Lake was commenting today (via text) on my darkness of late. He used the term “downward spiral.” Which I reminded him applies more directly to our nation and culture. I also reminded him of this Kipling story, about a born killer who has to follow his enemy down the hole no matter how dark it gets.
Rikki-tikki knew that he must catch her, or all the trouble would begin again. She headed straight for the long grass by the thorn-bush, and as he was running Rikki-tikki heard Darzee still singing his foolish little song of triumph. But Darzee’s wife was wiser. She flew off her nest as Nagaina came along, and flapped her wings about Nagaina’s head. If Darzee had helped they might have turned her; but Nagaina only lowered her hood and went on. Still, the instant’s delay brough Rikki-tikki up to her, and as she plunged into the rat-hole where she and Nag used to live, his little white teeth were clenched on her tail, and he went down with her — and very few mongooses, however wise and old they may be, care to follow a cobra into its hole. It was dark in the hole; and Rikki-tikki never knew when it might open out and give Nagaina room to turn and strike at him. He held on savagely, and struck out his feet to act as brakes on the dark slope of the hot, moist earth.
Then the grass by the mouth of the hole stopped waving, and Darzee said: “It is all over with Rikki-tikki! We must sing his death song. Valiant Rikki-tikki is dead! For Nagaina will surely kill him underground.”
So he sang a very mournful song that he made up on the spur of the minute, and just as he got to the most touching part the grass quivered again, and Rikki-tikki, covered with dirt, dragged himself out of the hole leg by leg, licking his whiskers. Darzee stopped with a little shout. Rikki-tikki shook some of the dust out of his fur and sneezed. “It is all over,” he said. “The widow will never come out again.” And the red ants that live between the grass stems heard him, and began to troop down one after another to see if he had spoken the truth.
I’ve been thinking about a post on this topic for a while now. I am no victim of my times. I was raised and trained expressly to do what I do. My father reared me as a cultural warrior. It’s not his fault that building a human mongoose has unintended consequences.
I hunt and kill cobras. What I do. I’m not nice or cute or useful for anything else. I don’t even change the net population of cobras.
But people who live in fear of cobras can take heart in knowing there’s such a thing as a mongoose.
My teeth are sunk in the tail of a poisonous culture that can kill our nation. I won’t let go.
I’ve spent years feeling guilty because I thought I’d disappointed my father. I’m finally realizing that I didn’t, couldn’t. He doesn’t approve all the choices I’ve made, but he knows that I never ever let go. Even more than he. And he knows the price that exacts.
Why I’m feeling as if it’s possible, conceivable, to imagine a state of peace. I was built to play this particular part in the end game of America. I’m pretty sure he’ll forgive the sins that helped turn me into the resistance weapon I’ve become.
Booooring. You don’t have to be a rodent to kill snakes. Hell, I’m damn near as quick as The Boss. They call me Rikki Tikki Izzi.
uh, Izzie has never scratched me. She leads a four-cat household in mouse kills. This absolutely crazed, wild-ass Bengal has never scratched me. I’m a mongoose. I was raised for this. Watch Hitman. I have a barcode on my head.
Hoodies are cool. Unless they get you killed. So maybe don’t wear one if you don’t want to get killed. An idea I had. But what do I know?
What a mess. No celebrating here. One life snuffed out. One life turned into a hell to its last breath. Two dumb young’uns who made a series of dumb decisions that resulted in death. Sad all round. Can’t stand the hyped up post-mortem coverage of the verdict any more than I could stand the mountains of media and political whoring that led to this night.
The participants are congratulating themselves on the victory of the legal system. Fine. But the legal system is powerless against the real villains in this case. The race hustlers who made a sad, sorry local fatality into a national obsession that amounts to incitement to riot. Who will prosecute NBC, MSNBC, CNN, Fox, or the president of the United States for inflaming racial relations in a completely cynical and unnecessary way — just to promote a race narrative that was obsolete before the current administration made it the be-all defense of every screw-up, failure, and corrupt act by the federal government?
Disgust. And sorrow. That’s all I’m feeling right now. How about you?
Blogger extraordinaire Erick Erickson has a fascinating essay linked via Hotair yesterday. It’s called Reality Check. He definitely needs one.
In truth we offered him one of those back in 2012 when he was so impressed with his own media ascendancy that he decided to disdain all bloggers who weren’t interested in becoming partisan political activists.
So imagine our surprise when we read yesterday that he is repelled by the “politicization of everything.”
He begins with typical modesty.
Two nights ago I posted my thoughts on being on radio. I followed it up on radio yesterday afternoon. In both, I made this observation:
No one likes people who talk politics all the time. I’ve spent an entire segment once on the fine art of browning onions in butter. And you know what? It’s been a widely requested segment of my show for repeat airings. People care about more than politics and, on radio, they want to know the guy they’re listening to on the way home does too.
First, it is absolutely true — I spent 20 minutes on the radio talking about browning onions in butter and how cookbooks lie that it only takes 10 minutes. It has been a highly sought after segment of my radio show. But second, people were downright offended that I’d suggest there is more to life than politics. I’ve gotten angry emails from a lot of people on the left and the right.
On this point, hat’s off to him. If he can mesmerize a radio audience for 20 minutes on the subject of browning, er, caramelizing onions, he’s the Limbaugh of cooking. I’ve watched dozens of cooking shows involving this procedure, some by Michelin starred chefs, and I’ve never heard any of them take as much as 20 minutes to explain how to do it. But he’s not the Limbaugh of politics.
He leaps from onions to these extraordinary statements:
When I point out I find some things the President does, like talking about sci-fi, endearing and find Michelle Obama to be a very beautiful First Lady, my conservative friends go insane. While I was at CNN they were convinced I had sold out to the liberal media. Now, at Fox, it just perplexes them.
When I talk about my faith and my views on gay marriage or abortion, liberals are convinced I must be lying when I say I have gay friends and pro-abortion friends and we get along just fine and they are wonderful people. Surely I must think they are going to hell and how could those people be friends with me. Folks, I think we’re all going to hell, but by the grace of God.
There are subjects I do not tackle with friends with whom I disagree because I value their friendship far more than I value my view on some subject that divides our ability to be friends. As a Christian, to me evangelism and sharing my faith is much more about being a good friend to someone, regardless of their faith or world view, than about being right in an argument or going to some beach in Mexico to work on my tan while I hammer a nail or two in a hut and speak Jesusese to a total stranger.
Jesusese? What an ass. This isn’t Christianity. It’s a recycling of the “I’m Okay, You’re Okay” self-help pap from the 1960s. It’s also a beautiful illustration of what I said in my post about Erickson a year ago:
It’s just that the post struck me oddly. Simultaneously defensive, almost guiltily so, and yet condescending in the extreme.
What we’re seeing here is someone who is perhaps incurably shallow. He builds himself a successful media career talking about the nuts and bolts of policy issues, campaign races, where conservatives should align themselves right now to score political wins, and just as with his own avowed religion, he misses everything important. While he thrives on the politicization of everything that has secured him gigs on CNN, Fox, Laura Ingraham, etc, he is naturally bored by any exclusive focus on what he clearly has come to regard as a game. Post and riposte. No harm, no foul. Just talk.
But it isn’t a game. Just as Christianity isn’t. The country and the whole world are at stake.
He equates gay marriage with abortion. Well, same-sex marriage may be a game, a Hollywood-driven fad that will blow itself up in the reality of gay male promiscuity and lesbian cat fighting. Abortion is not a game. I’ve lost patience with everyone who can’t see that it’s a sickening, violent act of murder that can’t be camouflaged with obscene euphemisms like “women’s reproductive health.” I don’t want to be “good friends to them.” And I certainly don’t think they are “wonderful people.” It’s a deal killer, an ender of friendships. Final.
The same with the current political environment in the United States. The freedoms that are being attacked, being lost day by day, will ultimately kill millions if not billions of people. I don’t give a shit about Obama’s “endearing” sci-fi interests or basketball brackets. I don’t give a shit about Michelle Obama’s looks, especially given that the only thing I notice about her is a constant resentful sneer. That’s not attractive to me in any woman, let alone a First Lady of the United States.
I don’t care about political horse races, congressional maneuverings and deals, and the hijinks of the Fed and the unlimited number of government agencies whose overpaid secretaries and deputies and unions seek to impose their will via this and that regulatory gambit. I care about what the loss of integrity and morality and commitment to our heritage are doing to the greatest nation ever established. That’s not politicization. It’s dirty, filthy, evil politics. Erickson doesn’t know the difference. Because he has good friends at CNN and the country club.
Politicization is something else. It’s the conversion of the MSM from investigative journalism to a leftist propaganda organ intent on injecting political opinions into every aspect of our contact with news, entertainment, and education. Why people are getting angry. Because there’s no place left to be free of idiotic insults on traditional values and faith without disconnecting entirely. Meaning we are being driven fiercely out of the national debate about who and what we are and should be. The Ericksons are the jolly whores who facilitate the process by propping up the pretense that we have a voice lefties tolerate.
Is there more to life than politics? Sure. But politics gets incredibly important when it starts suppressing, oppressing, and costing human life. Everyone here knows that I talk about more than politics. I don’t, however, regard politics as merely a tool for getting attention.
But I’ll give Erick the last word, because his last words really do tell the tale. For him it really is all about him. The good news is that he’s just above the rest of us. The good Christian with wonderful pro-abortion friends who tells his nominal conservative allies to go to hell for (Wow!) criticizing him. Try that on for size.
…I just cannot understand why so many self-described Christian conservatives are so angry so constantly that they get mad at the suggestion there is more to life than politics.
Truth is, there is more to life than politics. And while you and I can find things that outrage us and they may be different things, to hell with you for being outraged that I’m not outraged about something that outrages you.
While you’re firing up your twitter account or blog to tell the world what a terrible person I am for disagreeing or not caring or not apologizing for some perceived slight or injury you think I’ve caused, in the actual real world that exists off the internet I’m going to go build a train with my 4 year old and fly it through the rings of Saturn before sitting down under the oak tree in my backyard to have a scoop of homemade ice cream with my 7 year old and play a game of catch.
The little one behind the mountain range is Molly, a 65 pound greyhound.
But he’s still convinced he’s a lapdog. Just this morning he climbed onto the couch and curled up in Mommy’s lap. He’s worried about her. A lot. Hard to explain to him that he’s too big to sit in her lap. If you know how, please let me know.
In the movie “Job and the Volcano,” six time Oscar Winner Tom Banks starts feeling sick at his job in Philadelphia, no wonder, and goes to see a doctor, resulting in the scene above. His first response is probably a lot like yours or mine would be. He writes a novel about his rotten luck, using the nom de guerre Michael Hanrahan.
Hell to get AIDS. But a great way to get on the bestseller list. I could get lucky. Ask my ghostwriter. Get it?
Shit, I’m Dying
Chapter One
I was getting restless. Bill Boggs was a friend from the days so long ago—exactly three weeks now—when I was also a broker, furiously peddling thick sheaves of paper that promised millions if the sky didn’t fall in. But the sky had fallen in, on me at least, and I knew I shouldn’t have shown such an early draft of my work to a straight, even one I liked as much as Bill.
“The thing is,” Bill said, the way the straights do, as if there were only one ‘thing,’ and they had it in the back pocket of their blue suit-pants, “You guys always seem to think that everybody famous was gay. It’s just not convincing.”
I reread the passage he was so riled up about.
“Speak for yourself, John,” murmured Pocohantas. She was a drab girl who continuously exuded a strong smell of deer meat. John Smith edged farther away from her. He didn’t want that scent of rotting venison on his suit with Miles Standish coming so soon for a visit. No, what he wanted was Miles Standish himself—and not in the company of this young woman, but alone, where he could sound out the possibility so subtly alluded to in their discourse, the possibility which had kept him awake nights dreaming of…
“John.” Pocohantas was patient but insistent.
“John! Don’t you have anything to say to me?”
He turned back to her from his fevered imaginings. “Yes. I do. I feel you should know that buckskin is passé. It is no longer la mode. Do I make myself clear?”
“Yes, John.” And then she smiled that damned secret smile of hers, as if she knew. She didn’t know shit.
“It’s that last sentence, isn’t it?” I asked. “John Smith wouldn’t have said ‘didn’t know shit.’ You’re right. I’ll change it.”
Bill stood up, ready to return to the safe environs of his bulls and bears. “Sure,” he said. “That’ll take care of it. I’m glad to see you looking so healthy and energetic.”
“You don’t like my novel,” I said suddenly. A storm cloud I hadn’t seen coming was upon me, black and bursting with lightning, rain, and fury. “It just isn’t possible to you that we have always been around, right in the middle of things, keeping this big secret from all you dull, conventional, heterosexual mediocrities. You spend a big chunk of your lives trying not to see us at all, pretending we’re not there, and you get so good at lying to yourselves that you start thinking it’s some kind of modern fad that’s confined to a few streets and bars in New York and San Francisco. And that’s exactly the kind of narrow-minded, bigoted, delusional, bullshit myopia I’m trying to expose with my novel. And what’s more,” I screamed at him, my voice rising to a sibilant, glass breaking pitch, “I think you’re actually jealous, because while you’re stuck in that swamp of junk bonds and semi-fraudulent securities, I’m trying to do something important with the rest of my life.”
Bill waited impassively through the end of my tirade. “I know this is important to you, Edward,” he said. “I respect what you’re trying to do, and I wish you well. I really do. It’s just that maybe I can give you a helpful perspective from the other side, as it were. And as I think about it, what I’m trying to convey to you is that people in every kind of minority spend so much time thinking about the group they belong to, they wind up believing that everyone else is thinking about it all the time too, and if they don’t talk about it all the time like you do, then they must be suppressing something, or hiding something, or avoiding something. The dull truth is that dull, white, middle class guys like me spend hardly any time thinking about the lives of gays, or blacks, or women. Since we’re not gays or blacks or women, we spend most of our time thinking about what we’re going to do today and maybe what we’d like to accomplish next. So when you show me some scene with gay pilgrims or George Washington in drag, I don’t find it very convincing, that’s all. But you’re the writer. You’ll work it out somehow.”
After he left, I pouted for a while. Maybe there was something in what he said. Maybe. But then why had I seen that sudden rascal light in his eye that day when I accidentally came to work with the previous night’s mascara still in place? No. I knew my mission. I was going to blow the roof off the whole heterosexual lie before I died. That would at least make my death mean something. My death. Oh damn. That again. Frantically I sat back down at the word processor and … Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.
We could leave it there, perhaps, but it seems kind of unsatisfying, doesn’t it?
UPDATE YEARS LATER…
There was a second Hanrahan novel, this time an ambitious work in the graphic genre. In it he addressed his pain not just about death but about the difficulty of getting noticed in this world no matter who you are and how brilliantly you do what you do. It’s called “The Secret Life of Tom Banks” and we’ve excerpted it here for you as a bonus.
We certainly wouldn’t presume to improve on a review blurb by the great Leonardo Di Capuleti… or whoever.
Interesting. All from the 1970s. Before we got so politically correct. No politics involved in these choices, at least no politics imputed by me.
Frank Klammer’s Gold Medal downhill from the’76 Olympics. At the end of the day, on a beat-up course, as the favorite who was no longer favored.
Muhammad Ali in his amazing conquest of the fearsome puncher George Foreman. 1974. The boxer poet who became the fighter-chessmaster-killer. Too many other videos would be required. I remember this one as a social event. We cheered our asses off.
Secretariat. 1973. I just keep hearing the announcer giving up the ghost: “like a tremendous machine.”
No other horse was even in the picture. Only one other thing since the Seventies. The 1980 Phillies. But that would make this seem parochial. Which it isn’t. It’s universal.
Cómo pintar retratos de fotografías: un tutorial de pintura de aceite paso a paso
Yo solía ser intimidado por la pintura de retratos. Nunca pude conseguir los colores correcto y siempre me sentí como terminé dibujo con mi pintura en vez de pintar.
Me decidí a hacer frente a la pintura retrato de cabeza, y después de un montón de práctica, ahora me siento muy cómodo pintando retratos. Aquí están los pasos que he desarrollado para pintar un retrato exitoso de una foto.
Por supuesto que soy un completo imbécil.
***************
A Man Who Finally Turned to Finer Things
George Walker Chevy Snaffle Adidas Bush, IV
He used to be sort of famous for having a dad who was Presdent, also named Bush, and for owning a big league baseball team in Texus. He could party with the best of them.
Then he settled down, got married to a nice girl, and discovered he was wanted in the family business. Which, to be blunt, did not come easily to him. He had to be groomed in small venues before he could run for a training-wheels type office in Texus.
Initially he was a complete bust at public speaking. He would stand in front of the microphone, turn bright red, try to crack an off-color joke, and then forget the punchline. Salvation came in the form of a course of instruction in speechwriting and mucho practice at speech delivery reading from his own scripts. The first one was a store opening in Lubbock, where he brought down the house and acquired a measure of confidence.
Next came…
And then…
The children laughed and laughed. He was ready for a shot at a local no-brainer office, Governor of Texus, and not only got elected but re-elected with 70 percent of the vote. It was obviously time to follow his dad’s path to the White House, especially since Bush The Elder had been unceremoniously turned out of office after only one term by a hard-partying southern philanderer and perjurer named Bill Clitton, whose Veep, Al Bore, was confident of succeeding him in office after two popular terms. Bore had a book out, “Loving Ameria,” and so the Bush braintrust decided W needed a book too. (People had been calling him ‘W’ since first grade when his attempts to print his numeral, ‘IV,’ looked a lot like W’s.) With typical impish humor, W decided to call his own book, “Loving Ameria 2.”
Actually all the speech excerpts above are in the book, so you can pretty much go with that as a taste of the overall content.
So far, W is making steady headway in his presidential run, mostly by letting people go on thinking he’s his dad. He does this by not saying much. Which pretty much brings us up to date.
EXCEPT…
The Punk Writer Time Machine
Meaning we have more about George Chevy Snaffle Adidas Bush, IV, for a bunch of years in the future. Cool.
Let’s see. He was (will be) elected presdent over Al Bore in 2000.
The vote count was very close, so close that the Democrats never accepted him as presdent for all 8 years in office. Yes, he got re-elected too. He was even a hero for a while because of a giant 911 call the whole country got in his first year in office. He did some wars, won some battles, and was hated by everybody but some very quiet Republicans. His incredibly huge number of enemies said he was stupid, uneducated, a drunk, and a completely illegitimate mistake. His inner circle of staffers thought the best way to handle the constant abuse and slander was to say nothing, do nothing, and then resign at the first opportunity and write a book while he was still lameducking it in his second term.
So Bush decided to set the record straight with a book of his own, as reported by our friends at the XOFF News Channel:
W. Races His Book to Market
Buoyed by the news that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has published a book about herself in the teeth of congressional approval ratings that are even lower than his own, the President of the United States has announced that a book he has dictated about what it’s like to be him will be hitting the back storage rooms of bookstores all over the nation within the next few weeks.
“They will have to ask for the book by name,” Press Secretary Dana Perrino conceded. “The remarkably superior high school graduates who actually shelve books at the nation’s two bookstores — Borders and Barnes & Noble — are unlikely to carry a book by the President of the United States from the back of the store to anywhere that it might actually be seen or bought. But customers who ask for it are certain to be charmed by an account of the Bush administration from an utterly unexpected source — that of the chief executive from whom everyone else in his administration has made a fortune by libelling him to an unprecedented degree.”
President Bush is also planning, Perrino announced, to spend the rest of his second term on a book tour promoting the work. “I might as well,” she quoted the president as saying, “now that we have an ‘acting president’ so charismatic that the people of Germany are willing to follow him to the very end. Who could compete with that?”
Multiple stops on the president’s literary tour have already been booked, including a county fair in Wyoming, a cable access channel in Cowlick, West Virginia, and a college radio station in Gawdhelpus, Alabama. “We will announce other dates as they are confirmed,” Perrino said.
Some reporters at the press conference questioned the “as told to” attribution of some writing credit to former press secretary Scott McClellan, who has recently become a critic of the Bush administration. Perrino denied that McClellan’s involvement was any cause for concern. “This manuscript was completed well before Scott became a brilliant moral philosopher and political hero,” she said. “In fact, while he was actually taking dictation on the manuscript, he was still somewhere between a talentless Texas toady and an embarrassingly inept impediment to any sort of clear communication between the White House and the press. His new-found greatness as a progressive patriot was simply not a factor in this book, although his involvement did require more than the usual complement of spell-checks, and his foreword underwent multiple surgeries for the removal of metastasizing obsequies.”
The publisher — “You Got the Buck, We Got the Printing Press & Sons — has also released a few text excerpts. Among them:
“Dick Cheney never told me what to do. I brought a cattle prod with me from texas. The old bastard knew I’d stop his pacemaker in a second if he gave me any grief. And I would have, too.”
“I know. They say I’m dumb. I just have one question for them: Do you have any idea how hard it is to cheat your way through Andover, Yale, and the Harvard Business School? It’s damn near impossible. It takes organization, people skills, ruthless determination, and even an occasional lucky guess. I’m nowhere near as dumb as they’d like to think.”
“Drink? You better believe it. Who wouldn’t have after 9/11? Where do you think the term “shock and awe” came from? I gave the GO order in Iraq after I downed one bottle of scotch, one bottle of bourbon, and one 40-ounce bottle of Iron City beer. That’s when the damn generals knew I was serious. That’s my biggest doubt about Obama. World leaders have to be men of the world. FDR never made a decision in WWII without inhaling half a dozen martinis first. Churchill was blasted on brandy from day one of his prime ministership to VE-Day. Lyndon Johnson… well, whew, the stories I could tell from Herr Grandpa Prescott’s diary. And JFK had injections most of us would kill for. Yet, to this day, I’ve never even seen Obama sip a beer. That’s sick. And un-American.””
“I’m more like JFK than my ‘critics’ acknowledge. I went into politics for the same reason he did. Chicks. You get one kind of chick if you own a baseball team. You get a whole different kind of chick if you run the most powerful country on the planet. Enough said. If you want details, talk to Bill. Why do you think he and I hit it off so well?”
“Dan Rather. Geez. I thought he had me. Those memos. Word for word what I remember. What I couldn’t believe was how his snitch remembered them word for word too. If he’d had the actual documents instead of retyped copies, I’d have been a goner. Of course, the much bigger relief was that no one ever found out I didn’t know how to fly a plane. That would have been a political problem.”
“You want to know about Colin Pow? I’ll tell you about Colin Pow. One word. Dork. Never knew a black man who was more concerned about how his tie looked than the lies he was telling the U.N. He can go suck eggs.”
“Well, I actually like Laura. I really do. She’s been a good mother to those kids of ours — daughters, I’m pretty sure. And she stays out of my way. What else can you ask of a wife? I mean, really?”
“People get upset about all those death penalty cases in Texas. Why? Do you want those people running loose in your neighborhood? No. Of course you don’t. Dead is what some people really ought to be. It’s a lot easier to be from Massachusetts or California and act all outraged about the vicious killers we’re executing in Texas than it is to look at your next-door neighbor who got a kid murdered by some psycho and then argue that he should have cable TV, a kitty-cat, and free room and board for the rest of his natural days. Every time I signed a death warrant in Austin, I hung up that ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner I’ve gotten so much grief about. Where do you think we got it in the first place?”
“Yeah, there are always crap-weasels. George Tennent. Richard Clarke. Joe Wilson and that dumb whore wife of his. It goes with the territory. I don’t pay them no mind. When all is said and done, I’m the president. That’s what it’ll say in the history books. Does anybody bother Truman with the crap he pulled on Tokyo Rose? No. The crap-weasels are always footnotes.”
“I get tired of hearing that I’m soft on immigration. Of course I am. Never said I wasn’t. I ran on it back in 2000. How do you think I overcame all that New England constipation? And a mother who looked exactly like John Madden? Her name was Maria. She took care of me when my parents were at Kennebunkport. She taught me Spanish. And she also showed me her breasts. That’s why I’m so bilingual to this day. Quien bustamos las brassieros la takeitoffo nowomos. You see? I just wish that Laura wouldn’t keep stalking out of the room every time ‘West Side Story’ is on and Barney and I start singing ‘Maria’ and toasting each other with Margaritas and like that. It’s a lot more healthily than what we did at Skull & Bones, I can tell you.”
Then he went back to Texus and became an artist. Even had an exhibition at the Metropolis Museum of Art in Newyork City, hosted by his good buddies Bill and Hillery Clitton. Not much about politics anymore. Until That Man came along.
Not all of the Bush brushwork is on display in a museum, though. His ‘masterpiece’ is tucked privately away at home.
This the now the centerpiece of W’s ‘Man Cave,’ a kind of members-only establishment in the basement of the ranch.
