Robert, I'm thinking we're one ceremonial cup-o'-blood from the fate of the Mayas right now. Only this time it won't be a chunk of a small subcontinent left an overfarmed, depopulated former power...
"...The new captain looked up. Oh, good grief, Vimes thought. It's bloody Rust this time round! And it was indeed the Hon. Ronald Rust, the gods' gift to the enemy, any enemy, and a walking encouragement to desertion.
The Rust family had produced great soldiers, by the undemanding standards of "Deduct Your Own Casualties From Those Of The Enemy, And If The Answer Is A Positive Sum, It Was A Glorious Victory" school of applied warfare. But Rust's lack of any kind of military grasp was matched only by his high opinion of the talent he, in fact, possessed only in negative amounts..."
--Terry Pratchett, Night Watch, 2002
Anna, there is a kind of "Christian libertarian" tradition which is independent (mostly) of the Libertarian political movement as it now exists in the US, which is more strongly tied to the Anarchism movement both in spirit and historically, as it comes through what I personaly refer to as "the Oxford Movement" - people like GKC, CS Lewis, who wanted the government to butt out of telling people what they could do at home, so long as it didn't hurt the neighbors, and were opposed to socialism and to capitalism both because they didn't go far enough to help fix the broken situations that led to poverty. They saw the future in back-to-the-land, small artisans and craftsmanship - it has strong ties to William Morris, the Arts-and-Crafts movement, and to what would result eventually in the SCA.
I come partly out of this background, but since we all got coopted by the Right, without even realizing it, just as much as the "republicans who smoke dope" of the Cato Institute, starting with Chesterton himself (who didn't live to see the end of Mussolini's promise to restore an agrarian age of the Church Triumphant) - and since it had/has a deeply xenophobic, anti-Islam, resurrect the Crusades component - while the ideals of a just, creative, individualistic society are certainly worth it, the practical politics of the movement (it was always disorganized, never an organization, more of a drift) are just another failed Utopian dreaming, as it historically exists, and "part of the problem" now.
Because the trees that produce no fruit, or bad fruit, get cut down and thrown into the fire? (my guess.)
I've been referring to the combined synthetic of "fiscal" conservativism, "social" conservativism (which always overlapped more strongly than libertarians or conservative Christians historically have liked to admit) and the GOP, as The Virtue Party™ to satirize their claims to be the sole possessors and purveyors of righteousness, while at the same time behaving like total schmucks about morals, whether hypocritical or not.
(This also avoids the problem inherent in the fact that a lot of them are doing some weird synthesis of Judeo-Christianity, and how not to omit the presence of Michael Medved, Rabbi Lapin, Dr. Krauthammer, the Podhoretz clan, as well as the fact that there are too many RCs to make it all a WASP club to begin with.)
The "Church of Tashlan" and "the Church of St. Podsnaps" are more general descriptions, extending beyond strictly political definition, though nearly within the same borders as The Virtue Party™. The congregation of Tashlan prefers militarism slightly more than wealth as the primary purpose of a Straussian state; St. Podsnasps' congregation prefer Mammon themselves, while approving the war-god's victories from a polite, admiring but uninvolved distance.
Tina, cndolences, and it doesn't get any better. Even fans complained that it was getting very Wheel-of-Time-ish, though not in so many words, given that they wouldn't be caught dead reading that satanic fantasy stuff.
There are also short versions from the POV of the younger books, called Left Behind: The Kids, designed to woo the Goosebumps readers.
And graphic novels, too.
They're all *bad,* for a value of bad to the nth power, but weirdly the Graphic Novels are more readable and less absolutely sporkworthy because at least you're not chewing through Lahaye and Jenkins' cardboard prose.
I see Jon beat me to it.
But we also need very much to keep our eyes on what Crisco the Annointed One gets up to now whilst creeping around in the shadows outside the glare of the spotlights.
don't be too happy about Ashcroft, and don't take your eyes off of him. Remember that this happened with the renowned General Boykin, who went from giving anti-Paynim speeches at prayer breakfasts in full uniform, got in trouble, got yanked - and got rewarded for being such a good theocratic crusader by being put in charge of sensitve operations in Iraq which he proceded to help FUBAR while off our radar.
Sara, thanks - I know about Bosworth, I think the reason he's controversial is partly because he was the first to hit the radar in terms of arguing that gay marriage had historical precedent - the cost of being a pioneer - but also because he unabashedly had an axe to grind, which makes his use of data and conclusions a little bit suspect even to those not ideologically opposed to him (the way that any "scientific, statistical evidence" by John Lott is suspect.) My reasons for pinning it on the Cathar situation were that, aside from there being theologians discussing it as in the Summa there just doesn't seem to be the pop-cultural concern with it, in stories or songs, serious or golliard or visual art, and the word itself only coming from the association of the movement with the Bulgarians, and all the associated social convulsion of that era, with people rebelling, dropping out of society, defying sexual norms, economic conventions, and tying in with religion - kind of a Dobsian backlash in the High Gothic era, perhaps?
And in modern times, even, it doesn't seem to be for the most part a huge issue through the Renaissance and Enlightement - not the way arguments over feminism increasingly were - despite all the modern furore over certain of Shakespeare's sonnets and Marlowe, that seems to be more a *current generation* angst making a lot more of it than contemporaries did.
It really only seems to be a *major* issue, rather than a joke, a mean joke, but humor nonetheless as in Ben Johnson's snark at the guy who called him effeminate because he liked to spend time in drawing rooms with ladies, and heh heh, what did that make him, who spent all his time with guys? or the crook in the Conrad novel who is incensed that the Spanish girls thought his celibate boss (who seems to be a sex-averse psychopath) was homosexual. And this I tie, based on the ephemera and ideoloies of the early 20th century, to the rise of race-extermination phobias and eugenics. There is a disturbing confluence between the aversion to allowing GLBT couples to adopt, the ignoring of the problem of unwanted, homeless foster children, the insistence on marriage as purely procreative, and Occidental Quarterly's white-cultural-Christian dating service mindset: homosexuality is bad, because it reduces the number of available impregnators for The People...
Emily, speaking as someone who used to be one of those "nice" theological conservatives, it's managed by creating a wall of separation between empirical reality - the kind ordinary gays we meet in daily life - and the ideology that makes up the core of our self-definition, which we support by a) rationlization, we're hating the sin, not the sinner; b) not thinking about it.
The biggest mistake the Christian Right made, as far as losing me personally, and deconverting me into a missionary for the other side, was forcing me to think about these things, and take a stance, because I *won't* take an unconditional stance on something I don't know enough about, and haven't considered from all sides.
And thus I was forced to question the accepted interpretation of Leviticus and the story of Sodom, and learn a bit of Hebrew etymology to boot, and eventually to face the fact that I couldn't accept the theological rationalizations any more, and worse yet, to acknowledge my moral cowardice and past ideological slavery - willing slavery - and *do* something about it. And that *hurts*.
When something is rusted all the way through - archeology buffs know about this - sometimes you can't clean off the corrosion, because there isn't anything much left except oxides fossilized in the shape of the original object. Removing the corrosion would destroy the remainder of the original, because they're one and the same.
I'm deathly afraid that's what's become of Christianity and Western Civilization™ - but regardless of the macro level, on the micro level, this translates into having to give up much more than a hand or an eye, when your entire self-identity is wound around and through a core ideology or movement, and to rebuild your spiritual identity from near-scratch - because you have to examine *everything* and critically, all that you accepted as truism, once the foundations are gone. It's like Escher, a circularly-reasoned city of the mind, and how do you build something solid, where do you start?
But it's that, or be an enabler of evil and stupidity. I made my choice. And for that reason, I - who long ago voted for Buchanan and Keyes, recall - no longer am willing to cut such folks as myself an inch of slack.
I know it's really, really petty, and soooo Usenet to do spelling flames, but there's something really apropriate about someone appending an academic title to their handle and complaining about liberal elitism not even being able to spell "buggery" on a board where I'm sure I'm not the only one who knows the etymology of it. (Homophobia as a relict of ethno-religious prejudice and wars - does anyone know if there was such a focus on homosexuality in the western church prior to the Cathar wars?)
But the problem is, Bruce, that many of those refugees, were having to come here because their countries were wrecked by our foreign policy.
Which makes it an even more pathetically-naive faith in the shiningness" of the USA on their part.
The Hmong, whom we thrice betrayed - because what was using them as soldiers in a war that we started for our own vanity and socioeconomic issues, but a second betrayal, after the first betrayal of entering Vietnam, culminating in the fraud of Tonkin?
The Central Americans, who come here in the wake not merely of Reagan policy, but of Guatemala in the 1950s and Honduras again back at the turn of the last century, all those wars for bananas and sugar and yes, oil?
The Eastern Europeans, for whom the Cold War was our entering into the Great Game, taking Britain's place at the Risk board after the grande dame got tired, facing off against Holy Russia's rebellious kids, re-enacting in a play that goes on to this our the roles made popular by Kipling in Kim and scores of other stories, just as we reenacted the Opium Wars in Southeast Asia as the night wore on--
This is a kind of voluntary Babylonian Captivity, then, as if the survivors didn't realize that it was the same warlords' cities who had sacked their own, into whose lower economic strata they were straggling and struggling to be tolerated and rebuild.
Granted, all the *nice* Americans who welcomed them (and many of the bigoted ones who didn't) weren't aware of what was being done in their name in the 50s and 60s and 70s around the world - but what kind of an excuse is ignorance, when the information is there, and you choose to believe the happy narrative that we were only "Spreadin' Freedom" and not also spreading drugs, helotry, crony capitalism, satrapy, sexual slavery and all the other traditional goods of Empire either deliberately or as "military-industrial waste" across the world, from Okinawa to the Congo, in the name of "Fighting Communism"--
This is the problem when you study not Story, but the history-that-is-written-by-the-bystanders, the overarching narratives that come into focus are *not* neat stories of reversals and rescue, retribution and happy endings, with all the evil bottled up in the dragons.
Debra, you and Jim are in NH too, right? You might want to look at my charts and see if they make sense to you, too. (Sorry they're so large files - about 2MB ea - I had to do them in photoshop, and keep them readable.)
It is also the anniversary of the crushing of the 1956 Hungarian uprising, today.
It was e.e. cummings' poem, "Thanksgiving 1956," discovered by chance at around age 14, that caused me to question *everything* I thought I could rely on, in terms of the CW, such as that the US was at least honest and honorable in being anti-communist and pro-liberty, as well as that there was a unanimous patriotic acceptance of the Cold War.
Reading about that, subsequently, trying to make sense of it all, is why I was not so terribly surprised by anything that has been revealed of US dishonourable conduct in *this* war.
I am not one to believe in omens, but as a sign it offers various possible interpretations.
Tiercel is correct. I did the demographics on my state, because I think we can trust the ballots to be fair here - it's a small state, and last time they cheated, in 2002, it was by a KITV by phone DOS attack. We use paper ballots, clearly printed, marked in big circles with pen, and many many of them had to be hand counted this time, because they ran out of the optical cards and had to photocopy them instead.
The returns were showing to me *such* dramatic patterns, based on the fact that I've driven all over this state and I know people who live and work in the parts I don't, or know people who do, after having lived here a quarter-century, that I charted them all out on maps.
The *real* rural poor voted blue. The people who have bought up the 200-year-old family farms that went out of business, and either commute to Boston in their Escalades, or live off their severance packages or investment incomes, those regions voted red, by the largest margins. Yet even those townships did not go over 70% red.
It was the educated, wealthy, well-traveled people whose kids attended school with me, the ones who went to Mexico and Spain and Bermuda on holiday, the ones who live in the central corridor, or up around the Lakes Region, or in the Libertarian bits of the North Country (not the lumberjack and millworker bits) that nearly gave NH to Bush. Many of those people along the Seacoast side of the southern border and central corridor are MA expats who want to make the big dollars but not pay the big taxes, and can afford to send their kids to Pinkerton or St. Paul's and not care about the problems with school funding.
Claremont and environs went blue.
And so did most of the towns around the Navy base - far more than can be explained by the college town nearby. *That* trumped the Very High Property Values factor, in all but two small suburbs of Portsmouth.
It was greed that almost did us in, here, the pledge of bigger business, lower taxes.
And very few of the Bush/Benson voters here, had signs out or stickers. It doesn't seem like they were proud or confident enough to display their allegiance, not compared to the number of bumper stickers I have seen for Kerry.
I suspect, if we were able to chart out each state, town by town, and match it up with local economies and demographics, we would see far more of this over the country. But I can't do it for anywhere else, I only know little bits of MA and less of VT myself.
This may be old news to everyone here, but having only recently discovered that the jokes about the lunar landings being faked on a soundstage aren't jokes to Fox News [sic] viewers, and struggled to assmilate this interesting insight into my fellow Americans' minds, after which all the good stuff about Dinosaurs & Cavemen is kind of icing on the cake, I've just found that the anti-Copernican Catholics are alive and well.
in case anyone missed this, Pete the Dark Reverend (he's an atheist, but the mail-order Divinity degree was too much to pass up) has discovered a site with proof that UFO abductions are actually caused by the Nephilim returning to breed up new armies of immortal mutant warriors by impregnating human women.
Best comment is Ted's:
Pete you're just mad because the fallen angel mutant warrior guys are getting more action than you.
At least they haven't started saying that THK actually turns into a giant leopard at night and roams the streets of the city looking for lost children to carry off...
Good Person + Evil Cause + Nobly Serving = Consolation Prize.
That this is not, in the end, good enough for anyone is demonstrated by the desperate frenzy of the SBVT to prove that Vietnam was a Worthy Cause...
(Funny how you don't find this - at least in reading through a lot of ephemera from the teens through the thirties - in WWI veterans, the frenzied need to assure themselves and silence any disagreement, that the Salient was all Worth It.)
Kate N - fandom_wank *hates* me personally, because after I found out they existed, I played them for fools, and they kept on leaping in and smacking the tarbaby I put out for them. (That's where the "Overlady/minion" jokes we make come from, when they started whinging that it wasn't fair for me to do it back to them for our amusement.) They kind of don't learn real quick either - that there are meaner bastards than they out there, only not all of us feel compelled to indulge our inner Dragon all the time - which makes them very much like FreiRepublik as well. (Someone should set up a dating service!) Though actually I think they're more the Tucker Carlsons (or Parker & Stones) of fandom...
Janet - I'm not sure how helpful that is, in the end, though. What good is it to be a Good German? "I was a noble servant of a corrupt regime" is not exactly how I want to be remembered; having realized I was serving on the side of Umbar, I broke with them and left. Nor am I inclined to cut the Christian Right any slack, just because I know personally that many of them *are* well-meaning and deluded ideallists.
There's also this, about making your own realities and drafting others to join in with them:
But as the theme progressed, it came into the heart of Melkor to interweave matters of his own imagining that were not in accord with the theme of Ilúvatar; for he sought therein to increase the power and the glory of the part assigned to himself. To Melkor among the Ainur had been given the greatest gifts of power and knowledge, and he had a share in all the gifts of his brethren. He had gone often alone into the void places seeking the Imperishable Flame; for desire grew hot within him to bring into Being things of his own, and it seemed to him that Ilúvatar took no thought for the Void, and he was impatient of its emptiness. Yet he found not the Fire, for it is within Ilúvatar. But being alone he had begun to conceive thoughts of his own unlike those of his brethren.
Some of these thoughts he now wove into his music, and straight-way discord arose about him, and many that sang nigh him grew despondent, and their thought was disturbed and their music faltered; but some began to attune their music to his rather than to the thought which they had at first. Then the discord of Melkor spread ever wider, and the melodies which had been heard before foundered in a sea of turbulent sound.
And when the Ardaverse Lucifer falls, he may start out as a raging titan of dark majesty and awesome might - but he ends up at last a micromanaging paranoic shut in his bunker, whining about how none of the other Demiurges appreciate him and he has to do all this hard work of trying to make Order in the world all by his lonesome, and it just isn't FAIR that anyone else should enjoy life when he has to suffer...
Kate, that's a meme has been going around for a bit now - GreyLadyBast and Ginmar have both mentioned it recently, as have others.
This is the wellknown ffnet phenomenon, which can be very entertaining to bystanders, in which The Raging Fangirl Receives A Bad Review.
Whereupon the Raging Fangirl deletes it, and receives more, and deletes those, and receves still more, and gets into verbal fights with those mean!people!who!don't!understand! that Art means you can do whatever you want and no one can tell you otherwise, whether it's that Princess StarflowerMoonchild the half-elven-thief-ranger-goddess doesn't belong in Middle-earth, or that Aragorn wouldn't rape Legolas, or that Darth Maul is not going to magically reform because of Twu Wuv, be it Mary Sue's or Young!Obi-Wan's. Whereupon people point out that regardless of canon-fanon disputes, grammar and spelling are NOT optional, and then you get screaming angry author's notes filled with more exclamation points per sentence than I've used in this paragraph, and finally the story gets taken down in High Dudgeon.
Or else friends and partisans of the author get involved, and they go and leave profanity-laced rants as reviews on the stories of those who have dared to criticize, or they lodge complaints to get other users banned (though apparently there isn't much crossover with political boards, surprisingly) and then you find out that some of these kids aren't 14, but 22 or older...
It's just like that - only *these* Fangirls rule the Known World.
There's also a huge moment of whatever the opposite of Cognitive Dissonance is awaiting anyone who has yet to read, as I very recently did, Going Postal. It's all about people who try to reshape the world to their own wills for their own convenience.
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