Thing about being a prophet. You can just go. If you’ve a mind to, try to find me.

You picked and I accept your verdict.

The last polar bear on the last ice floe? Uh, no. Just a pic of another DC pundit wondering why his ass is so cold at night.

This is in response to an existential question posed by the ultimate conservative pundit Erick Erickson, who asked the other day, “Why Are You So Angry?”

I stepped away from the internet for a while. Hopping on I see sniping and fights between allies and friends. On twitter, I see conservatives enraged over this prisoner swap and more. There is a lot of anger and that is just the conservatives.

The liberals are always in a state of anger. When you’ve decided boy and girl are options, it’s rather a normal thing to define deviance as normal and normal as deviance and anger as good.

For conservatives though, it sometimes surprises me that there is so much anger — at each other, at the other side, etc. People, life is not fair. This several billion year old ball of hot magma, water, and rock is hurtling around a giant radioactive ball of burning plasma as it circles a cell crushing black hole through a vacuum of space. We are, in the whole expanse of space, a speck smaller than the smaller grain of sand on a beach. The slightest tilt in our orbit could kill us. Life is not fair. The universe is not fair. It all rather sucks if you think about too much.

And we are surrounded by people who are like us save for their faith in creation instead of the Creator. When left to their own devices they are “filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless.”

That we are not left to our own devices and consequently not like those who are should make us smile, not scowl. Conservatives, particularly those with faith, read 2 Chronicles 7:14,

if my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land

and they get all bent out of shape. “This is about America. The nation must repent,” they think. Bull. That passage is not about America. That passage is about us. We should be humble and pray, and see God’s face. We should not be angry. We should not turn the country into an idol. I get the frustration. I do. And I understand why there is anger. I do. It is hard not to be angry sometimes. But stewing in the anger like so many on our own side are doing is neither healthy nor productive.

He offers bland, Biblical-sounding nostrums for the rest of the essay, too, but his essential argument (highlighted by me in bold) recapitulates a pragmatically nihilist explanation offered by the old baseball reliever Tug McGraw (singer Tim McGraw’s late dad for you youngsters) when he was asked how he could remain so calm with men on base in the ninth inning of a one-run game in the playoffs. He called it the snowball in space theory if I remember correctly. We’re so small, the universe is so big, and so in the final analysis it doesn’t matter if I give up a walk-off home run. Be in the moment, not in the artificial context of others. Great sports psychology. Rotten philosophy. (And, by the way, not Christianity either.)

So Erick the Wise wants us to calm down. Why we can’t. Professional political pundits whose hole card on the rest of us is that matters which affect us in every possible way are reducible to a game in which the outcomes ultimately, in the grand scheme of things, don’t matter at all. Why professional political pundits can make pompous assertions an hour or two of real research would expose as ludicrous.

Exhibit I. A column by the chief political correspondent of the Washington Times, Timothy P. Carney.

Yes, the climate is changing. Now shut up and be reasonable.

In his fight against global warming, President Obama has issued new regulations on power plants’ emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses.

Republicans blast the rules as “job destroyers” and a “war on coal.” Democrats attack Republicans as shills for Big Coal and “science deniers.”

Both sides need to grow up, and the climate debate needs to be shifted to reasonable grounds. In short, Republicans need to stop denying that climate change is real, and liberals need to admit that they don’t have all the answers.

There are things we know with a good level of certainty, and conservatives should grant these:

In general, the Earth’s atmosphere is getting warmer. Of course, there is no single temperature of the atmosphere. Even speaking of an “average” is a bit tricky, because our temperature stations are irregularly spaced, and of varied reliability and longevity. But the aggregate of the data shows a general upward trend in temperatures on Earth.

We know that carbon dioxide, methane and some other gases will (all else being equal) increase atmospheric temperatures by trapping heat. This is the infamous greenhouse effect.

We also know that human industrial activity – such as burning coal and oil – adds to the concentration of greenhouse gasses.

Predicting the future is much harder, despite the certainty with which alarmists promise 20-foot sea-level rises, the death of bees and rising beer prices due to climate change.

Climate has always changed. Climate will change. Climate is massive, insanely complex and inherently unpredictable.

We do know that greenhouse gas concentrations are rising pretty rapidly, indicating that the warming trend will continue. Not all change is bad, but in general, rapid change in complex systems is disruptive and bad. While plants and animals can adapt—and have always adapted—they’re better off adapting slowly to gradual change. While human society can adapt, it will cost money and lives.

Conservatives need to come to grips with these facts. Too many Republican politicians simply declare, “climate change is a hoax.” This is a bad habit partisans and ideologues on both sides display: If the other side proposes an undesirable policy response to a problem, just deny the existence of the problem.

He goes on to lecture the left in similarly condescending terms, but as an avowed conservative, he is clearly only reaffirming his bona fides with this gambit. To him, as with Erickson, the prime issue is politics, and we’re supposed to take his authority — avuncular or arrogant — as a lesson about the nature of the game.

What’s most interesting about this obnoxiously patronizing piece is how thoroughly the Washington Times commenters take him to the woodshed. Politely for the most part, but in detail and with facts Carney clearly knows nothing of. So the most important part to read is…

Comments (and take the link to load more)

Never mind that in the big post here nobody wants to talk about I linked at least four previously published articles on this subject that make a mockery of Carney’s bombast.

Why so many of us are so angry. Who is in charge of what constitutes being reasonable? Compromising with the intellectually, morally, and culturally corrupt is not reasonable. Not even to Christians who know the inside of their Bible and not just the cover. We’re not meaningless specks in space. We’re accountable for what we do with our lives. All of us matter, all of everything matters, and there is no chapter and verse which tells us to fight for right only to the point where it might cause rancor or open conflict within families, cliques, or the community at large.

The fight is not about this or that. It’s not a game. It’s not an existential experiment. It’s not about careers, putting on a good show, striking bargains with people who want us dead or imprisoned or worse. It’s about everything. It’s about the meaning of life and our own lives, each and every one. If you can’t get angry about that, you’re as much of a loquacious bystander as our moral cipher of a president.

Here endeth the lesson, Master Erick.

All hail our commander-in-chief and his latest Mission Accomplished.

I didn’t think there was any way this president could disgrace our country even further on the world stage than he already had. I was wrong.

The Blitzkrieg is on. Maybe you’ve missed it with all the talk that the administration is at low ebb and taking mortal shots every day. Poppycock. Der kampf is right on schedule.

I know you’re busy, have personal travails of your own, have political and cultural issues you follow because they hit your hot buttons. And so you’re probably missing it. We are in the midst of an all-out assault on the America we grew up in, and the weapons we have available in our defense have about as much chance of succeeding against the enemy as the Polish horse cavalry had against German tanks in 1939.

We’re in the bowels of the second term. The time when boredom and lassitude and cowardice and personal distractions make it easy to overlook the systematic and deliberate scheme to destroy the United States of America once and for all.

In the last two weeks, there is no aspect of our values and beliefs that has not been subjected to continuous assault, either directly and provocatively or cynically and seditiously.

They’ve taken sports away from us. They’ve taken entertainment away from us. They’ve taken our universities away from us. They’re trying to take our moral and biological convictions about sexuality away from us. (Not to mention life.)

Yeah. Suck it, Sarah. You’re the joke here. Half conscious jester ordinaire.

They’re trying to take our freedom of expression and other constitutional liberties away from us. They’re taking our hopes for the future away from us. And they’re winning on every issue but guns.

It’s all more than I can summarize. Too many links, too much explanation to quote.

All I can do today is hyperlink the names of writers who are talking about the lightning attack in its various dimensions. Which should work out okay, because everybody’s really way too busy to feel the groaning of the ship as it sinks. Less angst that way, don’t you know?

James Pinkerton.

Jordan Schachtel and Raheem Kassan.

Laura Barron-Lopez, and er, Brian McNoldy. Also, Rowan Scarborough.

Jon Gabriel.

Fox News.

Joel Pollak.

Jazz Shaw.

Frank Bruni.

A.J. Delgado.

Kevin Williamson.

Heather MacDonald.

And just because I can’t quite bring myself to fly the white flag, here are two little essays designed to put some spine in your spine.

Left Offended.

And this one, which I’m actually minded to quote from, at length, because I’m feeling so pissed off.

The truth is that conservatism is an ideology that is in accord with natural law and basic human decency, while liberalism is merely the summit of a slippery slope leading down to the hellish depths of collectivist misery.

Liberals aren’t going to like to hear this manifest and demonstrable truth. So you’re going to get called “racist,” “sexist” and “homophobic,” even if you’re a conservative black lesbian.

What you are not going to get is an argument. An argument is a collected series of statements designed to establish a definite proposition. Arguments involve the presentation of facts and evidence from which one draws a conclusion. Implied within the concept of an argument is the potential that one might change his conclusion. But liberals start with the conclusion.

They don’t change their conclusions based on the facts and evidence; they change the facts and evidence based on the conclusion they want. This is why a 105 degree day is irrefutable proof of global warming, while a 60 degree day is irrefutable proof of global warming. As is a -20 degree day.

Liberals are only concerned with argument, or what superficially appears to be argument, as a rhetorical bludgeon designed to beat you into submission. They aren’t trying to change your mind. They don’t expect you to agree with them. They don’t even care whether or not you grow to love Big Brother.

They just want you to shut up and let them run rampant. If you understand that, you’ll be fine…

…This is why I prefer to counterattack. When you counterattack, you ignore the proposition offered by the liberal and refuse to respond on the liberal’s preferred terms. In fact, you don’t even need to address the same subject the liberal is talking about. Your goal is not to undercut the liberal’s assertion. You’re going to counterattack to undercut the liberal himself.

There are many good reasons to choose the approach of treating the liberal like he is a terrible person with terrible ideas who seeks to impose a quasi-fascist police state upon America, including the fact that it’s all true.

Let’s try a counterattack battle drill. Some doofus with a “Capitalism Is a Patriarchal, Cisnormative Hate Crime” t-shirt starts babbling about “privilege.” The undecideds start listening, their jaws drooping slightly. Some of the more conservative ones are silent, not wanting to be labeled racist by some geek whose grandfather came from Oslo. You need to act. So you causally inject the question, “Hey, why are you an eager and active member of a political party that made a KKK kleagle a beloved Senate Majority Leader?”

Then you mention that you’re a member of the party that fought slavery and didn’t turn hoses on civil rights marchers. Then you finish by announcing, “Well, I’m going to stand with Dr. King and judge people by the content of their character.” It’s optional whether you then get up, scream that the liberal should have issued you a trigger warning about his racism, and leave.

But be careful – the liberal may totally spit in the next latte he sells you.

Some people might question whether this kind of Alinsky-esque tactic means we are stooping to the liberals’ level. Except the liberals’ level is six feet underground, where the victims of collectivism lie buried. Anyone not willing to take the fight to them simply empowers their liberal fascist fantasies.

I’m pretty sure this has been a total waste of time. Where I am right now.

Sorry. Some things, as I’ve always known, are too big to see.

Left and liberal are no longer terms that have anything to do with one another. The left in this country is totalitarian. As the essay quoted above declares, they are terrible people. If you can’t see that and battle it tooth and claw, there is no hope for us whatsoever.

P.S. Okay. Since I know you’re too busy to read, I’ll give you a hint about what’s going on. The ObamaCare and VA screwups are not an accident any more than IRS targeting was. It’s about shearing off big chunks of inconvenient traditional populations. The scheme has always been about death panels for the inconvenient Americans. Old folks who once learned about the constitution get squeezed subtly out of life. Veterans who have a patriotic love of American exceptionalism need to be trimmed down in numbers. Middle class achievers need to be forced down, down, down into a simple fight for month to month survival until they too are government dependents.

Black people. The powers that be in the lefty world never regarded them as anything but chips on the table. Now they’re valuing Hispanics at 1.2 to 1 over blacks, not as people, mind, but simply a higher denomination of gullible losers. So far it looks like they’ve done their calculus right. Nothing sadder than Democrat politicians pushing for illegal alien amnesty when the first jobs lost will be those of their most loyal constituents.

And so it goes… until all that is left are the government schooled morons of all the motley sexes and races who know no history and have no allegiances except to the first person offering them a check for simply being there.

Congratulations, Brizoni. Your rational, godless universe is being born. The smart guys have made a shrewd deduction. Transfer America’s wealth to the rest of the world, pauperize the producers, and trust that there will still be enough money to fund a class of aristocratic American plutocrats who flit from Paris to Dubai to Monte Carlo while their kids learn tyranny at Harvard and Yale. (I first learned this from an MIT guy from a union family who exclaimed constantly about the Brits: “They’ve committed every economic mistake in the world and just LOOK at how much money there still is in the U.K.!” As if money were the point. Union values.) The best of all possible worlds? Sure. Absolutely. As long as our own kids can go to Sidwell Friends before they’re old enough for MIT.

Why am I so tired? Some few outlier intellectuals are acting and writing as if they discovered the phenomenon of lefty hatred of America. God bless their perspicacity, but I identified it 40 years ago. I specified its sources and how it would remake the world. Now, having been right so early, I’m not sure how to make it new again. But you’re all dying day by day from my failure to become more than a crackpot.

That’s what galls me. I thought you needed to know what was going on and how it happened. Never thought you needed to learn how to fight in the first place. My bad.

But I give up. YOU pick which one of me you want.

Well, I wanted “Fight” from Dirty Work (N/A on mobile devices??) Would have made the choice easier. So be it. You can’t always get you want.

But if you try sometime, you just might find, you get what you need. On your wife’s laptop. :).

Don’t be high fiving or fist bumping just yet. I know how to fight for civilization. Do you? Think before you answer. If you don’t know how to fight to the death like a cornered wolf, where you gonna run, where you gonna hide?

Look. It’s not easy to look.

So. Tonight CNN is revisiting sixties television when everything was tolerant, lovely, and great. The Smothers Brothers. Star Trek, meaning the first interracial kiss. The Twilight Zone, which was continuously worried about the varied ways humankind would destroy itself. And, of course, TV’s role in educating all of us that Bill Cosby and Robert Culp got along just fine, given that those of us who made ‘I Spy’ a hit were all terrible racists.

Guess the CNN show isn’t having the effect it should. It reminds me of PBS. Years old BBC series recycled late and sold on DVD during pledge drives for five times their value. Always the same shows: the blind tenor, the three now dead sighted tenors, the E-channel guy who sings in the Grand Canyon, well, you know the drill. The rest of the time, we’re expected to put up with idiotic political documentaries — oh yeah, starring fossils like Bill Moyers and Dick Cavett — hating the U.S and promoting Global Warming in fruity tones with that infuriating finality PBS has always had because the next show is going to feature Oxbridge pretenders who live in great estates that can’t possibly be as ugly as they obviously are. (One plaintive bleat from my younger self — watched Inspector Morse because I’m supposed to, and I can report that compared to Harvard, Oxford is Lena Dunham. The former is lovely and inspiring. The latter looks like a slattern and a pile of ugly g(r)ay fortresses designed to keep her out.)

We men shouldn’t be attracted to women. They’re too good for us. The gospel of the left.

Dreary, sorry, awful, ancient, and did I say awful. Oxford. Like America, Harvard is lovely.

Beyond Oxford.

‘Cause, you know, Harvard is lovely. Why John Harvard sits there in the spring. Nobody else can be so relaxed.

Oxford don’t got The Yard in springtime.

Sigh. PBS. Sigh. Which leads us to Great Performances.

Have you figured out that I’m pissed and tired and probably deader than PBS? All the public stations in our area keep rerunning the same shows. Everything the party of America’s progressive future does with its public broadcast dollars is a celebration of a very mundane, even antique, past. Barbara Streisand a decade or two ago. Communist Pete Seeger celebrating his ninetieth birthday and three quarters of a century of loving every enemy of America. Bob Dylan caterwauling on some stage somewhere sometime from a decade no one remembers. I could go on.

But I won’t. If I started, I would never stop. Anyone want to hear what I’d ask of all of you if life as we know it were on the line? No. Of course not. I’m the lance for a painful boil. That’s all. Life goes on. You live life. Life is for the living, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

You know. Same old male white privilege problem.

But sometimes the dying know something too.

Unfair, you Oxbridge types? The equalizer. Google. You tell me which is more beautiful. Oxford or Harvard.

P.S. Harvard. Rub my tummy. I’m the killer you’ll never know.

It’s gotten bad. (That’s his face…!)

Everything I wrote before about important posts and cover posts is just so much misdirection. I’m worried about the important stuff. Raebert is getting a haircut tomorrow. I have to deliver him between 7:30 and 9:00 to a ‘professional.’ Who’s a professional when it comes to deerhounds? No one I’ve ever met.

I wouldn’t do it. But he’s a mess. A complete and utter mess.

Seems like just a few weeks ago that I had it sort of under control. Brushings and like that. Then it all just went nuts.

Ever seen a coat like that? Thicker than all the thistles in Scotland.

Lying down, at a distance like that and stuff, he looks even worse.

What happened to my beamish boy? He’s becoming a sinister Harry Potter forest.

But I have faith. In him if nothing else.

Because I know who he is underneath the everything.

My Boy.

Before we knew him, he knew us. He was waiting for us. Don’t talk to us about scary.

Hmmm. Who?

Someone sent me the pic and the explanation:

While suturing a cut on the hand of a 75 year old rancher whose hand was caught in the squeeze gate while working cattle, the doctor struck up a conversation with the old man.

Eventually the topic got around to Obama and his role as our president.

The old rancher said, ‘Well, ya know, Obama is a ‘Post Turtle”.

Not being familiar with the term, the doctor asked him, what a ‘post turtle’ was.

The old rancher said, ‘When you’re driving down a country road and you come across a fence post with a turtle balanced on top, that’s a ‘post turtle’.

The old rancher saw the puzzled look on the doctor’s face so he continued to explain. “You know he didn’t get up there by himself, he doesn’t belong up there, he doesn’t know what to do while he’s up there, he’s elevated beyond his ability to function, and you just wonder what kind of dumb ass put him up there to begin with.”

See? What I usually do. An easy post sitting on top of a complex post. This is the one you feel comfortable responding to.

And the one I’m most likely to be hauled away for. What with being a post turtle myself in the age of new media.

Unless I’m really just a Yertle Turtle…

King of the Mud.

Tradeoffs. Comments, Ho! Because I’d really like to hear something from y’all.

Even the ones who stand so tall. Busy is the new virtue.

Sadly, it still leads inexorably to mud.

I used to have a vision of the pond myself. Now the pond is a dot in the landscape of my nightmares. Take my advice. Talk to the Yertle.

I haven’t been staying away because I was mad at you. I’ve been mad at everyone else, who offers so little reason to hope. Conservative icons are down in the dumps, simultaneously playing to their grim faced audiences and yet trying to play the Q-Rating media game. Charles Krauthammer blistered the Obama West Point address in the harshest possible terms, only — when pointedly asked for a letter grade — to give it a C-minus. For once he was embarrassed when Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard said, “What do you mean? It’s an F.” Driving the grade home by quoting Charles to himself. Meanwhile Kevin Williamson, luminary of National Review, finds it important to respond to a fancied feud between himself and Rush Limbaugh. Gaaah.

Others are taken in by the massive leftist diversion attempt to make everything about some historically unacceptable identity based inequality — from a new argument for African American reparations to a white male, gun-obsessed misogynist interpretation of the latest mass shooting (and stabbing and car crashing btw) to the idiotic new gambit against the Washington Redskins in which 50 Democratic senators participated, to frenzied and ludicrous new arguments by supposedly rational representatives of our government that we should be more concerned about global warming than we are by Islamic slaughters of Christians, honor killings of women, and the genital mutilation of pubescent girls.

Each of these has drawn some kind of answering essay, as if any of it were worthy of response. Nonsense is nonsense, and evil is evil. Tiffs are a waste of time. The volume of such responses is as huge as Kim Kardashian’s grossly implant-mutilated ass. Which National Review and other new media sites felt compelled to weigh in on, in light of the low ratings her latest wedding received on the internet.

If it occurs naturally, it’s a pathology called steatopygia. How did we get here?

So where do you go in search of hope? I can offer two interesting avenues today.

Everyone knows that video games are somehow complicit in school shootings. Everybody’s heard of Grand Theft Auto. But what if thug games aren’t the only choice video youngsters have? What if GTA is simply a natural selection for the constant population of the world’s thugs? What if the most successful games represent some kind of odd reaching out to a world in which virtue, duty, honor, bravery, and sacrifice are the ideals:

Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn is a live-action film and miniseries set in the Halo universe. Although shot as a feature-length film, Forward Unto Dawn was originally released as a webseries consisting of five roughly 15-minute episodes, the first of which was released on October 5, 2012, with the last episode released on November 2, 2012. The series’ plot, occurring in the early days of the Human-Covenant War circa 2526, revolves around Thomas Lasky, a young cadet at Corbulo Academy of Military Science, and how John-117 inspired him to eventually become a leader. Lasky is also a prominent character in Halo 4 as a commander on the UNSC Infinity. The name of the series, aside from being a reference to the UNSC frigate Forward Unto Dawn, is given new significance in the series as part a running motif based around a poem. The series was known as Sleeper during pre-production.

Actually, I can show you the whole Halo 4 movie. It’s as far as you can get from Grand Theft Auto.

Don’t need to watch much here. Only enough to see the kid is not an incitement to California school shooters. The rest is at Netflix.

The protagonist is not a sociopathic killer. He’s a young man in doubt. His journey is from a sense of loss and ambivalence to the necessity of placing his unit’s lives above his own. How traditional can you get? There’s no sex, no nudity, no scriptwriter editorializing. One of the best pure futurist sci fi movies I’ve seen.

Thing is, the most impressive feature of Halo 4 is the music. Purists will deride it as derivative, but that’s too easy. It’s clearly rooted in Orff’s Carmina Burana, but it also does somehow convey a time beyond ours. Here’s the whole soundtrack. Call it Neo-Neo-Romanticism. Gregorian Chant and other liturgical forms seem to be hard-wired in us. There’s salacious and violent rap rebelliousness (mysteriously not here) and then there’s the need for transcendently deep, harmonic and rhythmically guilt-ridden meaning underneath our dreams and nightmares. The dark and the divine, intertwined. Why you can hear Rachmaninoff in the opening strains. Sweetened by electronic futurism that beats the human heart back to life. What it is to be human. That impossible long arc between our worst and our best. Why we all still need God, whether we know it or not.

Which is my introduction to the most interesting essay I’ve found in over a week, a philosophical formulation of precisely this kind of straddling. Which might be our last, best hope.

Post-Modern Conservative

To be postmodern and conservative is to deconstruct other uses of “postmodern” by beginning with the obvious. To be postmodern means to be about conserving what’s true and good about the modern world, as well sustaining or restoring what’s true and good about various premodern forms of thought and life. It is also, as Solzhenitsyn explained, about criticizing the modern world for its excessive materialism and its replacement of God and virtue with legalism, and the medieval world for its excessively single-minded focus on spiritual life or the soul at the expense of the body.

One of our conservative criticisms of purely modern thought is its prejudice in favor of endless innovation, which can be seen, for example, in its overly technological view of science. Maybe the purest sources of modern thought these days is the hyper-libertarianism of some economists and Silicon Valley technologists, which points in the direct of transhumanism. The false hope is that through techno-innovation we can become better or freer than human, a hope that depends on ungratefully misunderstanding how stuck and how blessed we are to be beings born to know, love, and die. That’s not to say that we believe, as do those existentialists, that death is the final word about who each of us is.

So to be postmodern and conservative is to take our stand somewhere between the traditionalists and the libertarians. The traditionalists focus is on who each of us is as a relational being with duties and loyalties to particular persons and places. The libertarians — or, to be more clear, the individualists — focus on who each of us is as an irreducibly free person with inalienable rights, a person who can’t be reduced to a part of some whole greater than himself or herself. A postmodern conservative is about showing how a free person with rights is also a relational person with duties. The truth is that each of us is a unique and irreplaceable free and relational person.

If you’re not suffering from ADD, you might be able to read and think about the whole thing.

She sailed far and wide in this dream boat.

The exact opposite of a 1960 Coupe de Ville.

Probably not a good thing to be married to a motorhead. Now she knows more. Frighteningly, she likes the Italians.

Yeah. She’s learned that before Ferrari there was Alfa.

And the French.

Life is not fair. The grandest car ever built is one Lady Laird would like to own. Bugatti Royale.

And, God bless us, the antediluvian Americans.

The most stylish monster equipped with headers before NASCAR was even a glimmer in some moonshiner’s eye.

And, shockingly, the aristocratic English, namely Jaguars.

Yeah, beauty interrupts life. Sorry.

We’re still working on the small English, which includes the car that if it actually worked would replace that Coupe de Ville in a second.

MY dream car. If it would only start. And not show instant electrical problems. Why I have an MR2 instead.

But it doesn’t, never did, work.

I could write 10,000 words about this movie. I could link dozens of recent Internet posts about the war on women, the new hyper-aggression of feminists, the snarky protests of disappointed metrosexual males, the inevitability of a woman president named Hillary because “it’s time.”

Maybe I will soon. But not today. I’m getting ready to visit the Devon horse show Saturday and a granddaughter’s wildly excessive Barbie birthday on Sunday.

So I’ll leave you with this Netflix available movie to watch on your own. It’s mostly for all you men who have young sons. I won’t even reference the philosophical implications of Plato’s cave, or the significance of one of my all time favorite poems, Kublai Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I, too, know the opening lines by heart and many more after that.

Make of it what you will.