Blackface Bad, Dragface Good

The  President of [West] Texas A&M has just manfully stepped up to declare in public that drag shows “degrade women and are ‘derisive, divisive and demoralizing misogyny.’” This has prompted the predictable storm of manufactured gayfake outrage from the Commies, which he must have known would be sure to follow his remarks.

Now, while his courageous act is extraordinarily unusual these days in any figure of prominence, the most remarkable aspect of this turn of events is I think that *it had never before occurred to anyone that, in effect, drag shows treat women the way that the old blackface vaudeville productions treated blacks: with contempt.* This had not even occurred to me, and I wager that I am fairly unusual in my extreme sensitivity to and morose cynical enjoyment of the manifest and absurd contradictions espoused by the Left (whatever the character of its current skin suit).

For white men to make themselves up as black in public performances is bad, horrible, a sin that cannot be forgiven. But for men to make themselves up as women in public performances is totally cool.

So funny.

The Lethal Economic Lacuna of the Left

In an article that details the economic disaster the West has visited upon itself by the sanctions it has in its war upon Christian orthodoxy imposed upon Russia – to the gist of which (to my amazement: strange bedfellows and trenchmates, that’s history for you, am I right?) I mostly concur – longtime Leftist Cassandra Medea Benjamin and a fellow traveler of hers whose name I don’t recognize, or care to learn about (Nicholas JS Davies) utter an economic absurdity:

Western sanctions on Russia reduced the global supply of oil and natural gas, but also pushed up prices.

This is like writing:

Democrat defund the police policies reduced the supply of policing services nationwide, but also increased crime.

It is also like writing:

War reduced the population, but also killed a lot of people.

They immediately continue:

So Russia profited from the higher prices, even as its export volume decreased.

Well, duh. Honestly, did these guys learn nothing in Econ 101? Did they even take it? Do they even understand Newton’s Third Law (generalized in Emerson’s Law of Compensation, aka Karma)? Do they know how to count change?

Wait, dumb questions: of course they didn’t, and don’t. Manifestly, they cannot put two and two together, even in an article that cleaves pretty close to sagacity. I suppose they approach geopolitical sagacity the way that the broken clock approaches temporal accuracy twice each day.

This is why the Left must never be allowed to take power. Their hearts are ostensibly in the right place, I suppose. Some of them, anyway. But, they are economic idiots. This is as much as to say that they are idiots about reality, period full stop. They talk nonsense. This is sufficient indication that they think nonsense – that, i.e., they do not think. They must never be allowed access to levers of economic or political power.

Kill Them All, & Let God Sort Them Out

This is how social deliquescence appears concretely. One faction or another – or, all factions – throw up their hands, give up negotiations, and resort to civil war. As soon as the percentage of those in the nation ready to take such a step surpasses about 3%, war is on, no matter what, sooner or later, and despite the wishes of all the other nationals. On such occasions, a Fort Sumter event is inbound. It shall soon or late happen. Then, all bets are off.

This is where we now find ourselves. Far more than 3% of Americans – perhaps it is as much as 5%, or even 7% – have decided that all Americans who are remotely such as we of the Orthosphere ought to be, and so are to be, deleted. So, the war is on.

The shooting has not yet begun, but the imprisonments have. The American gulag has already begun.

What is more, the plan is already out in the open. The elite have by the offices of the FBI declared war upon Traditional Catholics, such as I. Good heavens, and forsooth: I sang the Hassler Missa Secunda at Mass this last Sunday, in Latin; probably that makes me an enemy of the state.

ApologetiX: Repurposing Classic Rock Performances for the Glory of God (or at Least the Enjoyment of Some Christians)

There’s a Christian band named ApologetiX. They started in the 90’s. Their thing is recreating classic rock recordings, but overlaid with Christian lyrics that tell a new story.

I first encountered them about fifteen years ago when I heard (on the radio, I think), their song Triune Godhead. They recreate the Stones’ classic Satisfaction, but with words that cite Scripture and make an argument for the Trinity of God.

They match the musical arrangement and the energy of the original. The concept may sound dubious, but they pull it off. Give it a listen.

(If you don’t know the recording they’re repurposing, it’s here. Satisfaction was the number one pop song in the world during 1965, or so I’ve been told. Otis Redding’s cover also deserves honorable mention.)

In this, the first of their songs that I heard, they achieve the purpose of their name. This is apologetics for the divinity of Christ and the Trinity of God.

On the Difficulty of the Cosmos

Twenty years or more ago someone I care about gave me a couple 3D wooden puzzles. I forget how I got them, or from whom, but I remember I care about them. So I kept them on a shelf in my study. Here is one of them, disassembled:

Here is the other, ordered on exactly the same principles, assembled:

The Devil’s Latest Dictionary, Part I

[In the spirit of Ambrose Bierce.]

Note: Most of these definitions assume a certain point of view without which they become incoherent.

*

Fundamentalist. Noun. When you believe your religion is true and / or you support your people. Synonyms: bιgοτ, deplorable, suprεmαcιsτ.

Mansplain. Verb. To be competent and confident.

Equity. Noun. More for us, less for you.

Democracy. Noun. A political outcome or system which gives results we like.

Fαscιsμ. Noun. A political outcome or system which gives results you like. Synonyms: ωhιtε sυprεmαcy, institutional rαcιsm.

Protestor. Noun. Someone publicly taking our side.

Rioter. Noun. Someone publicly taking your side.

Diverse. Adjective. More of us, fewer of you. Synonyms: vibrant, inclusive.

Tolerant. Adjective. Demanding things be done our way.

Intolerant. Adjective. Wanting things to be done your way.

Cμlτμrαl αρρroρrιατιοη. Noun. When you play with our toys and we hαtε it because we hαtε you.

Rαcιsτ.  1) (Archaic noun) One who hαtεs people only because of their rαcε. 2) Adjective. The quality possessed by anything nonωhιτεs don’t like. 3) Noun or Adjective. ωhιtε people and their activities and achievements.

Science. Noun. A discipline or study which confirms our beliefs.

Superstition. Noun. A so-called discipline or study which denies our beliefs.

Crιτιcαl Rαcε Thεοry. Proper noun. You bad, we good.

Whιτε Prινιlεgε. Noun. Your ancestors established the culture of their nation according to their preferences.

Hαtε. Noun. Disagreement with our doctrine.

Love. Noun. Agreement with our doctrine.

Green Grocer Placards, circa 2020

And Now For Something Completely Different

Crusoe the Celebrity Wiener Dog, now ten years old, lives in Ottawa, Canada, with his human parents Lauren and Ryan Beauchesne. With his brother Oakley and his sister Daphne, Crusoe stars in short comedies on YouTube. I watch them, of evenings, while sipping from a tumbler of brandy, to take my mind off current events. Orthosphereans might know of my fondness for Dachshunds, i.e., Wiener Dogs. My dog Shorty, who passed away last February, was a half-Dachshund, half-Beagle mix. “The Three Doggy Rule” is my favorite Crusoe video. I embed some others below.

Notre établissement, notre révolution selon Offenbach

From Act II of La Belle Hélène (1864) by Jacques Offenbach (1819 – 1880): The mighty Kings of Greece introduce themselves.

From Act I of La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein (1867) by Offenbach: General Boum-Boum disciplines his troops.

The Allure of Lemuria (Beta)

It Might as well be Lemuria

The poet and fantasist Clark Ashton Smith (1893 – 1961) wrote in a sonnet of “enormous gongs of stone,” of “griffins whose angry gold, and fervid / store of sapphires [were] wrenched from mountain-plungèd mines,” and of other exotic artifacts that exist in a long-lost provenance, inaccessible except in dreams or by ecstatic witness.  Contemplating the vision, and beseeching the reader in his opening line, the monologist of Smith’s verses asks the portentous question, “Rememberest thou?”  Ah, remembrance!  Plato’s “unforgetting”!  Smith called his poem “Lemuria,” after the fabled counterpart in the Pacific Ocean of Plato’s Atlantis, the far-famed and foredoomed continent, home to a high but wayward civilization, which vanished beneath the waves in a great and world-implicating catastrophe some twelve thousand years ago and more.  According to the claim, Atlantis leaves its traces in such geographical entities as the Canary Islands, the Azores, and the submerged Mid-Atlantic Range.  Lemuria’s fragments, as enthusiasts purport, consist of the scattered atolls of the South Pacific, their enigmatic monuments, as at Ponape or Easter Island, and a tissue of myth that the poetic sensibility might cherish, but that stern rationality dogmatically and erroneously dismisses.  Rational or not, plausible or not, the Legend of Lost Lemuria, like the Legend of Lost Atlantis, speaks to a need – or rather to a gnawing hunger – that afflicts certain rare souls who find themselves stuck against their will in the modern world: To believe in the fabled, in the scientifically unsanctioned, and in the remoteness-cum-greatness of a past age, very nearly lost to memory, that mocks the modern pretension of omniscience.  The allure of Lemuria, like the fascination of Atlantis, responds to the vapid parochialism of the so-called rational world’s ultra-conceited self-perception.

The story supposes Lemuria to be as old as Atlantis (although the precise measure of its age varies from author to author), but, as a story, Lemuria post-dates Atlantis by two and a half millennia.  The notion of Atlantis – the island-continent beyond the Pillars of Hercules whose people, grown decadent and greedy, attempted world-conquest only to suffer heavenly chastisement in a cataclysm that obliterated them and their homeland – goes back to the previously mentioned Plato (428 – 347 BC), the greatest of Greek philosophers, a metaphysician, and a visionary.  In Plato’s linked dialogues Timaeus and Critias, the tale of the Sunken Continent figures centrally.  Plato offers the Atlantis narrative as a “likely story,” whose meaning remains within the realm of symbols and whose imagery the reader should take care not to interpret literally.  Nevertheless, the tendency since Plato, especially in the late Nineteenth Century and again in the early Twentieth Century, has been to take it literally.  As for Lemuria, it only becomes a topic in the Nineteenth Century in a proposal, indeed in a scientific one, put forward by zoologists and ethnographers to explain otherwise inexplicable uniformities in the zoology of the Pacific archipelagos and in the myths and legends of their people.