Sometimes he tells me “No.”

It was Father’s Day. Got the usual cards and stuff, but all I am anymore is a grandfather. Marooned as we are, we celebrated the day mostly by watching movies, two we sat through and one I only saw advertised because I don’t need to see it again.

First up was “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Which, to be honest, I’ve had my problems with over the years. Not because I mind a movie in which nothing whatever happens for the first two or three hours, but because I feel mockingbirds are seriously misrepresented. They’re absolutely not little Billy Budds on the wing. They are highly intelligent, devious, and frequently malicious little bastards who deserve a comeuppance as much as slicksters and conmen of any other species. I remember a mocker who decided on slight evidence that a cat named Tigger had assaulted his nest. (Yeah, he was probably guilty but the case was purely circumstantial…) For two weeks thereafter, Tigger couldn’t take a step outside without being dive-bombed, chased, and driven into the bushes alongside the house.

It reached a climax when I was finally present to witness the extremity of Tigger’s distress. The mocker stationed himself on a telephone wire in front of the house, like a middle linebacker shadowing the quarterback. Whenever, wherever Tigger moved, the attack came like a furious pass rush. One time tough guy Tigger cringed and tried to press his body into the foundation of the house. While the mocker returned to the wire and laughed, yes, laughed at his victim.

I’d had enough. I got the hose, turned the nozzle to the “jet” setting and blasted the little sonofabitch off the wire. Then I did it again. Which is all it took to show the newly moistened maniac that the first time wasn’t an accident. He left Tigger alone after that. But don’t try to sell me on the crapola that mockingbirds are God’s defenseless little sweethearts.

Where were we? Oh, right. The fraudulence of the central metaphor aside, the movie is an excellent representation of a lost ideal of fatherhood. It reminds my wife of her own father, and it reminds me of my paternal grandfather. Yes, there really were such men. Believe it and experience the sorrow of not having such a one in your own life. Men whose natural gravity and goodness sufficed to replace angry words, punishment, and lectures. The very worst thing you could possibly do was disappoint their abiding faith in you, and you’d do anything to prevent that catastrophe.

I almost never watch movies multiple times, and I avoid TKAM because it always makes me miss the key figure of my childhood, but I watched it all the way through again last night. This time, an old man myself, I found myself fixated on the suits Atticus Finch wore in every scene. He wasn’t a dandy. He was just dressed for behaving with politesse and honor, dressed for living up to the demands of life. I miss that more than I can say. There are no role models in track suits.

Next up was Life with Father, which old time Hollywood turned into a fairly broad comedy with father as the reliably stuffy, unobservant Victorian punchline. The movie itself is entertaining, a Technicolor delight starring William Powell, Irene Dunne, and a very young Elizabeth Taylor. But I was reminded of the book it came from, in which Father comes across rather differently, not as a punchline but the rock-ribbed anchor of a household. Neither unkind nor hopelessly rigid, he set an example of duty, firm principle, and magnanimous authority that is also missing in action today.

Finally, the one I didn’t want to, didn’t need to watch again: Searching for Bobby Fischer. Another necessary variety of father, the one who drives his offspring to fulfill the very best they are capable of. In our time, such pressure looks indistinguishable from child abuse. But it isn’t when the men behind it are motivated by love and faith rather than narcissism. We need more fathers who make serious demands on their children, not just in terms of accomplishment but character, morality, and discipline.

I meant this to be a positive post. Why do I feel that Father’s Day has slowly become a kind of Memorial Day, mostly devoted to remembering what is irretrievably lost?

If you’re a pharaoh, everything you do is cool.

So we have ourselves a pharaoh. A god-king. Just what the founders had in mind. (Excuse me. I’ve just been corrected in the Comments. The “founding founders.“)

King Tut was all golden and shiny, famous in the end for being famous and shiny, not for anything he actually accomplished. He just had more stuff than we ever found with any other pharaoh. That will be Obama’s legacy too. More pictures with Beyonce, LeBron, and other gilded idols than any other president ever had.

Just how stupid are we? A symbolic pagan god-king can be absent from the history of his own time. (It’s impossible to name ANY historical event King Tut was involved in.) But if we want more from our leaders than golden masks and divine gestures, we should be liberal and modern enough to demand that they actually be present during their rule.

What we never get from our own American god-king. Almost a year later, we have no information at all about where he was on the night of Benghazi. Except that he had a fundraising date in Vegas next day. He made one strong remark about the IRS scandal and has been silent since. He endorses Holder, promotes Susan Rice, and says nothing, nothing, nothing about the NSA or ANY of the multiplying scandals of his administration. He just wears his suits to usual good effect.

God-kings don’t have to be leaders. Good. Because he isn’t. Not a single leadership gene in his whole fucking body. God-kings just have to have golden masks.

Ain’t I fucking wonderful? Even LeBron lets me dunk on him.

The only question is why we as a people have so nostalgically reincarnated the mentality of ancient Egyptians. When you figure it out, please let Chris Matthews know…

Well, not the only question. There are others. Why do you still think you would have stood up in all the great moral crises in history? That you’d have been an abolitionist, a suffragist, a civil rights activist, a heroic anti-Nazi in 1930s Germany? Why are you not screaming all day long and all night long right now? Until you’re hoarse and broken and bleeding from a rage that cannot be voiced without injuring your mind and body. Why can’t you see that the current siege of scandals is more notice than most people ever get of their chance to be importantly moral?

Oh. I forgot. You love Beyonce’s ass and Obama’s celebrity schedule too. A golden mask is always, well, golden. Ain’t it? Not to mention a Golden Ass, always turned toward those who would kiss it forever…

The Golden Hind. Francis Drake’s bitch. You’d have kissed that ass too.

All it ever has to be is a royal ass. Unless you still think you’re immune. Still, you know, in Da Nile.

Teamwork is essential.

Two key personnel announcements this week. Tim Tebow is joining the New England Patriots. Right. And Sarah Palin is joining Fox News as an analyst. Right. First sign she’s really going to run for president. The big news, you see, will be when she resigns from Fox News a year or so from now. Informal announcement of candidacy. Tim should be available by then too.

You can see how it’s going to go. Sarah will run, the treacherous slime balls of the MSM will attack her in the vilest, most sexually demeaning ways possible, and then…

Tebow time!

I don’t know about you. I can’t wait.

I’m Molly. Slipped my collar tonight. Don’t you wish you could? I think I look sleek. Do you?

I wrote a series of posts on the tenth anniversary of 9/11. Here’s one excerpt:

What do I mean when I talk of splintering? That each of us devolves to one predominant emotion that is somehow isolating. Apotheosis speaks of spite. Eduardo speaks of being sick of sadness as if sadness were irreconcilable with rage. It’s all part of the splintering. Precipitated by the slow withdrawing from MSM view of the images that seared our hearts in the first place — because they might offend the survivors. The first splinter.

Other splinters? Loss of heart. Loss of faith. Conservative/libertarian neo-isolationism, the first since Republicans wanted to give Hitler a free pass in Europe. Not our business. Transference in the form of Bush Derangement Syndrome. He was more than clever in realizing that we could not garrison the U.S. to keep ourselves safe by purely defensive means. He chose a strategy akin to the Allied decision to fight Hitler in North Africa because they couldn’t fight him anywhere else.. So Bush fought in Iraq to keep them away from here. And (omg) he was right. Al qaida streamed into Iraq to fight the Great Satan and died by the thousands, draining their blood and treasure. More splinters. (But) Bush was the problem of terrorism. He was creating enemies we hadn’t had before. Really? If we were just nice to the jihadists, they would be nice back. Like they were in London and Madrid, etc, etc. So we dismissed him from office, hated, ridiculed, endlessly maligned, entirely forgetting that the next great big attack on American soil never happened.

I also had a loftier view of it all. Which seems sadly, naively optimistic now.

Liberalism intervened, the way it usually does, substituting insanity for common sense. Martial victory was transformed to diplomatic surrender and retreat. Apology became the order of the day, and all that was left was pure domestic defense, which meant, obviously, that outside threats could only be dealt with by systematically removing privacy, liberty, and free speech from the home of the brave.

We are now reaping what we have sown. We gave up fighting or even naming the enemy. We killed rather than captured and interrogated because interrogation is so unpleasant. We pretended we could protect ourselves by persecuting, uh, ourselves. We let the TSA grope our grandmothers. We accept that profiling Islamist killers is racist and intolerable. We apologize for discovering that everything we do is monitored and recorded. We stand up to decry anyone who objects to our new subservience to government as a traitor. How cool is that, bitch?

Go ahead. Choose safety over liberty. Blindly trust the NSA even as you fear the IRS because the one has nothing to do with the other. Those of us who know better will soon be in our graves. Where your beloved government will soon and surely put us. The little girl with the new lungs owes her life directly to Sarah Palin, because the heavy hand of HHS showed everyone that routine federal regulations are the death panels she warned of. Hence the judicial intervention. You know. Necessary PR. Not to say spin. Pitiful. But for everyone who isn’t a ten year old front page story, the death panels do hover and smirk in waiting.

But the doomed old ones will have the last laugh when all is said and done. The real America will die with us who are denied treatment for lives actually lived, including all the smoking and drinking that used to be vices but are now what passes for immorality in a hedonist culture that pushes ten year olds to buy “morning after” pills without parental notification. So you’ll all die younger than the ones you euthanize via budget cuts. You’ll die of STDs and hepatitis and obesity and boredom. Those of you who don’t die of authoritarian acts of personal destruction because you got in the way of somebody more important, more connected, more protected.

Safety? There’s no such thing. Life is dangerous. It always has been and always should be. Otherwise, it’s the zombie existence our movies are suddenly, presciently obsessed with. But there is always irony. As your lives contain less and less moral content, you will be more and more vulnerable to the mechanisms of ruthless government that target you when you become, for any reason, inconvenient to someone just as heedless and feckless as you, only higher up in the political class structure. You won’t stand a chance.

Because the only ones who could have taught you how to fight, and stood with or in front of you in the fight, will be dead in the mass graves of ObamaCare.

Get used to your collars. Make sure your licenses are up to date. Don’t ever miss the dates required for your distemper and rabies shots. Get spayed before you do anything that might require you to be put down. Learn how to sit, lie down, and stay. Believe me, your life (such as it is) depends upon it.

Put a collar on this. Go ahead and try. I don’t do orderly.

Not a game. Chaos.

When I was a kid, there were two card games that corresponded to politics. One civilized and one rowdy. The civilized one was War. The rowdy one was Spit. We’ve been playing Spit since the 2000 election. It’s not about gentlemen and ladies playing seriously across a table. It’s about being faster, more ruthless, more physical, and yes, more violent with your cards than your opponent. War doesn’t have an equivalent of the race card. Spit has nothing but. The so-called play is just short of fisticuffs. Which it sometimes leads to.

But there was a whole other game nobody really played. 52 Pickup. It wasn’t a game at all. It was a damnation of games. It consisted of simply throwing the whole deck up in the air and challenging anyone to make sense of the result.

Where we are with the NSA revelations. Left and right no longer entirely matter, and they are not predictive. Time to figure out where you really stand. This is a juggling of first principles, and I’m thinking it’s a litmus test it’s possible to fail utterly.

The contradictions and reversals are so huge that I feared I couldn’t find a way to illustrate them. But then I saw Fox News Channel’s show The Five this evening. Enough to start the discussion.

Bob Beckel. The crusty reliable lefty. Outraged. To the max. He referenced the Patriot Act, but he didn’t content himself with blaming Bush. He blamed Obama more for extending the surveillance to all Americans.

Dana Perino. She was inclined to trust the NSA. Huh? She wondered why the whistleblower ran away to Hong Kong and asked why he didn’t come to Washington, DC, to make his revelations. Really? He wouldn’t have been swarmed by 8000 federal agents and disappeared from view? Really?

Greg Gutfeld. Total sellout. Ultimate libertarian announces he has an End Of the World clause that justifies the end of liberty if it prevents a nuclear terrorist attack. He seemed, I’m sorry to say, in a state of near panic.

Kimberly Guilfoyle. Thought she was raising the central issue when she said, “if we’re talking the ends justifying the means…” But I forgot that she’s a former federal prosecutor. The only ends vs. means issue she saw was the whistleblower. He’s a boastful would-be hero who has to be prosecuted. In her red dress and corpse makeup, she had only one objective: prosecuting the accused who had broken the law. Unmindful of her own double irony. First that the moral question of whether ends justify the means applies only to the whistleblower and NOT to the federal government. Second, that she wanted the whistleblower taken into federal custody ASAP because al Qaeda would certainly want to capture him and torture his secrets from him. So, he’s doing this for fame and glory when you regard him as a beheading victim in waiting? Really?

Eric Bolling. I thought he would buy the Republican defense. He didn’t. Doesn’t. He’s right. He agreed with Beckel. It’s outrageous and utterly unacceptable. You know. A little thing called the Fourth Amendment that half or more of putative conservatives have cravenly forgotten about.

A few additional points.

It’s been at least a decade that critics of U.S. intelligence have been decrying the decline of human intelligence in favor of high-tech intelligence. The NSA programs we’ve been learning about are the ultimate proof. The FBI was unable to translate a human intelligence tip from the Russians about the Boston bombers. Interestingly, since the U.K. Became the most surveilled society on earth, that country’s crime solution rate has plummeted. Too much data and too little, uh, intelligence applied.

I once wrote a post about death. More than 6000 Americans die every day. Terrorism? Less than 2500 victims in the last dozen years. There are 300 million Americans. No, I won’t ask you to do the math. I know most of you can’t, and I AM talking about you, Gutfeld. Your fright is disgusting. Not even losing a city is worth abandoning the freedoms you have spent so much time proclaiming. 30,000 Americans die every year just bashing into each other in their cars. Maybe the government should monitor the new GPS apps in motor vehicles to find road rage and texting teens and slurring daddies. Screw the constitution if one life can be saved by hounding them to paralyzed paranoia.

Finally, I’m fascinated by the brand new Iron Curtain righties have discovered between the predatory Obama administration and the benign nexus of CIA/NSA/FBI and all the companies that funnel our private communications to them. I’m stupefied by the lack of imagination involved in assuming that “if you haven’t done anything wrong, you have nothing to fear.” Who decides what is wrong? Can’t envision people who think some phrase in a casual email is grounds to destroy your life? If somebody in the government decides you’re a threat or a pest. Ever heard of the recent media concept called the “narrative”?

Oh, just think. For once. Think of every google search you’ve ever done. If I wanted to cast you as a villain, what STORY could I concoct of who you are based on all those searches?

Just think.

Then come back at me sounding like Dana Perino, Greg Gutfeld, or even Kimberley Guilfoyle.

Actually, don’t. I don’t feel the need to respond to idiots anymore. They bore me so.

How does he always know what I’m up to?

I’m so rich I must be smart.

Oprah got her honorary degree. The Harvard grads got the wisdom of Oprah. I’m certain it ranks right up there with all the other luminaries who actually attended the school — you know, less wealthy folk like Ralph Waldo Emerson, T.S. Eliot, ee cummings, Henry James, John Updike, John Adams, John Hancock, Philip Johnson, Charles Bullfinch, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Orson Welles. Fortunately, the audio of her commencement address is permanently enshrined here. You’ll find it inspiring, I’m sure.

Unless, like me, you’d prefer to hear the thoughts of a real Harvard graduate who was not invited to this year’s festivities. An excerpt if you need that sort of incentive.

In high school you were National Merit Scholars, student council presidents and captains of your fencing teams. You took dozens of practice SATs, practiced viola for thousands of hours (violinists are a dime a dozen) and French-braided the hair of homeless veterans.

You masterfully tied together a set of emotional symptoms that looked enough like attention deficit disorder to buy you extra time on all your finals and standardized tests. Plus, you got to take the exams in special quiet rooms, where a test facilitator would sharpen the pencils outside, because the grinding sound triggered your acute sensory overload. (Which somehow didn’t preclude your part-time summer job at Blenders Juicery.)

You hired private college advisers to read your essays and hone your interview skills. Just think back to those valuable sessions where you learned to practically leap out of the chair talking about your passion for writing one-act plays in Cherokee, or how your heart raced that summer on the Mongolian steppes when you first spotted an ovoo monitor lizard, once thought to be extinct.

And you learned to deftly walk the college interviewer through your many achievements while still showing carefully modulated self-effacement: “Yes, I helped design the CO2 scrubber that will save humanity from global warming, but it was totally a team effort.”

Then you arrived at this great institution, where you dabbled in a couple of your passions, only to quit them after freshman year because you found new ones: playing hundreds of rounds of “Settlers of Catan” and having long debates into the night over which Stark son is hotter on “Game of Thrones.”

The keys of your $20,000 Powell flute became rusted shut after it was put to use as a bong for the last two years. Your Wilson Pro H22 tennis racquet quickly became a drying rack for your underwear once you found out that the college tennis team was filled with power-hitting recruits from Estonia and the Ukraine who could knock a flash drive off the top of your head with a backhand.

So you relaxed into college life—a well-deserved break after the exhausting race to get here. You’ve spent four years percolating in a warm stew of beer, gender studies and online pornography—which led to the subject of your senior thesis, “Jacobean Dramatic Tropes in Modern ‘Massage Surprise’ Videos.”

Yes, Rob LaZebnik knows his audience. If you want to see what advice he has for the spoiled brats who presently occupy the prestigious houses of Harvard, go here.

On the other hand, you might think he just has a bad attitude. There’s a lot of that going around these days.

Harvard is having a bad year. The football team sucks. Second to Penn? Talk about suck. The boss can hardly hold his head up since that happened.

Like my Adam’s apple? Implant.

It’s gotta be tough. To be smart. Really smart. But not brilliant, insightful, or breakthrough. To be just a glib repetitious cliche. You’re a Rhodes Scholar, well paid, and nothing but a propaganda mouthpiece for the lamest political agenda in 80 years.

All so so old. Why nobody watches anymore. Why you must be tearing your hair out. Touch of grey seems appropriate.

The gay brother is the coolest character.

It’s a tough call. The show deserves a row of Emmies. Delightfully subversive of all kinds of shibboleths without ever seeming to deviate from standard lib doctrine. The villain of the script is, finally, as it must be, corporate, but the villain of the subtext is totalitarian scientism, which regards all of us as indistinguishable units to be managed like cattle and if necessary slaughtered like cattle. Equally sly is the dynamiting of the false notion that homosexuality is genetic, which even geneticists concede it can’t be.

None of this is meant to suggest that the show itself is some kind of screed. It isn’t. It’s suspenseful, action-packed, hilarious, moving, and utterly absorbing. Ten episodes, complete season finished. Emmies obviously go to show, scriptwriter, and director. Where it gets hard is with the actors. Felix as the foster-brother of Sara is tempting as the top candidate. In the later episodes you worry that they might actually kill him off, which would cut your interest in half.

On the other hand are the actresses who play the clones. They’re all marvelous, starting with the crazed assassin Helena.

I’m a Ukrainiac. Kill, love, kill, love, kill.

But the soccer mom Alison is as subtly realized as Helena is over the top. Just as nuts yet it takes hours to realize how deep down batty she really is.

I just want my life back. Even if it kills you.

Cosima is even subtler, a weedy academic rational shell hiding a volcanically passionate emotional pushover. This far in, we’re still not sure who she is.

I’m smarter than everybody but me.

Still, the winner has to be Sara, streetwise, sexy, cunning, disreputable, and absolutely focused on protecting her five year old daughter. It’s a spellbinding performance, so good that you forget she’s not technically beautiful. It turns out that she is beautiful, as played by Tatiana Maslany.

I can do this. All of it.

Remember that name. She became a star in Orphan Black.

As long as I can touch I can relax.

So we’re doing better. After a week of looking after the hurt one my not so reliable knees gave out and one of the daughters had to take her for the X-ray and the prognosis. Which were both excellent. She’s healing fast. As she predicted she would.

Thought we could share one of her tonics.

We’re city folk.

The red tailed hawks at the Franklin Institute are scrutinized more closely than the IRS watches conservatives. The missus has been observing their babies for years on the “Bobble Cam.” She loves it most when the bobbles start “wingercizing,”getting ready to fly.

I’m not ever going to fly. I’m just keeping mom off my back.

She likes it especially now, given that she’s flying on one wing herself. But even she was startled to discover, just like the IRS, that sometimes the watched are also watching the watchers.

You see me, I see you.

We’re good. My legs are back. And she’s back to getting cross when I tease her. Nest righted. Hawks on the wing again.