Referring my previous essay, Teretia asks:
Do you have much hope that we will accomplish your last sentence? Or are we fighting the long defeat?
The last sentence to which this refers is the observation that when war comes upon you, the only options are to fight, or to surrender. We should fight because we have so much to fight for.
To quote a better man than I:
Actually I am a Christian and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat’- though it contains (and in a legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory.”
–Letter to Amy Ronald , 15 December 1956
As the Bard of Oxford says, all of history is a long defeat, But the end is not entropy, by victory and joy and power beyond all words to express and vision to imagine. What war, what childbirth, what worthy act is not this way? Before joy, sorrow; before triumph, loss; before the harvest, the plowing and sowing.
I did not say erenow, so let me add that there is, of course, a third alternative to war and submission. If one’s philosophy is as devoted absolutely and without exception to insolent and utter falsehood in thought and word and deed as is Political Correctness, the remaining alternative to deny the truth to yourself and to others for so long as one finds victims willing to help one maintain that illusion, and bear the costs of one’s delirium.
And this submission by self deception is worse that surrender, since it lacks even the dignity which slaves and dhimmi keep, for defeat and death come as an unexpected shock, and as a shattering of one’s shallow yet precious world of defiant, neurotic make-shift make-believe. And all the children and students who trusted the Politically Correct make-believe of their leaders and heroes are betrayed by that very trust to their bonds and stripes and chains and grinding humiliation and shame.
Political Correctness is cultural Marxism, the belief that all human interactions are nothing but the exploitation of the weak by the oppressor, and that all human ills are solved by the elimination of the thoughts and words and actions of the oppressor. Political Correctness cannot criticize, and cannot think critically, about any group that has achieved the divine status of victimhood. Victims, in the thinking of this cult, are graced with the charism of infallibility, and all their pronouncement are truth it is sin to question. Unfortunately, when a group like the Jihadists, who are violent, international, organized, well funded, sadistic and ruthless and barbaric, are elevated to divine victim status, the PC code allows no demotion back to mortal status. As did the bronze-wheeled and gigantic idol called Juggernaut to his idolators, the Political Correctoids are trampled by their fetishes.
Myself, I see no way to defeat the military and terrorist arm of the Jihad absent a spiritual victory, that is, acts which will restore civilizational confidence to us, and rob their dark and crooked civilization of its faith in itself and its destiny.
That is what defeated Communism, which is why the Soviet Empire collapsed without shot fired. Odd as this sounds, that is what defeated Nazism also. I do not mean the allied military did not defeat the Axis military with unthinkable sacrifice of a generation of men and treasure.
I mean the idea of Nazism was discredited, so that even among campus intellectuals and Hollywood fops, the idea of racial superiority has no purchase, no traction. (Although Margaret Sanger’s Planned Parenthood is carrying out an effective genocide on a case by case basis, by convincing inner city blacks to kill their children.) The people who love and follow Nazi ideals the most closely, the Politically Correct Statists or Leftists, use the word ‘Nazi’ now as a swear word, merely to denigrate those freedom loving small-r republicans and small-d democrats who obliterated that particular form of totalitarianism. If an idea is used by its advocates as a smear against their enemies, it is a bankrupt idea. Nazism will never rise again.
Nazism made the mistake of making particular claims that were particularly disprovable. The Third Reich did not last a thousand years. The Aryan Race was not a scientific fact. It is not in Darwinian competition with other races, and it was not a master race able by its mystical unity with folk and homeland able to overcome inferior Slavic and Gallic and Mongrel races from Russia, Western Europe, America. It promised military victory and glory in this world. The Third Reich was broken. Its promises were shown false.
Communism fell but was not discredited. It is ailing, but still alive, in China, Cuba, and in American Campuses. However, it is fundamentally a parasitic idea, because communism requires some nearly friendly democracies to fund and sustain it. The genius of Ronald Reagan was to recognize this simple fact, and to cut off the aid and supplies the West suicidally fed to Stalin. His Holiness the Pope and the Polish union organizer Lech Walesa robbed the Reds of their main talking points, their spiritual strength.
Because communism made the blunder of also promising wealth and equality, utopia and glory in this world. After decade upon decade of those promises being shown hollow, and Communism being shown able to produce only mounds upon mounds of corpses, the spirit of Communism broke.
Mohammedanism is wiser than either of these previous foes of Christendom. It promises its followers paradise in the next world, seventy-two virgins, and revenge against the Jews on whom all blame in earth and heaven is laid. The promise cannot be shown false, because it is a close parallel, I am tempted to call it a satanic and mocking parallel, to the promises of Christ. Those who yearn for things of the spirit cannot be lured or deterred by worldly things.
The idea of luring the faithful Mohammedan into a middle-class civil society with the luxuries of modern life has a certain surface feasibility.
But the detriments of modern life do not allure. Each Moslem father rightly fears his daughter will dress like Brittany Spears, or (which is the same thing) like a streetwalker, and will talk like Sandra Fluke, not merely unashamed of indiscriminate amateur harlotry, but demanding both approval for her wanton acts, and funds to pay for it, and next funds to kill his grandchild in the womb; and he fears his son will talk like Dan Savage, not merely unashamed of indiscriminate unnatural acts, but demanding both approval and funds to pay for whatever medications may be needed to assuage the various venereal disease which accompany such depravity.
On an less sickening level, the faithful Moslem may also fear, and rightly so, the degeneration of simpler virtues like honesty and hospitality, courage and war and faith in kinsfolk, which modernity and its mobility treated (until the Great War) indifferently, and then (during the Cold War) with positive and malign hostility.
Talk to your grandparents, if you doubt me. Men stopped keeping their word, then stopped thinking they ought, and then no longer knew anyone who even talked of such things.
Or the faithful Moslem may look at the soaring minarets and grim domes looming over the lands his ancestors conquered, and see the beauty of the geometric tracery reciting verses from holy books adorning these fanes, and compare that to the sheer mind numbing overwhelming ugliness of the West, in whose art museum, the most sacred symbol of the Western Lands, a crucifix, is dipped in the urine of Andres Serrano.
And he might rightly say that he and his people tried modernization, they tried Westernization, but, unlike the Soviet efforts, they failed and failed miserably. Wealth and peace and prosperity did not come.
From the Paynim point of view, the freedom of free market representative democracy seem to him as hollow as the promises of communism and Nazism seem to us. What can he do but attack, and send his children to commit suicide in grotesque despair against the superior civilization?
The idea that all men desire wealth, freedom and happiness and therefore all men desire modern democracy is false. For here are societies who tried for a generation to imitate modern democracy, and only found themselves deeper in tribalism and tyranny and profound unhappiness of anarchy and civil war. The wealth promised by modern industrialization did not come. Hand outs from the West turned them into dependents and serfs.
Their hatred and disgust with the West is not irrational. They cannot be lured to embrace our way of life, our fine cars and fine houses and fine whores and finer sodomites and expensive drugs and cheap televisions, because this stuff is glitter and fool’s gold. It is the gifts of Oberon that returns to yellow leaves at dawn. We cannot give them wealth: it turns to rubbish in their hands.
According to what I’ve read — and I leave the assessment of the matter to those better versed in the history of the Middle East — the political theory behind the modern Jihad is entirely Western in origin and practice, inspired by the Nazi methods. It is cell based conspiracy of terror and law-war, the attempt to disintegrate the superior civilization using its own psychological weaknesses, limitations and scruples.It takes it cues from Communism and uses their tried and true and very successful methods.
They differ from communism in that there is no large military power at their beck and call. However, in a modern interconnected world, one unwilling to identify enemies as enemies, nor to place restrictions on the movements of men, money and arms across international borders, military power is not needed. A squad of men armed with boxcutters and the angry soul-destroying faith of heretics, and camouflaged by a cooperative Political Correctness, can slay thousands and tens of thousand. What need have they of military power? The strategy is psychological. The unannounced and cowardly ambushes are indiscriminate, directed against innocent civilians, bystanders, and purely symbolic targets without military value.
If it were not for the Left and their Fifth Column in the press, the enemy would have no microphone from which to spread their terror, and the Left would have no platform from which they apologize and bow and whine and coward before these militarily insignificant but spiritually enormous foes, and encourage them, and urge them on, and promise them victory.
(Ah? Do you think the West did not promise them victory? The leader of the free world just told them that the future does not belong to us. Since I consider it an honor and a duty to slander their false prophet, I cannot interpret Mr Obama’s comments as other than craven and disloyal.)
Yes, I called them enormous. You cannot beat faith, even faith in the devilish mockery of God called Allah, with a shallow vacuum of faith. Our current society is a vacuum. Our faith in God is weak, is openly mocked, and indeed by some few fools is blamed for acts of terror like the very ones which currently oppress us. As if Christianity were the same as its opposite, Mohammedanism.
As long as we attempt to pacify the foe with promises that they can be wealthy and shallow and empty like us, with our broken families and our contemptible self hatred, they will sense our weakness, and be encouraged to the attack.
To eliminate this pacification, we must shame into silence the Political Correctness, punish with both formal and informal sanctions, abolish their hold over the minds of the young. Without the enthusiastic aid and assistance of Leftists here and abroad, the violent Jihadists would be little more than a gang of pirates and thugs, too fearful of the confident military hyperpower of America to stir from their holes and caves.
However, Political Correctness is both deeply entrenched and precisely and perfectly evolved to act as a parasite on our civilization, perhaps to the point where it cannot be eliminated without damaging the host.
Nowhere do I see the cultural confidence or clarity of vision needed to lead a crusade against the Cultural Marxism called Political Correctness. Just this very day on the radio, I heard a practicing Catholic say in public that the question of abortion and contraception was a matter for the private conscience, which no Pope nor Priest nor General Council, no Apostle and no Church, and apparently no God has the right to guide. I sat with my mouth agape and my heart filled with fear and rage, wondering how in the world this man’s bishop did not excommunicate him.
If the Catholic Church, that most serious and hoary and well organized form of organized religion on the planet, is not serious enough and organized enough to discipline its children in the face of Politically Correct bullshit, where shall we look for guidance? We Christians are meant to salt the meat of the Earth, to preserve it from decay and make her able to sustain life, and we are meant to be light to the benightened and frightened and sin-blinded. But if the salt has lost its savor, how shall it be flavored? If the light is hid, what shall it illume?
The West will not have the strength to face Jihad until and unless it recovers its Christian faith. That cannot happen until and unless Political Correctness is utterly broken in spirit, broke in funds, humiliate, laughed out of existence, cursed, scorned, and forgotten save as a warning tale to frighten children.
I do not believe such a thing is likely. It may not be possible. Political Correctness is evil, confidence, ruthless, conscious-less, highly adaptive, and highly expert at using our laws and customs to disarm attacks both legal and verbal against its depredations.
The law is on its side. The political parties are on its side, the Democrats openly, the Republicans reluctantly.
The mass media, the press, and the entertainment industry that both reflects and shapes the mood and opinion of the common man, the powerful and subtle instrument of propaganda ever devised, are in their hands and they are expert at operating the engines of deception.
The academia are on its side: men of ordinary learning and prudence face evil geniuses of sophomoric idiocy. (And do not ask me how they can be geniuses and idiotic at the same time. No doubt it is special gift of Azathoth, their tenebrous god, which renders them immune from the law of non-contradiction).
Every worldly gift is on their side. On the other hand, if God is with us, who can be against us?
Let us not be less than the fierce and idolatrous Norseman, whose highest hope was to die in battle that he might live again in the Final Battle. He foretold that the dim and stupid giants of frost from the north and the raging giants of fire from the south, the world serpent shattering the circle of Midgard and the chaos world cracking the sky dome with its ravenous jaws, would assault the last home of gods and men, and those worthy few, oh so few, mortals would be called when wounded, one-eyed Odin, and wounded one-handed Tyr limped to their battered and cracking walls of gold, Frayer unready and without his great sword, then Hiemdall doomed to die would sound the final blast. Oh, the pagan yearned to fight alongside the gods and offer the giants defiance, if though it spelled utmost doom and the twilight of the gods from which no dawn could ever rise again.
If with such courage they war and welcomed death, then how much more should we, unashamed and singing, go to crusade and martyrdom, having the gift of hope no pagan knows, and the extravagant promises of Christ?
Christian saints can loose all battles, but we can never lose the war.
Against the crooked men at home and the crooked swords of Asia, loosen your longswords in their scabbards, and raise the sign in which we conquer. DEUS VULT!
The bitter harvest of the empty platitudes of political correctness is a bumper crop. Under the weight of all that bitter fruit is the student, realizing he’s been lied to, burdened with debt that can’t be repaid, decreed with a worthless degree, unskilled, broke, living at home (this is my daughter, in fact). Meanwhile, he sees the teachers, safely hidden from the reality they don’t believe, tenured, anchored in a very expensive educational amusement park, never tasting the rancid fruit they’ve sowed. There is a clarifying moment in every man’s life, and either they will turn on those who lied to them, or they will turn on those who have made it in life without having the millstone of a worthless college diploma hanging round their necks, or they will turn on the government, and follow an even crueler master. I hope they will gather up what is left of their shattered dignity and see PC as the spiritual rot it is and turn to God. I have a feeling, though, because they were never taught to think rationally, they will react like animals, unreasoning and unreasonable.
Dear Mr. Wright:
I absolutely agree with your analysis of Political Correctness and Mohammedan Jihadism, and the threat we face from them. Political Correctness is the cancer rotting out the US and the West. And our own awful president, Barry Obama, is a perfect and disgraceful example of that cancer.
Just one tiny quibble. Shouldn’t you include “small m’ monarchists along with the small r republicans/democrats who helped to break and defeat Nazism and Communism? Christianity is willing to adapt to all forms of government which does not crush the human spirit or claim to be God or like God. Limited or constitutional monarchies also have their place.
And of course, all true Tolkienians knows where the “long defeat” comes from! I mean Galadriel’s words to Frodo at Lothlorien.
Sincerely, Sean M. Brooks
I would be happy to add Monarchists, big or small, to stand shoulder to shoulder against those mutual enemies of civilization and Christendom, the idolaters of Mahound called Jihadists and the idolators of the Totalitarians state called Statists. I welcome all men of good will. For better or worse (and, as an American, I think it largely for the better) the totalitarian national monarchies of the Sixteenth Century have passed away forever, as discredited and incredible to the modern mind as Communism and Nazism.
Back when Imperium still had power to persuade the human spirit, the evildoers all called themselves “Caesar” or “Kaiser” or “Czar.” If Monarchy still had power to persuade the human spirit, all the evildoers of the Earth would be calling themselves “The Most Holy Christian Kingdom of Russia, etc.” instead of “The People’s Democratic Republic of Russia, etc.”
Dear Mr. Wright:
A slightly better analogy would be to the “People’s Republic of China” or the “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea” (North Korea). Post Soviet Russia seems to have become an ordinary, if nasty, despotism.
And monarchies, whether large or small, may again be common. Esp. when we finally get off this rock and start colonizing other worlds. New nations and societies will arise and some of them are as likely to be monarchies as republics.
My dread is that Political Correctness and jihadist Mohammedanism will, in some what different ways, prevent us from getting off Earth.
Sincerely, Sean M. Brooks
If had sunk all the money spent on Mr Obama’s utterly meaningless and pointless ‘stimulus package’ on the space program, we could have bought an Orion-drive style starship by now, or a moon colony. For that matter, if we had merely piled all the money up in a column out of the atmosphere, we could have reached the moon to found the colony. Of course, all the forests of the world could not have been hewn down fast enough to print up that many greenbacks.
Dear Mr. Wright:
I absolutely agree! Even a small percentage of all the trillions wasted on our futile welfare programs and so called “stimuluses”, devoted to a REAL space program of the kind you outlined, would have vastly paid off by now. I’m so bitterly frustrated by our folly!
Sean M. Brooks
“And monarchies, whether large or small, may again be common. Esp. when we finally get off this rock and start colonizing other worlds. New nations and societies will arise and some of them are as likely to be monarchies as republics.”
Without monarchies, how can there be space princesses?
Q.E.D.
I am awed into silence by your insightful and airtight logic.
Being an American, a natural rebel and sons of rebels, I am less than impressed by most European Monarchs. But the sheer hellish bloodthirstiness, the sadism, the desire to kill people in countless numbers, is only found among the so-called scientific and progressive political movements of the Bloodsoaked Century (as the Twentieth Century shall be called by future historians): the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the National Socialists of Germany, the Fascists of Italy, Imperial Japan, and the various communist hellholes and nation-sized prison camps from Cuba to China to the Soviet Empire.
So Republic are better than Monarchies, but anything is better than modern dictatorships.
“So Republic are better than Monarchies”
Only for a certain peoples that have republican virtues (such as 18C Americans of 5C bc Athenians) otherwise the record of monarchies is far better.
Your comment is ignorant. Of the Monarchs of England, which is one of the more successful and civilized on monarchy, roughly half died in murder and war under the blades of their own kin, or in civil wars. Republics can change administrations peacefully, through the ballot. Monarchs cannot receive a vote a “no confidence” except in the fashion of Brutus against Caesar.
Monarchs can work for certain peoples who have monarchic virtues, such as the British under Victoria. Otherwise their record is like that of the English under Elizabeth I — by which I mean even a queen reigning over England’s golden age and periods of greatest glory and growth to a sea power, was bloody, vicious, oppressive to the true Church, riddled with spies, traitors, informers, incompetent to the point of sadism when it came to ruling conquered lands in Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, and so on.
If you were to condemn direct democracies, as ruled so badly in Athens, or revolutionary governments calling themselves republics, as in France during the Terror, there I will grant you your point. Otherwise, the history of the Roman Republic or the Venetian shines brightly in contrast against all but the best and most enlightened kings and princes.
Hard on the monarchs. The question is, whether it’s better for the country as a whole.
The irony is that by their own account of his life, Muslims admit that he was a false prophet: that he himself said that some things he said were inspired by the Devil, not God. And even though in sharia, a good character is needed to be a witness, it is apparently not needed to be a prophet.
Any chance you have any specific citations I could use? Is this in the Koran or part of Muslim tradition?
Mary is referring to the hadith of the Satanic Verses. Google it, there’s lots of material.
Political correctness makes me think of John 7:24. Men today are so afraid to judge anything that they have no footing at all. It’s like Chesterton says: we need to be free to bind ourselves. Today’s creeds leave us enslaved to the idea that every opinion is equal. Instead, we need men who will stand up and say “this I will do; this I shall not do”. We’re so nuts about not being judgmental when judgment is exactly what’s called for.
LOL. I am using that exact verse on the title page of my next book, SOMEWHITHER. (The bad guys are Babylonian Astrologers, who literally spell the stars, you see).
Looking forward to it, sir.
“The academia are on [PC’s] side: men of ordinary learning and prudence face evil geniuses of sophomoric idiocy. (And do not ask me how they can be geniuses and idiotic at the same time…)”
Dr. Bruce Charlton has an interesting theory about the “clever sillies”, as he branded the highly intelligent – and devoid of common sense – leaders of political correctness. He also implies the demon has a role because PC is so evidently evil. For my part, I don’t know about Azathoth but I would say the root of the problem is Satan’s pride and pretension to self-sufficiency. This is characteristic of highly intelligent people who don’t grasp reality because they are too full of themselves. I was like that for a time, and luckily I am only moderately intelligent, so I had the chance to wake up after a few years of idiocy.
http://medicalhypotheses.blogspot.ca/2009/11/clever-sillies-why-high-iq-lack-common.html
In my case, it took direct divine intervention, and I still and choked with stinking pride.
Mr Wright,
You advocate war against Islam while against Left you advocate Persuasion. Why?
Is the Left more benign towards Christianity?
Has not Left killed far more Christians than Islam ever did?
The Islam leaves considerable freedom to Christians but Left gives no space to the Christianity whatsoever.
Remeber the hundred churches burned in Barcelona in a single day.
The Left will not be persuaded. The disagreement on Personhood can not be resolved by debates.
It would be utmost folly for Christians to play by the Leftist rules, for tribal and nationlist reasons.
This is a remarkably foolish question. The American Left have not committed acts of war and mass murder against American. The Jihadist have.
I do not advocate war against “Islam” but against a political movement that seeks to impose Sharia Law first in the Middle East, and then on as many other lands as it can.
This is also a remarkably foolish question.
Are we talking about the Democrat Party in America? As far as I know, the only time they resorted to war was during the Civil War, when they were trying to protect their particular institution of slavery. Other than that, they indulged and encouraged race riots in the 1960′s.
Are we talking about Napoleon and Hitler and Stalin? I do advocate war against them, both world wars and cold wars.
There is no way I can be misunderstood to this degree. If you wish to ask me a question in the future, please relate your question to some comment I actually made, and if you insist on “interpreting” the comment to alter or reverse its meaning, please write out explicitly what it is you are pretending you think I said, so that I can at least have a notion of what the strawman argument is you are engaged in. Otherwise, I can do nothing else but stand to one side with my hands in my pockets while you furiously engage with dirk and sword against a completely imaginary foe, slicing and stabbing at shadows of your own making.
Islam hasn’t left considerable freedom for Christians, if the current trends are a proper interpretation of its past. Jamie Glazov noted correctly nearly ten years ago that the left and Islamists have joined forces. The left believes it can ‘control’ the Muslim Rage Hordes, while the Rage Hordes will happily use the infidel running dogs and dispose of them when they are no longer useful.
The leftists who believe their own lies the Islam is a peaceful religion of peaceful inner struggle and quest for self-improvement, a peaceful moderate religion that has been hijacked by just an itty bitty minority of ‘extreeeeeemists.’
If Islam gets its way in matters concerning the law, these happy lefties will be the first to lose their heads.
If I may be permitted to ramble in the host’s space, the host said something I find particularly provoking:
I like to think of it in this way: none can thwart the Mind of God.
It is to *this* realization that I gratefully return whenever I feel that the movement of events in the country and the world are about to overtake us all. It was to this realization that I initially returned as a teenager, having flirted with secular-agnosticism. I was unhappy with how the materialist paradigm held no answers to any of my pressing questions: what is my purpose, what is the purpose of the world, and is there any point to all of it? It is to this realization that I owe my continued involvement in my church — born and raised LDS — despite the fact that I am as much a Natural Man as they come, prone to sloth and vulgarity and avarice and lust. Because I believe that we are not just meat machines accidentally here according to the chaotic fizz-bubbling of a billion-year Miller-Urey experiment. I believe there *is* a point to it all. And because I believe this, I believe that all will play out as it should.
Even the baal-worship of PC cannot thwart the Mind of God — much as they mock and deride even the concept of the Lord, or the Christ.
When I feel myself doubting and I begin to worry that PC will win — and that all of civilization will be cast down into meaningless destruction, either at the hands of the Islamists, the Socialists, or due to simple corrosion as a result of sloth — I go back to the central idea of faith: that the universe is an ordered place, that God oversees all of humanity whether humanity chooses to honor that oversight, and that God in His purposes will rectify all things in the Final Judgment.
Now, there may be (has already been?) a great deal of pain and woe along the way. This too may seem overwhelming until we remember that pain and woe are the price of Adam’s Fall from the Garden, and that if we bear the pain and woe knowing that it is not just the randomly futile suffering of a randomly futile existence, then we are honoring God’s wishes for our learning and progression as His spiritual children.
Meanwhile, as the host has noted repeatedly in this space, what the vast PC cult seems to worship — above all other things — is satiation of physical wants and desires. There is nothing more “holy” to the PCist than physical gratification.
If a man is hungry, he must eat. Even if it means from his neighbor’s plate. If he desires to copulate — marriage or no marriage, male or female, underaged or not — he must do this thing. His orgasm is paramount above all else. If the woman in that scenario finds her (resulting?) pregnancy inconvenient or bothersome, she must rid herself of the baby. If either the man or the woman ever experiences cold when (s)he wishes to be warm, heat when (s)he wishes to be cool, thirst when (s)he is without water, or the aches and pains of labor when (s)he wishes to lay about and ripen in the sun, then (s)he is not only justified in moving Heaven and Earth to appease his/her desires, (s)he is entitled to force the issue. To take from those who have obediently built houses on stone and kept oil in their lamps, that they must give up their homes and their lamps and their oil so that the morally corpulent may avoid effort or suffer any degree of privation.
And the morally corpulent are winning the American culture war, no question about it. Just look at how they fawn over Obama — the golden calf — and mock and fear and hiss at the morally-unimpeachable Romney; who built his house upon a rock.
It won’t mean much in the final analysis, though. Again, none can thwart the plans of the Lord. Not PC. Not the Islamists who pervert their conception of God into heinousness and murder. Not the Socialists and Democrats who enshrine abortion and homosexuality and all manner of physical sin.
Christ will return. It is promised. Who can prevent it? And who can stand against the Lamb with merely mortal ambitions or tools?
When the world threatens to consume my hope, I take a big deep breath and remember that it has always been thus. We have always lived in ages of peril, both great and small. Abide it. Work through it. Live as best as you can according to the rules we’ve been given by the Father and the Son. Try to do all of this despite being spat on and mocked and ridiculed and spurned and derided or even chained up, jailed, tortured, and murdered.
The nihilist faces the stark reality of what God has set up for us, and goes infantile: sucking his thumb. All is hopeless.
The man who honors God faces what God has set up for us, and he keeps his wits. Feet on the Earth. Back straight. Eyes on the horizon.
As a faithful Christian, I expect things to get worse before they get better. Whether the Antichrist is literal or figurative, one or many, we are told the great battle of Armageddon is coming.
An aside: Ironic that you denounce PC and yet happily use one of their ugly buzzwords: “(s)he”
As Strunk and Wagnall explain in their definitive book on the correct use of the English language, except when the antecedent is or must be female, use “he.” In grammar as in life, the male embraces the female. In other words, “he” is the accepted and correct pronoun to use when the sex of the antecedent is unknown or indeterminate. We do have a gender-neutral pronoun in English. That pronoun is “he.” We merely happen not to have a special pronoun for males only, so we share it.
This is no more nor less confusing that using he same word “man” for males and “man” for humans. But since no one says “There is a fox or vixen in the henhouse; I hear a dog or bitch barking” I do not see why men should be treated different than most of the animals in our language. (There are some exceptions. “Tom” is used for the male cat and is not shared; but then again cats are supercilious and proud creatures.)
The idea that this somehow offends or excludes the fairer sex is beyond absurd, and well into the territory of laugh-out-loud stupid. If anything, the fact that we men do not have a special pronoun of our own, but must share the pronoun used for use when referring to any person whose sex is unknown or unmentioned, demeans rather than exults us.
But even if it were an insult, the PC vermin should just stomach it like men, without whining. Let them get over their freakish obsession with sex, their neurosis of blaming the innocent, their love of pretending hurt from the harmless, and stop whining.
You see, grammar is not something where this generation gets a vote. There are English speakers today who, having been taught the wrong meaning of the word “he” cannot read an English sentence written in English by the rules of English and understand its meaning. They think sentences that refer to all humans, male and female alike, refer only to males, and that the sentence writer meant to exclude females.
No heir gets to make out his father’s will. Your father decides what you inherit, not you.
John, I am inclined to agree with you, except for the fact that the English spoken and written by the Founders is not precisely the English written and spoken by Shakespeare, nor is it precisely the English written and spoken by 21st century Americans. Language evolves. I don’t mind the effort to do a he/she or a (s)he because it requires no effort. At least not for me. And it reflects a sensibility that does not particularly threaten me. When someone does not do these things I don’t feel inclined or qualified to “correct” them nor would I want to in any case. I elect to write as I write because it suits me. Others will write differently. If ideas are communicated, then I think that’s the main thing which matters most?
What does require effort — and drives me batty at every turn — is keeping a straight face while PCists denounce the rights of the insulters of Mohammed with one breath, then defend Andres Serrano’s right to put crucafixes in urine with the second breath.
One of the reasons I admire your blog is that you see the problem clearly: Western secular intellectuals do not hate all religion equally. They have a particular animus against Christians and, in the case of Israel, Jews. The Christian and the Jew are given special status as Public Enemies. Thus that which offends the Christian and the Jew is right and proper and just and my-oh-my can we please have some more of it!
Nevermind if the denizens of Islamic countries practice heinousness and murder against the innocent, or if they treat their women as second-class citizens to be beaten, raped, and killed at will by men whose true hatred for the female seems astronomical according to Western standards. No. Let’s gin up a fraudulent “War On Women,” with Sandra Fluke as our poster child for infantile statist overreach that destroys the Constitutional protections and separations outlined by the Founders — where religious freedom is concerned.
And that’s just one example of the PC hypocrisy. There are many others. Because all PC cares about is lumping all of humanity into one of two classes: the class of VICTIMS and the class of OPPRESSORS. And you’ve been very excellent about outlining the how and the why of this ridiculous, contradictory situation.
I just wanted to throw in my two cents as a, “Yes, very much!”
Your comment here is most welcome.Your two cents, as far as I am concerned, are as precious as the widow’s mite in the Bible story.
As for PC hypocrisy, my conclusion is that the reason why they indulge in every sort of moral relativism and philosophical convolution is precisely because Logic is the one tyrant they wish to escape. Sane people are loyal to reality. PC are loyal to the unreality principle, the principle that reality is not real unless you agree that it is.
I hesitate to argue the point for fear of giving offense, but my own muleheadedness requires that I point out that your acquiescence to PC in the matter of “(s)he” is something some people find offensive.
Your claim is, in effect, that since language suffers occasional minor changes due to natural processes, adopting a chance in order to promote the politicized worldview and propaganda purposes of the PC is no big deal. But an honest evolution is not the same as a dishonest propaganda technique.
In effect, you are wearing their gang colors. They want innocent bystanders to talk like them so that they seem to be more numerous than they are.
You wrote more words telling me it is no big deal than times you used the offending pronoun. Obviously it is a big deal, since you have absorbed their main axiom of belief: the idea that there is no such thing as right and wrong, or even if there is, you get to choose what the rules of English are.
But you don’t get a vote.
Please don’t take this as a criticism or an insult, but you’ve been PC-ified apparently without your even knowing it. You even phrase your defense in their pseudo-Fruedian terms, as if any criticism is because the critic “feels threatened”. Please note that I refer to Strunk and Waggner (an objective source and authority that supports my argument) and in return you imply that they (or maybe me) “feels threatened” (a cheap ad hominem used to avoid the argument by denigrating the source of the argument.)
They say it is correct and polite to say (s)he, and you believe them. Please don’t believe them: they are liars. You copy their assumptions and patterns of argument. Please don’t follow them.