Some days

I think I should just shut down the blog and, more importantly, stop reading any kind of anger-inducing news or information whatever and spend my time writing either my magnum opus or a bad novel.

Speaking of bad novels, Harper Lee, who wrote the unfortunately influential To Kill A Mockingbird, sacred scripture to racial liberals, wrote another quite different version of St Atticus Finch. In this one --which is apparently selling like hotcakes-- he is a "bigot." That is to say, he holds opinions contrary to The Great 60's Revelation. Some lowlife souls might say he saw things clearly...

I am no utopian, clearly. Human history provides no grounds whatever for believing that we can escape the conditions of "flaw, scarcity and contingency" (Kekes) which always and forever eventually produce tragedy on this planet. My paradoxical assessment is the people are happiest when this truth is faced and accepted rather than denied and attacked. That route always ramps tragedy up into catastrophe. Today, the paradise of equality, tomorrow, the guillotine and the gulag.

You'd think that people like popes, who have the advantage of bimillenial institutional memory and the messy myth of the Fall by Original Sin, would know better. But people don't wanna hear about limits. They want the romance of Snideley Whiplash and Little Nell on the tracks. So we have an self-admittedly ignoramus pontiff lecturing the whole planet about how to set up a new economic world order. No wonder the verb to pontificate exists.

The West has never gotten over the French Revolution. Its poison still courses through our veins.

This makes the idea of loyalty to "The West" --something I have a deep identity with-- problematic.
So much of our current fecklessness is based on ideas of our own making. That is the human condition, though, at least as much as a particular Occidental weakness.

But the looser loyalty to kin and tribe which produced prosperous republics also allowed people who hate us, Alinsky-like, to use our own principles against us.

Time for a pipe-smoke.

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