“Duty Sex”

     I’m feeling a bit quirky this morning – yes, I have a lot of mornings like that; the evidence is copious and easily obtained – and I’ve been particularly fascinated, in a not-entirely-wholesome way, with the arguments flowing on X / Twitter about “duty sex.”

     The core of the thing is that there are a great many married men who “aren’t getting any.” This is a real problem, though most women (and a considerable number of men) would never confront it openly. Men have a greater need for sex than do women; this is empirically beyond dispute. And it’s not about the pleasures available from sex. I’ve written about this before.

     Some pro-man voices are exhorting mated women to “give it up” even if they’re personally uninterested. Some women have derided this as a kind of enslavement. I’m uninterested in the more vitriolic exchanges. My own stance is that spouses should want to accommodate each other. He’s rarin’ to go, but you’re disinclined? Indulge him! Unless you’re in serious pain or seriously fatigued, let him enjoy you. Maybe the next time you want him to take you shopping, or out to dinner, or to visit your (ulp) parents, he’ll remember it.

     But enough of that. For giggles, enjoy the following, which I’ve been assured isn’t authentic advice from the 19th Century. It’s funny all the same.

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INSTRUCTION AND ADVICE
FOR THE
YOUNG BRIDE
on the
Conduct and Procedure of the
Intimate and Personal Relationships
of the Marriage State
for the
Greater Spiritual Sanctity of this
Blessed Sacrament and the Glory of God
by
Ruth Smythers
beloved wife of
The Reverend L.D. Smythers
Pastor of the Arcadian Methodist
Church of the Eastern Regional Conference
Published in the year
of our Lord 1894
Spiritual Guidance Press
New York City

     To the sensitive young woman who has had the benefits of proper upbringing, the wedding day is, ironically, both the happiest and most terrifying day of her life. On the positive side, there is the wedding itself, in which the bride is the central attraction in a beautiful and inspiring ceremony, symbolizing her triumph in securing a male to provide for all her needs for the rest of her life. On the negative side, there is the wedding night, during which the bride must pay the piper, so to speak, by facing for the first time the terrible experience of sex.

     At this point, dear reader, let me concede one shocking truth. Some young women actually anticipate the wedding night ordeal with curiosity and pleasure! Beware such an attitude! A selfish and sensual husband can easily take advantage of such a bride. One cardinal rule of marriage should never be forgotten: GIVE LITTLE, GIVE SELDOM, AND ABOVE ALL, GIVE GRUDGINGLY. Otherwise what could have been a proper marriage could become an orgy of sexual lust.

     On the other hand, the bride's terror need not be extreme. While sex it at best revolting and at worse rather painful, it has to be endured, and has been by women since the beginning of time, and is compensated for by the monogamous home and by the children produced through it. It is useless, in most cases, for the bride to prevail upon the groom to forego the sexual initiation. While the ideal husband would be one who would approach his bride only at her request and only for the purpose of begetting offspring, such nobility and unselfishness cannot be expected from the average man.

     Most men, if not denied, would demand sex almost every day. The wise bride will permit a maximum of two brief sexual experiences weekly during the first months of marriage. As time goes by she should make every effort to reduce this frequency.

     Feigned illness, sleepiness, and headaches are among the wife's best friends in this matter. Arguments, nagging, scolding, and bickering also prove very effective, if used in the late evening about an hour before the husband would normally commence his seduction.

     Clever wives are ever on the alert for new and better methods of denying and discouraging the amorous overtures of the husband. A good wife should expect to have reduced sexual contacts to once a week by the end of the first year of marriage and to once a month by the end of the fifth year of marriage.

     By their tenth anniversary many wives have managed to complete their child bearing and have achieved the ultimate goal of terminating all sexual contacts with the husband. By this time she can depend upon his love for the children and social pressures to hold the husband in the home. Just as she should be ever alert to keep the quantity of sex as low as possible, the wise bride will pay equal attention to limiting the kind and degree of sexual contacts. Most men are by nature rather perverted, and if given half a chance, would engage in quite a variety of the most revolting practices. These practices include among others performing the normal act in abnormal positions; mouthing the female body; and offering their own vile bodies to be mouthed in turn.

     Nudity, talking about sex, reading stories about sex, viewing photographs and drawings depicting or suggesting sex are the obnoxious habits the male is likely to acquire if permitted.

     A wise bride will make it the goal never to allow her husband to see her unclothed body, and never allow him to display his unclothed body to her. Sex, when it cannot be prevented, should be practiced only in total darkness. Many women have found it useful to have thick cotton nightgowns for themselves and pajamas for their husbands. These should be donned in separate rooms. They need not be removed durning the sex act. Thus, a minimum of flesh is exposed.

     Once the bride has donned her gown and turned off all the lights, she should lie quietly upon the bed and await her groom. When he comes groping into the room she should make no sound to guide him in her direction, lest he take this as a sign of encouragement. She should let him grope in the dark. There is always the hope that he will stumble and incur some slight injury which she can use as an excuse to deny him sexual access.

     When he finds her, the wife should lie as still as possible. Bodily motion on her part could be interpreted as sexual excitement by the optimistic husband.

     If he attempts to kiss her on the lips she should turn her head slightly so that the kiss falls harmlessly on her cheek instead. If he attempts to kiss her hand, she should make a fist. If he lifts her gown and attempts to kiss her anyplace else she should quickly pull the gown back in place, spring from the bed, and announce that nature calls her to the toilet. This will generally dampen his desire to kiss in the forbidden territory.

     If the husband attempts to seduce her with lascivious talk, the wise wife will suddenly remember some trivial non-sexual question to ask him. Once he answers she should keep the conversation going, no matter how frivolous it may seem at the time.

     Eventually, the husband will learn that if he insists on having sexual contact, he must get on with it without amorous embellishment. The wise wife will allow him to pull the gown up no farther than the waist, and only permit him to open the front of his pajamas to thus make connection.

     She will be absolutely silent or babble about her housework while his huffing and puffing away. Above all, she will lie perfectly still and never under any circumstances grunt or groan while the act is in progress. As soon as the husband has completed the act, the wise wife will start nagging him about various minor tasks she wishes him to perform on the morrow. Many men obtain a major portion of their sexual satisfaction from the peaceful exhaustion immediately after the act is over. Thus the wife must insure that there is no peace in this period for him to enjoy. Otherwise, he might be encouraged to soon try for more.

     One heartening factor for which the wife can be grateful is the fact that the husband's home, school, church, and social environment have been working together all through his life to instill in him a deep sense of guilt in regards to his sexual feelings, so that he comes to the marriage couch apologetically and filled with shame, already half cowed and subdued. The wise wife seizes upon this advantage and relentlessly pursues her goal first to limit, later to annihilate completely her husband's desire for sexual expression.

     Copyright © 1894 The Madison Institute

Men, Reading, And “Literature”

     The trends running through the world of fiction publishing are susceptible to many possible explanations. One keeps coming up in discussions on X and elsewhere: “Men have stopped reading! Have they really? Why?”

     If you’re the editor-in-chief of a publisher whose sales figures have been dropping, and your market surveys suggest that the great majority of your customers are female, those are questions that will occupy you heavily. You’d like to sell more books to men, albeit without losing your female customers. But to do so requires that you understand why men are buying your product.

     You raise the question at your quarterly editorial meeting. You do so gently, in the spirit of greater success for the company and for everyone at the table. You swing questioning eyes from associate to associate, from Sally to Jane to Marie to Hester to Rosemary to Elizabeth to Sue to Phyllis to Maureen and finally to Agatha. But none of them have the least idea.

     In sober truth, it can’t all be because publishing houses are overwhelmingly staffed by women. But the paucity of male editors doesn’t help. Women tend not to read the sort of material that men seek. Why, then, should we expect lady editors to be receptive to fiction that appeals to men?

     Yes, romance fiction is oriented toward female tastes. Publishers are sensible enough not to expect a lot of male readers for their romance offerings. But as romantic themes and motifs have seeped into other genres – most notably fantasy and science fiction – those genres have started to lose some of their traditional male readerships. That’s a part of the puzzle that deserves greater attention.

     One subject that might matter more than anyone has yet mentioned is the matter of “literary fiction.” I’m a writer and a reader. I do my best to stay aware of tastes and the patterns that run through them. And I can’t name even one recent work of “literature” that would attract a male reader.

     One further current of interest: Crime fiction and police procedurals, historically a male-favored genre, has trended toward female authorship and has lost male readers in the process. The “hard-boiled” detective story is shedding representation in the crime / mystery genre. Yet the stories are quite similar to those once told primarily by male writers.

     It’s far from simple, especially considering that the “indie” sector is gaining male readership, and has been for some time. Yet indie writers are about equally split between men and women. The distribution of genre production is about the same as in conventional publishing. What accounts for the difference?

     No, it’s not simple at all. We could discuss characters. We could discuss action. We could discuss the prevalence of male writers and male protagonists – but wait: there is no such prevalence! This chestnut will take more than a simple explanation to crack.

     My inclination is toward sensibility:

     Yes, writers have very different styles. Some are austere and distant, formalists of classical discipline who regard a dangling preposition as something up with which one should never put. Others strive for a Hemingwayesque simplicity, They write short, single-clause sentences. Those sentences contain nothing but nouns and verbs. They leave all else to the reader's imagination. Still others are Faulknerian in the luxuriance of their prose, every sentence a labyrinthine maze of baroque elaboration decorated with as many descriptive and evocative elements as one can digest before running out of breath. But this is packaging for a story and, beneath the story, supporting it with relevance and timeliness, its theme.

     A writer's sensibility is composed of the sorts of themes he likes to explore, and the angle from which he approaches them. It partakes greatly of his moral vision. Indeed, it cannot be separated from his grasp on the moral order of the universe...whether or not he believes there is one.

     Gentle Reader, have you ever encountered a writer whose command of the language is superb and precise, but whose stories proclaim ideas that you simply can't abide? Have you ever encountered a writer whose works, despite serious shortcomings of style, throb so powerfully with truth that you can't imagine ever forgoing them? If so, you're peering down the barrel of auctorial sensibility. You're staring the bullet of theme right in the face. It's the ultimate weapon in the battle for the reader's time, money, and attention.

     Everything matters, yet theme is frequently overlooked. The writer’s sense for what ultimately matters – what Tom Kratman calls “eternal verities” – is seldom discussed in this matter of female-skewed readership.

     Courage.
     Justice.
     Duty.
     Loyalty.
     Freedom!

     I sense that stories that revolve around these things are what attract the male reader most powerfully. They’ve been somewhat muted in conventionally published fiction. But they remain strong in the “indie” world.

     Food for thought.

The Great Men Of Our Time Have Their Own Fears

     Consider this one:

Something Actually Newsworthy

     Perhaps you remember this story:

     A couple of days ago, something unusual happened Across the Water: A Briton dared to defend another Briton against the threat of rape by an immigrant.
     If you aren’t familiar with the details of the event, the defender was a 14-year-old Scottish girl named Mayah Sommers. The intended victim was her 12-year-old sister. The would-be rapist was from... somewhere else, probably the Middle East or Africa. Mayah protected her sister by brandishing a large knife and a hatchet at the immigrant. Apparently that was enough to daunt him, and thank God for that.

     The U.K. being the totalitarian state it is, Mayah Sommers was immediately arrested for her courage. Britons aren’t allowed armament, regardless of the circumstances. (You can’t have a Second Amendment to the Constitution when there’s no Constitution to amend.) There was an outcry, but it proved insufficient to liberate young Mayah.

     But time marches on. (No, it’s not relevant; it’s just beautiful.) And just a couple of days ago, Mayah Sommers was vindicated:

     A man has been found guilty of making sexual remarks to a group of girls aged between 12 and 14 in Dundee before grabbing and pushing one of them to the ground.
     Ilia Belov, 22, claimed he confronted the girls after receiving abusive remarks and said he saw one of the girls with a knife in her waistband before the assault.
     His sister Nadjedzha Belova, 20, previously admitted assaulting a 13-year-old girl by seizing and pulling her hair, dragging her to the ground, and striking her on the head to her injury during the incident.
     The pair will be sentenced at Dundee Sheriff Court on 5 August.

     Very nearly a full year passed before this emerged. While it would be Pollyannaish to expect Britain’s powers that be to apologize to Mayah, or to imagine that Britons’ rights to protect themselves will receive greater respect henceforward, nevertheless this “should” clear Mayah’s name and expunge the arrest from her record.

     Yes, those are sneer quotes around “should.” Regular Gentle Readers of this dive will already know how I feel about “should.” The police who arrested Mayah Sommers are as unlikely to acknowledge their fault as Keir Starmer. To admit to an error, however slight, would undermine the Authority of the Omniscient, Omnipotent, and Omnibenevolent State and is therefore “right out.”

     I could go on in this vein, but there’s little point to it. (Yes, I know that hasn’t stopped me in the past.) Britain has been conquered; its people have been subjugated; the flood of migrants lord it over them as a triumphant army, with the open connivance of the government. Native Britons, once among the proudest peoples of the world, are less than serfs: they’re mere sources of revenue for the State.

     What Americans and other freedom lovers can do is to publicize this development:

• To make clear that those two immigrants did pose a threat to those Scottish girls;
• To proclaim that a courageous young woman has been vindicated;
• To make plain the British State’s attitude toward its people.

     Will it overturn that criminal State? I doubt it. But one must start somewhere.

Education Or Jobs?

     The never-ending contentions over American education have several parts. One of them, “higher education,” is particularly significant for this reason:

Conservatives often criticize universities for failing to prepare students for jobs.

But that's like criticizing a library for failing to function as a gym.

The purpose of a university was never vocational training. It was always the pursuit and transmission of knowledge.

— Liza Libes (@pensandpoison) June 13, 2026

     That dichotomy is the secret shame of the American educational system. But it’s also a consequence, rather than a primary that can be addressed in isolation.

* * *

     The history of compulsory education in America is worthy of more attention than it gets from the typical adult. Time was – and I’m not talking about the Pleistocene Era here, but the mid-19th Century – a “grammar school” education was all that was required by law. Moreover, a student didn’t need to traverse eight grades to escape the school’s clutches. What he needed was his teacher’s endorsement of his ability to function as an adult. As the greater part of the population was engaged in agriculture or other manual labor, that didn’t demand much.

     But as John Gall told us in his classic Systemantics, every system embeds a growth dynamic. Grow or stagnate and die is the rule. “Education” proved to be no exception. Once teaching became a recognized occupation, schools ceased to be regarded as a local convenience for imparting literacy and numeracy. They fell into the hands of careerists eager to see their domain enlarge.

     That process was contemporaneous with the rise of industrial America: the transformation of our previous, family-centered agriculture-heavy economy into an urban one heavy with employers and employees. Over time, parents surrendered their part in the education of their children to the schools, while the schools came ever more completely under political authority. “High schools” were born, as were teachers’ colleges. Teaching specialties took a bit longer to emerge, but shortly after the turn of the 20th Century we no longer spoke of “teachers” as an undifferentiated mass.

     But as the system expanded, it also moved away from its previous mandate: i.e., to teach the basic skills required of an adult citizen and leave all else to the home environment. Systems do that sort of thing. Among other diversions of educational effort, we began to see “practical” courses and the “vocational” school: things previously neither required nor requested by the parents of minor children. Prior to the Civil War, the idea of classes in “Home Economics” or “Shop” never occurred to an American parent. That was what Mom and Dad were for.

     With the rise of large enterprises and the need for management came a need for “white collar” employees: persons removed from manual labor who commanded informational skills. (The occupational designation “white collar” apparently originated with writer Upton Sinclair in 1911.) By then, the fundamental skills taught by the “grammar school” had been expanded by the “high school” to include more extensive education in literature, mathematics beyond arithmetic, history and geography, and rudimentary knowledge of the sciences.

     For a while, those two segments of schooling maintained themselves and their putative duties stably and successfully. But change was coming. World wars, conscription, industrialism, unionism, state encroachments on previously local prerogatives and, eventually, federal encroachments on state prerogatives were soon to come upon the United States. All of those trends promoted giantism, the disease that anonymizes decision makers and insulates them against the choices and opinions of the common man. In unionism, teachers found a route toward increased respect and prosperity. State governments were slowly compelled to mandate union membership for teachers employed in government-run schools.

     The “educational system” expanded enormously. Property taxes intended to pay for the government-run schools swelled to such an extent that only a small minority of families could afford a private or religious school for their children. Alternatives to the government-run school system dwindled. With the dwindling of competition and the overweening authority of “departments of education” came the consequence one must always expect from a government monopoly: sharp declines in educational quality and in responsiveness to the parents of school-age children.

     There was one path left to follow.

* * *

     For parents and children who wanted a better and fuller education than was available from the government-run schools, the sole recourse was to “higher education.” That, until relatively recently, remained outside government control. And indeed, a student admitted to a college or university did still have opportunities to learn much to which he hadn’t yet been exposed. But after World War II, the returning GIs were mainly concerned with making a living. Most had had their twelve years of government schooling. They looked upon the American economy, now dominated by corporations, and sought the kind of education that would ready them for corporate employment.

     Government loan and grant programs offered the GI the possibility of free college education. They took it in large numbers. Colleges and universities sprang up like toadstools in response. And to an increasing degree, the education they provided leaned toward readiness for employment. The older goal of a college education, acquainting the student with “the best that has been thought and said,” slowly receded from the priorities of everyone involved.

     Now that governments provide by far the greater portion of funding for “higher education,” those institutions prioritize what governments want. There are still “liberal and humane arts” colleges, but in comparison to the larger number, they’re fewer than ever before. Above all, governments want money. Therefore, they want the “educational system” to produce workers, ready to earn taxable incomes. With the quality of “primary” and “secondary” education having fallen so far that even Ivy League colleges offer remedial reading and high-school mathematics courses, preparation for employment, especially in “white collar” positions, has become the province of “higher education.”

     Most of the above has come upon us so gradually as to be invisible. That’s how social and institutional transformations occur. And this one has conquered education in the United States so completely that any possibility of undoing it – returning early schooling to its original mission and “higher education” to the mission of enrichment it once pursued – is beyond my power of imagination.

Money Fights

     If you’re around my age, and have had a lifelong addiction to the printed word, you might remember the halcyon days of the “advice columnists.” Mostly, if memory serves, they advised individuals with individual concerns. The quality of the advice was irregular, but in the Fifties and Sixties the subjects on which people sought their counsel were a concentrated few. (No: they didn’t advise their correspondents on which toothpaste would renew their love lives. They left that to the Madison Avenue crowd.)

     One of the most popular subjects was how married couples should manage their money. Occasionally, amid the scattered practical recommendations, some helpful columnist would recommend a regularly scheduled “money fight.” It was intended to be a good-humored, largely facetious exchange between him and her over their respective spending habits. Perhaps it worked, for some. But it had risks that could emerge unexpectedly, with consequent destruction. One of the worst was a segue from spending to earning.

     Remember, Gentle Reader: those were the days of the single-income household. In such a household, only one member earned; therefore only one member could be attacked for not earning enough. Need I detail just how much marital carnage could result?

     Well, for better or worse (and for richer or poorer), those days are behind us. Most families are two-income households today. But fighting over who earns how much and what he could do to increase it is still massively destructive. I’ve seen the consequences up close. It should be avoided for the sake of… well, a lot of things.

     And from that we turn to money fights in the news!

     The big one, of course, which could touch every White American alive today, is the fight over “reparations.” Let me be absolutely candid here:

Not one Negro in these United States,
No matter the identities of his forebears,
Deserves one cent from anyone
Because of “slavery” or on any other grounds.

     The black grifters screeching for “reparations” are morally no better than pickpockets. They deserve to be ridiculed, then ignored. The same treatment should be awarded to any White man who claims they have a case.

     I could go into detail here, but it’s not necessary. What is necessary is some thought about what those black grifters hope to accomplish. I’m fairly sure it isn’t a huge cash windfall from the federal treasury.

     They’re getting a lot of publicity from the legacy media. Publicity can be converted into cash, in specific cases. But that cash is far more likely to come from a distributed set of private pockets. Beyond immediate bundles of cash, there are opportunities, with the help of compliant media, to become very well known, and thus to obtain entry to circles that might otherwise not have them. Such circles are themselves entry points to gainful things. And of course, political prospects often flow from notoriety. The machinations deserve to be watched.

     Of less immediate but greater ultimate impact is the outpouring of resentment and disparagement aimed at Elon Musk. Yes, in purely paper terms, Musk has attained trillionaire status. Those who think he can open a checkbook or a bank’s website and gaze upon a cash balance of $1,000,000,000,000 are of course deluded. Given the way the equities markets work, it wouldn’t be possible for him to convert his stock and other paper possessions into that amount of cash no matter how hard he might try.

     That having been said, Elon Musk controls a lot of capital. He can put that capital to many uses, just as he’s done to date. What will matter to the rest of us non-trillionaires is what uses he chooses to address. And the Left, which hates private wealth, is determined to take Musk’s choices, and his capital, away from him. Recent emissions from the detestable Elizabeth Warren and the odious Bernie Sanders are clear indicators.

     Don’t think it can’t happen. There’s a huge wave of envy-powered politics in motion. The “blue” states’ governments, ever hungry for more revenue, are hatching schemes that would catch Musk in their jaws. I wrote about one such scheme just yesterday. Moreover, there’s no guarantee that some future federal administration with a solid backing in Congress won’t take aim at Musk’s fortune, on the grounds of “equity” and “fairness.”

     Remain alert to the patterns. Government always grows until it’s destroyed by a revolution or an internal collapse. As it grows, it consumes ever more of our substance. Leftist “intellectuals” will provide the rationales for advancing taxation and confiscation. Here’s one that should not be forgotten. It got respectable attention from a significant number of Congressvermin.

     Envy is among the strongest political motivators. Expect the screws on private accumulations of wealth to be tightened as the years pass. The defenders of property rights have been lax for quite a while. It’s time to awaken and remobilize them – and ourselves.

Tax Shackles

     I strained to come up with a clever neologism for what I’m about to address, but I failed. “Taxicles?” No, sounds too much like “popsicles.” “Shtaxles?” No, that’s too ethnic; someone would probably suggest that it be served with wiener schnitzel. Anyway, the subject is one of some gravity, so the above title will just have to do.

     If you have twenty minutes, the following video is worth your time and attention:

     Five populous states are trying to fetter their residents – give them a tax disincentive to move out. Those “exit tax” provisions won’t retard all emigration, of course, but they will cause a significant fractions of Californians, New Yorkers, et cetera to cast about for ways of averting the planned amputations of their net worth. There might be some dodges. There’s also the possibility that the federal courts will strike those exit taxes as unConstitutional on the ex post facto provision of Article I, Section 10. But for the moment, it’s a trend in motion, and likely to spread.

     It sets up an interesting tension. You want to move your income away from California’s high-income tax? Well, then the Golden State will get you on the way out. If you insist on not paying the exit tax, then California gets to keep taxing you for years more… possibly including your net worth, which the Giermeisters in Sacramento have already fixed their sights on. But which of those decisions would be favored by the California legislature? The exit tax would yield large prompt revenue, but the income tax and (contemplated) net-worth taxes would yield more over a protracted interval. And once a resident has fled, he’s gone for good.

     The voracity of governments always grows over time. That’s been demonstrated so many times that it no longer requires substantiation. However, I will remind my Gentle Readers of the debates over the proposed Sixteenth Amendment:

     When the Sixteenth Amendment was being debated on the floor of the Senate, one of its opponents rose to ask the body what it could say to reassure the American public that this tax would not rise to seize some unconscionable fraction of their earnings -- perhaps as much as ten percent! A pro-income-tax senator rose and replied that the country need never fear such a development: "The people would never allow it!"

     The American Revolution was a tax revolt, as much as an assertion of independence and the right to self-governance. Americans have been subjected to a mind-boggling array of tax measures since then, most of them falling at the state and federal levels. (If you live in an incorporated municipality, keep a hand on your wallet.) There appears to be no event free of taxation… not even death. And now, the greediest of America’s state governments, aware that their tax policies are causing their states to lose their most taxable residents to lower-tax states, are determined to chain us down so they can mulct us in perpetuity.

     Food for thought – if it’s not fuel for an actual revolution.

“Communities”

     BREAKING NEWS! It has come to my attention, which, yes, has been slipping a bit, that a large percentage of the Gentle Readers of Liberty’s Torch are stressed. It’s perfectly understandable, what with conditions these days. High prices, racial and ethnic strife, government surveillance, Gerrit Cole’s uneven mound performances… I must admit that I’ve been feeling a touch stressed myself.

     But this is America, where there’s a supply for every demand. Yes, friends, here you can find relief for… well, for some of your troubles, at least. For the rest, there’s always alcohol. Anyway, if you feel that your ability to cope is slipping, take a minute to watch this video, and enjoy an admittedly ephemeral moment of relaxation:

     There, wasn’t that pleasant? Now, on to the topic of the day.

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     We hear about various communities rather frequently these days. The black community. The homosexual community. The transgender community. The community of brain-damaged Russo-Turkic welders. Communities, it seems, are everywhere.

     Why don’t I see them? Many voices prattle about these communities, yet all I can see are individuals. The media harp on them, especially after some distressing event. You know, like the senseless murder of a White teenager by a black thug, or a transgender somebody shooting up a tavern.

     With the conviction and sentencing of Karmelo Anthony, we got a lot of pontificating about the “reaction of the black community.” Tell us, oh omniscient media pundits, where is The Black Community headquartered? Did you go there and interview a spokesblack? Or did the organization issue a formal press release to be aired on the six o’clock news?

     Nope. Just individuals. Some are horrified that “one of ours” did such a heinous thing and got caught, while others jump up and down screaming that a black kid who killed a White boy shouldn’t have to do time for it. (A lot of time, I hope, but that’s a subject for another tirade.)

     When a pedophile rapes a child of the same sex, the media immediately leap to proclaim that the “gay community” – they’re homosexuals, but that word has some negative implications, so they’ve adopted “gay” as a synonym in hope of averting mention of those implications – is utterly opposed to such practices and shouldn’t be tarred with them. Once again, I’m unable to find The Gay Community in the Yellow Pages. Nor does Directory Assistance have a number at which they can be reached. Puzzling.

     Once again, just individuals. Some homosexuals live quietly and keep their business to themselves; others parade around in all manner of dress (and undress), wailing about how “invisible” they are. We hear a lot about their “community,” but when I raise my gaze to the passing scene, all I see are individuals.

     What are these communities of which the press so confidently speaks? Are they occupational groupings? Social associations? Voting blocs? Are there subjects on which these communities have official positions? Do they all support the same charities, or the same volleyball teams? Answer comes there none.

     Media promotion of such communities is intended to make them seem larger and more unified than they really are. When some pundit proclaims that the Z Community is outraged over some unpleasant event, it’s an attempt to efface the divergences and divisions among Zs. This is especially important when an issue routinely associated with Zs is in the news, and an election is looming. It’s the ink-on-newsprint version of whipping the vote.

     Bless their shriveled little hearts! As insubstantial as they are, such communities are staples for promulgation and prognostication. The statements of a vocal few are presented to us as the voice of their community. We accept it without question… unless we’re members of the relevant group and know better. Then we’re told to sit down and shut up. For the greater good of the community, of course.

     It’s amusing and tiring, but it never seems to end.

     For myself, I have no community. Not even the neighborhood in which I’ve lived for 46 years. No one speaks for me but me. I’d venture to guess that other software engineers, writers of fiction and nonfiction, Americans of Irish and Italian descent, and persons who share my Zip code would say the same. But when some “issue” that involves one of those groups rises to public attention, I won’t be surprised when the regional media proclaim what my position must be, on the grounds of affiliation.

     Do you belong to any notional communities, Gentle Reader? Make sure you know how to cancel your membership. It might prove to be important. Especially if you’re behind on your dues.

Did It Happen That Way?

     The jury has returned its verdict in the case of Austin Metcalf and Karmelo Anthony: Anthony has been pronounced guilty of first-degree murder. The crowd of black protesters outside the courtroom, who have been stridently vocal that Anthony is “innocent,” was upset.

     I stopped myself from prefacing the previous sentence with “Needless to say.” Yet it was predictable that people protesting on the defendant’s behalf, would be unhappy that he’s likely to be imprisoned for the rest of his life. A few of them had some “interesting” things to say: e.g., that Anthony should have killed Metcalf’s twin brother as well.

     Austin Metcalf’s family must be wary henceforward. Threats have come at them from several directions. This is the way of things in these United States in the Twenty-First Century. Even peripheral contact with a case of interracial violence makes your future uncertain.

     Yet the entire incident was video-recorded, from several angles. There’s no dispute that Anthony pulled a knife and killed Metcalf. Even several of the witnesses for the defense testified that Metcalf had not attacked Anthony – that Anthony was not defending himself from a credible threat to life or limb. Those demanding that Anthony be freed cannot argue away the facts of the case.

     Their beef, of course, is that Metcalf was White and Anthony is black.

     There were no blacks on the jury that convicted Anthony. Those who were called to the voir dire all admitted freely that they would have trouble “putting a brother in jail.” The prosecution challenged them off for sufficient cause. As the resulting jury was all-White, the blacks incensed about the verdict are screaming “racism.”

     It’s unnecessary for me to comment on that aspect of the case. We’ve seen it before. But it is necessary to ponder something commentator Matt Walsh observed:

     Now go back and consider every supposed racist atrocity from decades or centuries ago. Every “innocent” minority wrongfully persecuted by racist whites. I’m not saying that all of those stories aren’t true. I’m saying that you can’t assume that they are true. If they can lie about the stuff we all witnessed with our own eyes, imagine what they can do with the things none of us witnessed.

     Enough such incidents were reported by a single source to make them disputable. The sources themselves were sometimes of dubious credibility.

     The justice of a verdict is often disputed. In these days of ubiquitous security cameras and cellphones that can video-record, the facts of a case are less disputable than ever before. But those conditions have only obtained for about three decades. Everything before that is a matter of eyewitness testimony and forensic evidence.

     And recent interracial incidents, many of them meticulously filmed, have undermined the credibility of the record.

     When we speak of things that happened long ago, credibility is less important than credulity. People are inclined to believe accounts that accord with their beliefs and convictions. Written records are often disputed on the grounds that the writer “had an agenda.” The most thoroughly reported and recorded event in all of history, the Passion and Resurrection of Christ, is frequently waved aside on that basis, even though the chroniclers were almost all put to death for maintaining it.

     Today, credulity is less important than an activist agenda. The activists vocal about the Anthony verdict have such an agenda. What they’ll do, now that that agenda has been thwarted, remains to be seen. Apparently there was some violence immediately outside the courtroom when the verdict was announced.

     Now, with a number of thoughtful people openly inquiring whether we can trust the historical records of “minority persecution,” the matter will be further inflamed. Yet there is justification for re-examining those accounts, to the extent possible. The record is almost purely one of White persecution of blacks. But the purity of the record itself provides grounds for dispute. Was it really that way in every case? Is there no possibility that in some cases the “victim” was objectively guilty of a heinous crime? Or were the recorders themselves pushing a particular viewpoint on the rest of us?

     Unpleasant, distasteful food for thought. In our current climate, it will be spoken of more openly than ever before. I fear to imagine the consequences.

“Settling”

     Consider the following observation:

Sexual double standards make it so that the woman in a marriage is more often settling for a man less attractive than those she dated and wondering if she could have done better.

This actually hurts men, but they never stop to think of the harm they cause themselves.

— Jessica Pin (@jess_ann_pin) June 8, 2026

     “Settling.” A word with ragged edges, no? Don’t we “settle” about something, every day of our lives? When lunchtime rolls around, I “settle” for whatever’s in the house, rather than demanding Lobster Newburgh. When I buy this, that, or the other thing, I “settle” for what my means will support, rather than insisting on the best-of-breed. And when I chose a wife, I, a relatively ordinary man, “settled” for a relatively ordinary woman – don’t look at me like that; the C.S.O. would agree – rather than holding out for Reese Witherspoon or Christina Hendricks.

     Settling is simply what we do when our opportunities are limited and don’t include our fantasy aspirations. That applies to the great majority of our decisions, regardless of the subject matter. It certainly applies to our mating decisions.

     Settling is not, in and of itself, any kind of issue. No, my lunch will not be Lobster Newburgh. No, my next car will not be a Mercedes Maybach or a Bentley Continental GT. No, the C.S.O. is not Reese Witherspoon or Christina Hendricks. But I chose freely from among the possibilities that were open specifically to me. No one forced any of my choices upon me. Therefore I will settle, accept the consequences, and learn to be happy with them.

     The issue is realism.

     Economists – real economists, not Marxists or meliorists – are relentless about the concept of scarcity. There’s a small supply of Lobster Newburgh. There’s a small supply of Mercedes Maybachs and Bentley Continental GTs. There’s definitely a small supply of supremely beautiful women – and it’s even smaller if you insist on a woman with a sweet and affectionate character. That will never change; therefore, the prices of those things will never descend to the level of the peanut butter and jelly sandwich, the used Ford Pinto, or the woman an ordinary man is likely to marry.

     The tragedy is not in the settling. The tragedy is in the recrimination and the failure to adjust.

     Consider Jessica Pin’s tweet above. Do you imagine that there are many women who never fantasize about the Adonis who had no time for her? Do you imagine that there are many men who never dream of the prom queen they yearned for but who wouldn’t spare them a glance? Most of us “revisit” our past choices and the domain in which we made them, at least on occasion. Where some of us fail is in the acceptance of our circumstances.

     Time was, it was deemed a matter of course that you would learn to love your spouse. Of course, in that era, many marriages were arranged by the parents of the spouses-to-be. Families and the reputations of families were a much greater part of matchmaking. Parents were conscious of their responsibility for guiding their children into a mature understanding of reality, its constraints, and our individual limitations.

     Perhaps mature realism has become rare, now that such arrangements are no longer the rule.

     At any rate, if we must fantasize about “how it could have been,” keeping those fantasies in the box labeled as such is paramount. Alternatively, we could purchase and read absurd romance novels that will temporarily transport us to an alternate universe where each of us can have his dream lover despite being a relatively ordinary person. But that’s a subject for another time. For now, have a little music:

The Food Chain

     [I don’t remember when I first posted this piece. It first appeared at Eternity Road, beloved in memory. It’s more appropriate for Corpus Christi Sunday than anything else I could say.
     All glory to the God who feeds His people! – FWP]

---

     We who believe often speak of the need to "grow in faith." I've never been certain exactly what that means. But as time has passed, my own faith has become ever more important to me: not as a comfort against the certainty of bodily death, and not as some sort of confirmation of my own superiority, but rather as a unifying set of premises that allow the universe, and human life within it, to make sense.

     This is critical for one overriding reason: the incoherence of every other religion Man has ever practiced with the observable laws of Nature in action around us.

     Today being Corpus Christi Sunday -- a holy day celebrated much more enthusiastically and demonstrably in Latin countries than in us of the AngloSphere -- allow me to reprise an old favorite.

* * *

     The most fundamental of all relations among living things is the food relation. For any two species, which one can eat the other, either in theory or in practice, determines just about everything else about their interactions.

     This might seem a little fuzzy in certain cases. Beyond question, a dog can kill and eat a man. The same is true for the Portuguese Man O' War. But how often does it happen? Yet there are millions of people in various parts of the world for whom dog or jellyfish is a regular part of their diets. (You can stop shuddering now.) In the usual case, Man is considered the eater and these other species the eaten.

     Thus, a brief exploration of the food chain.

     Man has been an eater for a lot longer than he's been a builder of civilizations. His career as a hunter has established him as the world champion at that contest. His development of systematic agriculture demonstrated that his hegemony extends equally well to the plant kingdom. By all measures, he's at the pinnacle of the food chain. He eats whatever he wishes, and only in the rarest of cases does any other species eat him.

     The centrality of food relations to Earth's biosystem is so obvious that we're all but unaware of it. Two of the more significant but less frequently pondered manifestations of the thing can be found in our nightmares and our rites of worship and propitiation.

     Almost as soon as men began to compose tales for one another's entertainment, they invented creatures with power to hunt, kill, and eat human beings. Vampires, ghouls, and werewolves are items of fantasy, traditional terrors that have been invoked in horror tales for many centuries. Yet what is it that makes them so terrifying? Not that they can kill men, for far lesser creatures can do that, if they get the breaks. No, their ability to frighten comes from their greater-than-human hunting ability, and their view of men as food.

     There's nothing that terrifies like the prospect of being eaten. Men have gone into battle against other men under conditions that virtually guaranteed their deaths, yet they've often gone willingly, sometimes even eagerly. They still do. But no man can face the prospect of becoming an entree for a greater creature without quaking in fear.

     Mess with a man's assumptions about the food chain and you upend his whole concept of himself as a man.

     On the other side, there are human practices with relation to their concepts of divinity. Divinities -- gods -- are by definition superior to men. Yet their participation in the life of Man is not categorically predatory, even in those creeds which place evil gods on an equal par with good ones, and see the history of the world as a struggle between equally matched forces of light and darkness in which humans are less than pawns. In our attempts to win the favor of the gods, and on occasion to avert their wrath, men have traditionally offered sacrifices to them. Those sacrifices have almost always been food.

     Contemplate the nature of ritual sacrifice for a moment. What's offered to the god being propitiated is something valuable to men: creatures men had to hunt or cultivate, whose substance could nourish and sustain human life. Yet it is deliberately removed from the human economy, usually by burning, in the attempt to convey to the god the sense that we acknowledge his superiority to us. By denying themselves the consumption of the offered food and instead offering it to the god, the sacrificers make plain that they submit themselves to him. Metaphorically, the sacrificed items are substitutes for human bodies: pleadings that the shamans and their congregants not be eaten.

     The Biblical story of God's command to Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, and Abraham's readiness to obey, is terrifying and exalting for that reason. On the one hand, the God of the Old Testament was not perceived even by His Chosen People, of whom Abraham was the progenitor, as being so intrinsically kindly disposed toward Man that He would never, ever demand such a sacrifice. Moreover, His power was such that there was no question that He could enforce His will in such a matter, and much worse besides. On the other hand, God intervened at the last instant to prevent the sacrifice, having established to His satisfaction that Abraham submitted entirely to His will. Thus, the pact between God and the children of Abraham -- the Jewish people -- was sealed as one of guidance and beneficence from above in exchange for worship and obedience from below. God did not intend to eat His people.

***

     Clearly, the food relation is a superiority / inferiority relation. He who eats is the stronger, who can have his will in all things. He who is eaten is the weaker, who must prostrate himself before the other in the hope of benevolence or mercy.

     Men, the highest of the creatures of this world, do not eat one another, except in the most extraordinary circumstances. Those micro-societies that have practiced cannibalism have extinguished themselves thereby -- there are some very nasty diseases, with fatality rates approaching 100%, that arise from cannibalism -- or have been humbled and re-educated by more civilized, more insightful peoples. We have attained enough insight into moral matters, and most particularly into the fundamental equality of rights all men should enjoy, to regard cannibalism with appropriate horror.

     But we still tell, and shudder over, stories of powerful, inhuman creatures that hunger for human flesh and blood. Vampire legends make up a healthy fraction of our fantastic literature. When we figure in the werewolf, the ghoul, and the occasional extraterrestrial who regards us as haute cuisine, we've covered the overwhelming majority of our scare stories. That's how fundamental the food relation is to our view of our place in the natural world.

     There aren't many religious sects in the modern world that still practice the old form of ritual sacrifice, in which a food item -- usually an animal -- is offered up to a god in hopes of winning his favor or pardon. The devotees of Santeria do it, now and then, as do the practitioners of voudoun. But these are meager survivals of old, animistic-pagan creeds. Their adherents are few and will probably never be many.

     However, a form of sacrifice still characterizes the most important religious rite in the world. Its devotees number in the billions. They partake of this sacrifice at every opportunity; to them, it is the highest a living man can rise in communion with God. And most curiously of all, it is a bidirectional sacrifice, the only such ever celebrated in all the eons of Man.

     I speak, of course, of the Miracle of Transubstantiation in the Christian Eucharist.

     In the days of Christ, the ritual sacrifice of food animals at the Temple in Jerusalem was still the preeminent religious rite in the classical world. The Hebrews regarded those sacrifices as God's due for extending His protection over them as His Chosen People. Indeed, according to the Book of Exodus, such sacrifices were ordained by God Himself, as He gave the Ten Commandments to Moses. The Jews of that time considered them the only truly complete act of religious devotion.

     Christ upended their world by inverting the food chain. No more would they give up their sustenance in propitiation of the divine will. Henceforward, it would be the other way around: the Son of God would be the Sacrifice, and His people would partake.

     From the Gospel According To John:

     "I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh."
     The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, "How can this man give us his flesh to eat?" So Jesus said to them, "Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever." [John 6:48-58]

     The rite of the Eucharist, in commemoration of the Last Supper, offers bread and wine to God and prays that they might be found acceptable. In response to this humble offering, and in fulfillment of Christ's promise, through the celebrant-priest He works the Transubstantiation, which allows the form of the bread and wine to remain as they are, but converts their substance into the body and blood of Christ. At each Mass, a traditional sacrifice of food to God is met with a renewal of the offering of Christ's body and blood to the world, for the remission of sin and as a perpetual grant of His grace to all who will accept it.

     No other creed has anything to compare with the Eucharist. Nor could any conceivable rite, however elaborately crusted with mystery or symbolism, approach the stunning power of God Himself, in the Person of His Son, offering Himself as food to lowly Man.

     He could eat us all. Instead He offers Himself as food, that we may remember His Sacrifice for us, and draw as close to Him as mortal creatures can get while still in this world.

     Today is the Sunday ordained for the celebration of the Body and Blood of Christ, the Sacrifice beyond all others, that no offering by mortal men could ever equal. The proof that the food chain is not God's manacle about our hands. The unanswerable refutation of those who insist that a malevolent power bestrides the universe. The ironclad guarantee that we are not to be eaten, but to be fed.

* * *

     And may God bless and keep you all.

An Intellectual's Duty

     [This piece first appeared at Eternity Road on March 12, 2008. -- FWP]

---

     There aren't many persons who, if asked whether significantly above-average intelligence could ever be a liability rather than an asset, would answer in the affirmative. That's because there aren't many persons with significantly above-average intelligence.

     Yes, you read that right. You have to be pretty smart to understand why smarts aren't a good fit for every context and every occupation. One of Jack L. Chalker's Flux and Anchor books presents a penetrating example. In it, a woman who has earned a large boon from a powerful wizard asks him to use his power to make her permanently happy and carefree. The wizard plies a spell that strips her of her memory, halves her intelligence, and turns her into an uncritical, limitlessly willing sexual plaything -- the simplest conceivable satisfaction of her request.

     True, most of us wouldn't aspire to that position. But some would, and dare anyone say (from a purely secular perspective) that to choose such a life would be wrong? Happiness and peace of mind are fleeting things; all but a few truly fortunate persons possess them only in snatches. Aldous Huxley is reported to have been greatly troubled by the number of persons who viewed his Brave New World, in which the overwhelmingly greater part of the population of the world was engineered for subnormal intelligence and high susceptibility to a happiness-inducing drug, as a depiction of a true Utopia.

     Still, there's that "Better Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied" business. Most persons of high intelligence wouldn't sacrifice it for anything, not even a greatly prolonged, blissfully happy life. In part, it's because high intelligence enables the owner to imagine and pursue fulfillments inaccessible to the less gifted. In even larger part, it's because the esteem generally attached to intellectual power greatly stokes one's self-regard.

     High intelligence is a tool that can work many wonders. We owe much of our comfort and security to the insights of a few dozen geniuses. But that doesn't make a genius suitable for a position only a dullard can fit.

---

     Just this morning, your Curmudgeon stumbled upon the following at co-conspirator Travis Corcoran's site:

NZC: Didn’t Spitzer want to be president someday? So, that’s totally in the toilet.

     TJIC: One American disqualified for the office…only 299,999,999 more to go!

     NZC: And you’re allowed to say that, because you’re leading from the front - you’ve totally disqualified yourself a dozen times over.

     TJIC: Yeah, that whole “dig up the corpse of FDR, and then !@#% in his skull” blogging topic would totally come back to bite me in the primaries.

     NZC: Indeed!

     TJIC: …unless I ran as a Libertarian…

     It was good for a chuckle, but your Curmudgeon sincerely hopes that Travis is aware that his high intelligence disqualifies him from any and all public offices.

     What's that you say? You want very intelligent people in government? You, sir, are a hazard to the body politic. What on Earth are you doing at Eternity Road? Don't you know what sort of mischief smart people get up to when entrusted with power? Didn't we get enough of a demonstration from the Clintons? Do you really want a reprise of that disaster?

     No. No smart people in office. Please! Smart people are too good at reinterpreting their marching orders and rationalizing their way around moral or Constitutional constraints on their authority. If any of the Founding Fathers was a genius, Thomas Jefferson was -- yet he, most libertarian of them all, violated the Constitution's constraints on federal power several times in his first term of office. He rationalized his transgressions as "necessary" and "practical." So highly did Congress, and the people generally, think of him that he always carried the day.

     High intelligence is almost always accompanied by a high opinion of oneself. He who thinks that well of himself is all too easily led to see himself as above the rules that bind others. If you were looking for a capsule summary of Eliot Spitzer's downfall, you have it now.

     What Americans should seek in their public officials is men who can understand the duties and limitations of their offices, and will cleave to them unswervingly. This demands a routinier, an "organization man," a dullard. It's not the right billet for a genius. Very bright people chafe at taking orders, even from brighter, more knowledgeable people; they're always looking for an angle, a way to finesse their way out of doing what they've been told.

     The duties of an elected official are spelled out in either the Constitution of the United States, or some similar charter subordinate to it. The powers that attach to whatever government his office pertains to are spelled out in a similar fashion, albeit not always with the degree of specificity a libertarian-conservative would like. If those rules and constraints are seriously meant, then we don't want our officeholders looking for ways to chisel around the edges. We want good, solid dullards, schooled from the Bible and the handle of a broom, who'll do as they're told, without the slightest trace of creativity.

     We don't often get such men, these days.

---

     The word "intellectual" has acquired an unsavory connotation these past few decades. It deserves that connotation rather more than not. Intellectuals in the corridors of power, rich in self-regard and flushed with ambition to leave their footprints upon history, have wreaked great harm upon American liberty and our Constitutional order. But we were foolish enough to admit them, so the blame lies at least as much on us.

     Restoring the original Constitutional compact has proved dauntingly difficult. Once government opens niches for men of intellect, those niches prove damnably difficult to close. There's always an argument for genius in the power seat, usually that it's necessary if we're ever to undo the damage wrought by prior geniuses. Even when it's tragically wrong, it can be too seductive to resist.

     But an intellectual's duty is to resist. If the word "duty" has an objective meaning, a man of genius should feel a duty to move toward those fields where his gifts will bring good to the world, rather than to a post where others will have to pay for his mistakes. For even geniuses make mistakes. Indeed, they make more of them, and more rapidly, than persons of average attainments.

     Sadly, in our current milieu, wherein the achievements of an Edison or a Tesla are reckoned as grubby commerce while "high office" earns the highest of plaudits, too many bright fellows are drawn toward the profession of politics. But power doesn't merely corrupt; it attracts the already corrupt and corruptible. Thus, it's in the nature of political power that those with the weakest morals will be the most successful.

     This is not the time or place for the exploration of so perverse a situation; among other things, your Curmudgeon hasn't yet had enough to drink. Suffice it to say that we've created incentives that divert high intelligence away from its proper applications -- science, commerce, and philosophy -- and into the quest for power over others. Those incentives are self-reinforcing; they can only be unmade by the creation of even stronger counter-incentives, at whose nature we cannot yet guess. For the present, due to the excessive adulation of the hoi polloi for the conspicuously gifted, we're doomed to be ruled by persons of low morality protected by high intellect. It's the worst situation we could have contrived for ourselves.

     To young Americans seeking a suitable course in life:

• If you're smart, go into business.
• If you're very smart, go into the sciences.
• If you're not smart, but were properly raised and can follow clear, simple directions, there may be a spot for you in government.
• If you're a Certified Galactic Intellect...how about a nice game of chess?

---

     [Having reread and reflected on the above -- hey, what do you do at 4:00 AM when the dogs won't let you sleep? -- it occurs to me that a review of our recent, supposedly smart chief executives is in order:

• Woodrow Wilson: World War I, huge expansion of the federal government, the income tax, the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Amendments.
• Franklin D. Roosevelt: The "Brain Trust," a thirteen-year economic contraction, World War II, the destruction of the Constitution's restraints on the federal government.
• John F. Kennedy: The Bay of Pigs, hot and cold running prostitutes, and the elevation of the detestable, wholly amoral Kennedy family to a kind of American aristocracy.
• Bill Clinton: Semen-stained dresses and bombed-out aspirin factories in Sudan.
• Barack Hussein Obama: Please!

     Any questions?]

Berserk, Or Merely Bookless?

     [The following first appeared at Eternity Road on February 25, 2008 – FWP.]

---

     Your Curmudgeon strongly disapproves of psychologizing one's political or ideological adversary. For those unfamiliar with the term, "psychologizing" is the attribution of motives, character defects, or mental or emotional aberrations to one's adversary as the "real reasons" for his positions, instead of arguing against them on objective grounds. Persons who do such things are all too obviously seriously disturbed, dangerous to themselves and others, no doubt damaged by their toilet training traumas or failure to resolve their Oedipal conflicts before attaining puberty.

     Hm. Well, anyway, by way of Cassy Fiano at Wizbang comes this example of the practice from a conservative, aimed (of course) at liberals:

     Just when liberals thought it was safe to start identifying themselves as such, an acclaimed, veteran psychiatrist is making the case that the ideology motivating them is actually a mental disorder.

     "Based on strikingly irrational beliefs and emotions, modern liberals relentlessly undermine the most important principles on which our freedoms were founded," says Dr. Lyle Rossiter, author of the new book, "The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness." "Like spoiled, angry children, they rebel against the normal responsibilities of adulthood and demand that a parental government meet their needs from cradle to grave."...

     Dr. Rossiter says the liberal agenda preys on weakness and feelings of inferiority in the population by:

• creating and reinforcing perceptions of victimization;
• satisfying infantile claims to entitlement, indulgence and compensation;
• augmenting primitive feelings of envy;
• rejecting the sovereignty of the individual, subordinating him to the will of the government.

     "The roots of liberalism - and its associated madness - can be clearly identified by understanding how children develop from infancy to adulthood and how distorted development produces the irrational beliefs of the liberal mind," he says. "When the modern liberal mind whines about imaginary victims, rages against imaginary villains and seeks above all else to run the lives of persons competent to run their own lives, the neurosis of the liberal mind becomes painfully obvious."

     This is no more valid an approach to political argument than it was when liberal-leaning "scholars" in the University of California system claimed that their study proves that conservatives are inherently fear-ridden and deficient of imagination.

     Back about fifteen years ago, your Curmudgeon first heard the political Left styled "bookless." It was an apt characterization, and remains so today. The Left has run through all its ideas, all have failed, and it can generate no new ones. If a new one were to happen along, liberal political strategists would have to weigh the consequences of adopting it -- contradicting standing liberal dogma; alienating a special interest; admitting to error -- against the consequences of not adopting it -- trundling along on the same tired slogans and failed policies. Therein lies the danger of assuming a pose of moral and intellectual superiority while selling one's movement to a coalition of interest groups.

     But the Right is treading substantially the same ground. The "Republican Revolution" of 1994, so bravely begun, proved to be a wet firecracker. That wasn't because the ideas it had promulgated were bad ones, nor that its representatives were arrogant asses, but because once in power, Republican legislators overwhelmingly placed press approbation and "collegiality" above achieving what the voters had sent them to Washington to achieve. They allowed their victorious theses to be muddied by their conduct in office -- talking low taxes, free markets, and the rule of law while perpetuating the existing regime out of fear of criticism from their opponents and bad notices in the New York Times.

     The Left can no longer write books; the Right has burned the ones it penned.

     The Left seems a bit frenzied these days, frenzy being the behavioral evidence of having no new ideas, yet staring at the same old problems. But the Right is tinged with despair, having betrayed its ideological legacy, and seeing it badly stained by public disdain, for a mess of column-inches. Conservatives and libertarians had the intellectual assets with which to establish a truly enduring majority; they merely failed to act on them.

     The Republican majorities of 1994-2006 are now only a memory, and Republican officeholders have only themselves to blame. Their overt ideology is still vastly superior to that of the Democrats, but their embrace of the privileges of power, and their preference for praise over the public interest, have tarnished it in a fashion that might take decades to cleanse. That's what you get for burning the books you've written. Psychologizing your opponents is no substitute for well thought out ideas and their faithful execution.

“A Decent Place To Live”

     [In light of the rising discussions about whether compulsory integration has been a mistake, I’ve decided to repost this piece. It first appeared at the “V2.0” site on October 12, 2021 – FWP]

---

     Fairly recently, a dear friend became troubled about the way his neighborhood was changing. He was reluctant to speak of it at first, because it involved the anthropological and sociological third rail of American public discourse: race. Several homes near him had recently been purchased by Negro families. After that, several more homes in the neighborhood went on sale. My friend was alarmed, as he saw an influx of black families as destabilizing to what had been a peaceful, safe environment for his wife and children.

     I agreed with him. Even prosperous, seemingly stable black families can bring with them the problems for which their race is known: noise, disruptive behavior, drug abuse, high traffic of nonresidents into and out of the neighborhood, fights and petty crime. The problems arrive with the youth of their race. Many of the same phenomena accompany the arrival of Hispanic families.

     The above are established facts. Charles Murray has put hard numbers to them in his recent book Facing Reality. If my friend wanted to secure his family and home against a degradation in their quality of life, he would have to move. He was reluctant to do so, as it would involve accepting new debt, but in the end he saw that it was the best course.

     Which brings us to today’s topic.

***

     Among the mechanisms prosperous communities have used in attempting to secure themselves, zoning is preeminent. A neighborhood that excludes all but residential properties on large lots has guaranteed that anyone moving into it will at least possess the financial wherewithal to do so. The desirability of the neighborhood will then make the price of such lots high. The exclusion of multiple-family structures raises another significant barrier to entry.

     So-called minority-rights groups have attempted to pierce the barriers created by zoning with “lawfare.” To this point, they’ve been largely unsuccessful. However, the Left is attempting a Samson-smash of the walls around such neighborhoods by outlawing single-family zoning:

     [In Virginia,] in the midst of the high-stakes McAuliffe vs. Youngkin race for governor, the conservative group Frontiers of Freedom Foundation is running an ad that highlights Terry McAuliffe’s support for Joe Biden’s plans to undercut single-family zoning.

     The ad, which I found powerful, reminds voters that attacks on local control of zoning can come from states as well as the feds. In fact, this has happened in California which recently abolished single-family zoning. The anti-McAuliffe ad pointedly reminds Virginia voters of this news from California.

     As commentator Paul Mirengoff notes:

     Few issues matter more to voters than the character of their neighborhoods and the character of their schools. The second issue — schools — has become a high-profile one. Maybe now the first one — neighborhoods — will come into prominence.

     Possible – but expect massive blowback in the form of racism-shouting and claims of “discrimination” and “exclusion.” As it has become an act of extreme courage to reply to such attacks by saying “You bet your ass I want to exclude your kind. You bring trouble wherever you go,” those attacks have more power than usual. Nevertheless, that is the intention, and a perfectly valid one it is.

     In the past, the attack on protective zoning has come via the courts. A case that reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1974, Warth v. Seldin, is illustrative. Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong noted it in The Brethren:

     In one case (Warth v. Seldin) civil-rights activists in Rochester, New York had challenged a nearby suburb’s zoning law. The ordinances required all homes to be single-family residences on large lots, in effect barring low-income minorities. The challengers sued to overturn the ordinance as discriminatory. Two lower courts had denied them standing and refused to hold a hearing on their claims. [Associate Justice Lewis] Powell was assigned the majority opinion for his fellow Nixon appointees and [Associate Justice Potter] Stewart, who agreed with the lower courts that the activists didn’t have standing to sue in federal court. His opinion said that the challengers had failed to allege and prove they could not buy a particular residence; the case was hypothetical; the alleged injuries were intangible and speculative....

     As Stewart explained it to his clerks, the case called for a value judgment, not a legal one. The challengers were asking the courts to rule on economic differences that kept low-income minorities from living near affluent whites. “What they are actually asking us to do is to overrule the capitalist system,” Stewart said....

     [Associate Justice William] Brennan’s dissent argued that Powell was using legal technicalities to prevent the disenfranchised groups from pressing their claims. And there was a Catch-22. In order to have the standing to sue, you had to have the money to begin building a low-income housing project and be willing to go to the inconvenience of filing a plan so the local zoning board could reject it. In order for the poor to sue, they had to be rich. Brennan found the whole idea absurd and deceitful. It was the ordinance being challenged—not neutral economic factors—that insured that the housing market would never change....

     Brennan saw this as the extension of a disastrous trend. The lower courts would get the message that the poor must prove precisely how they were affected before they would even have standing to bring suit in federal court. The Court would no longer be the final protector of rights, the guarantor of fair play.

     Those paragraphs from The Brethren express a tremendous amount: first about legal principles and judicial procedures, second about the attitudes and orientations of the Justices. Potter Stewart, a moderate conservative, was aware of the underlying intent of the suit, but in voting on the verdict stayed within the established rules of jurisprudence: The plaintiff must prove that he has been injured, or definitely will be irreparably injured, to have standing. As there was no provable injury from an ordinance that effectively prevented low-income residents from becoming close neighbors to high-income residents, the plaintiff lacked standing and the suit was without merit.

     William Brennan, a left-liberal, saw things differently. He felt the exclusion of low-income people from high-income neighborhoods was itself an injury: a moral wrong. He saw the zoning ordinance as a denial of “minority rights.” That this is an extreme, wholly unjustifiable creation of a right, which Brennan sought to assign to “low-income minorities” against more affluent persons, is at the heart of the greater part of today’s racial and ethnic conflicts.

     Compare Brennan’s implied assertion of a “right” for low-income persons to live cheek-to-jowl with high-income persons with the outcries of exactly the same persons against “gentrification.” Could the hypocrisy be any clearer? But more pointed still is a John Derbyshire essay about the “theory of magic dirt:”

     In the past couple of decades we've seen the rise of one particular explanatory strategy. That strategy recently acquired a name—or possibly it's had the name for a while and I only just recently noticed. Whatever, I really like the name: Magic Dirt.

     The core idea is that one's physical surroundings—the bricks and mortar of the building you're in, or the actual dirt you are standing on—emit invisible vapors that can change your personality, behavior, and intelligence.

     That's why, for example, you read so much about "bad schools" or "failing schools." The thing to be explained is that schools whose students are overwhelmingly non-Asian minorities—blacks and mestizos—get much worse results on academic tests than schools whose students are majority white and East Asian. This has been so for decades, defying even extravagantly expensive efforts to change it, like the Kansas City fiasco of the 1990s.

     Parsimonious explanation: innate differences in behavior, intelligence, and personality between the races.

     Magical explanation: Bad schools! The bricks and mortar of these schools, the asphalt of their playgrounds, are giving out invisible noxious vapors that enstupidate the kids!

     Gentle Reader, it cannot be said better than that. If one’s physical surroundings or neighbors determine one’s one “behavior, intelligence, and personality,” then pace William Brennan, it would be at the very least unkind to deny “aspiring” low-income Americans the chance to improve themselves by living next door to high-income Americans. But unkindness has no legal weight, so the Left has to represent the claim as a denial of “minority rights.”

***

     Most people would prefer not to live among criminals, drug addicts, the dissolute and irresponsible, or politicians. These persons tend to “lower the tone” of a neighborhood, rendering it displeasing to those of us who like order, responsibility, and privacy. Thus we save as much as we can from what we earn, use it to buy “a decent place to live” when the opportunity presents itself, and thereafter do our best to protect our new homes and their environs from the kind of maltreatment that comes from criminals, druggies, etc. This is in keeping with the American conception of private property rights: You can have what you want as long as:

1. Someone is willing to sell it to you;
2. You have the means to pay for it.

     But groups do not have rights as such. Neither do “neighborhoods.” So when a prosperous district coalesces and the residents resolve to limit what changes can occur there, the usual recourse has been zoning ordinances. While the decisions of zoning boards are not always received with approval, preserving the character of neighborhoods for their existing residents is the predominant use of zoning.

     Zoning ordinances can legally specify:

1. Permitted uses (e.g., single-family residential; multiple-family residential; commercial; light industrial; heavy industrial; mixed);
2. Minimum lot size.

     They may not say “No parcel in this zone may be sold for less than $X.” And they may not make any mention of race or ethnic heritage. So it’s at least possible, if against the odds, to find a parcel in a “prosperous” neighborhood that’s available dirt-cheap. Legally, if the owner is willing to sell it to you, your neighbors-to-be can do nothing about it no matter what they think of you or yours.

     But dirt-cheap parcels in affluent neighborhoods are exceedingly rare. The demand for such parcels is high. The Law of Supply and Demand functions to make them dear. And your neighbors-to-be probably like it that way, so you’d better have the means.

     As matters stand, Negroes are less likely than Whites and Asians to possess the means to purchase parcels in very affluent neighborhoods. That’s been the case for many decades. Often the minimum lot size dictated by the zoning ordinances is part of the reason. Other things being equal, large lots are more expensive than small ones, for the same reason that large diamonds are more expensive than small ones: there just aren’t that many of them. If the zoning ordinances forbid breaking up such a lot and selling the fragments, there’s nothing to be done about it.

     But the key is not race nor ethnicity; it’s finances. Low-income Whites and Asians face the same barrier to entry. Affluent residents are no more eager to live next to low-income Whites or Asians than next to low-income Negroes– and there are a lot more low-income Whites than low-income Negroes. But you don’t hear them on the six o’clock news. “White trash” is dispreferred by the rights activists as a group to champion.

     All that having been said, this remains: when a formerly all-White neighborhood is first penetrated by Negro families, the residents look to their defenses. Even if the initial penetration is by solidly middle-class Negroes with intact families, homes will swiftly go on the market, often in great numbers. The demographics of the neighborhood tend to change rapidly, as does the prevailing level of law-abidingness, public order, and general civility. Whites have learned to fear what comes with a Negro incursion, and all the wishes of the bien-pensants will not prevail against that hard-won lesson. Good intentions are powerless before the desire for “a decent place to live.”

     See also the meaning of the venerable term blockbusting.

For Trinity Sunday

     Good morning, Gentle Reader. I’m just back from Mass. It’s a nice day here on Long Island. I’m minded to put a chaise longue out in the sun, lie back with a good book, and just laze away the day, but… well, you know me. Too full of words. They have to come out now and then.

     One of the more pleasant things about having written so much over so many years is that I can frequently revive pieces I wrote long ago. I often do that with pieces about Christianity, especially its more important doctrines and feast days. I’m about to do it again, but first, a quick snippet from one of my novels:

     “I never really got that part,” Christine said.
     Ray nodded. “Understandably so. It seems paradoxical. I don’t really think we’re expected to ‘get’ it. Just accept it on the evidence.”
     The room had grown dim. It had gotten quite late, but neither Ray nor Christine was in any hurry to conclude their chat.
     “What makes it hard for most people,” Ray said, “is that we tend to think of God as just a very powerful temporal entity, like some sort of super-magician. But He’s not. He created time. He looks down on it from above, the way you or I would read a map. He knows the path we follow because He knows all the paths we might follow, and what might flow from every one of them.” He sat back and reflected for a moment. “So our time-dependent language about ‘choosing’ and ‘knowing’ gets us into trouble when we try to apply it to God.”
     “You know,” Christine said, “that would go a long way toward explaining the Trinity, too.”
     “Hm? How so?”
     “Well, why is the Trinity a tough nut to crack? Because people can’t be in more than one place at a time, right? Wherever you go, there you are, and you’re still you.”
     “Uh...” Am I getting in over my head here? “That could be part of it.”
     She leaned toward him, intensity and delight merging in her expression. “But if you take the Gospels as factual, then the evidence says there were three divine Persons, even if that’s tough for us time-bound types to imagine. You don’t have to figure out how you could pull it off. You just have to allow that He can do that sort of thing even if we can’t!”
     Ray opened his mouth, closed it without speaking. Christine frowned.
     “Did I say something wrong, Father?”
     “Not at all, dear,” he said. “In fact, I think you’ve been teaching me my trade.” He grimaced in rueful remembrance. “I used to think more about these things when I was a teen. Talks like this one were why I wanted to become a priest. Then I got caught up in all the social activism nonsense that infects the church these days. You know, the stuff Father Schliemann disdained and that I tried to bring here with me.”
     The stuff that drove you away.
“The social welfare crap is a lot easier than being a man of God,” he said. “That’s probably why it seduces so many priests away from their real responsibilities.” Ray rose and ambled aimlessly around the sitting room. “After all, when you spend your time distributing food, or clothing, or fliers for some rally or demonstration, you know exactly what you’re doing. You can count up your results, even if it’s just in pounds of bread or sheets of paper. Preaching the Christian faith, proclaiming the love of God and the importance of Christ’s New Covenant, getting people to accept that it’s vitally important even though you can’t prove it, is a lot harder to enter into a spreadsheet.”

     In the above, Christine does something a lot of us have trouble with. She accepts an unprovable proposition that lacks a human-comprehensible rationale, based on the evidence for it. She doesn’t demand to know “how” or “why.” She accepts that “He can do it even if we can’t.” “He,” of course, being God.

     Her interlocutor, Father Raymond Altomare, the pastor of Onteora parish, makes a critical admission: that helping his parishioners to deal with the several mysteries of Christianity is much harder than social activism. Yet as a priest of Christ, he has responsibilities in both realms. For many priests, that causes them to prefer the “social activism nonsense” and to downplay the faith itself. And that weakens the Church.

     The faith promulgated by the Church is the reason for Christians to conduct ourselves according to the norms promulgated by the Church. If we lose hold of the faith, what reason remains to cleave to the norms? Neighborliness? Self-promotion? Identity management?

     We do as we do because we believe as we believe.

* * *

     I’ve written several times about the mystery of the Trinity. I’m going to repost one of those pieces right now. It first appeared on Trinity Sunday 2012:

---

"God made the angels to show Him splendor, as He made animals for innocence and plants for their simplicity. But man He made to serve Him wittily, in the tangle of his mind."

[Robert Bolt, A Man For All Seasons]

Some years ago, when my gift of faith reasserted itself and I returned to the Church, I realized that I had yet to confront the core mysteries of Christianity, much less to accept them as beyond question. That sort of acceptance is more difficult for me than anything else I could name.

Being what I am, I had to allow my intellect its time at bat. Allowing unconditional pronouncements from a self-authorizing source to pinch-hit for my reason would have been unthinkable. Insistence by such self-nominated authorities on prefabricated dogma was part of what had separated me from God as a young man; I wasn't about to let that happen again.

Some of the Christian mysteries rest on particular postulates about the nature of God: His omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, and omnibenevolence. If you can bring yourself to accept the existence of a Supreme Being -- which I do -- those characteristics are consistent with His Supremacy. So such mysteries aren't much of a problem.

But not all the Christian mysteries are that simply resolved. The one we celebrate today is one such.

Today is the Feast of the Holy Trinity, upon which Christians celebrate and praise the Three Persons of God. No tenet of Christianity involves more intellectual suspension of disbelief than that one. Christ born of a virgin? Naah, too easy. Resurrection of the body? Child's play. God knowing all yet Man having free will? Once you stop thinking of time as we perceive it as the only sort of time there is, that one cracks in a jiffy. But three Persons, yet one God?

Give me a minute for that one.

***

Your deeds can open the door for your words; nothing else will. And when that door is opened to you, you must speak. You must tell your story -- without embarrassment or fear -- and you must learn how to reassure others who haven't "gotten there" yet that their stories still have a few chapters to run. -- Duyen Ky

It strikes me as odd that the invention of abstract categories, the foundation upon which all other reasoning rests, should be traceable only as far back as classical Greece. That concept, so critical to organized thought, makes its first appearance in recorded history in the writings of Plato and Aristotle, philosophers with radically different attitudes toward it. The Aristotelian approach, based upon his approach to definition, is the underpinning for virtually the whole of Western analytical thought.

But categories and definition have their limitations too. Indeed, they're premised on the existence of limitations to all things that are less than the totality of existence, the All. A category must have a genus and a differentia, else it is without definition, and therefore useless. You cannot reason about something unless you can say both what it is and what it is not.

But it follows from those requirements that the All as we know it, and whatever might envelop it from some higher plane we cannot access, are beyond all our categories. We might learn something of it -- we might be able to say with fair confidence that certain assertions about it can or cannot be true -- but we cannot grasp it whole, for we are too small for it. The old Qualifying Exam gag, "Define the universe. Give two examples," has much point.

This seems to me to be the case with the arguments over the Trinity: whether it's factual or metaphorical; whether the Persons are merely manifestations of an unchanging Unity, or whether we ought to throw the whole thing aside as beyond resolution by human reason. But for one to whom comprehension seems a necessity, the frustration involved is very hard to bear.

***

Doubt is inseparable from faith. We cannot have either one without the other. Most persons, the overwhelming majority throughout history, have not merely had faith but have wanted to have it. If we desire faith we must learn to tolerate and endure that which makes us doubt.

In that connection, the Trinitarian conception of God might be the most important of all the posers presented by Christianity.

But in the Gospels we read of manifestations of all three Persons to human perception. We read of God the Father speaking of Jesus as "My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased." We read of Jesus's miracles, and His Passion and Resurrection. We read of the descent of the Holy Spirit upon Mary and the eleven Apostles, granting them the gift of tongues that every man might hear them in the language most familiar to him. These aren't mysteries themselves, but narrated events the accuracy of which one must take or leave as they are.

If the events recorded in the Gospels occurred as they're set down there, the Trinity is real. Or some super-race with a really good cloaking device and a cruel sense of humor is playing a two-thousand-year-long joke on us. You pays your money and you takes your choice; I've made mine.

***

Trinity Sunday often brings out the worst in a Mass celebrant. Far too many priests attempt to explain the inexplicable: to make lucid to minds inextricably locked into temporal bondage a phenomenon that pertains to a supra-temporal Entity. I've endured several such sermons, and have tried my best not to cringe.

Rather than tackle the how of the Trinity, which is impervious to mortal understanding, perhaps we should confront the why: Why did God elect to manifest three divine Persons, rather than to maintain the Unity that seems intuitively obvious about a Supreme Being?

C. S. Lewis once tossed off a comment about how the Trinity allows God to incorporate love right into His nature. As an obscure writer of little-known novels and stories once said, isn't it pretty to think so? But in a rare episode of dissent from the views of the greatest lay Christian apologist of recent years, I think that's fundamentally irrelevant to the Divine purpose in this connection. Being an old engineer, I prefer a functional approach.

Personhood is about personality.

The three divine Persons have dramatically different Personalities, at least in the appearance they present to Man:

• The Father: The Lawgiver, who has decreed the laws that govern all things, who sees all ages as a single gestalt, and who will preside over our ultimate fates.
• The Son: The Emissary, who points us in the way we should go and intercedes for us before the Lawgiver’s judgment.
• The Holy Spirit: The Defender, who empowers us to restrain ourselves from what is wrong, and steels us to confront and accept our duties, however trying they may appear.

These three Personalities regard Man from the standpoints appropriate to their respective roles in the creation, maintenance, and ultimate disposal of all things. We experience them in that way: through the functions each has taken up, and the attributes they manifest in fulfilling those purposes. This is a part of the divine Gift to Man, which makes our relations to and with God more comprehensible, and thus more reassuring, than would otherwise be the case.

One of the least appreciated phrases in theology is the one that would provide the most assurance in the face of this mystery: Holy Trinity. For holiness always pertains to wholeness: unity, integrity, and internal consistency. The Three are holy because they are, from the supra-temporal standpoint, also One.

Persons of other creeds have often denigrated Christianity on the basis of the Trinity. The above is my answer to them, with the following as a grace note:

"You, who claim to know God so much better than I, have committed a critical error: you have arrogantly imposed one of your limitations upon Him. But He stands above you, not only in this way but in many others your limited vision would deny. A temporal creature attempting to comprehend the infinite and the eternal should exhibit more humility. May God guide your thoughts and your steps henceforward."

May God bless and keep you all.

---

     The doctrine of the Trinity is fundamental to Christianity. The faith can go nowhere without it. Note that the Old Testament makes no mention of it. Yet much of the Old Testament points directly to the New one, through its many prophecies of the coming of a Messiah who would raise the Chosen People from their sinful ways to their rightful estates. Yet the majority of the Jews of Jesus’s time rejected Him. They were expecting a temporal leader, not a spiritual one. They weren’t willing to set their expectations aside for the sake of this itinerant preacher who nattered on about His Father in heaven or the Holy Spirit whom He would dispatch to guide them after His Ascension.

     The Trinity is a great part of the reason so many Jews rejected Him. They wanted explanations, rationales. Jesus didn’t do a lot of that. He traveled, preached, healed, and drove out demons. That wasn’t enough for a people who would argue for centuries over the meaning of a single word. Even coming back from death, as He had promised that He would do, wasn’t enough for a lot of them.

     It’s enough for two billion people now living. Is it enough for you?

     May God in His Three Persons:

• The Father, who creates and decrees the laws of creation;
• The Son, who came to lift the Mosaic law from our backs and redeem us from our sins;
• The Holy Spirit, given us to enlighten us and protect us from the snares of Satan;

     …bless and keep you all.