Not really the end, but at least we have a start. Bill Willingham of Fablesfame announced his personal mission statement on the Big Hollywood blog recently that he would take up arms, or, at least, take up his pen, to reverse the degradation of the American superhero.
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I read that one of my favorite actors has taken his final curtain call. I doted on ‘Number 6’ when I was young.
He was also in ICE STATION ZEBRA, and Disney’s THE SCARECROW, where he played Dr. Syn, the crown-defying smuggler. What a voice that man had!
This is from an obituary on the ‘Big Hollywood’ blog http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/aleigh/2009/01/14/archers-cost-money-use-up-the-irish/
McGoohan … was considered for the role of James Bond, but reportedly declined it for moral reasons. McGoohan was married to the same woman for 57 years, and included in the contract for his first TV series, “Danger Man,” three special clauses: 1) no kissing, 2) each fight had to be different, and 3) his character must always try to use his brains before resorting to a gun.
Myself, I always thought McGoohan would have made a perfect Gilbert Gosseyn, if WORLD OF NULL -A had ever made it to the big screen.
The Map is not the Territory! I am a FREE MAN!
Please see http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/13/arts/television/13hoax.html?_r=1&em
I know one friend of mine, usually an extremely well-informed lady who checks her sources, who thought that Sarah Palin, not Tina Fey, made the joke about her foreign policy experience was that she could see Russia from her house. When I sought to correct my friend, she reacted, not with disbelief, but with rage. (It may or may not be a coincidence that this friend of mine has had several abortions in her life.)
I know another friend who said he voted against Palin because Palin did not get a passport until late in her life: this was the shallowest reason I ever heard for making a judgment about a political candidate. My friend could not name whether Bush, Clinton, Bush, Reagan, or Carter got a passport early or late in life. So it was also a (ahem) "standard" used only for this one judgment.
He also said he was offended that Palin did not know whether Africa was a country or a continent. This seems to have been a hoax. (It may or may not be a coincidence that my friend works for the State Department.) Ironically, he claims to be wary of newspapers, and thinks of himself as ungullible.
Well, if this report is true, then my friend was simply fooled.
My hope is that Sarah Palin run again in 2012, under the banner "Keep Your Change."
This is a reprint of an entry I wrote in 2003. At that time, only two people were reading my journal. One called me provincial, and the other upbraided me for hypocrisy. Typical. Both were younger than I, and neither saw the portrait of himself in my description of my youthful arrogance.
There is a scene in Robert Heinlein’s GLORY ROAD, where the hero, Oscar Gordon, is traveling among barbarians from some outer dimension. Their custom is to share their daughters’ love (or wives’) with traveling heroes for a night or two, in hopes of fathering good stock. Oscar the hero unwittingly offends the custom by refusing the copulate with the daughter of the local lord, his host. For this he is tongue-lashed by the heroine for being provincial, backward, rude and stupid; at some personal risk to himself, he returns to the mansion of the barbarian lord, apologizes manfully, commits orgy, fornicates with gusto, and goes on his way with the heroine on his arm, her eyes shining with admiration. This heroine is named Star; the names of the nice young ladies with whom he ruts are nowhere mentioned.
Even as a youth, I prided myself (and my pride was immoderate when I was young, I am afraid, and may not be moderate now) on being a careful and skeptical thinker. But it was not until I was 41, some three decades after first reading that scene, that I thought, for the first time, there was something wrong with the picture Mr. Heinlein paints.
What if Oscar the hero had fathered a child during his one-night stand? Does a father have no moral obligations running to a child, to love, to cherish, to protect, to see to its upbringing? The mother of Moses sent her babe off in a basket down the river because the soldiers of Pharaoh were coming to kill it; but Oscar here apparently is sending his child down the river because he wishes to enjoy a momentary sexual pleasure with an unnamed woman, and because he does not wish to offend ugly customs of outlandish people.
I look at the perfect face of my own cherubic child, and I wonder, what kind of man would let his child be raised as a bastard by strangers? If the child is a daughter, will she be sent to whore around with other wondering heroes?
If the customs of the land had demanded our hero sacrifice a captive to Tezcatlipoca, would his bitchy girlfriend have brow-beaten him into doing that, too?
The bitchy girlfriend turns out to be an Empress, and she marries the hero. I must laugh. What kind of girl would marry a man (or even give him the time of day) after he has sported with harlots? How did Clytemnestra react when her husband lord Agamemnon come back from the wars, having slept with many a golden slave-girl from Illium? She killed him with an axe in the bath. Compare Heinlein with Aeschylus. Who do you think knows more about how women really act?
For that matter, compare Heinlein with Robert E. Howard. Solomon Kane, puritan adventurer from New England, travels the world slaying troglodytes, vampires and witch-queens descended from the survivors of devil-worshipping Atlantians. He would not take off his hat for a king of Europe or Asia, or bow to an alien idol, even if he might die for his unbending defiance. Who is more the hero?
In a word, I was snookered. Skeptic that I thought I was, it did not occur to me to question the amoral, epicurean and hedonistic philosophy put across by Mr. Heinlein in his books. It seemed so much common sense. I had never stopped to wonder: would Socrates, or Cato of Utica (or Sir Galahad or Kimball Kinnison of the Galactic Patrol, or Frodo Baggins of Bag End) have done what Oscar Gordon did?
I was too young to know, and too arrogant to believe, that hedonism leads to nihilism. It is a dead-end philosophy: a hedonist has no reason to praise temperance; an epicurean has no reason to praise courage; the live-for-today libertine has no use for prudence; man who, like Oscar Gordon, says that all customs are merely arbitrary cultural constructions, and refuses to see the difference between cruelty and civilization, such a man has no sense of justice.
I assure you I was as settled in my beliefs as man can be: I had studied the premises and principles with great skepticism, and subjected the whole structure of philosophy to pitiless logic, and tested and retested every link in my chain of reasoning. But I was inexperienced. Non-Euclidean geometry is also perfectly logical, but only experience can tell you whether or not Euclid’s fifth postulate describes the world we see, or not.
ADDED LATER: ‘Cultural relativism’ or ‘when in Rome, do as the Romans’ is not taken seriously by Heinlein, or anyone else, except in minor manners like courtesy (take off your shoes in a mosque, for example). If it were taken seriously, Heinlein would have written a scene where Oscar Gordon is passing through the Friendly Planet Harmony, run by strict Puritans, and when he tried to kiss a girl, Star would upbraid him and send him back to Cotton Mather and Lord Cromwell for a ducking, which Oscar would endure like a man.
Oscar would then become dispassionate and emotionless on planet Vulcan, and adopt a touchy sense of honor when on planet Klingon, become a duty-bound stoic on planet Romulus, and would sniff spice up his nose and obey the rules of the rigid class system (Faufreluches) when on planet Dune. He wold then practice sodomy when on planet O, for such is the custom there, and admit himself to be a sexual pervert when on planet Gethen, for so he would be there, and practice cannibalism when on planet Tschai, or planet Geta, or even on Mars, for such is the custom in these places. And when in Rome, he would bow to the Pope and kiss his ring, for such is the custom in Rome.
Somehow, I cannot imagine Oscar Gordon doing any of these things.
The fact of the matter is, one cannot be both a cultural relativist and a revolutionary. The revolutionary proposes changing the culture. A cultural realtivist can never propose such a change. What standard could be used? A cultural relativist, were he honest, would hold his own culture to the same standards as a foreign culture, and say that our laws, traditions, and customs cannot be changed or criticized — for if the only yardstick of what is considered right or wrong comes from the culture, well, obviously this applies to Christendom (aka Western Culture) as well.
ADDED MUCH LATER:
One particular unrealistic aspect of the scene in GLORY ROAD is that Star the Sexy Space Babe did not warn or coach Oscar beforehand that he was expected to stud-service the whores and father bastards to be abandoned. Instead, the author makes it clear that having any reservations about performing the mating act with a female with whom one has no intent to mate is so wrongheaded as to need no comment: why OF COURSE Oscar should have known without being told that the rules of biology and romance and ethics were ass-backwards on this planet! It’s utterly obvious!
And if the host sends up a pre-adolescent girl, younger than Mohamed’s child bride, why, you are supposed to commit statutory rape at once, rather than offend the ironclad law of hospitality! And if the host himself had come by at midnight and expected homo-sex, good manners would have demanded you grip your ankles and present your plump buttocks immediately, with no explanations needed beforehand! And you must honor the corpse of the ancestral grandmother by fornicating with the sacred mummy! And then service the sacred totem animal, which, for our clan, is the ewe. And wipe your feet on the mat before entering someone’s house! Didn’t your mother teach you anything?! — or does the rule about "Doing the Romans when in Rome" only apply to sexual deviations that we personally like?
I am not making this up. May sweet Jesus headbut me in the groin with His coronet of thorns if I am making this up. May the beautiful but evil daughter of Ming the Merciless, Princess Aura, lure me into a gladiatorial arena where I have to fight Prince Baron of Arboria on a field of upright possibly radioactive daggers if I am making this up.
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From his 1917 book EUGENICS AND OTHER EVILS: An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State
The wisest thing in the world is to cry out before you are hurt. It is no good to cry out after you are hurt; especially after you are mortally hurt. People talk about the impatience of the populace; but sound historians know that most tyrannies have been possible because men moved too late. It is often essential to resist a tyranny before it exists. It is no answer to say, with a distant optimism, that the scheme is only in the air. A blow from a hatchet can only be parried while it is in the air.
There exists to-day a scheme of action, a school of thought, as collective and unmistakable as any of those by whose grouping alone we can make any outline of history. It is as firm a fact as the Oxford Movement, or the Puritans of the Long Parliament; or the Jansenists; or the Jesuits. It is a thing that can be pointed out; it is a thing that can be discussed; and it is a thing that can still be destroyed. It is called for convenience "Eugenics"; and that it ought to be destroyed I propose to prove in the pages that follow. I know that it means very different things to different people; but that is only because evil always takes advantage of ambiguity. I know it is praised with high professions of idealism and benevolence; with silver-tongued rhetoric about purer motherhood and a happier posterity. But that is only because evil is always flattered, as the Furies were called "The Gracious Ones." I know that it numbers many disciples whose intentions are entirely innocent and humane; and who would be sincerely astonished at my describing it as I do. But that is only because evil always wins through the strength of its splendid dupes; and there has in all ages been a disastrous alliance between abnormal innocence and abnormal sin. Of these who are deceived I shall speak of course as we all do of such instruments; judging them by the good they think they are doing, and not by the evil which they really do.
I merely wish to emphasize the similarity of what Chesterton elsewhere calls "Prussianism" to the schemes of social engineering which disgrace our current political theater of operations: the verbal ambiguity on which the cause must rest has not changed. The abnormal innocence of the splendid dupes has not changed: Stalin coined the term "useful idiots" to define them. The gulf between the good they think they do and the evil they actually do has not changed. The flattery of evil has not changed: look at men who slaughter women and children being called freedom fighters.
Nothing has changed. This is not a trait of one political party or one polis only, but of an eternal evil that can be put to rest either with the heat death of the universe or on the Day of Judgment (take your pick).
I am not sure whether to include the science-fiction-inspired notions of Transhumanism in the category of ‘social engineers’. Part of my uncertainty is due to a lack of conversation with them: I have found myself sort of informally drummed out from the ranks and anathematized from that school of thought. Perhaps I could not pass the religious qualification.
I recall that I proposed that moral character needs must be instilled in whatever post-humans or super-humans Man creates, if these children of men are not to grow up to be devils: this is a theme an alert reader might detect in my book THE GOLDEN AGE. The idea that moral education is the primary duty of a parent to a child, or a parent race to an uplifted or artificial race, provoked heated controversy.
In light of that uncertainty, all I can report is that an unnerving number of the Transhumanists I have had the honor of corresponding with turned out to be pro-socialist, pro-abortion, and antinomian. They lived and moved in the same moral atmosphere as one might scent in an author like Olaf Stapledon, particularly in his remarkable (and, I fear, remarkably risible) book DARKNESS AND LIGHT.
Other transhumanists were libertarians, or New Age mystics, or merely optimists looking forward to the re-engineering of man. A few (very few) of them were weird idolaters of a mechanical Moloch, looking forward to creating a Frankenstein monster, a cross between Magneto and Skynet, to drive homo sap into extinction and erect the shining palace of a superior race on our skeletons.
I feel about Transhumanists sort of the way I feel about Libertarians: when there is a third party in the room, I am willing to close ranks with them against mutual enemies, whom I see as far more dangerous, but when we are alone in the room, I am a skeptic and an opponent.
If you do not know who Fr. Neuhaus is, I suggest you look up some back issues of FIRST THINGS, and find out what a loss the world suffered this day. He has has gone before us, and now walks in the golden gardens of a country of joy.
Fr. Richard John Neuhaus slipped away today, January 8, shortly before 10 o’clock, at the age of seventy-two. He never recovered from the weakness that sent him to the hospital the day after Christmas, caused by a series of side effects from the cancer he was suffering. He lost consciousness Tuesday evening after a collapse in his heart rate, and the next day, in the company of friends, he died.
My tears are not for him—for he knew, all his life, that his Redeemer lives, and he has now been gathered by the Lord in whom he trusted.
I weep, rather for all the rest of us. As a priest, as a writer, as a public leader in so many struggles, and as a friend, no one can take his place. The fabric of life has been torn by his death, and it will not be repaired, for those of us who knew him, until that time when everything is mended and all our tears are wiped away.
Funeral arrangements are still being planned; information about the funeral will be made public shortly. Please accept our thanks for all your prayers and good wishes.
In Deepest Sorrow,
Joseph Bottum
Editor
First Things
I have some reason to believe that Epicureanism (which means pursuit of pleasure for pleasure’s sake), including its most predominant modern social manifestation, the Sexual Revolution (which, intentionally or not, promotes unchastity, late marriage, high divorce rates, and, in general, a discouraging environment for childrearing), is alien to human nature. Despite what teenagers and John Galt types say, we are not meant to live for ourselves alone, and not truly happy when we try.
This article is like something out of a bleak gallows-humor SF dystopia. But it is real:
http://www.wjla.com/news/stories/0109/582097.html
As an Objectivist might say: I swear by my life and my love for it that I am not making this up. Or, as scifi fans might say, may the Shogun of the Dark send a suicide-squadron of biologically-altered albino Human-Plutonian-hybrid ninja-cyborg space-pirate fembots in form-fitting power armor, addicted to psionic spice and trained since childhood in Cthulhian martial arts, use the long-lost Golden Flying Unicycle of Hell technique send death-vibrations through my anterior chakres to make my brain explode into subatomic plasma if I am lying.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/3964683/Marking-in-red-ink-banned-in-case-it-upsets-schoolchildren.html
They are scrapping the traditional method of correcting work because they consider it "confrontational" and "threatening".
Pupils increasingly find that the ticks and crosses on their homework are in more soothing shades like green, blue, pink and yellow or even in pencil
But the opposition to using red ink is now a worldwide trend with recent guidelines to schools in Queensland, Australia warning that the colour can damage students psychologically.
