so it looks like 'Blame Canada' isn't just a South Park bit...

     'Meanwhile, one might have expected the American Civil War to have refocused American military thinking, but as Richard A. Preston shows in The Defense of the Undefended Border, until 1940 anglophobia remained a central motivating factor in the United States, and Canada a target for conquest. Between the world wars the United States developed three major war plans: one against Japan, one against Mexico, and War Plan Red, against the United Kingdom. (Germany was color-coded black, but there never was a War Plan Black.) In 1935 secret congressional hearings for air bases to launch surprise attacks on Canada, based on War Plan Red, were mistakenly published by the Government Printing Office and reported by the New York Times and the Toronto Globe. The story was re-discovered in 1975 and again in 1991 before being dug up once more in 2005. The existence of such a plan was treated with a sense of disbelief and laughing up the sleeve. But War Plan Red was not funny: it was detailed, amended and acted upon, and . . . it was no defense plan. The United States would start the war, and even if Canada declared neutrality the United States would still invade and conquer it, planning to "hold in perpetuity" all territory gained and to abolish the Dominion government. The plan was approved in May 1930 by the secretary of war and the secretary of the Navy in expectation of "consequent suffering to the [Canadian] population and widespread destruction and devastation of the country." In October 1934 the secretaries approved the strategic bombing of Halifax, Montreal, and Quebec City "on as large a scale as practicable." A second amendment, also approved at cabinet level, directed the U.S. Army to use poison gas at the outset as a supposedly "humanitarian" action that would cause Canada to surrender quickly, and thus save American lives. Even as late as 1939, as the free world was mobilizing to fight fascism, the U.S. Army War College and the Naval War College set as their planning priority "Overseas Expeditionary Force to Capture Halifax from Red-Crimson Coalition." This enduring hostility to Britain and Canada within the U.S. military was a legacy of the War of 1812 and was finally extinguished only by the Second World War, which ushered in the "special relationship,"' Jon Latimer, 1812: War with America, p. 407-8.

intervention fever...

     Below you have an illustration from Punch, as found on page 318 of Amanda Foreman's A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War. 'Reports of the terrific slaughter at Antietam shocked the nation [Britain]; the 25,000 casualties on a single day seemed inconceivable, especially when compared to the 25,000 Britain suffered during the entire Crimean War,' (p. 315). 

yes, i watch football...but not futball...

     OSU's football team plays the California Golden Bears later tonight. California Golden Bears - are their biggest rivals the Care Bears? Do they enter the stadium doing an interpretive dance? 

     If Urban Meyer is looking for a terrible fifteenth string player for this game, I'm available.

something apt to the day...

     'Achilles pays for nothing; to Hector everything comes dear. Yet it is not Hector, but Achilles, whose insatiable rancor feeds even on victories, and who is forever "gorging himself with complaints." The man of resentment in the Iliad is not the weak man but, on the contrary, the hero who can bend everything to his will. With Hector, the will to greatness never pits itself against the will to happiness. That little bit of true happiness which is more important than anything else, because it coincides with the true meaning of life, will be worth defending even with life itself, to which it has given a measure, a form, a price. Even in defeat, the courage of Hector does not give way before the valor of Achilles, which has been nurtured on discontent and irritable anxiety. But the capacity for happiness, which rewards the efforts of fecund civilizations, puts a curb on the defender's mettle by making him more aware of the enormity of the sacrifice exacted by the gods of war. This capacity, however, does not develop until the appetite for happiness has been stilled, the appetite the drives the aggressor, who is less civilized, on toward his prey and fills his heart with "an infinite power for battle and truceless war," Rachel Baspaloff, On The Iliad.

something from Fr. Capon +

     'Omnes dii gentium daemonia sunt; Dominis autem coelos fecit. Deliver us, O Lord, from religiosity and Godlessness alike, lest we wander in fakery or die of boredom. Restore to us Thyself as Giver and the secular as Thy gift. Let idols perish and con jobs cease. Give repentance and better minds to all pagans and secularists; in the meantime, of Thy mercy, keep them out of our [wine] cellars,' The Supper of the Lamb, p. 88.

yes, this...

Sometimes you just need a little encouragement. 

something from Ernst...

'...it is never unequivocally clear who God is. The one for whom we live and die, whom we love or hate, who possesses us in our inmost being, yields the evidence. If this is so, then Christianity is not merely akin to conviction, even less a mere religious doctrine, or conversely a particular morality within a limited social sphere. Rather it is worldwide service in the discipleship of Jesus and in resistance to superstition. What is determinative is the tie to the Lord, who was crucified on Golgotha, ' Ernst Kasemann.

not a movie review...

     In a fit of melancholy, I watched Taken 2, and found it hilarious. Apparently, one can set off hand grenades all over Istanbul without anyone noticing a thing.

     Like I said, it's hilarious.

the elca never fails to disappoint...

     I see the ELCA continues its slide into both fully embraced apostasy and the bad sort of irrelevance. I've long since accepted that the ELCA's was a false promise. Still, it saddens me from time to time.

time to denounce the Left once and for all...

     Yes, when I say that the US Progressive Left is more dangerous, more Totalitarian, than Russia's Authoritarians, I mean just what I say. Soon, we will find the illusion of neutrality stripped away once and for all. For me and my house, we reject the Progressive Left and all its pomps and works.

     And what are those pomps and works? Well, behold the gifts of the Progressive Left in the US: eugenics (abortion; euthanasia; the elimination of the poor and unfit); a vast digital panopticon; war without end for revolutionary ends both vague and dubious; the destruction of the family (itself a product of an earlier, more truly progressive movement).

     That's all just the beginning of the end you know. 

yes, i wrote this...weird it all is...

     So, we're in Oppositeland - Russia seems more and more sane a place, even with its outbursts of violence (which are, perhaps, over-hyped by the Progressive West). Progressives in the US are, to my ear, the greatest threat to life and liberty at the moment. In fact, they are for all intents and purposes the new Fascists in this country. 
     It comes down to what is, at the moment, the only choice - Totalitarian or Authoritarian order. What's so hard to accept is that the US is rapidly moving in the Totalitarian direction, while Russia simply follows its Authoritarian ways. I really don't know what to do with that. 

damn, 'die hard' is taken...

     Through the first half of the sales season, I got my ass kicked repeatedly. There's no other way to put it. I could go into detail, but would thus quickly fall into a litany of Salesman's Excuses, and I hate those. Suffice it say, again and again, my ass hath been kicked repeatedly. For that reason, I found myself down for a couple of weeks. It was the lowest your factotum has been for many a year. 

     Well, the past week or so has seen a shift in momentum. Those insurance adjusters who were taking the most delight in kicking me up and down the road are gone. So far, I have outlasted the bastards. If there are more out there, then let them come. 

     Yes, I daresay things are getting back to normal. 

     Although sales for the year obviously track to the end of December, the season ends around the last week of November. I am determined to break my own record, and to do it between now and that November deadline. What's more, I have been asked to help carry the office through the end of the season so that we meet our goal for the year, and that is precisely what I'm going to do.

     Believe it or not, there is one good thing about taking a lot of real beatings while growing up - I know how both to survive and prevail. So, come the Christmas bacchanal round about the second week of December, I will come limping into the room, yes, but for all that I will win.

     There's a lesson in that somewhere, but for the life of me I can't figure out what it is.

a poem...

A Request



Run, tell the one who killed my heart
that it might live again, They’ve lost
the life you gave them, tossed 
it aside, so only you,
who embraced them at the start,
can by terrible words accost
them, making them fearful of the cost
of flight and wringing their hearts anew -
such intercession may renew
a bond so strangely wrought for us
with one who, through illustrious,
lived with a flock all unaware
of who it was who found them so fair.

so, that happened...

     I threw my back out on Sunday. How, you ask? Well I'll tell ya - I was pulling weeds when it happened. 

     O, the day was beautiful, cool and breezy it was, out of character for late July. It had been far, far too long since I had tended to the gardens, and they were overrun with nettles and ivy. So, a little weeding seemed the thing to do.

     Damn this pain. Love the pain killers - it's easy to see how folks could become addicted to the things. I won't of course. After all, I have far too many addictions as it is. 

     To sum up, here's the buzz - the back's out, wifi's down, and I'm in bed reading The Spanish Civil War by one Hugh Thomas. It's a damn fine piece of work. Soon, life will once more become a wonderful dream. 
     So annoying it is.

a poem...

Musings at the End

 It’s past time that I found my ancient broom,
 cleaned out all this junk, and swept my cell
 from end to end, an exercise to quell
 my anxious roving round this messy room
 beneath a dark, apocalyptic doom, 
 for I’ve made myself some trouble - hell,
 I wouldn’t be too shocked to hear the knell 
 that signals earth’s one last defiant bloom
 before all creatures find eternal rest
(me too, I hope, for nothing is my own) - 
 and so I tidy up as for a guest
 right royal, with a fickle faith now grown
 old, untended, hardly made to wrest
 good fruit at last from words yet newly sown.

'a million revisions'...

    So, I revised the poem in that last post. The fault was in those last two lines. It also now sports a title, which, while not essential, is often a welcome challenge.
     

On the Lookout for Fall



About the house our summer seems
a riot now of madness, all order
gone in a tangle of vines and nettles 
forcing all to cede their place, 
heat creeping slow, a garden gone
to seed, until the days grow shorter
and the slanting sun in time restores 
to dappled form each dying leaf.

an untitled poem...

About the house late summer seems
a riot now of madness, all order
gone in a tangle of vines and nettles 
forcing all to cede their place, 
heat creeping slow, a garden gone
to seed, until the days grow shorter
and the slanting sun restores 
at last every calm and dappled form.

poetry criticism...

     As usual, there's not a poem in the current Poetry that's worth a damn. For instance, there's a blurb of hideousness entitled 'Age Appropriate'. Here are the first few lines:

Sometimes,
mystified by the behavior
of one of my sons,
my wife will point out
if it's age-appropriate,
making me wonder why
I still shout at ballplayers on TV
and argue with the dead.

It's complete lack of style and grace is a manifestation of its intellectual and emotional banality. The turn implied by 'and argue with the dead' is senselessly appended to add a spectre of depth to the damn thing. And, it's pairing with the clunky 'I still shout at ballplayers on TV' is risible. Who cares why you do anything?
     Nothing more than bad prose chopped at random into lines that run down the page without music, this bland thing is a perfect example of the typical Contemporary Poem In America. All such works deserve their future inevitable oblivion.

something he said...

     The Rev. Soon-to-Be Doctor Tripp Hudgins wrote on Facething: 'The great theological debate of our present time is more fundamental than that. It is about what we do.'

     Yes, the world groans to find itself once again a Pelagian wilderness. In fact, there is no debate my friend - there is good, there is evil, and more and more our fine-tuned options for apparent neutrality are being taken away from us. This not, however, about what we do, but rather about whose we are. Now, that is far from certain in this opaque time if we are left to discern on the basis of what we do. How fortunate then to know that what's been done to us is far more important than what we do - it's crucial in fact. 

     As for me, I'm just a scoundrel who would like to be saved - 'deserve's got nothing to do with it'.

news...

     Time for Nabokov, Vaughan, Keats, Gogol, Cervantes, and assorted Latin poets.

sure, i'll say something about the Zimmerman verdict...

     Allow me to uselessly and presumptuously ramble on the basis of the scant reading I've done to date: 
     First, it's likely that both Martin and Zimmerman were defending themselves. Zimmerman set in motion a series of events that led to a confrontation in which each rightly felt that his life was in danger. This confrontation was neither inevitable, nor necessary. Right up to that fatal moment, Zimmerman could have identified himself and stated his purpose, in which case we might have had a story of a stand off that ended when police arrived to find that Martin was doing nothing wrong, and that Zimmerman was an overzealous fool. (The bulletproof vest etc are giveaways that he likely inflated not only the purpose of the Neighborhood Watch, but his role in it.) 
     Second, Martin isn't a symbol of anything, neither is Zimmerman. This horrible event doesn't tell us anything about race, gun violence, 'Stand Your Ground' laws - it tells us nothing at all about anything at all. It just happened. It was pure absurdity, abetted by idiocy. It's likely, to speculate on the basis of nothing at all, that Zimmerman is in fact guilty of some kind of criminal recklessness, but the idiot prosecutor chose to overcharge and thus lost the whole thing. So there's more stupidity, more idiocy (those are different things). 
     The death of Trevon Martin can only be used to further an agenda - whatever that may be - at the expense of the truth that it is, for all of us outside the circle of family and friends of both men, meaningless. The death of that young man, and the weight of having killed him borne by another, are without purpose, without meaning, without yield for us and our various Causes. Why did it happen? Because it happened. The reality of providence in which I firmly believe does not imply that such events are anything other than absurd acts of stupid fortuity, fortuity aided, yes, by idiocy and misapprehension, but not less but more fortuitous and thus stupid for all that. 
     The real question therefore is, Can we live in a world where things like this just happen? Can we accept moral responsibility for our free acts in such a contingent world? Zimmerman to be sure acted freely, if idiotically. That the Triune God is first and final cause of all that is, does not mitigate but rather establishes this freedom, this existential responsibility. So, rewind that night, and have Zimmerman or Martin do the least little thing differently, and the whole damned tragedy might never have happened. Once again, we see that this tells us nothing about anything other than the often blind contingency of our lives, and our moral responsibility to act accordingly, knowing that foolishly overreaching can yield terrible consequences. 

it's called a bar...

just a thought...

     When someone says that a 'decision' was 'difficult' and 'anguished' it ususally means they did something evil and need to justify it by the profundity of their pain. It's all right to do all manner of evil, you see, if only you can tell a sad story about necessity and your personal struggle. 

     Remember, it's all about you.

criticism...

     I'm not sure that last experiment, a poem consisting of what could be first lines of other poems, really works. 

a poem you've seen before...

First Lines



I don't know what the sea is doing tonight

the Gadarene swine seem to have swarmed into the city

do lilies grow in fields do birds never toil for their keep?

fog rolled over us at breakfast with bourbon outside

bituminous are the rocks at the waters edge

don't look at the sun keep gazing at your shadow

drops dripped branches cracked ice tortured leaves

toil away for the lasting crown as the lilies toil away

never know never what the sea is doing don't look

query...

     Dare I drink another glass of wine?

a poem...

The sequence continues:


O garden veiled 
stone dark with water
a light drizzle shimmering 
sunlight in water - 
the end is not the end
a man fears a veil to no end.

untitled...

     It's been a while since I drank a whole bottle of wine in such a short time. It was damn fine I don't mind saying...

in lieu of anything of my own, here's something about Mary...

     'There is the reality of the icon, which is a picture of some bit of this world, so depicted and so constructed as to open the world to the "energy" of God at work in what is being shown. And, most importantly, there is the person who stands on the frontier between promise and fulfillment, between earth and heaven, between the two Testaments: Mary. That she can be represented in so many ways, thought about and imagined in so many forms, is an indication of how deeply she speaks to us about the hope for the world's transfiguration through Jesus . . . ,' Rowan Williams, Ponder These Things: Praying with Icons of the Virgin, p. xv.

poetry blues...

     So, today I received several emails rejecting poems I had submitted to a few journals. 

     Fuck 'em.

     I like posting my poems here, and sending 'em to friends and family the old fashioned way. 

     It's the seventeenth century all over again for us poets, dear reader. We write our poems, and circulate 'em amongst those we deem fit to receive 'em.

     Now, if only I could find a patron willing to give me a stipend of, say, three grand a week, for which I had to produce the occasional poem for his daughter's graduation or his wife's new pool house. 

     That would be sweet.

untitled...

     I miss Mary. Why did we banish her from the Sanctuary?

on second thought...

     Maybe I'm really supposed to be one of those wealthy laymen you read about in Church history. It does seem to suit me, for what that's worth.

an exercise in automatic writing...

I don't know what the sea is doing tonight
the Gadarene swine seem to have swarmed into the city
do lilies grow in fields do birds never toil for their keep?
fog rolled over us at breakfast with bourbon outside
bituminous are the rocks at the waters edge
I never know what the sea is doing anymore 
don't look at the sun keep gazing at your shadow
drops dripped branches cracked ice tortured leaves
toil away for the lasting crown as the lilies toil away
never know never what the sea is doing don't look

revelation...

     You know, this here blog has long past drifted into complete irrelevance. I continue to post here out of sheer cussedness. I like writing for the three or four people who still stop by. 
     It's an apocalypse out there, so be careful.

thesis...

     If it's a work of political philosophy, then the argument of Plato's Republic - inasmuch as it has one - is utilitarian.