"The sky is red, dumb ass," or -- humor in Matthew (we found some!)

If you are reading it for the first time in twenty or thirty years, it may strike you as something out of a Seth Rogen movie. Just one small paragraph, seven verses. In fact, let's pretend it is a movie script, and we are millennial hipsters writing it.

***

(Working title: The Sky is Red, Dumb Ass)

Scene: ancient Israel, during the Roman Empire, about the year 30 A.D. The frenzy of Jesus of Nazareth's career is at the height of its -- well, frenzy. He travels about a smallish quadrant of a very small land, mostly staying near the sea of Galilee, preaching, telling the Jews their religious authorities are corrupt (a la James Kirk -- "your Bible is a lie!" though of course, not that exactly), and especially healing people. People being what they are, they mostly come out for that. In droves, in crowds, in throngs. Over and over again we are told "the crowds were so great," "great crowds followed him," "they brought him many" to be cured. Once they are cured they tend to go away. Or he sends them away, perhaps knowing what they are. We don't often hear "and the paralytic stayed and listened to what else he had to say." 

There have also been huge miracles and bizarre sights. He has calmed storms at sea, he has caused a few loaves of bread and fish to be enough to feed thousands, he has walked on water from shore to his disciples on a boat, pitching about in a storm on the sea of Galilee. 

Frequently, after some course of miracles and healings and teachings, the presumably exhausted Jesus goes away by himself somewhere. Usually when he comes back they all climb into a boat and cross "the sea," and the cycle of working the crowds begins again.

As this scene opens, not only is that new cycle beginning, but food and bickering about food is on everyone's mind. (Incidentally we're talking about a world in which hungry men eat grains of wheat off the stalk in a field, or pluck figs off a tree by the road. Memo to casting director, everybody is skinny.) In his most recent fracas with the religious authorities, Jesus has had to answer questions about why his followers don't wash their hands (ritually?) before eating, plus he has had to deal with the Canaanite woman who rebukes him about 'dogs eating the scraps from the table.' Then he feeds another several thousand with a few loaves and fishes.    

***

Dawn on the sea of Galilee. A few minutes of gray coolness, even mist, are left before the heat begins. The boat glides in to the bank, and the disciples splash wearily one by one into the water, to pull it all the way in. (Memo to set director, were there wharves and piers? Did guys just run boats up on to the sand? Is the shore of Kinneret sandy or rocky? Find out.) Jesus also gets out and helps pull. Well, he would. He is the farthest ahead of all of them.  

The last couple guys picking up their stuff from inside the boat, before they get out too, notice that nobody has brought any food. In all the everlasting hubbub that their lives have become, "they had forgotten to bring bread." Or, maybe they had been saving those last few loaves that he just used to feed the crowd. Present are: Simon called Peter, and Andrew (brothers); James and John (also brothers); Philip; Bartholomew; Thomas; Matthew the tax collector; James "the son of Alphaeus;" Thaddeus; Simon "the Cananean;" Judas Iscariot. Jesus.

THADDEUS. (Still in the boat. Rummaging in a bag.) Ohhh ... (Did the disciples ever use oaths? They were, after all, ordinary guys before.)

JAMES SON OF ALPHAEUS. What?

THADDEUS. You're not going to believe this.

SIMON THE CANANEAN. What?

PHILIP. What's the matter?

THADDEUS. Let's just say it's a long walk back around to that bake-shop woman.

SIMON. Are you kidding? We don't have bread?

BARTHOLOMEW (breathless, working in the water). I'd go. She was cute.

JUDAS. (Furious.) Fuck. (Yes, he would say it.)

MATTHEW THE TAX COLLECTOR. (Looking up, knee deep in the water, a rope over his shoulder.) Don't. What is it?

JUDAS. It seems we've forgotten bread, because we're all so brilliant like that. (He jumps over the side, followed by Thaddeus, James son of Alphaeus, Philip, and Simon. The boat is empty. The men heave and push it to shore. One tosses the anchor up on the grass (the sand? The rocks? Find out.) They wring out the hems of their clothes. They would normally gather to sit and eat now. Judas stalks a little away, to get his bearings, to look for a road.)

BARTHOLOMEW (approaches Simon Peter.) We'll have to live on mutual admiration until the next town. We forgot the bread.

SIMON PETER (turning, then grins). At least there's no lack of water. 

ANDREW (the disciples have begun to gather in two knots; Andrew crosses from one to the other, drawing them together). I hear we have ...

JAMES. Yes, yes. Now what?  

JOHN (shrugs). Move on, find a town, buy bread. Or beg it. 

ANDREW. They'll love us.

JUDAS (returning). They might.

PHILIP. They often do by the time we go. 

JESUS (He has been standing a little away. Now he comes toward them, brushing the dirt from his hands). What is it? 

JOHN. Nothing too serious. Just annoying. We forgot bread.

JESUS. (Still slowly brushing his hands. His mind is always working at a different level. Food -- bread -- the Canaanite woman -- scraps for the dogs -- healing -- the sick, the sick, the sick -- why don't you wash your hands? why do you pick grain on the Sabbath? -- the crowds, the crowds -- the sea, the sea -- bread comes from grain, all you need otherwise is water -- but also leavening, yeast -- show us a sign.) Well. (He smiles, absently, a bit grimly.) Rather beware the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees. (He walks a little way off, up the rise toward the road.)     

THADDEUS. I'm sorry, what? 

JAMES. What was that? 

SIMON THE CANANEAN. Do you think he's mad? 

JUDAS. I don't think so. 

JAMES SON OF ALPHEUS. Who would forget bread?

THOMAS. We all forgot it, do you mind? 

SIMON PETER. It's those loaves he used the last time. The second time. That's what we packed for now. 

JOHN. Would you rather he not have fed hungry people? 

SIMON PETER. No. I'm just saying, we're not stupid, that was what we planned. 

JAMES SON OF ALPHEUS. Well then, we should have made adjustments in our plans. Look, what are we, a bunch of women here? Can we move on? 

THOMAS. I agree. I’m starving.

MATTHEW THE TAX COLLECTOR. I agree. Let's go. 

ANDREW. What about the boat -- 

JESUS (Suddenly he is just there, as if they had forgotten about him for years). What is it? 

JUDAS (After a pause). Nothing -- we're sorry we forgot --

JESUS. It's not the bread! You've seen bread. You've seen five thousand people fed with five loaves, you've seen four thousand people fed with seven. You've collected the leftovers yourselves. Have some faith. What I said was, 'Beware the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees.' You know, the powers that be? 

SIMON PETER (actually squinting). You mean ... the leaven...

JOHN. What transforms. A small amount changes everything.

PHILIP. All through the bread.  

JESUS. Yes! 

THOMAS. Makes it what it will be. You can’t unmake bread.

THADDEUS. Makes us what we will be. What we might be.

PHILIP. Their teachings are like leaven, in people.

BARTHOLOMEW. And, going forward ... because we'll meet them again. 

JESUS (Gestures a 'hello, dumb-ass' Yes, not to any one of them, but more to the day in general. 

(They all turn to go, Jesus first with Judas close behind, followed by the rest. As they walk, one disciple quietly explains to another, in snatches and whispers. "He didn't mean the bread. 'Leaven' is teachings, how they work in you like yeast works in dough ...." 

(The straggler is Andrew. Once or twice he looks back at the boat.) 

ANDREW. What about the boat? Should we just leave it? That's not our boat, right? 

They keep walking, and he runs to catch up. 

***

END OF THE SCENE BASED ON THE GOSPEL OF MATTHEW, CHAPTER 16: 5-12.

(Minor note: it’s amazing how often, if this were set in modern times, the characters would have said “Christ” or “Jesus” as a throwaway oath. Frequently had to stop myself from typing it in automatically.) 

Driving to work with Chesterton

Listening to Chesterton's Orthodoxy on disk in the car. So far he seems to be saying that the modern Western world is living in a state of insanity because we are governed by single-subject intellectuals who function as the insane do: they reason perfectly inside their own tiny circles of obsession, but are as untruthful, in day to day living as humans, as lunatics are. We know our modern joke about the man wearing a tin-foil hat. In Chesterton's day they were said to stick straws in their hair. "The madman has reason, and nothing else," Chesterton says.

And this in 1908, when the single-subject intellectuals at least propounded rather meaty codes like "materialism." They at least knew they were objecting to Christianity which, as Chesterton saw, they were glad to use "any stick to beat with." Too meek! Too violent! Unscientific! Uselessly scholastic! Today their great-great-grandchildren (in spirit) know nothing whatever. But they have only to nod their royal heads at the society under their care, to put women in combat and men in women's bathrooms. Just mopping up operations, as it were.

But -- the problem with Chesterton is that after a short while he is so annoying. I tried Napoleon of Notting Hill once, on a Kindle, so perhaps I could not do it justice one tiny screen at a time. At any rate I had to bail quickly. He described two friends walking together. Every so often one friend lay down on his back and waved his arms and legs in the air. Probably the author was on his way to some fine lesson about crazy behavior in public actually being holy, or about how long it takes bystanders to question crazy-holy behavior, or something. This went on for page after page, and it was early in the book. I shut off my Kindle and thought "Chesterton was insane."      

Now with Orthodoxy we have, I am sure, many fine thoughts and lessons, but all done in strings of sing-song paradoxes that just go on and on. "Far from the lion eating the baby, the baby ate the lion." Not exactly that, but very much like it. On and on. I pulled into the parking lot after thirty minutes of this, parked, pulled out the disk from the player and thought, "This guy was mentally a mess." A terrible thing to think of Chesterton -- twice -- the happy and healthy and productive and satisfied. But I couldn't help it. He mentions Nietzsche often, the "God is dead" philosopher who went insane. But what with the sing-song, and the artistically blurred photo of himself on the disk cover, glaring and mustachioed, I thought again -- well sir. I'm sorry but you look a bit like Nietzsche yourself.                                

Rooftop garden

The answer

I think I've discovered the answer to all the nation's problems!

To wit.: return to taxation based on population, not income. This is what the Constitution provided for. (When Progressives got the income tax amendment ratified in 1913, "they won the war," as an old econ. textbook of mine said.) Think of the results: the problem-children regions of the country, the leftist coasts, the ossified Democrat-plantation cities, would bear a fairer share (isn't it delicious?) of the burdens that they are. Especially considering that they attract the bulk of illegal immigrants who are then counted in the census, which ends up giving those regions more votes in the Electoral College, and so eternal power over us poor benighted bill-payers anyway. And we would keep more of our own money.

There. Take it or leave it. Now I'm off to write my novel.

   

What kind of balance

Random thoughts, random questions. 

Why do our (mostly) young leftist friends feel free to make grand political statements, context-less pronunciamentos, at family gatherings, or indeed anywhere? I heard a few exasperated oh-God-I'm-sorry-I-brought-it-up Easter survival stories recently. So I heard about people who found it necessary to casually proclaim, for everyone, which of the presidential candidates are xenophobic and exclusionist while handing the ham and scalloped potatoes. It's exactly reminiscent of some very minor P.G. Wodehouse character wolfing tea and sardines and lamenting that the foodstuffs have been "wrung from the bleeding lips of the starving poor." That was already a hundred years ago ("Comrade Bingo," 1922). On other days I have listened to wine seminar leaders brightly yip about climate change, and I've known a gynecologist purr "Thanks to the Affordable Care Act ..." while absolutely attending to his duties. I wonder if it felt like this for centuries while the Christians in antiquity took over. Granted they did far more good than our Comrade Buttses have ever done (though the comrades are certainly plying a religion). I would much rather have lived in a world of monasteries and hospitals than of arenas where slaves fought wild beasts. Still. The time must have come when decent people who happened to be pagan no longer felt free to speak. That willowy triumphalism forever at your elbow can't have been pleasant. 

And where is our modern novelist, our Wodehouse or our Barbara Pym, to chronicle it? This spontaneous scolding is as prime a fact about life in society, which is what novels chronicle, as gaslight in Victorian London or Wodehouse's harmless upper class twits or Pym's postwar spinsters, living quiet lives but yearning for the archdeacon. We want a novelist to immortalize the character of what Rush Limbaugh calls the "millenial snowflake [i.e., each one unique] _________" -- fill in the blank. The reporter, the hipster, your niece's boyfriend, forever performing these little mopping up operations long after their victory. Oh but um, wait. Any novelist chronicling that has to get past the millenial snowflake editorial assistant gatekeepers first, the ones wearing rainbow/Che Guevara t shirts, whom we have already seen give the nod to all the right genuflections in some of our recent, random contemporary reading. The teen boys kissing, the Russian monarchist emigre slamming Margaret Thatcher, the olive oil researcher blessing Mohammed, each in the earliest pages of their respective thick books.   

Now then, re: the jihad murders in Brussels. Or, pick one. Something else will probably happen before I finish this. Did you know that the Jews in Europe held a kind of one-off candle-lighting ceremony in 1942 or '43, to honor Jews who had already been killed by the Nazis? You will find the story documented, I think, in Arthur Morse's While Six Million Died (1967). Of those who lit candles, another million or two were destined for Auschwitz themselves when their own countries fell. Hungary for example. I don't coarsely compare war crimes, I just note a possible pattern in the way prey can't believe predator is serious, even to the end. Even ISIS -- which some observers, writing in financial magazines of all places, claim really is "on the run," picking soft targets in Europe because its commanders are being killed off in Iraq -- even ISIS taunted "what [commemorative] color will the Eiffel tower be next?"  

Let me ask you this. What kind of balance is the aware person obliged to find, between the little frivolities and escapes of civilization -- and the massive threats to it which make one think it's a dereliction of duty not to focus forevermore on politics and war? On the mere survival of human possessions like the Gospels or the idea of murder being wrong? Here are some of the birds of Kenya. For example. 

And yes, I want you to cook amazing food and drink amazing wine. I want you to savor the Turkish rose botanicals in Nolet's gin. Would you believe, once in a while very kind p.r. people still contact me to ask whether my readers would be interested in a certain product? Then, I presume, they open a new tab and get a look at Pluot, and they email again asking, Um, what other publications are you writing for? 

Have you ever read much about astronomy? Have you ever read Astronomy magazine? 

Supermassive black holes blast matter into their host galaxies with X-ray-emitting winds traveling at up to one-third the speed of light. In the new study, astronomers determined PDS 456, an extremely bright black hole known as a quasar more than 2 billion light-years away, sustains winds that carry more energy every second than is emitted by more than a trillion Suns (Astronomy, February 20, 2015).

That's fine. It's also meaningless knowledge, except that human beings know it. And except that knowing it, like knowing a few Kenyan birds, may be more important than anything else. Art and science, escape and frivolity. In order to grasp that, you have to turn around and grasp that there is something better than and outside politics, something a civilized politics should leave one free to know. I think it was John Adams who said he fought the American Revolution so that his son would be free to do politics, and his son devote himself to the arts. But politics -- or whatever it is now, that random triumphalist scolding -- seems to invade all and shrivel all. Your Easter brunch, wine seminars, doctor visits and everything. Even astronomers clamor at the doors of global warming, begging for someone to notice them. For power. 

Here I pipe up about terribly serious things, even though to do so makes me feel like a pill. It seems so  disjointed, so single-issue. The botanicals in gin are more fun. But they do it, they pipe up all the time ....  

I chanced to watch thirty seconds of the movie Platoon recently. It was just at the scene when Willem Dafoe looks up into the murmuring jungle dusk and says, "We're gonna lose this war. We've been kicking other people's ass so long, I guess we got it coming." There, I suppose, lies the entire thrust of American politics for the last forty years. Politics, again, in the sense of your hipster nephew's pronunciamentos at family parties, not in the sense of foreign policy necessarily. Who knew Oliver Stone would have that much power? And I will admit: thirty seconds of Platoon teaches that if nothing else, the beauty of the single life is that you don't have to feign a pleased interest at this, too. And then discuss it. You can switch off the t.v. and go to bed. 

Last, and it is terribly serious, do you think it's likely that Ambassador Christopher Stevens died of something else besides smoke inhalation at the embassy in Benghazi on September 11, 2012? I have Facebook friends who post links attesting that it was worse than that, but I must admit these friends have a rather gamy taste in "likes" and links. No respectable source I know has ever raised the possibility. Still. Is some other cause of death likely? Is it likely we will never be permitted to know? Is it likely that previous generations of Americans would have demanded to know and would have been answered? Is it likely that the woman responsible for broadcasting the ambassador's whereabouts, ignoring pleas for help, and then swearing repeatedly afterward that his killers must have been provoked by an amateur movie, and then for infamously asking What Difference At This Point It All Makes -- is it likely that she will be the next President? Is it likely the ambassador never should have been there, negotiating "freedom fighting" and "nation building" with people who don't want either? Possibly, yes. All of the above. 

Image from Science World Report

A plea for screwcaps

Please. I'm sure it would be lovely. Light, crisp, refined, satiny, the most perfect, gleaming eau-de-Nil color imaginable, if eau-de-Nil could be faintest silver gold instead of greenish gray (which it is).

Please. A twenty-five dollar investment. A treat. Four glasses possible. Two evenings' pleasure spoiled, and what if I had opened it for company? Who wants to taste stale moldy books and wet basement? No cheese could overpower this, and why ruin even a piece of leftover salmon by trying to pretend it's all right?

Please. No one, I can promise you, no one is planning to cellar a $25 California chardonnay for eight to ten years. No one needs the cork for that purpose.

Please, dear Varner, next time use a screw cap closure. I could try the plastic-wrap-cure, but I've tried it before and I don't think the molecule 2,4,6 trichloroanisole really sticks to Saran wrap.

Still think screwcaps are too downmarket for good wine? But what were the odds that my bottle would be "corked"? Only five percent, the books say. Only when it's the wine I bought, the odds are one in one.

Wouldn't you know it

Wouldn't you know it! (This is to let you know I am still alive. Three weeks is a longish time.)

Wouldn't you know it, I no sooner turn off my electric fan in the middle of the night, because I am tired of hearing it thrum and I think I can detect soft noises as it were underneath that sound, which might be the carol of spring robins, which I do want to hear -- no sooner do I do this, than in the new hush I realize: oh no. It is the noisy neighbors after all. They had been blessedly quiet for a long time. I can hear their t.v. going, quietly, through my bedroom wall and I can hear the occasional hoot of laughter. There was a heavy thud against the wall, as of a teenager's head hitting it as he rocked backward. Wouldn't you know it, I muttered to the cats, and got up and switched the fan back on.

Last summer, this sort of thing was far worse, which is why I complained to the neighbors and to management, and got in the habit of turning my fan on just for the white noise all night, all fall and winter. One day I'll tell you the story of how I went out in my white robe at 2 am and simply stood on my balcony and stared at them in fury, the five of them who had been blithely chatting and laughing and shouting over each other when they got enthusiastic about their stories, in the dead quiet of a summer night while the brick buildings of the courtyard reflected sound back like I don't know what. They each looked at each other sheepishly one by one and then at me. One by one they trudged inside their apartment. ("Oh my God," my co-worker Anthony said, looking at me rather wall-eyed, when I regaled him with the story. "If you were my neighbor lady, that would totally creep me out.") That night I had been awakened by a slapping sound, and had been dreaming that a little girl was running in the courtyard in her flip flops, late for school. When I awoke fully and looked at the clock and saw 2 A.M., I realized it couldn't be that.

Months later, while eating my lunch in the breakroom at work, I heard that same slapping sound. I looked up to see another young co-worker slapping his package of cigarettes against the palm of his hand as he headed outside for a smoke. "That's what it was!" I almost yelled after him, but I didn't because it would have entailed long explanations that the poor young man would have had to be polite about when he just wanted to go. I had already told the apartment complex managers the story of my dream when I was still mad.

And by the way I've learned what pot smells like, too, thanks to my neighbors on the balcony and through the bedroom wall. When I first moved in and began to enjoy the balcony and the magnolia tree and the big open windows and everything, I thought more than once, "how many skunks can there be in this courtyard at night, feeling threatened enough to spray so often?" Then someone suggested pot and I understood. ("When your neighbors go out on the balcony, do they cough?" Anthony asked. "Yes!" "That's weed," he nodded.) Now I can recognize it anywhere. It's surprising how many people reek of it -- even softly -- just out in public. Even filling out job applications.

I've also got a second orchid to bloom. This is phalaenopsis I believe, moth orchid; the usual supermarket, beginner's species.

And I've met the novelist Barbara Pym, in her first book, Some Tame Gazelle (1950). I like this:

The trivial round, the common task -- did it furnish quite all we needed to ask? Had Keble really understood? Sometimes one almost doubted it. Belinda imagined him writing the lines in a Gothic study, panelled in pitch-pine and well dusted that morning by an efficient servant. Not at all the same thing as standing at the sink with aching back and hands plunged into the washing up water.

"Keble" is John Keble, 1792-1866, Anglican priest, intellectual, hymnwriter and all around gentle soul. We first heard reference to the " 'daily round -- the common task' " in Mapp and Lucia, when the Padre encourages all to buck up in the face of the tragedy of Elizabeth's and Lucia's having been swept out to sea on the kitchen table, and so apparently lost forever.                                                        

Again with the publishing industry's buttered bread!

My fatheads! It's happened again. Third modern book in a row, plucked at random from the local library's shelves, whose early pages show an author knowing full well on which side the modern publishing industry's ideological bread is buttered.

Very well, I didn't pluck this one entirely at random. I wanted to start some research on olive oil. Nevertheless, what are the odds? First we found the novel with the two adolescent boys kissing on page 64 of 800. Then, the novel whose Russian monarchist emigre in London in 1979 bothered to slam "that awful Thatcher woman," page 16 out of 470, something one doubts a real Russian monarchist emigre would do. Now, in a book on olive oil, we have an author who finds it necessary to invoke "Prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him," on page 9 of 238 (Extra Virginity, by Tom Mueller, Norton 2012). Mind you, this is only the Introduction. Why on earth? Is it that Mr. Mueller, like the others, knows what he must say to get past twenty-five-year-old copywriting interns wearing rainbow pride/Che Guevara t shirts? Or is he sincere?

Admiring his picture, one regretfully guesses he is sincere. He looks "sweet and slender," as a no doubt hairy-chested eastern European editorialist couldn't help but comment on the young German men who did not know which way to look or what to do when Muslim gangs in Cologne abused German women on New Year's Eve. (I tried to google the exact quote but I can't find it. When you search the keywords "very sweet and very slender" you get porn.) He looks, our olive oil author, like he would think throwing a sop to the gangs will spare him the fate of the infidel. While we're at it, sorry but I also don't believe some of the scene-painting he indulges in. "Francesco and Marina were waiting for us beside a large olive-wood fire, Francesco resting his head in his sister's lap as they ate pickled cima di Mola olives from a small porcelain bowl and tossed the pits onto the coals." Bull. Too perfect. The first page's chronicle of his witnessing the tasting panel in action in their clean scientific cubicles at the Corporazione Mastri oleari in Milan, rings much more true.

And while we're on the topic of young people, what is it with them? Yesterday was primary day here in Illinois. I had to wait in line -- for primary voting! -- which is encouraging. Civic participation and all. The man in line behind me was actually on the phone to his congressman, asking what to do because the election judges had no record of him as a registered voter, even though he had done what he was supposed to do to register months ago. Before I went to vote at all, a young person at work, who had cast his ballot before his shift, remarked with a similar wonderment that he had seen two teenagers at his polling place. Teens voting is unheard of, never mind in a primary. "I think these young people can tell," my coworker said. (He is thirty.) "The revolution is coming." He was very serious. He means they are voting for Bernie Sanders, septuagenarian socialist. They want change.

Really? The revolution awaits its time? In what sense is the lord of the revolution, Barack Obama, not President? By what measure has he not achieved everything he wanted in two terms in office, with the pending exception of his first announced Change in January 2009, which was to make wounded combat veterans pay for their own hospital treatments? He can always rectify that, with an executive order in the next nine months, and no one any the worse or wiser. Otherwise I should say gay marriage, nationalized health care, bow-from-the-waist abasement abroad, and no southern border constitute a revolution humming along nicely. Granted, if you the voter are eighteen now, you would have been ten when it all began, so to you it may look as though "nothing's changed."

But I decided something else too, as I stocked shelves and ruminated. Two things: one, "the Revolution" is aesthetics-driven. It's just cool to be opposed to stuff. It shows you have a beautiful soul. And as long as there's still stuff to oppose, you'll have a chance to be cool. Cultural historians may trace this back to Rousseau and Voltaire, who discovered sometime around 1760 that the status quo isn't necessarily very good -- what a shock! -- also that aristocrats aren't necessarily very kind -- I know! -- but at this late date, it hardly matters who first got the idea that cool people hate whatever is usual or non-shocking. It doesn't matter about what. Avant garde artists in the 1920s were cool because they were opposed to stuff (representative art). Rock music is cool and it's mostly about being opposed to stuff. (I await the sighs and head-shakings we'll have to hear from our local classic rock station's deejays -- who still smack their lips over "the dark days of 1968" -- should the peasants vote badly this November.) Planned Parenthood is cool because it's opposed to stuff (birth). It's also opposed to people who oppose it, mostly, but still. So definitely you can be cool outside aesthetics, outside the arts. The point is you want to be cool-souled everywhere. Movies are cool. The best of them are about being opposed to stuff, and they get awards. The internet is totally cool and the main guy who is the billionaire from it, Mark Zuckerberg, is opposed to stuff -- he's progressive, open borders, everything. It's those with nothing to say, when surrounded by the righteous beautifully opposing stuff, who seem aesthetically soulless. The old word square still applies to them. Notice that's an aesthetic word, a shape you can see. They just don't seem to care.
   
So I decided also: item two: no political or economic policy or action even matters much. Deep down, as long as one shred of Western civilization remains, it will be cool to oppose that shred. This is what Limbaugh means when he says "the left never gives up." It's personal aesthetics, the art of the beautiful soul. The revolution will be always bearing real fruit very soon.      

I haven't decided if I'll finish reading the olive oil book. It seems to contain some good information, especially about what fraud the phrase "extra virgin cold-pressed" masks, but do you agree there comes a time when you don't want your intelligence insulted on page 9 of 238, no matter what follows, just because the author needed to prove his cred to his masters? I'll bet I can find some equally good book on olive oil, maybe out of copyright and available at Project Gutenberg. Maybe written by some shrewd scholarly lady in 1910 or so, who had three names and wore pearls even at her writing desk. And who bothered to, oh I don't know, spell out "he would" for he'd and "she would" for she'd. Every time. This disciplined modern sloppiness is annoying on top of everything else.

   

Three odd new ideas, and the ancestral castle -- Llantilio!

Here are three strange new ideas: which I will try to summarize as clearly as possible, because although I read politics, when I try to write it, I turn unoriginal and merely end up repeating other people. These ideas may not be altogether correct, but they are certainly startling. Namely,

• that global "free trade"*** is a bad thing, while nation-by-nation protectionist tariffs are better for the nations that enact them. Free trade, it seems, may be a kind of free-for-all craft fair, where no one pays an entry fee to set up a booth. The result is that most of the goods for sale are junk hawked by the impoverished, who have few other job choices because borderless "free trade" has also prompted their old employers to close up shop and reopen only in the cheapest sections of the vast fairgrounds. Protectionist tariffs, on the other hand, are like the fees charged by any self-respecting town (or park district or hotel ballroom manager) to vendors to get in and sell. The fees fill the host's treasury let's hope, vendors have reason to stay in town, hire good help, and mind their and their neighbors' booths -- and the quality of goods rises above stolen shampoo and razor blades;
• that capitalism** is all very well as far as economic liberty is concerned, but once it married the modern state (which had already destroyed the medieval church and its curbs on human folly and sin) it helped birth the modern man; the modern man who does little else but buy stuff, and obey the authority that swept into the vacuum of religion: government, down to the last license plate renewal sticker and to the baking of correct cakes. Now I deny part of this dreary old complaint. There is nothing wrong with the pleasure of owning nice things. Queen Victoria, a great moral character, posed all hers and photographed them so people could see what she owned, art and knickknacks and such. Besides, if you turn righteous about the tragic emptiness of mere possessions, pretty soon you're leaning over your neighbor's fence and deciding he owns too much crap. That way lies, Georgie Pillson who loved his bibelots would say, mere "Bolshy" (Bolshevik, communist) attitudes. As to the other, the vacuum of religion filled by government diktat, yes, I see that. We seem to obey just about as readily as the medieval serf trudging his grain to the lord's mill. What has capitalism done to our inner life, to the soul that read Milton and said no to kings? 
• and third and most startling of all comes the idea that Abraham Lincoln*  -- Lincoln, I say -- was a bad apple very much responsible for the pitiless, authoritarian nanny-state that is Washington, D.C. At first it's hard to know whether a person who believes this resides in the far-left or the far-right fever swamps. It almost seems an opinion outside even those bounds of sanity, unless you are a Southerner, since they of course do have special issues about A.L. Coincidentally or not, the scholars who don't like him also refer to the Civil War as "the War for Southern Independence." What they seem to be saying nowadays, politically, is not that slavery was good, but that when Lincoln harnessed the power of the federal government to stomp out Rebellion, he also stomped out the Constitution which took its legitimacy from the people ratifying it --or not -- not from "demigods" in Philadelphia who, through it, had bestowed upon us in 1787 perfect, inescapable rule. After Lincoln, no more secession talk. You're in. The nation is all, and if you disagree you are overwhelmed and killed. The same scholars who dislike him note that Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and threw newspapermen in jail. And yet he always gets the benefit of the (incidentally, liberal) authoritarian's excuse, that it was all for a higher cause. He felt compassion.             

There are our three odd new ideas. I trowel them in here, thinking they might serve as mulch for our mental gardening project, Blogging the Gospels. For it is to the Gospels that we return, in answer to the challenge of these ideas. (Re: Lincoln. "The first shall be last, and the last, first"?) Do these short books have answers for the business of buying and selling, for the purpose of life outside business, do they have answers about government or liberty? If we, as modern people, seem to be so strangely unfree, what did freedom once mean and where did it come from? And can the Gospels civilize the hordes invading America and all Europe, against our will and at our governments' beckoning?

 

Above, please note a building which can seem even more haunting than it looks, if we think of it as dating from a time of strange freedoms we no longer know. Oh, I don't say it wasn't built to supervise a conquered population. I don't deny that circa 1216 dental care did not exist and Jews were too often expelled from too many towns. But it is possible to gaze at those towers and vaguely, vaguely imagine a time when something liberating overlay all. It may only have been as simple a fact as that even the lords of castles then, even kings, acknowledged an authority source, and a potentially punishing one, above themselves. I think it might have been the Gospels. Now, in our liberated West, no more of that.

A bleak but powerful late winter view, isn't it? The photo is of White Castle, in Wales, and comes from the blog Codlins and Cream. I have mentioned her before. She took a day trip there recently.

I have decided that this is my ancestral castle. Well, why not? You have only to go back a few generations before your family tree spreads out exponentially to include scores and hundreds of people, and then thousands and millions. "Arithmetical ancestors," Henry Adams called them in Mont St. Michel and Chartres. Your own, private four grandparents may recognize you and be enchanted to see you when you all meet in heaven, but after that all bets are off. Who knows but your many-times-great grandparents may shout in delight, and rush to take upon their knee as it were, people whom you would have been horrified to know in life. Is there jealousy beyond the veil? At any rate why not claim as your own, then, this pile once echoing to the commands of Hubert de Burgh? Its Welsh name is "Llantilio." Can't you just see that word as the title of a middle-aged-ladies' medieval romance novel? It's splashed in white script across the cover. The background painting is all rich sunshine, beautifully perspectived green hills, a towering pile, and a girl with flowing hair and royal blue kirtle on horseback approaching it at noonday. Llantilio!

I can. It's the year 1216. (My teeth probably hurt. I have been taught the Jews are a cursed race. I don't live in a society such that a daring man "pleasures" me in a side chapel during Mass.) I am sitting on the companion slope to the one before me in the picture, leading down to the river. Or no, that must be the moat, and I stand on a bridge overlooking it; overlooking it, and the tower and section of the wall -- my father's wall -- opposite.

Everything is freshly built. I marvel at the gleaming whitewash, and at the depth of the foundations that must have been dug to support those walls. It will stand a thousand years and more. Of course I'm in love with Gryfyth ap Summat, the foreman in charge of all the works, he with his deep brown beard and brown eyes. But I am the daughter of a march lord, and so I may not look at a vile person however handsome ... (is this what they call flash fiction?). And I can't possibly trace my ancestry back to the cook or the tenant farmers plowing all around, because what's the pleasuring in that? As an aside, do I also know freedom, because I know the Gospels?

Curiously, I happened to find -- it's me again, not the medieval miss of White Castle -- in the library yesterday a novel which is essentially male historical romance fiction. The House of Special Purpose, by John Boyne (Doubleday, 2009). Even the cover glows with a sort of male equivalent of the flowing-hair-and-horses art given to Particia Bracewell and Elizabeth Chadwick. We see an off-center detail shot of a real nineteenth-century oil portrait, all dark blue and olive-gray: some man in military uniform, and yellow and red roses below. I've gotten well underway reading the story. It seems good, if simple. (I'm sorry but I don't believe in the scene of the young girl chancing to look up while disembarking a yacht at dusk, to espy the hero in a distant third floor window.) Scanning a bit ahead, I think the plot is actually going to concern the hero's memories of guarding the Russian Grand Duchess Anastasia during the reign of the last Czar. The romance publishing industry belonging so very much to women, it's interesting to see what a man writer does when given his head.  

Also. This is the second modern novel I have plucked, at random, in the last month from the shelves of a nice suburban library, in which it seems to me that the authors -- whatsoever their subject matter -- clearly prove early on that they know on which side the publishing industry's ideological bread is buttered. In the first, Death and Mr. Pickwick, we already have two teen boys kissing on page 64 of an 800 page book; in this of Boyne's, we have an elderly Russian monarchist refugee in London, in 1979, bizarrely slapping down "that awful Thatcher woman" on page 16 out of 470. I can't believe the two snippets (and that's all they are) are coincidence. I believe these writers know they have to get past their share of twenty-five-year-old editorial interns wearing Che Guevara t-shirts, who have utterly rigid ideas about what liberation is. And just imagine "pitching" them a book idea on blogging the Gospels -- on what the Gospels have meant to the West. Incomprehensible. They think all that nonsense is done, and their ideas will last a thousand years.




*** "Trump is right on trade," by Patrick Buchanan, Feb. 16, 2016.
**"Capitalism: the conservative illusion," by Jack Trotter, Chronicles Magazine, Feb. 4, 2016.
 *"The Strange Case of the Missing Constitution," by Clyde Wilson, Chronicles Magazine, Nov. 1, 2007.