It’s A trailer. Click on it later.
Tyranny is the rule, not an exception. The assaults of tyrants or would-be tyrants are the rule, not an exception. (Laugh and cry at this. It ain’t just the Russians who live like this.)
That’s the real meaning of American exceptionalism. We had a moment — 200-some years in the sordid 5,000 year chronology of recorded history — in which one people organized themselves to address the constant antipathy between morality and power. “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s,” Christ said. The founders of our country added another sentence: “But if you can, keep Caesar in a box.”
We have all been the beneficiaries of that innovation. It’s doomed, of course. Caesar always escapes from the box.
Your children will live in a different world. Tyranny has returned, clothed as always in promises that it is the opposite of tyranny. As always, the tyrant definitions are polar reversals: weakness is strength, grievance is virtue, dependency is prosperity, sloth is entitlement, ignorance is knowing everything worth knowing, vice is liberty, passivity is wisdom, slogans are reason, baby murder is freedom, and loveless animal sex is sufficient consolation.
Sadly, most of you will lose your children, if you have not already lost them.
When social contracts get twisted into caricatures of what they were intended to achieve, everyone loses. What awaits is chaos, violence, confusion and endless loss, perverse obsessions, subjugation.
Where we are. Get your children ready. Your life is no guide to what theirs will be. Your moment will not be theirs. Theirs will be some variation of these movies.
The first is Hope and Glory, linked complete above. Brits in Britain during The Blitz. Still civilized but shredding slowly apart. Sometimes funny but not really. Sometimes inspiring but not really. Not what you’d hope for your own spoiled young consumers. Without you, how long would they last and how much would they remember?
The second is about a child’s life in a prison camp. More Brits, but sheared off from the root of their cultural tree of life.
The full movie is online here.
Finally, the fate of the defeated and deluded. Much closer to what our own young’uns are likely to experience. The survival fight of the barely conscious, striving mightily to understand what humanity actually consists of if it isn’t some pile of convenient unthought about platitudes.
This one’s on Netflix and it’s also available in 10 minute chunks on Youtube. Contrary to the intimations of the trailer, it’s not about sex. It’s about a desperate, only partially successful attempt to come awake in the face of grave physical and moral danger.
Brace yourselves. I know you’re not ready for this fight. Nothing has prepared you. The intoxication of your evaporating moment has made you believe that optimism can save your seed.
It can’t. And it won’t.
Shammadamma.
Strong words, and while I know they weren’t directed specifically at me, these are indeed vitally important moments in my boys’ lives and my life as a father. The boys are 4 and 6 now, and if your writing has taught me anything over the past 20 years, it’s that the country, the world, and our culture are inexorably changing. I don’t want to go into survivalist mode, I don’t want to leave the country. I don’t want to be a silent German citizen, either. My boys will live in a world that I have not seen but can imagine (with a lot of help from you). I don’t hold a flame of optimism for this country anymore (occasionally I backslide into hope…), but I carry the hopes that my sons will be good young men, raised right, “in the world but not of it.” Manners, respect, morality, a love of truth and learning, good discernment of people. It’s going to be tough, no doubt, with all sides pressing in and whispering (yelling) in their ears, but the world will need them when the next World War comes, whichever form it takes.
Within the last year, I had a realization that was obvious in retrospect. Each of us is the end of a long line of survivors, people who made it long enough to give birth to children who made it, yes. But also, for men, this means an unbroken lineage back to the first man, and for women, a long series of women back to the beginning. My sons will continue that line for me, and I owe it to them to forge them into good men.