations, but less attention goes to the Left's use of code words as a shield: a screen of attractive but irrelevant concepts deployed to prevent critical examination of something they favor.

     Consider the following, found at the head of this Web site:

     Finding peace in this world we live in seems like a daunting task. We watch as our own government is unmasked to reveal it's naked aggression, it's use of torture in the name of freedom and it's unholy alliance with corporate power and right wing religious extremists. Where are they taking our nation and and do we as a people even care anymore about peace, social justice and truth?

     Ignore the strange grammar and punctuation if you can. Ponder rather the implications of the statement, whose maker is undoubtedly in favor of "peace, social justice, and truth"...by her own interpretation, anyway. Read the most recent half-dozen of her posts and try to determine for yourself what her definitions of those things would be.

     They surely sound good, though, don't they?

     "Peace" by the norms of the liberals usually means surrender to socialist and communist insurrections, which they call "reform movements." "Social justice" by their lights means the erection of ever-larger transfer programs and laws that offer preferential treatment to their favored mascot-groups. "Truth" to a liberal...well, an Eternity Road reader is more than capable of judging for himself. But the terms themselves carry so pretty an aura that virtually no one is willing to compel their elucidation. So liberals get to hide their true intentions behind them: spinelessness before the march of totalitarians and thugs worldwide; exploding government spending and the ceaseless proliferation of laws that infringe upon freedom of speech, association, commerce, and the rights of private property; and the negation of objective standards by which statements of fact might be deemed pertinent to an issue and subjected to critical evaluation.

     Nobel Laureate Friedrich Hayek was especially harsh about the pseudo-concept of "social justice." Justice, he pointed out, refers to two things:

• A state of affairs in which each individual has that which is his by right;
• A process invoked to investigate situations alleged to be unjust and to correct them as necessary.

     The two meanings are tied together inextricably. A justice process cannot function to any advantage unless one can determine the just state of affairs toward which it must strive. But to determine that endpoint, one must concede that it once existed in reality, or that it would have existed except for an injustice that prevented it. This is impossible except by defining the rights of Man and specifying them for the particular persons in the controversy at hand. Thus, it is inherently an individualist premise; it cannot be "socialized" except by destroying the objective basis for the very thing it seeks to protect.

     Of course, socializing everything in sight is what the Left is all about. In liberals' ideal world, every imaginable human action is either compulsory or forbidden. There would nominally be "laws," but there would be administrators and commissions -- staffed wholly by liberals, of course -- with unreviewable plenipotentiary power to interpret those laws. Elections and legislatures would become meaningless; infinite power would rest in the hands of persons whose decisions could not be challenged, and who could be removed from their thrones only by death. That's the precondition for all "progress" by these "progressives'" lights.

     But for anyone to perform that analysis aloud must be prevented. It would give the game away in a rather final manner. So rather than campaign for infinite power for liberal mandarins, they prattle about "social justice," and hope that no one notices the opposition between the first word and the second.

     The thickness of the miasma that steams from such rhetoric -- accusations of "code word" employment by persons on the Right; deployment of "code word" defenses to avert critical analysis of the notions of persons on the Left -- makes it all but impossible to find a route back to wholesome, constructive discourse. Worse, calling a liberal on it is a glove hurled in his face. The fundamentally decent ones mostly lack the insight to see what their rhetoric really means. The indecent ones cannot abide the imputation that their favorite tactic is a tip to their dishonesty. Which suggests that the Era of Code Words is likely to hang around for a long time to come.

Small Lives

     [A short story for you this evening. Not everyone aspires to greatness. Quite a lot of us have no ambitions of that magnitude. But think about the children of a family of great wealth and power. Think about the pressures that might be put on them. Not all of them will respond the way their greatly accomplished and admired relatives would like. – FWP]

* * *

     Jack’s playing was as blazing as ever. The Black Grape crowd was mesmerized by the guitarist’s endless fresh improvisations. Rolf had backed him for three years, yet he was as impressed by the skills of Onyx’s star guitarist as he’d been at their first encounter. He strove to concentrate on his own role: keeping a steady, solid foundation with his Schecter six-string bass against which Jack could spin jazz-rock arabesques from his dazzling white Gibson Les Paul.
     Hal, at Rolf’s left, strove with equal effort to maintain the percussive thunder that undergirded the jam. It was just as invisible as Rolf’s bass, and just as vital to the support of Jack’s virtuosity.
     It was the trio’s two hundredth performance for a paying crowd, and it was special. They were locked together as tightly as if they were a single instrument. The crowd seemed to sense it just as sharply as Rolf did.
     The jam had been going on for nearly twenty minutes when Jack played the agreed-upon phrase that signaled the wind-down and the conclusion. Twelve bars more, and it ended to a thunder of applause. Onyx’s star stepped to the mike, said “we’ll be back in a little while,” unslung his guitar and set it down. Rolf and Hal did likewise. The three stepped off the dais with Jack in the lead.
     Hal ambled off to the men’s room, whether to relieve himself, have a smoke, or whatever. Rolf merely took a seat at the far corner of the bar and asked the bartender for a tap beer. He was sipping quietly mere moments later as the crowd converged on the guitarist for autographs, questions about appearance dates, or whatever.
     Bet there’s lots of whatever tonight. There were three girls up front who couldn’t tear their eyes from him. Two of them had wet spots in their jeans. Ten to one he doesn’t go home alone.
     “You look lonely.”
     The observation came from directly behind him. He set down his beer and half-turned to confront a tall, very pretty blonde who looked to be some years older than he. She wore a subtly probing look that was not at all invasive or threatening. Reflexively, he looked her up and down.
     A dress and heels? Here?
     “Good evening, Miss.” He extended a hand, and she shook it.
     “So far, anyway,” she said. She took the stool next to his and waved to the bartender. “White wine, please.” Presently the barman set a glass before her. She raised it to Rolf. “Skoal.”
     He grinned and hoisted his stein in reply. “Salud.” They clinked and sipped.
     “Sarah,” she said.
     “Rolf,” he replied.
     “Why no crowd of fans around you, Rolf?”
     He shrugged. “Sideman.” He nodded toward Jack and his cluster of admirers. “The star does the shining. Hal and I just bask in the glow.”
     It elicited a chuckle. “You’re all right with that?”
     “I couldn’t do what I do if I weren’t.”
     His phrasing seemed to pique her. “A man who knows his subjunctives!” She clapped perfunctorily.
     “Thank you, thank you. I’ll be here all week. Try the veal.”
     A second chuckle. “Yeah, right. So what do you do when you’re not backing up Mister Wonderful?”
     It was his turn to take particular note of her words. He looked her over a second time, more carefully.
     She carried herself with a relaxed, unaffected poise that seemed completely natural. It gave her a presence that went beyond mere good looks. Other women he’d known who shared her beauty and self-command had been more focused on their own images than on anything around them. Her attention was entirely on him.
     He took a moment to collect his thoughts.
     “Well,” he said, “not much of importance. I work in the lumber mill in Laurelton five days a week. I do yard cleanups on weekends for extra cash. Friday and Saturday nights I do this, if we can get a gig.”
     “Sounds…regular,” she said.
     He nodded. “Unexciting, but quiet.”
     “Like it that way?”
     “I do. It’s the life of a regular guy in a regular little New York backwater. Uncomplicated, undemanding. Pays the bills with a little left over. I can go on doing it as long I don’t slice off a finger or tick off my bosses. Maybe I’ll make supervisor someday and watch other guys slice off their fingers.”
     Her gaze flickered over to where Jack was entertaining his fans.
     “Like him?”
     He shrugged. “He’s okay. Pretty good guitarist.”
     “But you don’t pal around.”
     “Nah. There’s always a hubbub around him. I prefer the quiet.”
     Her smile quirked. “And yet,” she said, “you’re a rock musician who plays in noisy nightclubs and bars.”
     “I guess that’s how I fill my hubbub quota.” He finished his beer, rose, stretched, and reseated himself. “What about you? On your way to fortune and glory?”
     The smile vanished. “No, I’m sort of hiding from them.”
     It was curious enough to elicit a reciprocal probe. He wondered if it would be welcomed.
     Only one way to find out.
     “Are you—were you a performer too?”
     He could feel her gathering her courage.
     “No,” she said at last. “I’m a Forslund.”

#      Throughout Onyx’s second set, Rolf felt compelled to split his attention between his bass and Sarah. She remained at the bar despite it putting her sideways to the dais. Her eyes remained upon him, not in a demanding way, but simply companion to companion. She seemed to have linked herself to him in some way that extended beyond their half-hour of conversation.
     He fancied he could feel the link. Its weight was simple and comfortable, like a handclasp.
     I like it.
     He forced himself not to think beyond the moment. He was there to play, not to preen or strut.
     Or fantasize.
     The duel in his head made a forty-five minute set seem three hours long.
     The crowd was just as appreciative as earlier. When they put down their instruments for the night, the swarm that followed Jack was as large and ardent as before. Rolf slipped through the crowd gracefully and beelined for the corner of the bar, where Sarah had remained.
     “Doing all right?” he said.
     She nodded. “Just enjoying the music. I’m glad you came back this way.”
     He smiled. “I’m glad you’re still here.”
     “Say, why a six-string bass?”
     “Well,” he said, “the extra range is nice, and Schecter makes a good one. But in my case it’s more that I started out as a guitarist. I tune the Schecter to a standard guitar tuning and play a sort of combined bass and rhythm guitar. Jack suggested it. He says it gives him a lot to work with. Besides, it fills in our sound.”
     “Do you and…Hal, you said?” He nodded. “Do you two always do what Jack wants?”
     He shrugged. “I guess. It keeps the tensions down. Besides, he’s the draw. No one comes to hear Hal and me.”
     “I have a lot of trouble with that.”
     “Hm? What part?”
     “Doing what I’m told.”
     That pricked his curiosity. He peered at her.
     Forslunds mostly tell other people what to do.
     “You never said what you do for a living,” he said.
     “I work at Albrecht’s.”
     “Doing what?”
     “Selling women’s clothes.”
     “Does it suit you?”
     “It’s fine.” Her smile twitched. “I run the department. Anyway, the Forslund Trust is the majority shareholder in the company.”
     He wondered at her offhanded consent a position in a service industry.
     Her family’s wealth would allow her to do whatever she pleases.
     “What were you thinking just now?” she said.
     “Hm? Oh, just that you must enjoy it.”
     “I do,” she said. “It’s not a big deal, but I’m good at it, and it lets me live on my own instead of at Forslund Manor. Besides, I don’t get a lot of petty little orders from people with brassy titles.”
     Without thinking, he murmured “Or other people named Forslund.”
     Her eyes flared wide.
     “What?” he said. “Did I offend you?”
     “No,” she said, and looked a little away. “It’s just…I didn’t expect you to be so sharp.”
     He tried to lighten the tone. “Never underestimate a sideman. We could be just pretending while we await our moment to strike.”
     She looked him full in the eyes, her expression utterly serious. For a moment he became afraid.
     “Sarah…”
     “It’s okay,” she said. “It’s a long story, and it would probably bore you.”
     For a moment they sat in silence. He reflected on the strangeness of the encounter.
     A Forslund in a working-class bar. A beautiful woman worth a ton of money, all alone…except for me.
     Why me?
     “Rolf?”
     He turned to find Hal standing behind him.
     “Hm?”
     “Gleason wants us out. Jack told me to get our stuff into the van,” Hal said.
     “What, Jack doesn’t plan to be involved?” Rolf said. “Has he suddenly lost the use of his hands?”
     The drummer shrugged and indicated the guitarist with a nod. At the other side of the tap room, Jack was flirting aggressively with two very attractive brunettes. Each of the girls had an arm around the other, They looked enough like one another to be sisters, and neither seemed to be trying to edge out the other.
     He's in for an interesting night.
     “Moment please, Hal.” He turned to Sarah. “Sarah, this is Onyx’s drummer Hal Fraser. Hal, this is Sarah Forslund.”
     Hal’s eyes went wide. Sarah extended a hand with perfect aplomb. Hal took it hesitantly.
     “Pleased to meet you, Miss Forslund. Apologies for interrupting your chat. Rolf, we’d better get busy. Gleason wants us out of here before midnight.”
     “Sarah,” Rolf said, “would you like to continue this conversation?” She nodded. “Then please wait here while I engage in a little manual labor. It shouldn’t take long.”
     “You’re coming back?” she said.
     “Yeah. Wasn’t that sort of implied?”
     She nodded. “Okay.”
     He slid off his stool and ambled toward the dais.
#      Rolf shoved the last of the amplifiers into the van, closed and locked the twin doors, and wiped the dust from his hands. “Good gig, as always.”
     “Number two hundred,” Hal said.
     “Well, goodnight guys. See you tomorrow night for number two-oh-one.” Rolf started back toward the Black Grape.
     Jack looked at him curiously. “You’re not going back with Hal?”
     Rolf shook his head. “I’ll beg a ride from Sarah.”
     The guitarist looked at him levelly. “You know who that is, don’t you?”
     “She told me.”
     “So…then what if she says no?”
     “Onteora Taxi is still in business, isn’t it?”
     “Geez.” Jack shook his head in disbelief. “I thought I was doing well.” He glanced behind him at the brunettes who awaited his attentions.
     “You are,” Rolf said. “Have fun.” He returned to the bar. #      Rolf found Sarah where he’d left her.
     “Sorry, I didn’t think it would take that long,” he said. He remounted his stool. “Where were we?”
     She merely looked at him. Her expression was opaque, unreadable.
     “Sarah? Everything okay?”
     “What…” She paused and visibly gathered her forces. “Rolf, what do you want out of life?”
     He gaped.
     “Rolf?”
     “Yeah, I’m all right, just…give me a minute.”
     It’s not a question I spend a lot of time on.
     “Well,” he said after a few moments, “essentially, just to live it. Quietly. Peacefully. I want to be able to meet my bills and save a little. I want to keep getting better at what I do. But I don’t have any grand ambitions. I love music, but there are plenty of opportunities to enjoy that.” He waved at the dais, now cleared of Onyx’s trappings. “I’ll enjoy it while it lasts, but it’s bound to end pretty soon. Jack’s good, but he’s not Marquee quality. When it’s over, I’ll just…live.”
     “You’ll keep playing, won’t you?”
     “Well, yeah. Probably not the bass, though. If I’m with people I love who want to hear me play, I’ll play for them. Otherwise, I’ll play for myself.”
     She locked eyes with him again. “Would you play for me?”
     He held back the reflexive assent and studied her face.
     Of course I would, but…what else? What’s she really asking about?
     “Sarah,” he said deliberately, “what do you want out of life?”
     She closed her eyes and drew an audible breath. He waited.
     “I want,” she said at last, “what you want. What you already have. A quiet life. A small life. Inconspicuous. Unimportant to anyone but those who I love and who love me.”
     “That would…satisfy you?”
     She nodded.
     “From what you’ve told me,” he said, “it seems like you already have all of that.”
     “I do,” she said. “Except for one thing.”
     He closed his eyes and strove to slow his heart.
     “Sarah,” he said, “I will play for you whenever you ask.”
     She gazed at him for a long moment. Presently she nodded, stepped off her stool, and held out a hand.
     “Come home with me,” she said. ==<O>==

     Copyright © 2024 Francis W. Porretto. All rights reserved worldwide.

Nostrum Assassination Time

     Good morning, Gentle Reader. Welcome to a bright new Monday. I’m sure it will be filled with all the things that have made Mondays beloved throughout the world. And now that we’re past that blasphemy, what do you think of the title?

     In truth, I never disliked Mondays. But that’s because I enjoyed my work. Many people can’t say that. For them, work is something to be minimized, something to get away from as early and for as long as possible. Yea verily, even today, when you can make a living from commenting at X/Twitter.

     But that’s a depressing subject, and not germane to what’s on my mind just now. So let’s have three centered asterisks and proceed thence to the main event.

* * *

     There are innumerable bits of pseudo-wisdom in circulation these days. Most of them are pitched in short, punchy phrases. That makes them easy to remember. It also makes them context-free, and therefore easy to refute.

     But in truth, a lot of those bits of pseudo-wisdom can be handy. Given the appropriate circumstances, a bland saying that encapsulates a common sentiment can be enough to pull you off the mat and get you back into the fight. Try this one: “As long as you have your health…”

     For a man who’s down on his luck, who’s suffered reverses and disappointments that have drained him of zeal, that can actually be good over-the-counter soul medicine. “Hey! You’re young and healthy. You’ve got will and skills. Stop moping and get back in there!” That can do the trick for some. But I wouldn’t prescribe it for a soldier under siege who’s low on ammo and at imminent risk of being overrun. “Hey, as long as you have your health…” -- ? Naah.

     How about this hoary old saying: “Practice makes perfect.” Does it? Suppose you’re practicing the wrong thing? A piano student has to practice his fingerings, but he has to practice the right ones, and practice them correctly. More, once he switches from the piano to a stringed instrument, those well-practiced fingerings become useless at best. Context is everything there.

     Or try this one: “As long as you’re happy.”

     Is there anything more fleeting than happiness, or more elusive? Can we even pin it down and stop its squirming long enough to say exactly what it is? Even Aristotle couldn’t do it. All he could say on the subject is that Happiness is what we seek as an end in itself and for no other reason.

     I’d bet that most people aren’t even aware of when they’re happy. When it’s upon them, that’s that. They don’t have a consciousness of happiness as a specific state of mind. Rather, they have a consciousness of unhappiness, whether from pain, or failure, or frustration, or what have you. They know that state of being as a specific one, regardless of the reason for it.

* * *

     I forget where I encountered it, but in some work of fiction the viewpoint character observes to himself that No maxim is meaningful without qualification. Nostrums require context to be judged useful or useless. Otherwise they just hang there, suggesting something that can be constructive in the right circumstances, but useless in others and destructive in still others.

     Realizations of this sort have helped me to kill an old, pernicious habit: giving advice. I’ve become too conscious of the limits of my knowledge, especially my knowledge of other people’s lives and circumstances. Others’ lives are quite as complex as my own, and sometimes far more so, and I will never, ever know them to any great depth. So these days I sympathize and shut up.

     Just an early-Monday-morning thought from an old man who’s tired of commenting on politics and has nothing fresh to say about fiction. And there it is again! Monday, the tormentor that never relents! Will we never be rid of it?

     Back later or tomorrow, I hope. After this Monday crap is over, anyway.