Saturday, November 08, 2008

Wakey Wakey: It's Mourning in America!

A chewy repost to repast upon, now with added poetic fiber...

"Niebuhr was right,” said Goethe, “when he saw a barbarous age coming. It is already here, we are in it, for in what does barbarism consist, if not in the failure to appreciate what is excellent?”

One of the “cult classics” of the modern conservative movement (which, ironically, is a century newer than modern progressivism, which begins way back with Marx) is Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, by Albert Jay Nock, first published in 1943. While there is a cheery and optimistic school of conservatism embodied in people such as Ronald Reagan and Rush Limbaugh, there is also a more pessimistic, even resigned, school of thought expressed by writers such as Nock, Richard Weaver, Russell Kirk, and T.S. Eliot.

In each of these men, there is a painful awareness of what we have already lost and can seemingly never regain. The former school is more forward looking and progressive, the latter more backward looking, romantic, and nostalgic. But it is a "spiritual" -- which is to say vertical -- gnostalgia, meaning that, on another level, it is a "memoir of the future," or a longing for the "changeless change" mentioned by Will in a comment yesterday. Eliot's earlier poems -- the ones leftists love -- are deeply pessimistic, while the later ones -- the ones that embarrass or befuddle secular critics -- attempt to convey this changeless change, which cannot be understood outside the context of a religious sensibility.

For example, Eliot's first major poem after his conversion to Christianity was Ash-Wednesday (1930). It goes a little like this:

Because I do not hope to turn again / Because I do not hope / Because I do not hope to turn / Desiring this man's gift and that man's scope / I no longer strive towards such things / (Why should the aged eagle stretch its wings?) / Why should I mourn / The vanished power of the usual reign?

Good question. Why should we? Interestingly, a uni-verse is "one turn." Eliot expresses a hopeless hope that he will cease turning, which very much reminds me of the metaphysics of Denys the Areopagite. From a vertical perspective, the "one turn" of the universe consists of God's immamentizing "procession" into creation, followed by the return of everything back to its divine source. If one lives within that vertical stream, it is a kind if changeless-change, like sailing on a vast sea with no markers to tell you exactly where are. Or, the markers are like clouds that streak by your window in an airplane. When the relative becomes properly relative, the Absolute comes into view. This is how Denys conceptualized it:

"Thus, the soul is turning together with the movement of God and his universe (from Latin uni-versus, 'one turn'). In her return back to Him, she turns with His own turning, she dances with Him in His thearchic dance, meaning a dancing around of the three hypostases [persons]. The Latin-writing Fathers used the expression 'circumincession'" (Wm. Riordan).

Elsewhere Riordan notes that the "divine yearning shows especially its unbeginning and unending nature traveling in an endless circle through the Good, from the Good, in the Good and to the Good, unerringly turning, ever on the same center, ever in the same direction, always proceeding, always remaining, always being restored to itself."

It was this knowa's ark of salvation and eternal "circle of redemption" that I was attempting to convey with the circular structure of my book, which you might say is "enstatically ecstatic." If you don't know about the circle, it hardly matters that you live your life upside down. Just now I was playing with future leader, and he was showing me the directions to a toy. The directions where upside down. I turned them rightside up, at which point their meaning suddenly emerged. But for him, it's all the same. For him, when shown the truth, "nothing happens." Just like our childlike scientistic jester.

Anyway, back to the old post. Nock was a spokesman for what he called the “Remnant." He wrote not for the uneducated -- much less the hopelessly overeducated, i.e., the tenured -- but for the "educable few,” the enlightened minority who “simply want to get at the plain truth of things.” For while we all know that the illiterate cannot read, that doesn't mean the literate can. Far from it. How many intellectuals actually know how to read the Bible? We should never confuse knowing psychology, or history, or religion, with understanding it. Most any ignoramus can be trained to become a university professor. Which is not to say that all professors are idiots, but that all idiots are ignorant of their ignorance and therefore halfway to tenure.

“You do not know, and will never know, who the remnant are, nor where they are, nor how many there are, nor what they are doing or will do. Two things you know, and no more; first, that they exist; and second, that they will find you.” You know, through the nonlocal attractor, which has local branches and arteries everywhere and when. It's always possible to "plug into" the gnostic grid, even in the most unsalutary coonfinement.

Of course, Nock wrote in the days before the internet, when it was more of a challenge to find each other. While there are not many of us, it is interesting that, just as soon as I hung up my cyber-shingle, we found each other. Naturally, this can never be a mass movement, so we, the Remnant, are placed in the awkward position of having to hitch our wagons to such odious and disreputable institutions as the Republican Party, but only because it is preferable to outright satan worship -- sometimes by a slim margin.

You know you are a member of the Remnant if you realize that a genetic man is merely the raw material for a human being; which is naturally to acknowledge that he is precious in his own way. But we proceed “first with the more obscure and difficult work of clearing and illuminating our own mind, and second, with what occasional help we may offer to others whose faith, like our own, is set more on the regenerative power of thought than on the uncertain achievements of premature action....”

Members of the Remnant “are everywhere; everywhere they are not so much resisting as quietly eluding and disregarding all social pressure which tends to mechanize their processes of observation and thought.” You might say that the Remnant is an order of Cosmic Raccoons “unassociated in any formal way, living singly or nearly so, and more or less as aliens, in all classes of our society...” Yes, you are a member of the vertical aristocracy, but you don’t make a big deal out of it.

Conservatism can be difficult to define, but William F. Buckley once characterized it as a paragon of essences towards which the phenomenology of the world is a continuing approximation. In other words, conservatism is a form of philosophical realism that appreciates that there is a source of truth higher than, and independent of, human beings -- an antecedent reality that can be perceived only by the awakened intellect, not the senses. (Which is why Queeg, for example, could never really be called a conservative.)

But for the postmodern barbarians of horizontal progressivism, the apparent exhausts the Real, which is why it is so fruitless to argue with its adherents. It is literally like arguing over the merits of Beethoven’s late string quartets with a dog, except that the worst dog nevertheless retains a noble instinct for adoration of its spiritual better, even if it cannot articulate the reasons for doing so.

I would add that this anterior noumenal reality is paradoxically the source, center, and destination of the phenomenal world. It is the cosmogonic vertical order, or principial reality, which it is the task of religious metaphysics to symbolically reveil and disclose, and spiritual practice to align ourselves with.

Thus, conservatism is progressive to the core, except that progress is measured in terms of fidelity to this divine-human template. In fact, this is the only meaningful definition of progress, because you cannot judge how well a thing is working in the absence of the goal it is trying to achieve.

What currently goes by the name of “progressivism” is a diabolical doctrine that defines vertical progress out of existence. It abolishes the real world of transcendent essences and measures progress in wholly horizontal terms, in relationship to that most fleeting, transient, and ungovernable of human modalities, desire. Thus, to the extent that there is a gap between the world and my wishes -- the way it is and the way I want it to be -- there is a frustrating lack of "progress." This is to live as an entitled child. In fact, to enter the kingdom of progressivism, one must "become as spoiled children, asking their Father for more stuff."

At the first turning of the second stair / I turned and saw below / The same shape twisted on the banister / Under the vapour in the fetid air / Struggling with the devil of the stairs who wears / The deceitful face of hope and of despair --Eliot

As such, the need for horizontal progress is infinite, in conformity with the combustible mixture of envy and imagination in the passive and somnolent Exterior Man. This in turn leads to the state of permanent rebellion, because the horizontal world can never satisfy the hungry ghosts of envy and entitlement, for in the absence of gratitude, none of the goods in our life can be assimilated. For as Richard Weaver put it, “when we attach more significance to feeling than thinking, we shall soon attach more to wanting than deserving.” America's progressive and truly revolutionary founders enunciated and liberated a system of timeless truths. But modern progressivism liberates only feelings, which amounts “to a riot which fizzles out with the gain or loss of its immediate object...” (Nock).

And this reversion to pure feeling is, of course, what is so frightening about secular leftism. To the Superior Man, even his own feelings are none of his business so long as they remain purely horizontal and untransformed by a vertical framework. Feelings are hardly denied, but they are spiritualized and placed in a human context. But to the Prince of this World, feelings are all-important, because feelings are the mental equivalent of touch, the most crude of our physical senses.

All beings who are awakened to the vertical are aware of the fact that -- in conformity with the axiom “as above, so below” -- there are vertical analogues to our five exterior senses. In fact, this is how the vertical is accessed, not through “seeing” but through vision, not listening but hearing, not touching but entering. Likewise, the truth of divine communication is self-evident by virtue of its spiritual perfume, as indicated by messages as diversely fragrant as the Psalms, the Gospel of John, the Tao Te Ching, or the Upanishads. Have you never known intellectual ecstasy?

Horizontal progress cannot be infinite for the simple reason that progress cannot be infinite. Rather, progress can only be measured in terms of an absolute standard that lies outside space and time. The “false infinite” of flatland progressivism is not conditioned from top to bottom, so there can be no higher or lower. Rather, there is only low and lower, until man sinks beneath himself over the horizon of linear history.

But for vertical man, to paraphrase Thoreau, his life is rich in proportion to the number of things he can do without. Our lives are defined not as what we have but who we are, but not in its horizontal sense. Rather, we must paradoxically become who we are, or transform the world by transforming ourselves. For it is written -- on my business card, as a matter of fact -- that you can only change the world one a-hole at a time. Timelessness takes time -- which is what time is for.

Evolution is always a saw-toothed function, so today we find ourselves a little closer to the mud, to the infra-human, to a postmodern neolithic age. Things will apparently have to get worse -- perhaps even much worse -- before they get better. While I try not to be pessimistic, sometimes it's hard not to bow before Petey’s meta-law, which is that bad everything drives out good everything. Or, as Mark Twain put it, “All I care to know is that a man is a human being; that is enough for me -- he can’t be any worse.”

To conclude on an uptimistic gnote, vertical man does not whine or complain, but polishes his character on the rocks of adversity. The Republican Party as an institution is almost without character at the moment. Thus, the perfect uppertunity to use what it deserves in these Dems of iniquity as a school of hardened nocks to evolve toward what it might have been.

66 comments:

julie said...

Maybe this is relevant, or maybe it's just me; Heads of Government: 1923.

QP said...

Sublime post Bob!

And for our masked friends on the gnostic grid but not the high speed utube grid:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.


Four Quartets 4: Little Gidding
T. S. Eliot

walt said...

I happened to pick up Nock's book just yesterday, and was looking to find what he wrote in it of religion. He was an ordained priest (Episcopalian), but you'd not have known it from his writing. There are a handful of passages toward the back of that book that give his estimation of the history of religion -- to say he was "not hopeful" is likely accurate.

One of his Remnant was William F. Buckley -- the father of the Junior that we knew from National Review.

You quoted him re Raccoons, er, I mean the Remnant: "...they are not so much resisting as quietly eluding and disregarding all social pressure which tends to mechanize their processes of observation and thought."

It is so, hereabouts.

That book is often out of print, but it is worth finding.

walt said...

Julie -

As a young Raccoon, I dreamt of being the man in the photo you linked. Taxidermy was my thing for several years -- until I spied even more attractive critters!

USS Ben USN (Ret) said...

"To conclude on an uptimistic gnote, vertical man does not whine or complain, but polishes his character on the rocks of adversity."

Amen! Ho!
You gno, we're gonna get purty shiny the next four years.

USS Ben USN (Ret) said...

Thanks, QP!
I love that poem!

USS Ben USN (Ret) said...

"When the relative becomes properly relative, the Absolute comes into view."

That's a powerful message right there. Simple on it's face but virtually impossible to explain to the spiritually blind.

USS Ben USN (Ret) said...

"--an antecedent reality that can be perceived only by the awakened intellect, not the senses. (Which is why Queeg, for example, could never really be called a conservative.)"

Indeed. Now Queeg is tryin' to destroy Robert Spencer for the horrible crime of linking to Gates of Vienna and Brussels Journal.
The horror! Queeg...the master of malicious melodrama.

Gagdad Bob said...

He's become such a pompous twit.

Anonymous said...

Thanks again, Bob!

Anonymous said...

I know that the Remnant is small in proportion to the earth's population, but I could wish far more would someday read your posts. I know we all hate flattery because it is always tied to something dishonest.

Yet there is such a thing as the recognition of a gift that should be recognized. Certainly you are the Bob Dylan of writers in this time. I think I speak for most here when I say I delight in the invention of words, the ability to make language a joy. Few can make words frolick in the mountain meadow like this.

Gagdad Bob said...

Well... pretty much all I pray for is the ability to do that, so it must occasionally be working....

Van Harvey said...

"For while we all know that the illiterate cannot read, that doesn't mean the literate can. Far from it. How many intellectuals actually know how to read the Bible? We should never confuse knowing psychology, or history, or religion, with understanding it. Most any ignoramus can be trained to become a university professor. Which is not to say that all professors are idiots, but that all idiots are ignorant of their ignorance and therefore halfway to tenure."

Oh my. That should be made into a plaque, and placed above every blackboard (whiteboard... smartboard... or whatever board it is they use in front of the bored today) in every classroom in the land.

julie said...

!

Anonymous said...

" . . . and more or less as aliens, in all classes of our society...”

Yes, that's it. That's what this feeling is, the one that has me as the protagonist in a scene from a Fellini movie the last few days, weeks, months. . . . Sometimes it's been very, very sad.

Bob, you've changed my life, you SOB.

Well, I know it's not really you.

And I know this is self-flattery on some level. But that doesn't make it any less real or compelling or absorbing. I may or may not be elected, but the aspiring is all I could possibly want it to be.

Man, today's post was great.

Anonymous said...

And thanks, qp, for the written version of the Eliot. The first four lines are my new screen saver.

For posterity, the old one was:

"Wherever politics tries to be redemptive, it is promising too much. Where it wishes to do the work of God, it becomes, not divine, but demonic." --Pope Benedict XVI

It's held up a long time, that one. But out with the old and in with the new.

ge said...

Pray Standing

Van Harvey said...

Top notcher today, several sections still reverberating about the noggin... interesting how that works. I heartily second and agree with Kepler's 10:54 comment, yet it's not as if I hadn't heard these truths before, several in similar clothes on the first time this post came to light.

I wonder if anyone else notices how with some of the ideas we deal with here, even though already met and grasped, on additional meetings they still seem to re-ring the bell as if a monk were leaping with their full weight upon the bell rope, and other times it seems to ring the same bell more... politely... as if noting it is a quarter past the hour. Also funny how in the comments some of us react as if "the British are coming!", we are very struck by the post, while others come strolling in as if responding for tea time. And yet at other times the same truths may hit you with the opposite vigor....

Ok, well I'm officially still shell shocked and just rambling, I'll leave it there and just listen to the bells.

BTW, Nock's essay about the Remnant, Isiah's Job, and a number of his others, are available at Mises.org.

Van Harvey said...

Maineman - thank's for passing that quote along, I'll give it a new home.

Anonymous said...

And thanks, qp, for the written version of the Eliot. The first four lines are my new screen saver.

For posterity, the old one was:

"Wherever politics tries to be redemptive, it is promising too much. Where it wishes to do the work of God, it becomes, not divine, but demonic." --Pope Benedict XVI

It's held up a long time, that one. But out with the old and in with the new.

Anonymous said...

Whoops. How'd that happen?

Van Harvey said...

vu ja de... it's just that sometimes Dejavu get's inside out. Look out for black cats.

(!)

Aloysius said...

And watch the response to the passage of Proposition 8 in California. This is progressivism.

Gagdad Bob said...

Good news: on November 7, 2008, at 9:45 am, Deepak became an anti-abortion activist.

walt said...

"...a world of peace, harmony, laughter and love by taking this vow..."

Hey: thinking is doing!

Gagdad Bob said...

I'll concede the laughter...

Van Harvey said...

Oh... come on now, you aren't supposed to actually apply ideas! Let alone try to integrate them with other ideas & principles!
Gagdad said "Good news: on November 7, 2008, at 9:45 am, Deepak became an anti-abortion activist."

Oh... come on! You act as if words mean something... or... like... Ideas have Consequences! Everybody knows you just say things to raise consciousness... get attention and publicity... and ... then... then have fun behaving like you're unconscious.

(sheesh)

Van Harvey said...

hmmm... there's that vu ja de again. Pesky stuff.

julie said...

Non-violence, huh? Is he gonna buy the world a Coke next?

DH and I are going shooting tomorrow at a local gun club; If all goes well, I'll finally be armed and dangerous. Somehow, Deepak's vow just made that prospect oh, so much sweeter.

julie said...

Hey Bob - was it Double Indemnity you were talking about recently?

Gagdad Bob said...

Possibly. It is one of my all time favorite films, if not my favorite.

mushroom said...

I got the deja blues,
all over again.
I got the deja blues,
all over again.

Naturally, this can never be a mass movement, so we, the Remnant, are placed in the awkward position of having to hitch our wagons to such odious and disreputable institutions as the Republican Party, but only because it is preferable to outright satan worship -- sometimes by a slim margin.

Which is why I can never understand the "purists" who get upset about voting for the lesser of two weevils.

Regarding the remnant:

God came down to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, and stopped by to visit Abraham on His way to check things out. Since Abe was a close friend, God decided He would see what Abraham thought about the plan. Abraham had kinfolks down there so started a pitch for sparing the righteous. He got it down to the point where God would have spared all the wicked for the sake of a mere ten people.

Stop the story there and you're an optimist.

In fact, the angels could not find five, let alone ten. Lot, his wife, and his two daughters were shoved out of the city just in time. His wife looked back and became a pillar of salt. His daughters became fabulously wealthy afternoon talk show hosts.

mushroom said...

Barbara Stanwyck.

And all you have to do is kill somebody.

mushroom said...

Julie will be the next Hannie Caulder.

I dropped a little over a hundred bucks on ammo today myself.

robinstarfish said...

This may be the decade the ammo loader finally comes back down from the attic.

And even my peace-loving wife wants a concealed weapon permit, while she can still get one.

For wolves, bears, and badgers, ya know.

julie said...

Re DI, just got done watching it (DH brought it home yesterday on a whim). Good movie.

Re Hannie Caulder, hm. I'm no Raquel, for one, and since I'm partial to DH I'd prefer to avoid the whole bit where he gets murdered and I get raped. If she's a good shooter, I wouldn't mind having comparably mad skillz, though :)

Anonymous said...

I've kinda been missing the timeless wisdom of our buddy WordVeri and today found a fun possible substitute in Internet Anagram Server on wordsmith.org.

(tw -AT commenter 'Bonzo')
Type 'president elect' into anagram server:

Lectern Despite

Cretin Depletes
Septic Relented

Scented Reptile
Decent Reptiles
Creed Pestilent

Intercede Slept
Precedents Lite

Reelect Stipend
Presence Tilted

John McCain Sarah Palin and got... A Panama Clinch John Sir!

********************

More distressing to me than what is surely coming our way with this election debacle, is loss of faith in the judgement of the American electorate en masse. Lots of chatterers are droning we've suddenly become Center-Left as a nation, however the passing of Prop 8 & similar items tells me something else is going on. Something has trumped & neutralized all the red flags that went up, and all the warning bells that sounded.

My moonbat-emailer-list keeps sending out 'The One Is OK because...'. What's up with that? Tells me they saw & heard, but something more important than getting screwed by worse-than-Carter was at stake. Then this showed up:

Rosa Parks sat so that Martin Luther King Jr. could walk, Barack Obama ran so that our children could fly.


Enter the excellent 11/5/08 item by the inimitable Shelby Steele: Obama's post-racial promise Barack Obama seduced whites with a vision of their racial innocence precisely to coerce them into acting out of a racial motivation.

"Answering no to such questions is like saying no to any idealism; it seems callow. How could a decent person not hope for all these possibilities, or not give America credit for electing its first black president? And yet an element of Barack Obama's success was always his use of the idealism implied in these questions as political muscle. His talent was to project an idealized vision of a post-racial America -- and then to have that vision define political decency. Thus, a failure to support Obama politically implied a failure of decency."

"It is exactly because America has made such dramatic racial progress that whites today chafe so under the racist stigma. So I don't think whites really want change from Obama as much as they want documentation of change that has already occurred. They want him in the White House first of all as evidence, certification and recognition."

Shelby, u da Man!

Susannah said...

"When the relative becomes properly relative, the Absolute comes into view."

That is perfect.

Hubby was speaking this morning of Peter's being challenged on the issue of the temple tax, and blustering, "Well, yes we do pay it." But the moment he returns and osees Jesus, not a word can come out of his usually impetuous mouth, because Jesus speaks first!

“What do you think, Simon? From whom do kings of the earth take toll or tax? From their sons or from others?”

And when he said, “From others,” Jesus said to him, “Then the sons are free. However, not to give offense to them, go to the sea and cast a hook and take the first fish that comes up, and when you open its mouth you will find a shekel. Take that and give it to them for me and for yourself.”

The Lord of the universe fishes out a shekel from the sea, so the sons will not give offense to the chattel of the world.

I'd say he was in constant view of the Absolute! "Whose image is on this coin?"

Was Jesus an optimist or a pessimist? He knew what the world would do to him, yet, "for the joy set before him, he endured...."

"Something has trumped & neutralized all the red flags that went up, and all the warning bells that sounded."

That is precisely the sense I get.

There's been a profound shift here. Everybody I know senses it.

Susannah said...

Optimist/pessimist...realist.

I like to think I'm the last.

mushroom said...

Julie, I was referring only to the skill aspect, of course. I suppose that one came to mind because I actually saw it on the big screen when it first came out. Need I say that it is "seared, seared in my memory"?

My girlfriend agreed to go for the sake of seeing Ernest Borgnine -- which explains why she was my girlfriend.

julie said...

I know, Mushroom - I was just messing with ya :) And since it was Raquel, I'm not surprised it was seared into your memory. They just don't make'em like that in Hollywood anymore.

Sounds like another movie I'll have to add to my list, as I haven't seen it yet.

gumshoe said...

"More distressing to me than what is surely coming our way with this election debacle, is loss of faith in the judgement of the American electorate en masse. Lots of chatterers are droning we've suddenly become Center-Left as a nation, however the passing of Prop 8 & similar items tells me something else is going on. Something has trumped & neutralized all the red flags that went up, and all the warning bells that sounded.

My moonbat-emailer-list keeps sending out 'The One Is OK because...'. What's up with that? Tells me they saw & heard, but something more important than getting screwed by worse-than-Carter was at stake. "
- ximeze said
11/08/2008 11:25:00 PM


care to elaborate,ximeze ?

specifically:
"Something has trumped & neutralized all the red flags that went up, and all the warning bells that sounded."

what red flags and warning bells?
from the MSM?
or from the blogosphere?

Anna said...

Watching Meet the Press...
Valerie Jarrett, Co-chair of the Transition Team, made probably a personal slip of the tongue that may or may not reflect Obama:

He will begin to rule at time.

or

...ready to rule by being prepared.

She said "rule" which made me half laugh and half go, what?

Unless I heard her wrong. Anyway "govern" is the word that she should have used in this country. She might not have intended that. I try to give the benefit of the doubt. :/

Anonymous said...

Obama is so unconsciously programmed and driven that he will continue to make freudian slips which will show his true nature and intent (i.e. the Nancy Reagan comment) he has limited control over it.
But the morons will heareth it not.

Anonymous said...

How many meanings could be gleaned from a bumper sticker "OBAMA RULES".
How long if ever until his accolytes discover its true meaning.

Anonymous said...

gumshoe,

Not sure what you're asking, but I'll take a stab at it. The email originators are long married with children, white, college educated professionals, Boomers of the radical-chic activist persuasion. They're friends of mine & I've met most of the other people on this group email list. They fit the originators profile.

All thru the primaries this group has been discussing back & forth all the red-flag items, ie Rev Wright, bitter clingers, taxes, redistribution, thuggish tendancies, Ayers, Rezko, Palin treatment, etal. The originators were hooked into the Obama talking-point memos, action plans & fight-the-smears campaigns, sending them out to everyone on the list.

As a sample, all 30-odd members of this
group were aware of these red-flag issues, but chose excuse them away before the election. By 11/5 am the 'Barak is ok because....' emails started, two or three a day.
So, suddenly they're nervious about the possible effects of what they've push forward for the last year? What's up with that?

I like these people, they're kind, generous, decent California moonbats. It's been fascinating to observe first-hand how the white-washing of red-flags played out. Something more important to them than listening to warning-bells was clearly at stake here. What exactly enabled them to paint-over their concerns, at least until Obama got elected?

The Steele article gave me the answer: voting for Obama was the decent thing to do, so that's what they went with. Hope for absolution & Change to post-racial status for their Liberal White Guilt. That's what trumped any other factor.

robinstarfish said...

ximeze - anagrams are my favorite time-wasting pastime. ;-)

Why did His Oliness win? Because Barack Hussein Obama Has Samurai Backbone.

Anonymous said...

hoarhey, try 'Obama rules' in the Anagram toy 1874 results - take your pick.

robinstarfish said...

Seems like a good day for some disco.

gumshoe said...

ximeze -

thanks for the reply.

i doubt there are many educated whites who can withstand the "racist" epithet.

i don't see it as a sign of strength.

nor do i have to point out how
illegitimate it use has been,
and will continue to be.

(un)connected fragment
of a zen story:

"what are you saying!?"

"WHAT ARE YOU DOING!"

the people who can tell justice from revenge are rare.

Van Harvey said...

I have a similar reaction to all of the 'Who would have thought it possible for a black man to be elected congress?!' comments as I did to the 'who would have thought a popular church could have a Rev Wright who would say such things as he did, and that a Harvard grad like Obama would listen' - how dare they be surprised on either account!

It is unconscionable to be that uninformed on what is happening around them, to be that unaware of the country they are living in, and the fraudulent themes that are pushed through 'public perceptions', they both expose quite a lot, and they are still unaware of it. As with leftist ideas of economics, or anything else, they will completely refuse to see the lie of it, because they are more interested in the appearance of what seems to them to be 'the decent thing to do', making a mockery out of what really is the decent thing to do.

But that's not surprising either. The 'ends justify the means', means that you prefer the Lie over the Truth, and that will never be the decent thing to do.

Van Harvey said...

'congress'should have been -> 'President'

(denial)

Anonymous said...

Yup, they bought the Lie that Obama equals post-racial, while in Truth voting for him for purely racial reasons. Sorry charlie, you've been had by a con man. Actual post-racial means you don't give a crap about melanin content & refuse to play that game.

ge said...

Babushka Macaronies
is gonna git ya
[BHO]

Anonymous said...

when the tounged of flame are in-folded into the crowned knot of fire and the fire
and the rose are one

I know it isn't a rose, but...

JWM

Anonymous said...

An imaginary conversation with Deepak conducted in a one-sided Bob Newhart phone-type conversation:

"Cool, Deepak! A vow of non-violence.

So do you also renounce all violence done on your behalf?

You know, like the army and the police.
Yes? Great!

You do realize, of course, that if there are no police then laws have no force, don't you.

You didn't? You ARE ultimately asking us to take a vow that we will make all laws non-operative in our country and the world. Is that what you are asking?

No? Oh, it's only a certain type of laws that should stand and only a certain type of police action to support those laws?

Hmmm... doesn't sound like much of a vow to me.

So what exactly are you really vowing?

(dial tone)

Gagdad Bob said...

Nice to know that the world loves us now.

walt said...

I gather from that article that he hasn't yet taken "the vow."

Anonymous said...

It has been a good week for me; I've had work every day. Earlier this last week I had a night shift, cleaning up one of the elementary schools. As I ran the dustmop down the aisle of one of the K-3 classes I noticed on the counter a pile of work sheets- a coloring book style line drawing of a cowboy's face, with a few simple paragrahs for beginning readers- it took a few seconds for me to recognize the mediocre cowboy portrait as John Wayne.
The title of the worksheet was, "John Wayne American Hero"
The first paragraph was about John Wayne's start in the movie business. The second part was about john Wayne making people angry because he supported the war that America was fighting in Vietnam. Two paragraphs followed about how the people who supported the war were wrong and how America lost.
Thae last paragraph rememberd that the worksheet was about John Wayne. It said that he was brave because he stood up for what he believed in.
I could do a little amateur deconstructing of the implied memes in that little narrative, and it would come out something like: America war bad. wrong people support war. Good American disagree with war. John Wayne supports war. John Wayne is American Hero.
Well, class- Is it good to be an American Hero?

Third grade.
The narrative starts in the third grade.

And we have just seen the fusion of electronic, print, publishing, television, and film media with the aims and agendas of the far left of the Democrat party. They effectively act in concert to demonize anything remotely conservative, religious, or Republican. The wall of noise. For the last eight years it has been the wall of condemnation for anything GWB said or did. I don't have to rehash the media drumbeat. You heard it too. There is a monopoly on the mass shaping of opinion, discourse, and even language itself, and that monopoly belongs to the militantly secular, anti-religious left.
That grade school narrative about John Wayne is a seed. Seeds like it have been sown in our culture for the last fifty years.
'08, apparently is the year of the harvest.

JWM

Ephrem Antony Gray said...

JWM: Read Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis if you haven't already. In it I think he mouths some of his more disparaging commentaries on modern society - through the mouth of a demon (naturally!)

The first chapter itself is enough get the idea...

julie said...

I won't be taking that vow, well, ever.

Jim said...

Julie

Now that is HOT!

Anonymous said...

Wow, so Bin Laden is going to plan something even greater than 9/11. No doubt he hasn't heard of our newer, cooler, hipper, and totally mellow gonnabe prez.
O-man will cut the Bin-dog a couple of lines of pure hopium, and then it's all gonna' go mellow so fast that we won't even have time to say, "cool!"

Don't worry
Be happy

JWM

Aloysius said...

Evan Thomas of Newsweek calls Obama creepy.

So now they tell us d'Oh

http://www.charlierose.com/shows/2008/11/5/2/a-conversation-with-jon-meacham-evan-thomas

gumshoe said...

newsweek would have you believe
you can pick it up from the clean end.

i find evan thomas creepy.

points to charlie rose for his usual constructive and informative interviewing.

those might have been some of the toughest questions in the whole sorry campaign season.
still not saying much.

Anonymous said...

Bob wrote:
"Yes, you are a member of the vertical aristocracy, but you don’t make a big deal out of it."

Besides from being an stupid act of pride, it is also extremly difficult to brag about something like this since no one will acctually have a clue what I would be talking about...

"Vertical? Are you into some kind of extrem sports or what?

"Raccoo... what? Do you have a raccoon-farm together?

"Spritual?"... Yeah I've heard the band, Spiritualized, they are great! Rock on!

And I must give all of you here a big hug and thanks for all insight and comments about the election. Helped me big time to get through it! :)


/Johan

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