Raebert +

Me

Equals:

One ancient, cranky laird of the manor. Hi. You were saying?…

Scottish arithmetic. It may not add up to much, but it has some bite to it.

Thanks for putting up with us. We appreciate it. Your thought for the day:

One you can see, I think. “Three Men in a Boat.” Charming, silly, episodic, and a relief from everything we’re dealing with now. Rowing on the Themes. For fun.

You can’t see it here, but you should also try Innocents Abroad. Mark Twain in a lovely miniseries starring Craig Wasson on PBS. Sorry I can’t show you the video, even though they also took some wooden boats here and there.

Sorrier still I can’t show you the best parts of the Snow Goose. Not my best night.

But I do love wooden boats nonetheless.

They breathe, you know. Like we do. Regardless of who’s at the tiller.

P.S. Forgot. The best river story ever, beginning right here.

Stop boring me with nothing. There’s no more soup. Otherwise, I’d kill The Nothing myself.

No talking. Please. I have to have my sleep.

He showed up on Fox News Sunday. His name at the moment is Ezekiel Emmanuel.

Even kids know The Nothing when they see him.

So why can’t ordinary Americans? Are we really so neutered that we can’t see the enemy when he announces himself?

Gee whiz. I had another me vs Raebert post lined up on the subject of Kirsten Powers, the Fox News Channel’s most beguiling defender of Democrat nanny state policies.

Sleeping Beauty

Yorkies rule

It seems we were both wrong this time.

I was wrong to think her coddled and Raebert was wrong to think her diminutive.

I honestly can’t think of anything braver for a professional liberal to do than publish the column she just wrote for Christianity Today. The first few paragraphs:

Just seven years ago, if someone had told me that I’d be writing for Christianity Today magazine about how I came to believe in God, I would have laughed out loud. If there was one thing in which I was completely secure, it was that I would never adhere to any religion—especially to evangelical Christianity, which I held in particular contempt.

I grew up in the Episcopal Church in Alaska, but my belief was superficial and flimsy. It was borrowed from my archaeologist father, who was so brilliant he taught himself to speak and read Russian. When I encountered doubt, I would fall back on the fact that he believed.

Leaning on my father’s faith got me through high school. But by college it wasn’t enough, especially because as I grew older he began to confide in me his own doubts. What little faith I had couldn’t withstand this revelation. From my early 20s on, I would waver between atheism and agnosticism, never coming close to considering that God could be real.

Later on:

To the extent that I encountered Christians, it was in the news cycle. And inevitably they were saying something about gay people or feminists. I didn’t feel I was missing much. So when I began dating a man who was into Jesus, I was not looking for God. In fact, the week before I met him, a friend had asked me if I had any deal breakers in dating. My response: “Just nobody who is religious.”

But she wound with a boyfriend who was religious:

A few months into our relationship, my boyfriend called to say he had something important to talk to me about. I remember exactly where I was sitting in my West Village apartment when he said, “Do you believe Jesus is your Savior?” My stomach sank. I started to panic. Oh no, was my first thought. He’s crazy.

When I answered no, he asked, “Do you think you could ever believe it?” He explained that he was at a point in life when he wanted to get married and felt that I could be that person, but he couldn’t marry a non-Christian. I said I didn’t want to mislead him—that I would never believe in Jesus.

Then he said the magic words for a liberal: “Do you think you could keep an open mind about it?” Well, of course. “I’m very open-minded!” Even though I wasn’t at all. I derided Christians as anti-intellectual bigots who were too weak to face the reality that there is no rhyme or reason to the world. I had found this man’s church attendance an oddity to overlook, not a point in his favor.

As he talked, I grew conflicted. On the one hand, I was creeped out. On the other hand, I had enormous respect for him. He is smart, educated, and intellectually curious. I remember thinking, What if this is true, and I’m not even willing to consider it?

She went to church, heard a pastor who argued philosophy, history, everything but fire and brimstone. She came to believe in Christianity as a moral system, but no more than that.

Then one night in 2006, on a trip to Taiwan, I woke up in what felt like a strange cross between a dream and reality. Jesus came to me and said, “Here I am.” It felt so real. I didn’t know what to make of it. I called my boyfriend, but before I had time to tell him about it, he told me he had been praying the night before and felt we were supposed to break up. So we did. Honestly, while I was upset, I was more traumatized by Jesus visiting me.

I tried to write off the experience as misfiring synapses, but I couldn’t shake it. When I returned to New York a few days later, I was lost. I suddenly felt God everywhere and it was terrifying. More important, it was unwelcome. It felt like an invasion. I started to fear I was going crazy.

More resistance, of course, because she’s a fighter.

I spent the next few months doing my best to wrestle away from God. It was pointless. Everywhere I turned, there he was. Slowly there was less fear and more joy. The Hound of Heaven had pursued me and caught me—whether I liked it or not.

Read the whole column. I believe she’s risking the career she spent her whole life pursuing. I, for one, admire her. She’s ceased to be a cartoon to me, not that that was ever my judgment to make for anyone else. She’s a human being who knows that’s not such a small thing in the grand scheme of the universe.

Kirsten Powers

Words Fail. Senses overload. Angels.

At 3:30 this afternoon, Notre Dame will play Navy again. Snore.

What’s not a snore is that the Blue Angels will make their first return to duty since the sequester.

Hallelujah. We’ve seen the Blue Angels. They’re magnificent.

We heard the takeoff. It sounded like the naval guns beginning the bombardment of Normandy on D-Day. But still no sign of those blue and yellow machines we had seen lined up on the tarmac. “They can’t do all their maneuvers ten feet off the runway,” I offered lamely. “Of course not,” said Mrs InstaPunk.

By now the sound was firing at us from, seemingly, all points of the compass. We, and a few others camped pathetically in the parking lot, craned our heads in every direction. Where were they? Where was the sound coming from?

Then I saw them. Four planes climbing straight up to the north. At our distance from them, there was no separation among the triangular shapes. Each wingpoint was welded to another, and the ascending formation was but a single unit through which you could see small triangles of sky. Behind us a shattering engine scream announced the arrival of a fifth plane, and a sixth, returning to the airfield from the south at very low altitude. They disappeared, and apparently parted company, behind the hangars that blocked our view west, but after their exhaust blasts diverged, I suddenly saw them through a wide gap between the two biggest hangars — passing each other in opposing directions nearly six inches apart just a couple hundred feet over the runway. “There!” I shouted. “Jesus.”

There were seven planes in all, but it seemed like more. We got the feeling of being at the epicenter of a vast virtual armillary sphere, around which various combinations of planes were orbiting in all possible directions, in impossibly tight formations, to the limit of the invisible tether that bound them, until the gravity of the center pulled them back together at the reckless velocity of a brand new universe. When they converged and flew past one another, the colliding onslaught of sound resembled Stephen Hawking’s version of the Big Bang, an incipient mega-explosion that doesn’t ever quite happen because you can never get closer than a trillionth of a second to the birth of physics.

“We can go now,” announced Mrs. InstaPunk. “I’ve seen the Blue Angels.”

So we started the car and began the drive back home.

That should be the end of it. But it isn’t. When you leave the ballgame or the concert, you’re almost immediately outside the action and whatever you hear of it is muted, diminished, and subsiding. When you leave the epicenter of a Blue Angels performance, you are merely plotting the direction of subsequent, incredibly immediate encounters.

We hadn’t thought of that. But the residents of Millville and the surrounding rural areas had. We reached the heavily wooded main road that would lead us back home, and the first clearing we came to was lined on both sides by cars, pickup trucks, motorcycles, lawn chairs, blankets and dozens of people. We followed the direction of their upturned faces, and here came the Blue Angels again, four planes locked together as one, slowly rotating as they shivered the pine trees en route.

“Should I pull over?” I asked. “They’ve obviously got the perfect spot here to watch from. I don’t want you to miss anything.”

“No. Keep going. It’s okay.”

We still hadn’t gotten it. Nobody had to go to the air show to experience the power and majesty of the Blue Angels. As we proceeded down what I’d always known as a back country road, every gap in the trees, every crossroad was jammed with cars, bikes, and people. Where there were houses, there were crowds, and the American flags flew, and the Blue Angels obliged by flying past and back again, showering us with waves of sound that rattled windows and rippled the wading pools.

Through one stretch of pure woods, we experienced a flyover so low that both of us ducked inside the car. The sound of the plane overhead was like a a yard of duct tape being ripped off your naked eardrums. Farther on, more people, more cars, more flags, the occasional, helplessly grinning state trooper guarding an intersection, and oddly unhurried traffic away from the show. I drove just under 50 and was astonished that an old biker who could have been Paul Teutle, Sr, made no effort to pass. When he finally turned off, I tossed him a wave, and he gave me a nod.

So I’m giving you a nod now. Watch the game and hope NBC has the wit to give us a glimpse at least of the angels in navy blue.

On earth…

…as it is in heaven…

…but then it’s back to earth, and step by step for every generation.

Step…

…by step…

…by step…

Because we’re all still alive until we surrender. Unless despair is our new passion.

FOOTNOTE: The Bach piece was borrowed from an NRO post in which a reminiscence was cited. Carl Sagan insisted that his Voyager mission had to include music. One professor said the answer was simple: Send the entire works of Bach. Then he thought better of it. “It might look like showing off.”

Now we have our own Gargantua.

The MSM is looking at a huge dilemma.

ObamaCare isn’t going to do anything but make health insurance more expensive, the quality of healthcare worse, and the contact of individuals with the federal government more necessary, time-consuming, frustrating, and, yeah, hurtful.

The all-important ‘narrative’ for liberals isn’t going to get better. The longer the website fails to work, the more people will encounter firsthand the incompetence of government. If the website does get fixed, the more people will discover that the government has hurled them into a state of anxiety and unwelcome choices, if not economic ruin.

Liberals like to filibuster about kitchen table issues. You know, they’re the ones who understand what affects ‘working people’ with bills and kids and needs, while the Republicans talk about capitalism and raising yourself by your own bootstraps.

So the MSM have succeeded throughout the Obama administration in supporting the Dear Leader by perpetuating the narrative that Bush is responsible for all our current ills and Obama is doing all he can to help average people by playing golf, doing black tie functions with Hollywood celebrities, refusing to meet with anyone in Congress until there’s some kind of dire deadline, doing endless deals and political job swaps with Wall Street billionaires, and blaming Bush for everything that’s not better.

Undeniably, the MSM has succeeded spectacularly in providing cover for the One. Rotten economic performance has been explained away in a blur of numbers. Scandals have been buried. Corruption has been unreported or yawned away as a transaction over our microcephalic heads. Throughout, the MSM elite has been encouraged by the fact that what they choose not to report at all never gets any traction. That’s how they got him reelected. They had high hopes for the second term.

But that’s all over now. It doesn’t matter what the MSM choose to report or suppress about ObamaCare. This program is so huge that it’s going to affect almost everyone, one way or another.

As it unfolds it will increase the fear and uncertainty throughout the nation of even the most comfortably employed middle class citizens. As the Medicaid sign ups roll up and as employers bail on their traditional coverages, the middle class will see that they, the 80 percent who pay the freight for everything, have been subjected to a huge tax increase and ballooning deficit liability on behalf of some number of uninsured, about 10 percent of the population, many of whom will remain uninsured because of the unintended consequences of the law.

This can’t be blamed on poor economic conditions generally. It can’t be blamed on Republican obstruction because the most outstanding examples of Republican obstructionism have to do with Obamacare. It can only be blamed on the Obama administration. Specifically, blame can be reduced in the ignorant, public mind to the succession of sound bites in which Obama told people that they wouldn’t be negatively affected by government’s sudden massive injection of itself into healthcare. “You can keep your health plan. Period.” How many times did he say these words? The exact number doesn’t matter. What matters is that everyone heard him say it at least once. And it was a deliberate lie.

NO REPORTING WILL BE NEEDED. The MSM can remain utterly silent about the implementation of ObamaCare. All the people who are suddenly thrust face to face into the dumb, unfeeling, hapless jaws of the federal government will have had a personal experience they won’t need Matt Lauer or Scott Pelley to explain to them.

This is an impending disaster of Gargantuan* implications An unnecessary disaster. Maybe Bush got done in by Katrina, as lefties have lately been using as a point of comparison for the threat facing Obama, but Katrina was a natural disaster, an Act of God as insurance companies define it. ObamaCare was an act of man, a completely unforced error with millions more potential victims than Katrina ever had, including insurance companies who have been more reliable to their clients over the decades than the federal government looks like being ever.

A point I’ve made before but will repeat again because it’s so important. This is the kind of monumental, long-term screw-up that will cost people’s lives. Come January 1, some millions of people will have no insurance, having failed to fight through a dead website to enrollment in a plan or, worse, unable to enroll in a plan they can afford. They can still go to an emergency room, sure. But how many of them will have lost access to the doctor who knows their history or the hospital that’s closest? And at the moment, they’re still looking at an IRS penalty for the bureaucratic incompetence that kills them.

Does this mean the Democrats who passed this horror movie of a law will be thrown out of office? No.

But we can hope. Hope that passengers on the boat deck of the Titanic will vote against the crew members who loudly and boastfully lassoed the iceberg and winched it into the hull for the mortal blow. Although who do we expect them to believe? Obama or their lying eyes?

Well, the MSM will obviously have some role to play in people’s perception. They have a decision to make. Keep protecting Obama or start serving the American people after a lapse of five years, or more, or even more years than that. When does the whore discover the heart of gold that makes her the third act heroine? The question is, though, whether they have control of any perception but the one of themselves vis a vis the people. I’m thinking people will decide about Obama and the ObamaCare advocates without their help. A word to the wise. But they’ve ignored my advice many times before.

Somehow, it looks like we all might lose, and all in the worst possible way.

[See the Long View post below.]

**********

*Bakhtin explains that carnival, in Rabelais’ work and age, is associated with the collectivity; for those attending a carnival do not merely constitute a crowd; rather the people are seen as a whole, organized in a way that defies socioeconomic and political organization (Clark and Holquist 302). According to Bakhtin, “[A]ll were considered equal during carnival. Here, in the town square, a special form of free and familiar contact reigned among people who were usually divided by the barriers of caste, property, profession, and age” (Bakhtin 10). At carnival time, the unique sense of time and space causes the individual to feel he is a part of the collectivity, at which point he ceases to be himself. It is at this point that, through costume and mask, an individual exchanges bodies and is renewed. At the same time there arises a heightened awareness of one’s sensual, material, bodily unity and community.

Of course it’s our duty to fight the battles of the present day, protect our nation and our children to the extent we can by opposing each malevolent change and threat.

But we owe a larger debt as well. We have to acknowledge that we are on track for an imminent Dark Age, not only consenting in it as a culture but officially hastening and promoting it.

The supposedly most intelligent, highly educated, and privileged among us are engaged in a relentless assault on the culture that begot their presumed talents for insight and global wisdom. They control and are our future, which means that in the long view we are doomed.

Because there are enemies who desire to sack our cities and undo our achievements, the most notable of which is consciousness itself. They are the primary cowards of life as we have become the secondary ones. They don’t want to be self aware in the first place. We, in all our pseuodo-intellectual vandalism of our own heritage, want to undo the pain of consciousness and become obedient mediocrities, indistinguishable units, equal drones in a global hive (unless, of course, as in all cultures from the beginning of time, we can be one of the “more equal” drones in charge.)

Only one strain of civilization has ever aspired to individuality as an ideal and defined human rights in those terms. All the ascendant rivals have an ideal almost exactly opposite.

Specific discussions of world politics aside, the rivals are poised to win in the near term. We are too civilized to prevail against them because we have forgotten, or chosen deliberately to overlook, what barbarism is. The barbarian does not care about the individual except as a statistic of ergs or casualty totals. If the individual does not submit to the uniformity of the hive, he is a target for extermination or failing that, abject subjugation, cruel punishments, and arbitrary executions.

We have lost the cultural consensus that might enable us to defend ourselves against those who don’t care how many of their own they kill to inflict unequal damage on us. In our silly delusional tower, we are unable to detect the intransigent murder in their eyes and the single-mindedness of automatons with a mission. Instead we kid ourselves that there is some way to placate them, make deals with them, and hope that we can counter malice with benevolence to good effect. And so we make excuses for them and demonize the ones in our own camp who see an avowed enemy as exactly what that enemy avows he is.

Therefore we lose. The nightmare slaughter and oppression will come, and many of our children and their children will not survive, at least in any form we envision. That’s how the odds look right now, anyway. Time to prepare. It needs must be.

What to do?

I have two suggestions. One requiring deep personal commitment and a second requiring deep personal commitment, technical skills, and clever organization.

The first is a kind of proclamation of individuality. For the record. Whoever you are, no matter how mundane you think your life is, get a blog or write a journal. Don’t think in terms of building an audience. Think of documenting the individual experiences of you and your family, what you think about them, what you believe, what you treasure from smallest to most life changing. If you blog, make paper copies. If you do a journal or diary, make photocopies. Think of how you might preserve your record through a long long darkness of barbarian rule.

The second is an adjunct to the first. Think about creating a large population of time capsules. Sink them deep enough into the ground to remain unfound for 200, 500, 1000, 2000 years. Stuff them with the evidence that you existed — your journals, your family photos, your favorite music, the books that contain your beliefs and emotional touchstones, everything from baseball cards to prom corsages, miniatures of Michelangelo or Rodin sculptures, newspapers, jewelry, rosaries and dashboard Jesuses.

No, I have no idea what the technical solutions are. What kind of container can preserve paper and other perishables for a millennium, how deep the holes must be, but I keep thinking of the archeologists I have followed all my life. Their like will come again. They do the best they can at decoding the ancient civilizations of Egypt and the Maya. Do the hard work of trying to make it easy for them. Make sure your capsules contain English-Arabic dictionaries, English-Persian dictionaries, English-Russian dictionaries, English-Chinese dictionaries. Whatever it takes to communicate to the distant future. Work out how to give them a Rosetta Stone that shows them you and yours and ours.

That’s how we win in the long view. No matter how catastrophically we lose in the next decade or two.

Sorry. A dark rainy day and a recognition that the trench we’re in is filling mighty quickly with foul, death-poisoned water. We’ll be going over the top again in the morning, but for now give some thought to what I’ve said.

Veteran IP/DD reader Tim offered this:

Btw, thought you might be interested to read the comments on a recent anti-Steyn moment from your old pal Glenn Reynolds at InstaPundit.

OCTOBER 28, 2013

BUSTING MARK STEYN for doom-mongering. I like Steyn, but more than most, he reminds me of why despair is a sin.

Apparently Glenn loves that same Tamny piece (linked in an earlier comment). Yeah, you had this guy’s number years ago, as do many of his commenters.

I responded:

Good catch. Reynolds is the Henny Youngman of bloggers.

(Don’t be nonplussed. Google and Youtube him. You’ll see what I mean.)

Okay. Don’t hunt. Go here…

Do read the comments at InstaPundit. Maybe the peanut gallery is finally getting tired of him. He’s always been more aggregator than thinker, law professor or no. His wife, Helen Smith, seems more thoughtful and interesting than he is. Cue the Youngman joke, “Take my wife, please!”

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