I have been dismayed by Trump’s failures to act on various issues but his actions or failures to act have to be understood in the light of the immense and scurrilous attacks on him by the the Department of Justice and key national security organs of the American government:
For more than two years, the United States and the world have had two competing narratives: that an elected president of the United States was a Russian agent whom the Kremlin helped elect; and its rival narrative that senior officials of the Justice Department, FBI, CIA, and other national intelligence organizations had repeatedly lied under oath, misinformed federal officials, and meddled in partisan political matters illegally and unconstitutionally and had effectively tried to influence the outcome of a presidential election, and then undo its result by falsely propagating the first narrative. It is now obvious and indisputable that the second narrative is the correct one.[1]
He’s no Hemingway (I read his book a while back. Not a Deep book, but really funny in his take on the Deep State and Their Official Cronies).
But, Donald Trump, Jr. either has a terrific staff person to write these tweets, or he’s got a true gift. And, since the tone is pretty consistent, I’m going out on a limb, and saying this is him (perhaps with an assist, but still largely him).
Hedge funders should really just “Learn To Code” or to “install solar panels” Am I doing this right??? I’m told those are the rules.
@DonaldJTrumpJr
Any Republican in Washington DC worth a damn should be calling for an immediate investigation into Robinhood and Citadel.
And while they’rere at it, subpoena Janet Yellen; lets find out if there was pressure coming from the Biden Admin to protect their cronies on Wall Streeet!!
@DonaldJTrumpJr
It took less than a day for big tech, big government and the corporate media to spring into action and begin colluding to protect their hedge fund buddies on Wall Street. This is what a rigged system looks like, folks!
@DonaldJTrumpJr
I wish the SEC had as much of an issue with Insider Trading as they seem to have with Outsider Trading.
New York State has suffered badly under the House of Cuomo. Emperor Mario was disastrous. I was glad to see him go even if his replacement was a centrist wimp. But Mario’s son Andrew is deadly and doesn’t care who knows it:
What’s that you say, Andrew? It sounded a lot like this:
And lest we forget, New York sent her, a Democrat carpetbagger with no attachments to our state other than a very recently purchased house in Chappaqua, to the United States Senate.
How do people with that little conscience get elected to high positions in government? Mind you, Andrew Cuomo has no achievements outside of politics. In that regard, he’s practically the archetype of the left-wing politician. (Cf. Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton.) But he managed to become first the state’s Attorney-General, then its Governor – and he’s left a trail of destruction that may never be corrected.
How does such a thing happen? Is there no one in the Right who can beat these left-wing monsters in a New York election? Are our Boards of Election too corrupt for a Republican – and a New York Republican is more a centrist than a conservative – to beat a conscienceless, massively incompetent Democrat?
A great part of our problem is New York City. The Giuliani years, when the city experienced a renaissance that brought it back to vitality and livability, are a memory. The city is now entirely controlled by wealthy Leftists who pander shamelessly to the city’s municipal unions and its large indigent and minority populations – and the city dominates the state politically. Recent movements to break New York into three or more states are motivated almost exclusively by a desire to get the rest of us out from under the city’s hobnailed boot.
But those initiatives, like the similar ones advanced in California, have a snowball’s chance in hell of being treated seriously. Not only would they deprive Albany of serfs to mulct; they would dilute Democrat power in the United States Senate and the Electoral College. Can’t have that.
Fortunately, despite Cuomo’s high-handed, completely unjustified “mandates,” New York State has weathered the Chinese Lung Rot reasonably well. We’ve acquired a high degree of herd immunity and are on the way to shrugging the Kung Flu off completely. What we seem unable to become immune to, or to vaccinate against, is the really deadly plague, the plague that’s turning the state into a disaster even lifelong New Yorkers are fleeing in increasing numbers: the plague of Democrat totalitarians who succeed one another ad infinitam in the corridors of power. For that disease, there is no relief in sight.
Many have asked, as America slides down the generously Vaselined slope toward totalitarianism, just “where the tipping point is.” That is: What incursion on Americans’ rights would – or will – provoke actual armed insurrection aimed at reestablishing Constitutionally limited government?
Time was, the most widely agreed such point was a major incursion against freedom of speech. Well, the Usurpers have successfully subcontracted that – with the bonus that their private-sector partners are also helping to destroy unapproved competitors – and no one has yet taken the musket down from the mantel. So maybe freedom of speech was “over-valued.”
Another much hyped tipping point was blatantly political prosecutions. Well, we’ve already had a couple of those, including Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the fellow whose YouTube video was deceitfully blamed for the Benghazi attack on American installations there, and more recently Brandon Straka of WalkAway. I just went out on my front porch, and I don’t see the militia forming up. Maybe that one was oversold, as well.
Then there are our Second Amendment rights. That sounded uber-plausible. After all, disarming us would end our possibility of resistance to tyranny for all time. But hark! What have we here?
Yes, it’s from the terminally insane Sheila Jackson Lee. No, it’s not law yet. Does it have a chance of passage? Who knows? But if both Houses of Congress pass it – and given the spinelessness of the Republican caucuses, that’s not impossible – the Usurper-in-Chief will sign it. What then, America? Would that be a sufficient tipping point?
I’m not placing any bets. We’ve become too sheeplike, too reflexively compliant, for me to wager with confidence that any imposition of unwarranted authority would awaken us. Far easier just to change the channel and natter about what the Kardashians have been doing lately.
Things are, to say the least, not good.
#
We are living through a time I never thought I would see. Blatantly stolen elections. Blatantly unConstitutional government. Blatant law-enforcement indifference to Leftists rioting in the streets. Blatant attempts to criminalize dissent from the Usurper agenda. The blatant garrisoning of the nation’s capital. And private citizens have accepted all of it, as if it were of neither present nor future significance. “Emergency! Everybody to get from street!”
This is not American. If we accept such subjugation, we are not worthy to be called Americans.
The violent rioters who’ve desecrated our cities should have already faced massed water cannons and fusillades of rubber bullets, at the very least. But upon whom have the attentions of law enforcement fallen? It’s not the people and organizations rioting and looting in the streets of Minneapolis or Portland. Dozens of federal legislators should have already been ejected from Congress for the violation of their oaths to abide by the Constitution of the United States. Yet upon whom are the media pouring their venom? It’s not the Leftists who’ve dismissed all Constitutional constraints, have demanded that President Trump be tried for murder, and have called for “re-education camps” for conservatives and Republican partisans.
It’s possible that America has passed a point of no return and can no longer be saved. It’s possible that complete subjugation is our future. But it’s also possible that we could reverse our current course with sufficiently forthright action. Is any such action forthcoming? That’s the question of the hour…and at the moment, the answer seems to be negative.
Many Americans are in denial. But covering your eyes as a carnivore advances on you won’t spare you from his claws and teeth. Many others are focused narrowly upon protecting themselves, their loved ones, and their own interests. Martin Niemoller could tell them a few things. So could Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
The time to act is now…if it hasn’t passed by already.
Naturally, the Judge is a Texan. TX citizens do not fear the Federal Government; perhaps that’s an artifact of their history as an independent republic.
For liberal democracies are built on the premise that human values and interests are unavoidably and perpetually in conflict with one another. The solution to these conflicts is not to grant total victory to one side or another, but to accept a system of government and civil society that allows pluralism to flourish within a common culture and single legal framework.”
Here, with a little emphasis added, is what suggests a coded message may be present.
“We are not blaming any pharmaceutical company,” said Rochelle Zook, a resident of Orange. “My husband loved what he did. He worked in hospitals for 36 1/2 years. He believed in vaccines. I’m sure he would take that vaccine again, and he’d want the public to take it.
“But when someone gets symptoms 2 1/2 hours after a vaccine, that’s a reaction. What else could have happened? We would like the public to know what happened to Tim, so he didn’t die in vain. Severe reactions are rare. In reality, COVID is a much more deadly force than reactions from the potential vaccine itself.
“The message is, be safe, take the vaccine — but the officials need to do more research. We need to know the cause. The vaccines need to be as safe as possible. Every life matters.”
Any person who has developed a deep sense of skepticism is apt to have spotted the actual message was buried in the middle of paragraph 2. We would like the public to know what happened to Tim, so he didn’t die in vain. The encoding was likely added just so this portion might appear along with the sad news. Whatever it takes to get it published.
Any who do not wish to consider this are free to go back to sleep.
Approximately 538 trillion people, aware that I was relocating from Blogger, have:
Exhorted me to use WordPress;
Assured me that “You’re going to love it.”
That group includes (of course) Mike Hendrix, whose assistance in creating this blog was invaluable. You could say Mike is a WordPress fan. He assumed that I would take to it as he has. “You’re going to love WordPress, Fran!” he assured me…repeatedly. He was, let us say, slightly over-optimistic.
There is an imperative principle in user-oriented software design that the folks responsible for this…system should have tattooed on their eyelids — the inside surfaces of their eyelids:
Commonplace things should be simple to do.
A system billed as user-oriented, but which makes commonplace operations difficult or obscure, is doing it wrong. There is no imaginable excuse. Yet that appears to be the WordPress milieu.
Take the sidebar foofaurauw I’ve been going through. I wanted a three-column layout, to balance the blog’s appearance and limit the lengths of the sidebars. The Graphene theme offers that option, and I was at first happy with it. But many users have reported overlap problems with that layout: problems I cannot reproduce, much less eliminate. So I had to dump it and revert to two columns.
Here’s another thing: Inserting an image inline into a post. That operation is deeply hidden within some very obscure controls. It took me nearly half an hour to figure it out — and I’m not sure I’m able to reproduce what I did.
Most offensive to this retired software engineer: WordPress changes my code. I prefer to edit with the HTML tags and elements visible before me. Yet no sooner have I pasted a post into the WordPress editor than my tags start to change! Paragraph and line-break tags, in particular, appear and disappear. Inter-paragraph spacing is difficult to control. This is the Sin of Sins. All by itself, it suffices to condemn WordPress.
Now, I accept that as a new WordPress user, I should expect to face a learning curve. But it’s unacceptable that there should be so little online help available, and that the bulk of it should be so obscure. Indeed, some of it is flat-out wrong: either it refers to controls that aren’t available, or it depicts them wholly differently from the actual controls.
Would anyone knowledgeable in the ways of WordPress 5.6 care to point me toward reference materials I can trust? Something that would help to quell this impulse to look up the designers and mail them a parcel full of Ebola virus?
My next challenge is to figure out how to import the backup from my Blogger site into WordPress. There’s a size limit of 64 Megabytes…and my backup file is over 80 Megabytes. Any Gentle Readers know how to go about this? Absent such assistance, I’m likely to be drunk before noon.
Suffice it to say that opinions vary. But the question reposes upon a fallacy: that safe has a specific, objective, and universally agreed meaning. It does not.
There are no safe substances. There are no safe activities. There are no safe places. Only degrees of risk… Some of which are incalculable.
I could go into a long explanation of why this is so. I shan’t; it’s too early in the morning for such discourses. Also, unless you know a lot more physics, chemistry, and strength of materials than the average Gentle Reader, it would fail to impress you. So take my word for it.
Contemporary Americans are fanatics about safety. They exert themselves in a quest for absolute safety – sometimes they call it “security” – without even knowing what they mean by it. The entire Wuhan Virus / Chinese Crud / Kung Flu fear-porn panic is about that and nothing else. That’s what makes it a turbocharged absurdity.
Washington: The US Department of Homeland Security declared a nationwide terrorism alert Wednesday, citing the potential threat from domestic anti-government extremists opposed to Joe Biden as president.
“Information suggests that some ideologically-motivated violent extremists with objections to the exercise of governmental authority and the presidential transition, as well as other perceived grievances fueled by false narratives, could continue to mobilize to incite or commit violence,” the department said.
The National Terrorism Advisory System Bulletin said a heightened threat of attack “will persist in the weeks following the successful presidential inauguration,” which took place on January 20.
“DHS does not have any information to indicate a specific, credible plot,” it said.
Leave aside that the Usurpers fear to be dethroned from the positions they so blatantly stole. Leave aside the “false narratives” BS – and with all the eyewitnesses who’ve testified under oath to the frauds they saw, you may be perfectly certain that it is BS – and the suggestions that the Right is filled with “ideologically motivated extremists.” Just contrast the tone of the first three paragraphs above with the fourth and most telling one:
“DHS does not have any information to indicate a specific, credible plot,” it said.
The Usurpers, fear-mongers without equal, propagandized the United States into a state of hysteria we never even approached in wartime…and it’s rebounded on them. Now they’re the ones who are afraid. Yet they can’t even point to a credible threat!
In part, it’s because they know what they deserve. But it’s unlikely to be what they’ll get. Given their smashing success at taking control of the nation’s electoral mechanisms, it’s even unlikely that their Reign of Terror will get them unseated electorally.
But fear is often useful. Their fear can be useful to us.
In the days leading up to the Biden inaugural, the nation’s capital has been turned into an occupied military zone like Baghdad. Armed troops authorized to use lethal force are manning checkpoints to enter and leave downtown Washington, D.C. Green Zone and Red Zone perimeters have been established. Several bridges into the city from neighboring Virginia are scheduled to be closed next week for the inaugural.
The more fearful a regime becomes of its subjects, the less control it has. It must separate itself from those peons, for its own safety’s sake. Political power grows more difficult to wield as the distance increases between ruler and subject.
Some ‘well known’ talking head goes out to some regional disaster, and tries walking around in ankle deep water again, and gets decapitated live on TV by a .338 Lapua Magnum hollow-point, along with his whole crew….
Or someone seals the doors to a well-known senator’s exclusive house at oh-dark early, and then throws copious amounts of Molotovs through the windows, burning them alive….
Then there’s always just the “random walks up to someone and gets shot in the face” completely randomly…like in NYC it happens all the time Even with security cameras, dude’ll be walking down the street casually, and all-of-a-sudden, another guy walking towards him whips out a gat, and does a 3 second mag dump, and is never found or caught.
Wolfgang Schmidt was seated in Berlin’s 1,200-foot-high TV tower, one of the few remaining landmarks left from the former East Germany. Peering out over the city that lived in fear when the communist party ruled it, he pondered the magnitude of domestic spying in the United States under the Obama administration. A smile spread across his face.
“You know, for us, this would have been a dream come true,” he said, recalling the days when he was a lieutenant colonel in the defunct communist country’s secret police, the Stasi.
In those days, his department was limited to tapping 40 phones at a time, he recalled. Decide to spy on a new victim and an old one had to be dropped, because of a lack of equipment. He finds breathtaking the idea that the U.S. government receives daily reports on the cellphone usage of millions of Americans and can monitor the Internet traffic of millions more.
“So much information, on so many people,” he said.
This is actually good news. The Usurpers are drowning in data. No power on Earth could sift through it swiftly enough to make it useful. Yes, they try, but a genuine threat to them could evade detection by a wide variety of methods. There are codes, ciphers, and concealment techniques that fiercely resist adverse analysis. Look into “one-time pads” and “steganography.”
Let the Usurpers be the fearful ones. The rest of us should relax a bit – yes, about the Chinese Virus, but about many other things as well. For the title question of this piece will always evoke contrasting responses:
Keep a portable car-starter/backup electricity source available – these are multi-purpose, and, yes, I have tested them out. They work as advertised, and will run your amateur radio, as well. Get one that can handle 12-volt needs. The others won’t cut it in emergencies. And, keep them fully charged, when you DO have power.
Buy the GMRS radios – get a 2-4 pack – you will want to be able to hand them out to trusted close-by friends and neighbors. Talk to your neighborhood association about buying some, and using them in neighborhood patrols/practice. Normally, I don’t like giving Walmart my money, but having a local source is important, too.
For those with children, strongly consider taking them into homeschool mode. It’s safer for the whole family, and it gives you the opportunity to teach them useful skills.
Short-term? Patriots would be advised against coming to DC again, to protest. Biden’s people are just LOOKING for an excuse to shed blood. Tulsi Gabbard is warning of this already, and she is not wrong. (We need to covertly court her – she is both electable, and reachable – well, a hell of a lot better than a lot of the RINOs).
Rather, work locally:
Border communities, work with the Sheriff’s departments to become deputized, and plan on putting in some volunteer hours (also, start raising money to fund the department – a small amount will go a long way, locally).
At the state level, get assistance from the National Guard (in many of those states, the Guard has already been recalled from Washington).
Pass laws against hiring illegals. Make it a felony conviction to repeat that offense.
Get familiar with the RICO laws, and consider taking the factories or other facilities of those guilty of employment of illegals – it could be a presumptive attack.
Get legislators on board with state laws against employers putting those without E-Check-type verification to work – put HARSH penalties in the form of fines, and felonies for those doing the hiring. Make them have to pony up for lawyers. Authorize the deputies to raid the places doing this, and shut them down for the day.
Name them and shame them – put the photos of the offenders – those at the executive and board level – into the media. Kick them off the boards of charities, take away their wives’ little perks socially, and bring it home to them.
Organize local protests of social events that have those people at them. Make them look like the un-American scum they are. The Left made this a fair tactic – go Alinsky on them.
This next part is going to be difficult. It’s NOT to openly call for rebellion/insurrection, but to point out the abuses that the government is committing.
We have to forthrightly raise our voices at the wrongs, while refraining from any hint of violence. Let our listeners/readers draw their own conclusions.
It’s a fence that we walk – both to plainly point out the Constitutional abuses, assaults against Americans, and Leftist-approved violations of the human spirit.
While, at the same time, preparing for the worst case scenario.
We are under siege. At the same time, we have to act (openly) as though we are not. We have to resist the abuses, while NOT giving them an excuse to commit slaughter upon Americans.
I don’t know how to keep on that edge. It’s likely that this will turn kinetic at some point – I hope not. I’d like to think that even the Leftist-affiliated Democrats will come to their senses before that point.
But, while I’m hopeful, I’m not confident.
Be a (formerly known as) Boy Scout – Be Prepared. Also, thrifty, loyal, reverent, and all that other stuff.
I am having no such problem, no matter which of my four browsers (Edge, Firefox, Brave, Dissenter) I use to display the site. The problem might be on your end.
How wide, in pixels, is your monitor? The site’s “container,” imposed on it by WordPress, is 1440 pixels wide. If your monitor is narrower than that, the problem might lie in that alone.
Power concedes nothing without demand. It never did, and it never will. Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they have been resisted with either words or blows, or with both. – Frederick Douglass
Earth’s population had been stabilized, about the middle of the twenty-first century, at eighteen billion. The Fertility Board, a subsection of the United Nations, made and enforced the birth control laws. For more than half a thousand years those laws had remained the same: two children to a couple, subject to the judgment of the Fertility Board. The Board decided who might be a parent how many times. The Board might award extra children to one couple, deny any children at all to another, all on the basis of desirable or undesirable genes.
“Incredible,” said the kzin.
“Why? Things were getting pretty tanj crowded, with eighteen billion people trapped in a primitive technology.”
“If the Patriarchy tried to force such a law on kzinti, we would exterminate the Patriarchy for its insolence.”
What we’ve allowed governments to get away with is a great part of our current problem. Yes, the Usurper Administration is the acme of corruption and oppression – in American terms, anyway – but it’s not as if there were no precedents.
Parents once understood the principle involved. Disobedience once allowed creates a precedent: “You didn’t object the last time!” It’s hard enough to counter it when it’s uttered by your teenage kid. It has even more force when invoked by legislators. And the number of times we’ve allowed the federal government to go beyond its Constitutional bounds is beyond my ability to count.
The worst of the consequences has been the mobilization of a substantial portion of the populate – the Takers and Fakers – against the Makers. Political polarization before this day was founded on differences in approach to problems we all agreed upon. Today it proceeds from differences in fundamentals: individual rights, the constraint of non-political evils, and the limits of America’s responsibilities to non-Americans.
What’s that you say? You’re a good person? You don’t want anything that’s not yours by right? I shan’t argue. You could be right. But then, you’re a mere expository fiction, a rhetorical convenience. But hearken to this: There are a lot of not-good people out there. People who believe they can do essentially whatever they want to you, as long as the government does it for them. They’d rather not wield the guns themselves, but apart from that…
Darleen Click’s essay on not trusting the Democrats is much on my mind this morning. Give it a look. Then have a gander at this old piece of mine and reflect on how hard it has become to trust anyone you don’t know personally. What’s their agenda? What do they want from me? are the questions uppermost in millions of Americans’ minds today. The answers are generally unpleasant, when there are answers to be had.
Present trends continuing essentially unmodified, we are entering an era of distrust by default. To extend your trust to another, such that you will routinely rely on him in word and deed, will demand of you an unprecedented degree of personal knowledge – a degree of intimacy that would astonish our forebears. Yet it’s entirely reasonable. Dark forces are at work on him, you know. They offer him rewards for betraying your confidences. And while it’s not the case that “every man has his price,” quite a lot of people do – and it can prove to be lower than you might think.
Beware!
Beware those who promote fear.
Beware those who shout Emergency! to deny you time to think.
Beware your own weakness before the temptation to profit at another’s expense by betraying him to those who wish him harm.
Beware above all other things the impulse to evade the judgment of your conscience in the oldest and most contemptible of all evasions:
Recall this political convulsion from more than a century ago:
[T]he Republicans, in the early 1890s, led by Ohio Republicans William McKinley and Marc Hanna, launched a shrewd campaign of reconstruction. In particular, in state after state, they ditched the prohibitionists, who were becoming an embarrassment and losing the Republicans large numbers of German Lutheran votes. Also, they modified their hostility to immigration. By the mid-1890s, the Republicans had moved rapidly toward the center, toward fuzzing over their political pietism.
In the meanwhile, an upheaval was beginning to occur in the Democratic Party. The South, by now a one-party Democratic region, was having its own pietism transformed by the 1890s. Quiet pietists were now becoming evangelical, and Southern Protestant organizations began to call for prohibition. Then the new, sparsely settled Mountain states, many of them with silver mines, were also largely pietist. Moreover, a power vacuum, which would ordinarily have been temporary, had been created in the national Democratic Party. Poor Grover Cleveland, a hard-money laissez-faire Democrat, was blamed for the Panic of 1893, and many leading Cleveland Democrats lost their gubernatorial and senatorial posts in the 1894 elections. The Cleveland Democrats were temporarily weak, and the Southern-Mountain coalition was ready to hand. Seizing his opportunity, William Jennings Bryan and his pietist coalition seized control of the Democratic Party at the momentous convention of 1896. The Democratic Party was never to be the same again.
The Catholics, Lutherans, and the laissez-faire Cleveland Democrats were in mortal shock. The “party of our fathers” was lost. The Republicans, who had been moderating their stance anyway, saw the opportunity of a lifetime. At the Republican convention, Rep. Henry Cabot Lodge, representing the Morgans and the pro-gold standard Boston financial interests, told McKinley and Hanna: Pledge yourself to the gold standard–the basic Cleveland economic issue—and drop your silverite and greenback tendencies, and we will all back you. Refuse, and we will support Bryan or a third party. McKinley struck the deal, and from then on, the Republicans, in 19th-century terms, were a centrist party. Their principles were now high tariffs and the gold standard, and prohibition was quietly forgotten….
The election of 1896 inaugurated the fourth party system in America. From a third party system of closely fought, seesawing races between a pietist/statist Republican vs. a liturgical/libertarian Democratic Party, the fourth party system consisted of a majority centrist Republican party as against a minority pietist Democratic party. After a few years, the Democrats lost their pietist nature, and they too became a centrist, though usually minority party, with a moderately statist ideology scarcely distinguishable from the Republicans. So the fourth party system went until 1932.
Yes, things were different then. But be aware, even so, that there have been dramatic political upheavals, amounting to the total transformation of partisanship in its entirety, on three occasions in American history. It can happen again, whether through the transformation of one of the “major” parties or through the emergence of a new, vital third party that commands majority sentiment in one or a few key issues, as in 1856.
I’ve always liked Sarah A. Hoyt. Discovered her around – I don’t know – maybe 5 years or so ago. She’s a very different type of person – much more focused about her writing. More cosmopolitan, more educated.
And, for the love of God, whatever you do, do NOT click on the related links below the posts. You will be sucked into a fascinating and strangely compelling Black Hole, from which you will emerge hours later, hungry, needing to go to the bathroom, and having no idea where the time went.
The stories about poor facilities, disregard for their sanitation/food/hydration needs, as well as the act of kicking them out of the Capitol building (the one that they were supposedly brought to Washington to guard), have had their effect. That, on top of total disregard for the risk of COVID in such close units, has led some states to pull the plug.
Some of the governors have spine, and concern about the uses to which their members are put. That includes:
Squirming around, finding a comfortable position for my seat in the blog.
It’s looking good. Of course, I’ve long used WordPress on Right As Usual and other blogs over the years (The Declination, for a time).
Let the following picture give you hope for the Not-Left’s success. And, more than a little fear that the American People let him get close enough to winning to be able to Cheat His Way In.
There’s a legend of sorts about the Federal Music Project (FMP), a subdepartment of the Works Progress Administration of FDR’s New Deal. That legend holds that many of the songs that became popular during that era were actually commissioned by the FMP – i.e., their composers were paid to compose popular songs. It could be true. Consider these titles:
All these songs were composed and became popular during the Depression years. There were others, of course, but these are the ones I can remember offhand. (No, I wasn’t alive then, but my father was, and he used to hum all of the above until Hell wouldn’t have them.) I’m not sure whether they were FMP-funded tunes, but their association with those years is strong.
One of my more unusual college classmates was addicted to several of the above songs. He had a habit of bursting into one or another of them in public, and regardless of the circumstances. It made the rest of us consider him a trifle odd…not the sort of bloke who’d enjoy a Led Zeppelin concert, don’t y’know. But then, his favorite band was Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians, so he probably didn’t give a damn about the tastes that prevailed among the rest of our generation.
Considering the tremendous effort the Usurper Administration is putting into returning America to the conditions that prevailed during the Great Depression, it wouldn’t surprise me if Depression-era songs were to experience a renewed popularity. In fact, just this morning I woke up with “Red Red Robin” playing in my head. Not a pleasant awakening, I must tell you…especially as the clock read 2:15 AM, an early arising hour even for your humble Curmudgeon. But then, I probably would have enjoyed the experience more were it not for the Newfoundland puppy (at ten months of age, well over 100 pounds) drooling into my left ear at the same moment.
Bread lines and soup kitchens…25% unemployment…indigents with their hats out on every corner…gangland warfare and blood running in the gutters…hairy nuisances in sandwich boards proclaiming that “the end is near”…
The world has been taught to scoff at that which it cannot see, hear, and touch. It has paid a heavy price for its scoffing. I trust I need not enumerate the many tragedies men have inflicted on one another, as faith has retreated and secular humanism, with its innate arrogance and vaulting ambition, has advanced to fill the void.
Matthew Arnold captured it in verse of crystalline brilliance:
The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
But while the Sea of Faith has retreated…or has been pushed back by overweening human pride…it has not vanished utterly. The divine Immanence still manifests to those who are willing to believe what they see and hear…even if no one else can see or hear it.
In 1917, World War I was raging across the length and breadth of Europe. Millions had already died; millions more would follow. The flower of European manhood would fall to the war and to the influenza pandemic that followed. Russia had fallen to Communism, with consequences that would impoverish and oppress three generations. The faith of the Old World had taken a terrible blow. For many, it seemed an illusion the war had disproved.
On May 13th, 1917, at noon local time in Fatima, Portugal, Lucia dos Santos, Jacinta Marto, and Francisco Marto, three shepherd children innocent in every sense, were granted a vision of the Blessed Virgin Mary. This was the beginning of what is known today as the Miracle of Fatima: a series of Marian apparitions, each of which occurred on the 13th day of the calendar month. It culminated on October 13 with the Miracle of the Sun, a supernatural event witnessed by some 70,000 persons in which the Sun seemed to gyrate, dance across the sky, and as its finale dive menacingly near to the earth.
It happened. It was not mass hypnosis, nor mass hallucination, nor some kind of enormous hoax. At Fatima, Portugal on October 13, 1917, seventy thousand onlookers witnessed what could only have been a manifestation of divine power: a miracle.
The Miracle of Fatima brought millions to the Faith, and renewed the Faith in millions who had fallen away. God does this sort of thing when the world slips perilously close to the edge of the Great Abyss. And note: He doesn’t deliver it to kings or premiers, but to the lowest and humblest of our kind.
There have been other miracles. Many have attracted scoffers certain that they could prove that nothing miraculous – that is, nothing inexplicable by what we think are the laws of nature – had occurred. But many alleged miracles have withstood every test the scoffers have rained on them. Including Fatima.
The Miracle of Fatima is now more than a century in the past. Yet it continues to inspire men to faith…and to works of art and drama. Including producer-directors Ian and Dominic Higgins, who made of it a movie of exceptional beauty and emotion.
See The 13th Day. I just did, and I promise you won’t regret it. It’s available on DVD from Amazon, or directly from Ignatius Press.
Greetings, liberty lovers! Mike from Ye Olde Cold Fury websty here, welcoming one and all to the new incarnation of your Curmudgeon Emeritus’s humble blog, Liberty’s Torch. As you probably know, Francis was concerned about his future prospects as a Right Wing White Supremacist Nazi Death Beast on Google-owned Blogspot; we constructed this joint to help him refugee on out of there before the infamous boxcars were dispatched.
So here we all are. Hope you’ll enjoy your stay. As always, do feel free to alert us to any problems or malfunctions that may crop up. There’s sure to be a few of ’em; after nearly twenty years of doing this stuff, I’ve learned that a big part of the whole process is an almighty Bug Hunt at the fag-end of it. Not to worry, we’ll get ’em all squashed.
Consider this the penultimate function-test post before taking the new site live—actually more of a check to see whether my third-party posting software is going to play nice with the new install than it is of the site itself. And then: on with the show!