Orthodoxy Is Inevitable

Cult effects culture. A people cannot efficiently coordinate their activities except insofar as they share a common understanding of the way things are, and of the proper way to deal with them. At the very least, they must agree about what is real, what reality is like, what it is for, and so forth; they must agree about First Things, and indeed Most Things. This they generally do, without ever even noticing all their myriad agreements; men rather tend to notice only their irksome disagreements, however petty.

Thus to cohere, a culture must recur to its common cult, and must rehearse it together. So is there always an established religion.

A people among whom heterodoxy regarding First Things begins to gain a foothold begins ipso facto to become confused in their motions: in their heads, hearts, and acts. Their loyalties are then divided, and so vitiated, at least at the margins.

Heterodoxy is cold civil war. Let it compound long enough, and it will go hot. So healthy societies must control for heterodoxy, especially about First Things.

How to Tell a Weenie

Reading a book of evangelical theology this afternoon, I realized that there are a few reliable ways we can be sure that an author is a liberal weenie, and that the text he has written is therefore ideologically driven, ergo tendentious (whether witly or not), and probably wrong in its arguments. It is very simple, at least in books of theology. We can be sure that an author is a weenie if:

• He uses “impact” as a verb.
• He uses “image” as a verb.
• He avoids using masculine pronouns in referring to God.
• He uses “gender” to indicate sex.
• He uses “gender” as a verb.

If furthermore there is ever in a writer about ancient texts anything like environmentalism or feminism, egalitarianism or communism, relativism or nominalism, we can be sure that he has read them anachronistically, and therefore wrongly. We can, in short, be pretty sure that he is a hopeless idiot, and what is worse, not even therefore much useful to his sinister god.

What can we take from this? That we should never, ever, ever in a million years commit any such howlers.

Probably I have missed a few. I welcome correction of any such omissions.

“You’re Fired!”: Trump Fires Obama (And Bill Ayres, and Possibly George Soros)

“You’re Fired!”: It is now clear that James Comey was the chief Obama-hangover and Soros-seditionist in the Post-Obama federal government — a mole doing Obama’s bidding (that is to say, Bill Ayre’s bidding and George Soros’ bidding) in the aftermath of Hillary Clinton’s humiliating defeat in November.  Trump’s move was not only morally and governance-wise justified; it was symbolically brilliant: Comey received notification of his firing via a hand-delivered message during his speech before an FBI “diversity and recruiting” seminar in California, as I understand it.  The best way to drain the swamp is to let the swamp know that it is being drained while it is making a narcissistic swamp-speech in another swamp.

And while Trump was firing Comey, he was conversing in a friendly way with the Russian ambassador! 

I am currently reconciled to President Trump.  A friend of mine, who voted for Hillary, has come over the the Dark Side and is now in favor of President Trump.

A Sacred War

The Alexandrov Song and Dance Ensemble originated under the Stalin regime in Russia , but it transcended that regime.  The Ensemble sang soldier-songs, folk-songs,  and popular Russian songs.  About two-thirds of the Alexandrov Ensemble died last year in an airplane-accident over the Black Sea.  I might say that it was a suspicious accident, with suspicion lying in the direction of the Turks or Chechen terrorists.  The Sacred War (actually, Voyna Narodnaya or People’s War) is a WWII song. But are we not in a Sacred War?  To FunkyProfessor: The rod in narodnaya is the same as the rod in Rodino.   Long live the Rodino!

I was present at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles in the late 1980s when the Ensemble sang this song by one of the foremost Russian composers —

Here is the last concert of the Alexandrov ensemble —

Hacked by Russia: A True Confession

It is not from any desire to shock my fellow Orthosphereans, but merely in order to explain how, beginning as a bland and generically liberal person, I came finally to be associated with an ultra-right-wing website obviously controlled by the spuriously defunct KGB, that I make the following confession of my long history of seditious crimes and treacherous misdemeanors. The evidence against me is overwhelming.  Below is Exhibit No. 1.

Left: Yessen Zhazoursky, Dean of the School of Journalism, Moscow University; Right: Yours Truly (TFB),  Doctoral Candidate in Comparative Literature, UCLA.  (Fall 1986)

The location was a beach house on Old Malibu Road, with convenient access to the Pacific Ocean hence also to surreptitious traffic to and from casually surfacing Soviet submarines in Santa Monica Bay.  (See the recent Coen Brothers film Hail Caesar!) I call attention to a damning detail of the photograph.  Obviously the Dean and I are exchanging vital, secret information in the medium of coded inscriptions in a notebook that can be concealed in a jacket pocket.  The red stripes of my shirt might also be significant.  By the way, the affair had been organized by Pepperdine University, long known as a communist front.  Below, again, is Exhibit No. 2.

Propaganda of the Deed Works Again!

Nineteenth-century anarchism gave us the idea of “propaganda of the deed.”  This refers to the use of outrages and atrocities to bring a political movement or event into public awareness, operating on the principle that there is no such thing as bad publicity.  The assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, on June 28, 1914, was an example of “propaganda of the deed,” since the aim of Gavrilo Princep was to get people talking about the cause of Serbian independence.  As the French socialist Paul Brousse explained:

A Lamp That Shall Be Put Out

Whosoever curseth his father or his mother                                                 His lamp shall be put out in deep darkness

Proverbs 20: 20

This past December I was standing outside a Louisiana filling station, waiting for my children to do what children do at filling stations on a long drive.  To pass the time, I idly read the portion of the first page of the Times Picayune that was visible through the window of the newspaper dispenser.  This included a headline announcing the New Orleans City Council decision to remove four Confederate monuments from prominent places in that city, an act in line with the flurry of iconoclasm that had been roiling the South since the Charleston shootings earlier that year.