John C. Wright's Blog, page 125

Viva Cristo Rey!

I saw FOR GREATER GLORY last night, and it was the most moving, dramatic, painful yet exhilarating film I can recall having seen in the last ten years.

The acting was flawless, the cinematography beautiful, the period sets and costumes perfect, the plot well structured, and the story was true: it concerns the armed rebellion that swept through Mexico after the government outlawed the faith and all the churchbells fell silent.

The cast includes Andy Garcia, Eva Longoria, Peter O’Toole, and Mexican star Eduardo Verastegui.

The story arc was centered around a retired general of the revolutionary days, Enrique Gorostieta Velarde (played by Andy Garcia). who now manufactured pink soap, but he is an atheist, despite his Catholic wife Tulita (Eva Longoria) .

When the ‘Christeros’ try to hire him for money to lead their scattered grassroots uprising, his wife, holding back tears, tells him to take the job and fight for a cause he does not believe in, because he may yet come to.

Another character was a priest turned rebel leader Father Vega  (Santiago Cabrera) who takes up the sword, and his conflict with the others of his order who will not condone any use of violence.

And yet another was a ‘Clint Eastwood’ style badass cowboy Victoriano “El Catorce” Ramirez (Oscar Isaac) who had rebelled with his own men for his own reasons, who neither believes in the priest nor trusts the general, but whose acts of derring-do are justly famous. There is a scene where he bests an entire group of federal soldiers singlehanded, as if in a typical heroic Western, but because the relentless realism of the surrounding picture, the scene comes off, by an ironic magic, not like a movie scene, but like a movie scene of real event so heroic it should be a scene in a movie.

Braver yet were the women led by Adriana (Catalina Sandino Moreno ) who smuggle arms and ammunition to the rebel forces.

Bravest of all is a little boy José Luis Sánchez del Rio (Mauricio Kuri)  who wants to join the rebelli0n after he sees his parish priest Father Christopher (Peter O’Toole), a saint who will not lift a finger to defend himself, martyred before his eyes. One of the more moving story lines is the growing friendship between the old general and the idealistic boy, who comes to regard him as the son he never had. The craven mayor Picazzo (an actor with the magnificent name of Nestor Carbonel), overawed by the brutality of the federals, urges José to betray his cause, his friends, and his faith to save himself, asking him only to cry out ‘Death to Christ the King!’

Each character, heroic or craven, was dramatic enough for a film in his own right, but together make that kind of story which has the realism and unevenness of life, because life does not follow the needs of drama.

It is worth staying for the credits to see the real fate of the historical characters, including what happened to a minor sidekick character named Lorenzo, afterward called Lazarus. Some things are too odd and miraculous to put into a film. Real life is so strange that people would not believe it.

If the number of characters and plotlines in the film make it difficult to follow, well, go see it twice.

—————————————————-

What I cannot understand is that critics panned this film. It got one star on Rotten Tomatoes. One star? That takes more than a considerable amount of willful blindness in a considerable amount of people to underestimate and misjudge a film that badly. That is not a sign of one or two crackpot reviewers with eccentric tastes: that is a sign that a vast swathe of the population has gone crackpot.

One would think that Leftists would cheer for any epic of rebellion against authority, especially one where America is the villain (or, at least, the shady character motivated by oil greed) and the heroes are all members of that Caucasian race who are afforded the honor of being a minority, at least in Lefty thinking, our brothers to the south of the border. One would think the Rightists would cheer for any epic of rebellion against authority, especially one where the cause was explicitly the cause of religious liberty: can you think of ANY film in the last ten years were the priests were the good guys? And, one would think anyone who likes good old fashion cowboy films would like this, because there were horsemen and ranchers and sixshooters a-plenty.You would think lovers of independent cinema would approve of any film that was not a studio-make generic McFilm.

Maybe some people don’t like stories with an unhappy ending. Sorry, friends, but all the martyrs beatified by the Pope who appear in this film do indeed get martyred, including a child martyr in a scene painful to watch.

It was only playing in one screen at my local art house theater.

Allow me now to quote Brent Bozell’s review on FOR GREATER GLORY, where he lambastes his fellow film critics who are suddenly dismayed by historical inaccuracies in historic films. They are, of course only dismayed about Catholicism being portrayed in a good light.

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/brent-bozell/2012/05/29/bozell-column-viva-cristo-rey#ixzz1wZhNJAsK

Bozell notes:

Just the idea … brings out the worst in the secularist press. Slant magazine pans it as a film “that gives the screen epic a bad name.” It attacks the “solemn speechifying,” the “overstuffed cast of characters,” the “half-baked material,” and given “this religion is specifically Catholic… [the movie] …makes the material a tough sell.” When Garcia’s character ultimately converts to Christianity, “we’re back to embracing a worldview where the implied mandate to practice Catholicism feels near as onerous as the inability to do so.”

But how historically accurate is this “implied mandate to practice Catholicism? Here’s a hint. Slant dismisses “a whole host of bathetic subplots” claiming “its martyrdom fetish reaches its grotesque nadir when a young boy dies rather than make the most token anti-Catholic gesture.”

As for the alleged mushy effusiveness and the martyrdom fetish, there are some historical facts. Over 90,000 died. Dozens have since been canonized by the Church, including 25 by John Paul II alone. The young boy was Jose Luis Sanchez del Rio, who was tortured with his heels slashed before being made to walk to his execution. “He cried and moaned with pain,” stated an eyewitness And then he was shot dead.

The “most token anti-Catholic gesture” which would have saved his life was his refusal to shout “Death to Christ the King,” instead proclaiming “Viva Cristo Rey!”

Jose was 14. He was beatified by Benedict XVI in 2005.

It is still illegal to celebrate Mass outdoors in Mexico.

My comment: I wonder how the reviewer of Slant would react when asked to spit on the cross of whatever secular idol or image he worships would be. Would he affirm the inequality of Negros if a Nazi held a gun to his head, or curse gay marriage? If so, he has less manhood that this little boy, who was a real person who in real life neither ratted out his friends nor betrayed his savior. I suspect his irrational antipathy toward this film rests in part in a recognition that he can never be a man of the character portrayed here by nearly ever character,

Catholics have a religious duty to patronize films such as this, as do lovers of serious film or independent film. Mexicans have a patriotic duty to patronize such films, as do lovers of liberty either of the Right or the Left.

Or, the film fans and film reviewers of the Leftist persuasion cannot see their way clear to support a film such as this, then it is finally time for the Left to admit that it hates with sneering orcish hatred the liberties of the civilized West, and would eagerly embrace the totalitarianism of the East, and gladly forsake and forswear their freedoms in return for the tyrants of the world destroying the Church. The vision of seeing anyone peacefully worship Christ is so painful to them, that they would eagerly be slaves, if only the Christians would be martyrs.

Admittedly, the film making had some minor flaws no which I will not dwell, but nothing to explain the outpouring of contempt for a film better than any number of other, and less accurate, historical epics one could name.

Only a hatred for the subject matter could explain such a reaction to a film. If you had a Western war-flick coming-of-age story about sacrifices made and battles fought in the name of some other cause, such as saving the whales, FOR GREATER WILLY, the Lefty critics would be peeing themselves in their meretricious eagerness to praise and laud and adore the film.

I thought anti-Catholic bias was a thing of the past. Well, it is a thing of the future and present as well, it seems.

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

“Sturgeon’s Law School” by Superversive

I want to direct any readers who have suffered through EYE OF ARGON to look at what Tom Simon has to say about it. He makes an interesting observation that its badness comes from its sober attempt at goodness.

http://www.bondwine.com/essays/sturgeon/sturgeon.html

Here is an excerpt:

Bad as it is—and it is infamously bad, hilariously bad, with the delicious awfulness of an Ed Wood movie or a William Shatner album—it nevertheless shows evidence of skills learned at great cost. It begins in medias res, with a creditable attempt at scene-setting. The plot, such as it is, bears a sort of phantom resemblance to the standard ‘plot skeleton’ taught in how-to-write books: the same kind of resemblance that a five-year-old’s Hallowe’en drawing bears to an actual human skeleton. It is recognizably made up of bones, or a plausible imitation of bones, though they are not connected together in any generally accepted way. The physical description of setting and action are actually fairly good; at least, they are not vague. Vagueness would have helped, perhaps. A good thick layer of muddy prose would have artfully concealed the silliness of Grignr’s exploits with his fifty-pound broadsword, or the sheer primaeval stupidity of the ‘scarlet emerald’.

In fact, ‘The Eye Of Argon’ is not utterly incompetent; it is haunted by a sort of sad ghost of competence. If it were not so good at reminding us of the effect it is trying to achieve, it would not be so killingly funny to see how it fails.

It is a thoroughly bad story, but a readable one—even an entertaining one, if you approach it in the right spirit, like a paying customer at the World’s Worst Film Festival. In fact, it is very like a thoroughly bad but watchable film. Plan Nine From Outer Space is one of the silliest and most incompetent films ever made, but one can see just why it fails, and what it is failing at.

[...]

If ‘The Eye Of Argon’ were fixed—if you cleaned up the execrable dialogue, and fixed the descriptions, and holystoned the prose till it contained no more scarlet emeralds or lithe noses, and gave the characters motivations and personalities, and made the action scenes physically plausible, and replaced the pointless tomato-surprise ending with something that would actually resolve the plot, and generally attached some sense of importance and tension to the whole story, so that the reader could care whether Grignr achieved his quest or not, and was not fatally attracted to the alternative idea of how pleasant it would be to see him get run over by a bus—oh, yes, and if one applied some real skill to replacing names like Grignr and Norgolia with something a human being could read aloud and not be choked with superior laughter—why, then, one would have, not a good story as such, but a good bad story; a serviceable fourth-rate sword & sorcery story, the sort of thing that could have been published in any respectable pulp fantasy magazine of the 1940s, at least in an off issue, when the editor had to choose between printing substandard work and leaving a sheaf of pages blank. Good journeyman half-a-cent-per-word stuff, in other words, and better than a lot that was actually published in those days. And there are still fanzines where such a thing would be publishable.

It would be a colossal waste of time to try to fix ‘The Eye Of Argon’, of course, but it could be done. And that would not be possible if Jim Theis did not have at least a rough visceral notion of what constitutes a good story, and enough of the rudiments of writing skill to bring off a recognizable imitation of one. No doubt poor Mr. Theis composed his parvum opus in a white-hot fever of creative euphoria, and printed it in his apazine with maximum haste, giving him the best possible opportunity to repent at leisure. And no doubt he knew it was not prozine-quality work, or he would most likely have sent it off to Fantastic or F&SF or Weird Bloody Mighty-Thewed Pulp Stories, and it would have vanished into the night with only the bare cenotaph of a rejection slip in the author’s bottom drawer to remind us that it had ever existed at all. He just didn’t know how far his work fell short of publishable quality, and so—he published it. It took a rare and fortuitous combination of lunacy and recklessness to give the world that tale, and fandom one of its most cherished legends.

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

The Eye of Argon by Jim Theis – Part Two

Back to Part One!

-6-

"Take hold of this rope," said the first soldier, "and climb
out from your pit, slut. Your presence is requested in another
far deeper hell hole."
Grignr slipped his right hand to his thigh, concealing a
small opaque object beneath the folds of the g-string wrapped
about his waist. Brine wells swelled in Grignr's cold, jade
squinting eyes, which grown accustomed to the gloom of the
stygian pools of ebony engulfing him, were bedazzled and blinded
by flickerering radiance cast forth by the second soldiers's
resin torch.
Tightly gripped in the second soldier's right hand, opposite
the intermittent torch, was a large double edged axe, a long
leather wound oaken handled transfixing the center of the
weapon's iron head. Adorning the torso's of both of the sentries
were thin yet sturdy hauberks, the breatplates of which were
woven of tightly hemmed twines of reinforced silver braiding.
Cupping the soldiers' feet were thick leather sandals, wound
about their shins to two inches below their knees. Wrapped about
their waists were wide satin girdles, with slender bladed
poniards dangling loosely from them, the hilts of which featured
scarlet encrusted gems. Resting upon the manes of their heads,
and reaching midway to their brows were smooth copper morions.
Spiraling the lower portion of the helmet were short, up-curved
silver spikes, while a golden hump spired from the top of each
basinet. Beneath their chins, wound around their necks, and
draping their clad shoulders dangled regal purple satin cloaks,
which flowed midway to the soldiers feet.
hand over hand, feet braced against the dank walls of the
enclosure, huge Grignr ascended from the moldering dephs of the
forlorn abyss. His swelled limbs, stiff due to the boredom of a
timeless inactivity, compounded by the musty atmosture and jagged
granite protuberan against his body, craved for action. The
opportunity now presenting itself served the purpose of oiling
his rusty joints, and honing his dulled senses.
He braced himself, facing the second soldier. The sentry's
stature was was wildly exaggerated in the glare of the flickering
cresset cuppex in his right fist. His eyes were wide open in a
slightly slanted owlish glaze, enhanced in their sinister
intensity by the hawk-bill curve of his nose andpale yellow pique
of his cheeks.
"Place your hands behind your back," said the second soldier
as he raised his ax over his right shoulder blade and cast it a
wavering glance. "We must bind your wrists to parry any attempts
at escape. Be sure to make the knot a stout one, Broig, we
wouldn't want our guest to take leave of our guidance."
Broig grasped Grignr's left wrist and reached for the
barbarians's right wrist. Grignr wrenched his right arm free and
swilveled to face Broig, reach- beneath his loin cloth with his
right hand. The sentry grappled at his girdle for the sheathed
dagger, but recoiled short of his intentions as Grignr's right
arm swept to his gorge. The soldier went limp, his bobbing eyes
rolling beneath fluttering eyelids, a deep welt across his
spouting gullet. Without lingering to observe the result of his
efforts, Grignr dropped to his knees. The second soldier's axe
cleft over Grignr's head in a blze of silvered ferocity, severing
several scarlet locks from his scalp. Coming to rest in his
fellow's stomach, the iron head crashed through mail and flesh
with splintering force, spilling a pool of crimsoned entrails
over the granite paving.
Before the sentry could wrench his axe free from his
comrade's carcass, he found Grignr's massive hands clasped about
his throat, choking the life from his clamped lungs. With a
zealous grunt, the Ecordian flexed his tightly corded biceps,
forcing the grim faced soldier to one knee. The sentry plunged
his right fist into Grignr's face, digging his grimy nails into
the barbarians flesh. Ejaculating a curse through rasping teeth,
grignr surged the bulk of his weight foreard, bowling the
beseiged soldier over upon his back. The sentry's arms collapsed
to his thigh, shuddering convulsively; his bulging eyes staring
blindly from a bloated ,cherry red face.
Rising to his feet, Grignr shook the bllod from his eyes,
ruffling his surly red mane as a brush fire swaying to the
nightime breeze. Stooping over the spr sprawled corpse of the
first soldier, Grignr retrieved a small white object from a pool
of congealing gore. Snorting a gusty billow of mirth, he once
more concealed th e tiny object beneath his loin cloth; the
tediously honed pelvis bone of the broken rodent. Returning his
attention toward the second soldier, Grignr turned to the task of
attiring his limbs. To move about freely through the dim
recesses of the castle would require the grotesque garb of its
soldiery.
Utilizing the silence and stealth aquired in the untamed
climbs of his childhood, Grignr slink through twisting corridors,
and winding stairways, lighting his way with the confisticated
torch of his dispatched guardian. Knowing where his steps were
leading to, Grignr meandered aimlessly in search of an exit from
the chateau's dim confines. The wild blood coarsing through his
veins yearned for the undefiled freedom of the livid wilderness
lands.
Coming upon a fork in the passage he treaked, voices
accompanied by clinking footfalls discerned to his sensitive ears
from the left corridor. Wishing to avoid contact, Grignr veered
to the right passageway. If aquested as to the purpose of his
presence, his barbarous accent would reveal his identity, being
that his attire was not that of the castle's mercenary troops.
In grim silence Grignr treaded down the dingily lit
corridor; a stalking panther creeping warily along on padded
feet. After an interminable period of wandering through the dull
corridors; no gaps to break the monotony of the cold gray walls,
Grignr espied a small winding stairway. Descending the flight of
arced granite slabs to their posterior, Grignr was confronted by
a short haalway leading to a tall arched wooden doorway.
Halting before the teeming portal portal, Grignr restes his
shaggy head sideways against the barrier. Detecting no sounds
from within, he grasped the looped metel handle of the door; his
arms surging with a tremendous effort of bulging muscles, yet the
door would not budge. Retrieving his ax from where he had
sheathed it beneath his girdle, he hefted it in his mighty hands
with an apiesed grunt, and wedging one of its blackened edges
into the crack between the portal and its iron rimed sill.
Bracing his sandaled right foot against the rougjly hewn wall,
teeth tightly clenched, Grignr appilevered the oaken haft,
employing it as a lever whereby to pry open the barrier. The
leather wound hilt bending to its utmost limits of endurance, the
massive portal swung open with a grating of snapped latch and
rusty iron hinges.
Glancing about the dust swirled room in the gloomily dancing
glare of his flickering cresset, Grignr eyed evidences of the
enclosure being nothing more than a forgotten storeroom.
Miscellaneous articles required for the maintainance of a castle
were piled in disorganized heaps at infrequent intervals toward
the wall opposite the barbarian's piercing stare. Utilizing
long, bounding strides, Grignr paced his way over to the mounds
of supplies to discover if any articles of value were contained
within their midst.
Detecting a faint clinking sound, Grignr sprawed to his left
side with the speed of a striking cobra, landing harshly upon his
back; torch and axe loudly clattering to the floor in a morass of
sparks and flame. A elmwoven board leaped from collapsed
flooring, clashing against the jagged flooring and spewing a
shower of orange and yellow sparks over Grignr's startled face.
Rising uneasily to his feet, the half stunned Ecordian glared
down at the grusome arm of death he had unwittingly sprung.
"Mrifk!"
If not for his keen auditory organs and lighting steeled
reflexes, Grignr would have been groping through the shadowed
hell-pits of the Grim Reaper. He had unknowingly stumbled upon
an ancient, long forgotton booby trap; a mistake which would have
stunted the perusal of longevity of one less agile. A mechanism,
similar in type to that of a minature catapult was concealed
beneath two collapsable sections of granite flooring. The arm of
the device was four feet long, boasting razor like cleats at
regular intervals along its face with which it was to skewer the
luckless body of its would be victim. Grignr had stepped upon a
concealed catch which relaesed a small metal latch beneath the
two granite sections, causing them to fall inward, and thereby
loose the spiked arm of death they precariously held in.
Partially out of curiosity and partially out of an
inordinate fear of becoming a pincushion for a possible second
trap, Grignr plunged his torch into the exposed gap in the floor.
The floor of a second chamber stood out seven feet below the
glare. Tossing his torch through the aperature, Grignr grasped
the side of an adjoining tile, dropping down.
Glancing about the room, Grignr discovered that he had
decended into the palace's mausoleum. Rectangular stone crypts
cluttered the floor at evenly placed intervals. The tops of the
enclosures were plated with thick layers of virgin gold, while
the sides were plated with white ivory; at one time sparkling,
but now grown dingy through the passage of the rays of
allencompassing mother time. Featured at the head of each
sarcophagus in tarnished silver was an expugnisively carved
likeness of its rotting inhabitant.
A dingy atmosphere pervaded the air of the chamber; which
sealed in the enclosure for an unknown period had grown thick and
stale. Intermingling with the curdled currents was the repugnant
stench of slowly moldering flesh, creeping ever slowly but surely
through minute cracks in the numerous vaults. Due to the
embalming of the bodies, their flesh decayed at a much slower
rate than is normal, yet the nauseous oder was none the less
repellant.
Towering over Grignr's head was the trap he released. The
mechanism of the miniaturized catapolt was cluttered with mildew
and cobwebs. Notwithstanding these relics of antiquity, its
efficiency remained unimpinged. To the right of the trap wound a
short stairway through a recess in the ceiling; a concealed
entrance leading to the mausoleum for which the catapult had
obviously been erected as a silent, relentless guardian.
Climbing up the side of the device, Grignr set to the task
of resetting its mechanism. In the e event that a search was
organized, it would prove well to leave no evidence of his
presence open to wandering eyes. Besides, it might even serve to
dwindle the size of an opposing force.
Descending from his perch, Grignr was startled by a faintly
muffled scream of horrified desperation. His hair prickled
yawkishly in disorganized clumps along his scalp. As a cold
danced along the length of his spinal cord. No moral/mortal
barrier, human or otherwise, was capable of arousing the numbing
sensation of fear inside of Grignr's smoldering soul. However,
he was overwrought by the forces of the barbarians' instinctive
fear of the supernatural. His mighty thews had always served to
adequately conquer any tangible foe., but the intangible was
something distant and terrible. Dim horrifying tales passed by
word of mouth over glimmering camp fires and skins of wine had
more than once served the purpose of chilling the marrowed core
of his sturdy limbed bones.
Yet, the scream contained a strangely human quality, unlike
that which Grignr imagined would come from the lungs of a demon
or spirit, making Grignr take short nervous strides advancing to
the sarcophagus from which the sound was issuing. Clenching his
teeth in an attempt to steel his jangled nerves, Grignr slid the
engraved slab from the vault with a sharp rasp of grinding stone.
Another long drawn cry of terror infested anguish met the
barbarian, scoring like the shrill piping of a demented banshee;
piercing the inner fibres of his superstitious brain with
primitive dread dread and awe.
Stooping over to espy the tomb's contents, the glittering
Ecordians nostrills were singed by the scorching aroma of a
moldering corpse, long shut up and fermenting; the same putrid
scent which permeated the entire chamber, though multiplied to a
much more concentrated dosage. The shriveled, leathery packet of
crumbling bones and dried flacking flesh offered no resistance,
but remained in a fixed position of perpetual vigilance, watching
over its dim abode from hollow gaping sockets.
The tortured crys were not coming from the tomb but from
some hidden depth below! Pulling the reaking corpse from its
resting place, Grignr tossed it to the floor in a broken, mangled
heap. Upon one side of the crypt's bottom was attached a series
of tiny hinges while running parallel along the opposite side of
a convex railing like protruberance; laid so as to appear as a
part of the interior surface of the sarcophagus.
Raising the slab upon its bronze hinges, long removed from
the gaze of human eyes, Grignr percieved a scene which caused his
blood to smolder not unlike bubbling, molten lava. Directly
below him a whimpering female lay stretched upon a smooth
surfaced marble altar. A pack of grasy faced shamen clustered
around her in a tight circular formation. Crouched over the girl
was a tall, potbellied priest; his face dominated by a
disgusting, open mouthed grimace of sadistic glee. Suspended
from the acolyte's clenched right hand was a carven oval faced
mallet, which he waved menacingly over the girl's shadowed face;
an incoherent gibberish flowing from his grinning, thick lipped
mouth.
In the face of the amorphos, broad breated female, stretched
out aluringly before his gaping eyes; the universal whim of
nature filing a plea of despair inside of his white hot soul;
Grignr acted in the only manner he could perceive. Giving vent
to a hoarse, throat rending battle cry, Grignr plunged into the
midst of the startled shamen; torch simmering in his left hand
andax twirling in his right hand.
A gaunt skull faced priest standing at the far side of the
altar clutched desperately at his throat, coughing furiously in
an attempt to catch his breath. Lurching helplessly to and fro,
the acolyte pitched headlong against the gleaming base of a
massive jade idol. Writhing agonizedly against the hideous
image, foam flecking his chalk white lips, the priest struggled
helplessly - - - the victim of an epileptic siezure.
Startled by the barbarians stunning appearance, the chronic
fit of their fellow, and the fear that Grignr might be the
avantgarde of a conquering force dedicated to the cause of
destroying their degenerated cult, the saman momentarily lost
their composure. Giving vent to heedless pandemonium, the
priests fell easy prey to Grignr's sweeping arc of crimsoned
death and maiming distruction.
The acolyte performing the sacrifice took a vicious blow to
the stomach; hands clutching vitals and severed spinal cord as he
sprawled over the altar. The disor anized priests lurched and
staggered with split skulls, dismembered limbs, and spewing
entrails before the enraged Ecordian's relentless onslaught. The
howles of the maimed and dying reverberated against the walls of
the tiny chamber; a chorus of hell frought despair; as the
granite floor ran red with blood. The entire chamber was
encompassed in the heat of raw savage butchery as Grignr
luxuriated in the grips of a primitive, beastly blood lust.
Presently all went silenet save for the ebbing groans of the
sinking shaman and Grignr's heaving breath accompanied by several
gusty curses. The well had run dry. No more lambs remained for
the slaughter.
The rampaging stead of death having taken of Grignr for the
moment, left the barbarian free to the exploitation of his other
perusials. Towering over his head was the misshaped image of the
cult's hideous diety - - - Argon. The fantastic size of the idol
in consideration of its being of pure jade was enough to cause
the senses of any man to stagger and reel, yet thus was not the
case for the behemoth. he had paid only casual notice to this
incredible fact, while riviting the whole of his attention upon
the jewel protruding from the idol's sole socket; its masterfully
cut faucets emitting blinding rays of hypnotising beauty. After
all, a man cannot slink from a heavily guarded palace while
burdened down by the intense bulk of a squatting statue,
providing of course that the idol can even be hefted, which in
fact was beyond the reaches of Grignr's coarsing stamina. On the
other hand, the jewel, gigantic as it was, would not present a
hinderence of any mean concern.
"Help me ... please ... I can make it well worth your
while," pleaded a soft, anguish strewn voice wafting over
Grignr's shoulders as he plucked the dull red emerald from its
roots. Turning, Grignr faced the female that had lured him into
this blood bath, but whom had become all but forgotten in the
heat of the battle.
"You"; ejaculated the Ecordian in a pleased tone. "I though
that I had seen the last of you at the tavern, but verilly I was
mistaken." Grignr advanced into the grips of the female's
entrancing stare, severing the golden chains that held her
captive upon the altars highly polished face of ornamental
limestone.
As Grignr lifted the girl from the altar, her arms wound
dexterously about his neck; soft and smooth against his harsh
exterior. "Art thou pleased that we have chanced to meet once
again?" Grignr merely voiced an sighed grunt, returning the
damsels embrace while he smothered her trim, delicate lips
between the coarsing protrusions of his reeking maw.
"Let us take leave of this retched chamber." Stated Grignr
as he placed the female upon her feet. She swooned a moment,
causing Grignr to giver her support then regained her stance.
"Art thou able to find your way through the accursed passages of
this castle? Mrifk! Every one of the corridors of this damned
place are identical."
"Aye; I was at one time a slave of prince Agaphim. His
clammy touch sent a sour swill through my belly, but my efforts
reaped a harvest. I gained the pig's liking whereby he allowed
me the freedom of the palace. It was through this means that I
eventually managed escape at the western gate. His trust found
him with a dagger thrust his ribs," the wench stated
whimsicoracally.
"What were you doing at the tavern whence I discovered you?"
asked Grignr as he lifted the female through the opening into the
mausoleum.
"I had sought to lay low from the palace's guards as they
conducted their search for me. The tavern was seldom frequented
by the palace guards and my identity was unknown to the common
soldiers. It was through the disturbance that you caused that
the palace guards were attracted to the tavern. I was dragged
away shortly after you were escorted to the palace."
"What are you called by female?"
"Carthena, daughter of Minkardos, Duke of Barwego, whose
lands border along the northwestern fringes of Gorzom. I was
paid as homage to Agaphim upon his thirty-eighth year," husked
the femme!
"And I am called a barbarian!" Grunted Grignr in a disgusted
tone!
"Aye! The ways of our civilization are in many ways warped
and distorted, but what is your calling," she queried, bustily?
"Grignr of Ecordia."
"Ah, I have heard vaguely of Ecordia. It is the hill
country to the far east of the Noregolean Empire. I have also
heard Agaphim curse your land more than once when his troops were
routed in the unaccustomed mountains and gorges." Sayeth she.
"Aye. My people are not tarnished by petty luxuries and
baubles. They remain fierce and unconquerable in their native
climes." After reaching the hidden panel at the head of the
stairway, Grignr was at a loss in regard to its operation. His
fiercest heaves were as pebbles against burnished armour!
Carthena depressed a small symbol included within the elaborate
design upon the panel whereopen it slowly slid into a cleft in
the wall. "How did you come to be the victim of those crazed
shamen?" Quested Grignr as he escorted Carthena through the piles
of rummage on the left side of the trap.
"By Agaphim's orders I was thrust into a secluded cell to
await his passing of sentence. By some means, the Priests of
Argon acquired a set of keys to the cell. They slew the guard
placed over me and abducted me to the chamber in which you
chanced to come upon the scozsctic sacrifice. Their hell-spawned
cult demands a sacrifice once every three moons upon its full
journey through the heavens. They were startled by your
unannounced appearance through the fear that you had been sent by
Agaphim. The prince would surely have submitted them to the most
ghastly of tortures if he had ever discovered their
unfaithfulness to Sargon, his bastard diety. Many of the
partakers of the ritual were high nobles and high trustees of the
inner palace; Agaphim's pittiless wrath would have been
unparalled."
"They have no more to fear of Agaphim now!" Bellowed Grignr
in a deep mirthful tome; a gleeful smirk upon his face. "I have
seen that they were delivered from his vengence."
Engrossed by Carthena's graceful stride and conversation
Grignr failed to take note of the footfalls rapidly approaching
behind him. As he swung aside the arched portal linking the
chamber with the corridors beyond, a maddened, blood lusting
screech reverberated from his ear drums. Seemingly utilizing the
speed of thought, Grignr swiveled to face his unknown foe. With
gaping eyes and widened jaws, Grignr raised his axe above his
surly mein; but he was too late.

-7-

With wobbling knees and swimming head, the priest that had
lapsed into an epileptic siezure rose unsteadily to his feet.
While enacting his choking fit in writhing agony, the shaman was
overlooked by Grignr. The barbarian had mistaken the siezure for
the death throes of the acolyte, allowing the priest to avoid his
stinging blade. The sight that met the priests inflamed eyes
nearly served to sprawl him upon the floor once more. The
sacrificial sat it grim, blood splattered silence all around him,
broken only by the occasional yelps and howles of his maimed and
butchered fellows. Above his head rose the hideous idol, its
empty socket holding the shaman's ifurbished infuriated gaze.
His eyes turned to a stoney glaze with the realization of the
pillage and blasphemy. Due to his high succeptibility following
the siezure, the priest was transformed into a raving maniac bent
soley upon reaking vengeance. With lips curled and quivering, a
crust of foam dripping from them, the acolyte drew a long, wicked
looking jewel hilted scimitar from his silver girdle and fled
through the aperature in the ceiling uttering a faintly
perceptible ceremonial jibberish.

-7 1/2-

A sweeping scimitar swung towards Grignr's head in a
shadowed blur of motion. With Axe raised over his head, Grignr
prepared to parry the blow, while gaping wideeyed in open mouthed
perplexity. Suddenly a sharp snap resounded behind the frothing
shaman. The scimitar, halfway through its fatal sweep, dropped
from a quivering nerveless hand, clattering harmlessly to the
stoneage. Cutting his screech short with a bubbling, red mouthed
gurgle, the lacerated acolyte staggered under the pressure of the
released spring-board. After a moment of hopeless struggling,
the shaman buckled, sprawling face down in a widening pool of
bllod and entrails, his regal purple robe blending enhancingly
with the swirling streams of crimson.
"Mrifk! I thought I had killed the last of those dogs;"
muttered Grignr in a half apathetic state.
"Nay Grignr. You doubtless grew careless while giving vent
to your lusts. But let us not tarry any long lest we over tax
the fates. The paths leading to freedom will soon be barred.
The wretch's crys must certainly have attracted unwanted
attention," the wench mused.
"By what direction shall we pursue our flight?"
"Up that stair and down the corridor a short distance is the
concealed enterance to a tunnel seldom used by others than the
prince, and known to few others save the palace's royalty. It is
used mainly by the prince when he wishes to take leave of the
palace in secret. It is not always in the Prince's best
interests to leave his chateau in public view. Even while under
heavy guard he is often assaulted by hurtling stones and rotting
fruits. The commoners have little love for him." lectured the
nerelady!
"It is amazing that they would ever have left a pig like him
become their ruler. I should imagine that his people would rise
up and crucify him like the dog he is."
"Alas, Grignr, it is not as simple as all that. His
soldiers are well paid by him. So long as he keeps their wages
up they will carry out his damned wished. The crude impliments
of the commonfolk would never stand up under an onslaught of
forged blades and protective armor; they would be going to their
own slaughter," stated Carthena to a confused, but angered Grignr
as they topped the stairway.
"Yet how can they bear to live under such oppression? I
would sooner die beneath the sword than live under such a dog's
command." added Grignr as the pair stalked down the hall in the
direction opposite that in which Grignr had come.
"But all men are not of the same mold that you are born of,
they choose to live as they are so as to save their filthy necks
from the chopping block." Returned Carthena in a disgusted tone
as she cast an appiesed glance towards the stalwart figure at her
side whose left arm was wound dextrously about her slim waist;
his slowly waning torch casting their images in intermingling
wisps as it dangled from his left hand.
Presently Carthena came upon the panel, concealed amonst the
other granite slabs and discernable only by the burned out
cresset above it. "As I push the cresset aside push the panel
inwards." Catrhena motioned to the panel she was refering to and
twisted the cresset in a counterclockwise motion. Grignr braced
his right shoulder against the walling, concentrating the force
of his bulk against it. The slab gradually swung inward with a
slight grating sound. Carthena stooped beneath Grignr's corded
arms and crawled upon all fours into the passage beyond. Grignr
followed after easing the slab back into place.
Winding before the pair was a dark musty tunnel, exhibiting
tangled spider webs from it ceiling to wall and an oozing, sickly
slime running lazily upon its floor. Hanging from the chipped
wall upon GrignR's right side was a half mouldered corpse, its
grey flacking arms held in place by rusted iron manacles.
Carthena flinched back into Grignr's arms at sight of the leering
set in an ugly distorted grimmace; staring horribly at her from
hollow gaping sockets.
"This alcove must also be used by Agaphim as a torture
chamber. I wonder how many of his enemies have disappeared into
these haunts never to be heard from again," pondered the hulking
brute.
"Let us flee before we are also caught within Agaphim's
ghastly clutches. The exit from this tunnel cannot be very far
from here!" Said Carthena with a slight sob to her voice, as she
sagged in Grignr's encompasing embrace.
"Aye; It will be best to be finished with this corridor as
soon as it is possible. But why do you flinch from the sight of
death so? Mrift! You have seen much death this day without
exhibiting such emotions." Exclaimed Grignr as he led her
trembling form along the dingy confines.
"---The man hanging from the wall was Doyanta. He had
committed the folly of showing affections for me in front of
Agaphim --- he never meant any harm by his actions!" At this
Carthena broke into a slow steady whimpering, chokking her voice
with gasping sobs. "There was never anything between us yet
Agaphim did this to him! The beast! May the demons of Hell's
deepest haunts claw away at his wretched flesh for this merciless
act!" she prayed.
"I detect that you felt more for this fellow than you wish
to let on ... but enough of this, We can talk of such matters
after we are once more free to do so." With this Grignr lifted
the grieved female to her feet and strode onward down the
corridor, supporting the bulk of her weight with his surging left
arm.
Presently a dim light was perceptibly filtering into the
tunnel, casting a dim reddish hue upon the moldy wall of the
passage's grim confines. Carthena had ceased her whimpering and
partially regained her composure. "The tunnel's end must be
nearing. Rays of sunlight are beginning to seep into ..."
Grignr clameed his right hand over Carthena's mouth and with
a slight struggle pulled her over to the shadows at the right
hand wall of the path, while at the same time thrusting this
torch beneath an overhanging stone to smother its flickering
rays. "Be silent; I can hear footfalls approaching through the
tunnel;" growled Grignr in a hushed tone.
"All that you hear are the horses corraled at the far end of
the tunnel. That is a further sign that we are nearing our
goal." She stated!
"All that you hear is less than I hear! I heard footsteps
coming towards us. Silence yourself that we may find out whom we
are being brought into contact with. I doubt that any would have
thought as yet of searching this passage for us. The advantage
of surprize will be upon our side." Grignr warned.
Carthena cast her eyes downward and ceased any further
pursuit towards conversation, an irritating habit in which she
had gained an amazing proficiency. Two figures came into the
pairs view, from around a turn in the tunnel. They were clothed
in rich luxuriant silks and rambling o on in conversation while
ignorant of their crouching foes waiting in an ambush ahead.
"...That barbarian dog is cringing beneath the weight of the
lash at this moment sire. He shall cause no more disturbance."
"Aye, and so it is with any who dare to cross the path of
Sargon's chosen one." said the 2nd man.
"But the peasants are showing signs of growing unrest. They
complain that they cannot feet their families while burdened with
your taxes."
"I shall teach those sluts the meaning of humility! Order
an immediate increase upon their taxes. They dare to question my
sovereign authority, Ha-a, they shall soon learn what true
oppression can be. I will ... "
A shodowed bulk leapt from behind a jutting promontory as it
brought down a double edged axe with the spped of a striking
thought. One of the nobles sagged lifeless to the ground, skull
split to the teeth.
Grignr gasped as he observed the bisected face set in its
leering death agonies. It was Agafnd! The dead mans comrade
having recovered from his shock drew a jewel encrusted dagger
from beneath the folds of his robe and lunged toward the
barbarians back. Grignr spun at the sound from behind and
smashed down his crimsoned axe once more. His antagonist lunged
howling to a stream of stagnent green water, grasping a spouting
stump that had once been a wrist. Grignr raised his axe over his
head and prepaired to finish the incomplete job, but was detered
half way through his lunge by a frenzied screech from behind.
Carthena leapt to the head of the writhing figure, plunging
a smoldering torch into the agonized face. The howls increased
in their horrid intensity, stifled by the sizzling of roasting
flesh, then died down until the man was reduced to a blubbering
mass of squirming, insensate flesh.
Grignr advance to Carthena's side wincing slightly from the
putrid aroma of charred flesh that rose in a puff of thick white
smog throughout the chamber. Carthena reeled slightly, staring
dasedly downward at her gruesome handywork. "I had to do it ...
it was Agaphim ... I had to, " she exclaimed!
"Sargon should be more carful of his right hand men." Added
Grignr, a smug grin upon his lips. "But to hell with Sargon for
now, the stench is becoming bothersome to me." With that Grignr
grasped Carthena around the waist leading her around the bend in
the cave and into the open.
A ball of feral red was rising through the mists of the
eastern horizon, disipating the slinking shadows of the night. A
coral stood before the pair, enclosing two grazing mares. Grignr
reached into a weighted down leather pouch dangling at his side
and drew forth the scintillant red emerald he had obtained from
the bloated idol. Raising it toward the sun he said, "We shall
do well with bauble, eh!"
Carthena gaped at the gem gasping in a terrified manner "The
eye of Argon, Oh! Kalla!" At this the gem gave off a blinding
glow, then dribbled through Grignr's fingers in a slimy red ooze.
Grignr stepped back, pushing Carthena behind him. The droplets
of slime slowly converged into a pulsating jelly-like mass. A
single opening transfixed the blob, forminf into a leechlike maw.
Then the hideous transgressor of nature flowed towards
Grignr, a trail of greenish slime lingering behind it. The
single gap puckered repeatedly emitting a ghastly sucking sound.
Grignr spread his legs into a battle stance, steeling his
quivering thews for a battle royal with a thing he knew not how
to fight. Carthena wound her arms about her protectors neck,
mumbling, "Kill it! Kill!" While her entire body trembled.
The thing was almost upon Grignr when he buried his axe into
the gristly maw. It passed through the blob and clanged upon the
ground. Grignr drew his axe back with a film of yellow-green
slime clinging to the blade. The thing was seemingly unaffected.
Then it started to slooze up his leg. The hairs upon his nape
stoode on end from the slimey feel of the things buly, bulk. The
Nautous sucking sound became louder, and Grignr felt the blood
being drawn from his body. With each hiss of hideous pucker the
thing increased in size.
Grignr shook his foot about madly in an attempt to dislodge
the blob, but it clung like a leech, still feeding upon his
rapidly draining life fluid. He grasped with his hands trying to
rip it off, but only found his hands entangled in a sickly glue-
like substance. The slimey thing continued its puckering ; now
having grown the size of Grignr's leg from its vampiric feast.
Grignr began to reel and stagger under the blob, his chalk
white face and faltering muscles attesting to the gigantic loss
of blood. Carthena slipped from Grignr in a death-like faint, a
morrow chilling scream upon her red rubish lips. In final
desperation Grignr grasped the smoldering torch upon the ground
and plunged it into the reeking maw of the travestry. A shudder
passed through the thing. Grignr felt the blackness closing upon
his eyes, but held on with the last ebb of his rapidly waning
vitality. He could feel its grip lessoning as a hideous gurgling
sound erupted from the writhing maw. The jelly like mass began
to bubble like a vat of boiling tar as quavers passed up and down
its entire form.

-END OF AVAILABLE COPY-

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Constitution declared Unconstitutional

In this space, in recent days, I have been arguing that the states are sovereign. The two most recent Supreme Court decisions have held, in effect, that they are not, and that our government is an unlimited autocracy, with no real check on its power.

From Chief Justice Roberts’ majority opinion, http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/11pdf/11-393c3a2.pdf

“Our precedent demonstrates that Congress had the power to impose the [individual mandate] exaction in Section 5000A under the taxing power, and that Section 5000A need not be read to do more than impose a tax. This is sufficient to sustain it.”

This means, in effect, that under the taxing power, the Congress may pass any law it sees fit for any purpose it sees fit, or for no purpose at all, touching any area of the law.

Even given the wide deference the High Court rightly gives to Congress, this decision is an abomination. It would live in history alongside the Dred Scott decision as the exemplar of a gross miscarriage of justice, if future histories would be allowed by the State to be written. As it is, I assume the First Amendment shall be repealed under the taxing power for the rest of you as it already has been, in effect, for the Catholics.

If you wonder how we came to the point where the fecklessness of one unelected official decided that Constitutional government was done for, and that man decided what you yourself shall buy and how much you yourself shall pay, all I can say is that it is a side effect of awarding Congress and the administration greater and ever more intrusive powers.

So you are no longer citizens, you are subjects. Put away your arms, and kiss your children farewell. Their future, and in effect their lives and fortunes and sacred honor, belongs to Caesar. Submit to the authorities placed over you, as they know better than you how you should run your life.

ADDENDUM:

As an final irony, even while it dismantles the core concept of federalism, the High Court affirms the principle, which I have wasted precious time in recent days attempting to explain. They say it better than could I:

The Federal Government has expanded dramatically overthe past two centuries, but it still must show that a constitutional grant of power authorizes each of its actions. See, e.g., United States v. Comstock, 560 U. S. ___ (2010).

The same does not apply to the States, because the Constitution is not the source of their power. The Constitution may restrict state governments—as it does, for example, by forbidding them to deny any person the equal protection of the laws. But where such prohibitions do not apply, state governments do not need constitutional authorization to act. The States thus can and do performmany of the vital functions of modern government—punishing street crime, running public schools, and zoning property for development, to name but a few—even though the Constitution’s text does not authorize any government to do so. Our cases refer to this general power of governing, possessed by the States but not by the Federal Government, as the “police power.” See, e.g., United States v. Morrison, 529 U. S. 598, 618–619 (2000).

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

Con Law 101

In which the basic American theory of law is explained painstakingly to our foreign friends, who say that the states are not sovereign:

The general police power is a legal concept relating to the core definition of sovereignty going back to the Civic Law (that is, Roman law). The general police power is a property of the crown of England was not inherited after the American Revolution not by the federal government, but by the individual states in their sovereign capacity.

Police Power is the plenary authority of government to regulate health, safety, welfare, and morals. In U.S. constitutional law, the federal government does not have this plenary power and the state governments do. This is not a topic where there is any debate, and not a single law case can be quoted to support the opposite opinion.

Adam Smith lectured that police comprehended attention to roads, security, and “cheapness or plenty.”  William Blackstone defined public police and economy as “due regulation and domestic order of the kingdom,” enforcing “the rules of propriety, good neighbourhood, and good manners.”

Police power does not specifically refer to the right to create police forces, although the police power does include that right. Police power includes zoning, land use, fire and Building Codes, gambling, discrimination, parking, crime, licensing of professionals, licensing of liquor, licensing of motor vehicles, licensing of bicycles, the abatement of nuisances, the provision and regulation of schooling, and public sanitation.

Here are the landmark US Supreme Court cases that refer to the state police power:

Muller v. Oregon 208 u.s. 412 (1908)

Gitlow v. People 268 u.s. 652 (1925)

Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co. 272 u.s. 365 (1926)

Erznoznik v. City of Jacksonville 422 u.s. 205 (1975)

Whalen v. Roe 429 u.s. 589 (1977)

Loretto v. Teleprompter Manhattan CATV Corp. 458 u.s. 419 (1982)

Nollan v. California Coastal Commission 483 u.s. 825 (1987)

Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council 505 u.s. 1003 (1992)

Maryland v. Wilson 519 u.s. 408 (1997)

United States v. Morrison 529 u.s. 598 (2000)

In all these cases the legal theory is assumed that the States hold the police power and the public trust: Muller concerns contracts, Ernozik concerns zoning, Gitlow public speech, and so on. The Federal government does not have and has never had the power to regulate these things — there is no national planning and zoning board, for example.

So I have listed several Supreme Court cases debating and defining the limits of state police power. Can a single case be quoted by anyone supporting the position that a general or plenary police power is held by the federal government and not by the states?  Can any quote from Blackstone or any other respected jurist or justice to support the proposition that sovereignty does not consist of the police power as its core attribute?

The feudal legal theory is that sovereign power vests in the king and is lent to vassals. The US Constitutional theory is that the sovereign power vests in the states and is lent to the federation by the explicit written agreement of the states: look at the signatures at the bottom of the document.

You may, if you wish, use the word “sovereign” to mean something other than the legal and commonplace meaning, and make the argument that any sovereign who pledges one aspect of his sovereign power (the enumerated powers where the federal government preempts the law) to a federation has abdicated the power and become a vassal.

The argument has the advantage of being novel, similar to morphic field theory or orgone theory in the physical sciences. The argument is to jurists what orgone theory is to physicists: call it fringe jurism.

If you wish to argue that the federal government has oversteps its bounds in many places and imposes unduly on the sovereignty of the states, you will get no argument from me. But if you say that a state is not sovereign because they ceded the power to make treaties with foreign powers to the general government, the argument dismisses the one single fundamental legal theory of the nation, which is federal and constitutional government.

You are simply misstating the law, as much as if you said theft was legal, or said contract law does not require consent of the parties and an exchange of consideration.

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

True Manliness

I would like to think my advocacy of the ancient and manly arts of chivalry, courtesy, and behavior becoming to a gentleman are having an effect on the younger generation.

Okay, just kidding. I thought you might need your daily dose of cuteness.

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

Good Entertainment and Great Art

Part of an ongoing conversation:

I am shocked that I find myself in the position of having to defend the proposition that Mozart is fine art, and that fine art is nobler and deeper than popular entertainment, dance tunes, jingles, yodeling, and such. Since my tastes are notoriously philistine, the irony of this should be lost on no one.

No one is disagreeing with the idea that fine art and good entertainment needs must be judged by different standards. The thing that makes fine art fine is that it is judge by fine standards. What makes popular entertainment popular is that it is judged by its entertainment value alone, and judged by nothing deeper. But I direct your attention to what that implies:

The thing that makes great art great is that it contains all that makes good entertainment good, except more of it.

I can recall periods in my life when my musical taste improved rather than changed, grew to encompass more rather than merely shifting loyalty from one thing to the next.

Profound is not the same as shallow, even if you are in the mood for shallow, because the profound also has a surface as shallow as anything with a surface. The difference is that the shallow has no depth. A Shakespeare sonnet about love is about the same emotion as a Beetles tune that says “I wanna hold your hand yeah, yeah, yeah” but there is also more to it.

There are some books simply not worth reading twice. They are not really about anything, and invoke nothing aside from a pleasing way to pass the time. There are popcorn movies not worth seeing again or thinking about, because there is nothing to think about. The movie craftsman did not put anything to think about in the movie. But it is OBVIOUS that not all books and not all movies and not all symphonies and operas are like this.

Now, if there is no objective standard of beauty, then there is no such thing as art we should, a civilized men, learn to appreciate even if we did not appreciate such in youth. There is no study of art. There is no thought to it. As an artist, I can tell you that this is merely not true.

I, for example, can write a creditable fight scene with all the blood and thunder of a true pulp tradition, mere action with nothing more. There is a craft to it, which is not to be despised.

But a true poet like Homer can also write a commentary about the deep issues of the day and the deep issues of eternity, then he has done something more than just write a fight scene — even though his fight scenes are, well, Homeric. To an unlettered man, A Homeric fight scene might seem stiff and unnatural, and the Homeric metaphors unwieldy.

That unlettered man is not representing an opinion worthy of respect: his taste is untrained. It is not a matter of opinion, he is merely wrong, or, rather, he is unable to appreciate great art or to support his opinion with rational argument or reference to what makes it good. Again I insist there is no dishonor to this: there are popcorn movies I like and crappy pulp novels and comic books and dance tunes. I myself am often in the mood for a hot dog rather than a gourmet feast. There are good hot dogs and bad ones. There are also bad gourmet feasts. But to call a hot dog a gourmet feast is egalitarianism gone mad.

As with writing, so with music, and all other fine arts.

I insist it is not merely a matter of better and worse. I have seen bad fine art, and, in the modern day, things called art which are Lovecraftian abominations and frauds. I insist that a great novel or a great symphony is trying to touch eternity, even if it fails miserably, and light entertainment or jingle tunes are not even trying. They are meant to be enjoyed once and thrown away. The final cause is different.

I do not know what other word to use than “obvious” to describe the difference between beauty and pleasure, art and decoration, deep and shallow, thoughtful and thoughtless.

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

Parable of the Traffic Light

Part of an ongoing discussion:

Any man who stops at a red light at midnight, and, even though no traffic is near and no cops are around, thinks it better to wait for the light to change acknowledges that some laws are prudent and just. A law that is prudent and just deserves our obedience even when it cannot compel that obedience.

We can start to construct what makes legitimate authority different from illegitimate. One of the factors is justice of the law. I suggest another is fairplay in execution. I regard it as legitimate to strike down a good law if the enforcement of that law is unfair: to this day we call a law “Draconian” if there no proportion between the severity of the breach and the severity of the punishment.

The case of the redlight is one where you are even will to obey a law because it is in general just, and you, and I assume all honest men, are unwilling to make an exception merely because no one is looking and no one is likely to be harmed. The case here is one where we have attempted to develop in ourselves a habit of obedience.

Again, I know of no man who would not run a red light if some valid emergency pressed him (rushing his wife to the maternity ward, for example) and the danger to others were small. The Draconian enforcement of the traffic laws in such cases would undermine the authority of the traffic laws.

Again, in real life, I was the only man I knew who always drove the speed limit. When I moved to DC, I realized that such obedience put my family in danger, because the people around me were routinely driving 40 miles over the speed limit. You see, the town decided to lower the speed limit not to serve a legitimate aim of traffic safety, but as a money making scheme. As is natural, the people lost respect for a law made for reasons that were not legitimate: and it was quite painful for me to break faith with the law, and I resent being put into the position where I am required to make a choice between family safety and legality. Were I ever to earn a speeding ticket, however, I would not flourish my Gadsden flag and exchange gunfire with the traffic cop: for HE is still legitimate in my eyes, even if the law he enforces is less than legitimate. But it is a bad law, because it encourages disrespect for law, and decreases rather than increases traffic safety (because cars going 70 have no real reason not to go 80).

So another factor in our contemplation of what makes for legitimate authority is whether or not that authority habituates us to virtue. An authority who, either because of bad laws or bad enforcement, encourages and urges and rewards me to develop bad habits, or makes me craven, selfish, vicious or treacherous in order to prosper, can be dismissed as an illegitimate authority.

Allow me to suggest a radical thought: we obey the authorities set over us for several reasons. First, because we love the authorities and we trust that our good is their aim. This certainly describes my relationship with my own father. I can of more than one teacher or professor whom I still love decades later.

Second, there are causes we love, and even if we mistrust the authorities, we love the cause the exercise of authority is a prudent necessity to serve. For example, no recruit loves his drill sergeant, and military discipline does not aim at the good of the serviceman, but of the kingdom of whom he is a subject or republic of which he is a citizen. He obeys at least on the whole because he loves his king or kingdom, or loves his republic and home.

Third, there are authorities that we trust, even if we do not love them, and we see obedience as prudent. If I am staying in a hotel, and there are rules about making noises or walking on the grass or which hour to check out, I obey these rules in part because I consent to the terms of the rental of the room, but also in part because I trust that the hotel maitre d’ and manager knows more about how to run a hotel than I do, and that some of these rules benefit me.

Fourth, some obedience seems provisionally prudent, that is, we obey traffic laws (or even rules of grammar) in part because everyone else is obeying them, and the unity of obedience is efficient, and the efficiency helps the common good.

Fifth, there are commands issued by enemies because and only because we fear them, as when a highwayman flourishes a pistol and demands our money, or a conqueror demand we worship him as a god, and we call the folk destroyed for their disobedience heroes and martyrs even if we call them fools. In this case, the obedience is only a matter of prudence for the sake of self preservation, and not for the sake of whatever cause or motive the enemy serves.

Any given circumstances can be found where one or more of these motives is in play, and even reasonable men do not know where prudence and loyalty rests. Even a criminal surrendering to a policeman, or a tax evader hauled before the IRS acknowledges some legitimacy to the authority punishing him, and even a rebel admits that the tyrant against whom he mutinies serves some legitimate good, even if the evil outweighs the good.

Sixth, and not to be overlooked, sometimes we obey the law because it is beautiful. As a lawyer who has deeply studied in common law, I am constantly amazed as how beautiful they are, and by this I mean the aesthetic appeal of their symmetry and fitness for their use; and consequently I am disgusted, like a nature lover disgusted with a factory, at the clumsiness of administrative regulation, which has none of the elegance and beauty of well made law.

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

Now Begins the Long Haul

Mark Shea on the dangers of enthusiasm

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/markshea/2012/06/my-friend-dave-deavel.html

Let me quote the best part:

I’ve always agreed with Belloc when he said the Church was “An institute run with such knavish imbecility that if it were not the work of God it would not last a fortnight.” I have a high view of the Holy Spirit, not of the hierarchy, not of the members of the Church and emphatically not of that member who greets me in the mirror each morning.

People assume that since I write about the Catholic faith and say, with conviction, that I believe all that the Church believes, teaches and proclaims is revealed by God, I must therefore do fist pumps and whoop with glee everytime a Leah Libresco comes along and announces they have come to faith. I am, of course, delighted at their faith in the Blessed Trinity and their union with the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church. But I am *highly* reluctant and resistant to treating converts as notches in the Church’s belt or as scalps collected. I’ve seen too many converts bail on the Church in anger and disappointment like the seed that falls on the path, or in the thorns, or into the bird’s mouth.

This boastful approach to converts is, I think, sinful, vulgar, and dangerous and Dave Deavel gets at some of why that is. Conversion is a trial, both because fellow Catholics can wound the convert deeply and because the convert suffers from the same thing George McClellan did at Antietam: though he brings overwhelmingly superior forces in the form of the Church’s tradition, philosophy, history and sacraments, he also brings himself. And speaking as one who is quite a jerk, I can tell you “Jerk” outweighs “Better Arguments and Sacraments” for most normal people.

Consequently, when people like Leah come along and are naturally full of the first flush of enthusiasm for the faith, I rejoice, but I also issue a note of caution: you have *not* found the Perfect Church and you have not now “arrived” at the platform where you can look down on your past. You have merely found Christ’s Church: a hospital for sinners and an asylum for lunatics before it is a shining paradise of saints in glory.

I won’t steal more of Mr Shea’s thunder by printing the beautiful words that end his piece, but I do urge you to go read them.

My comment: During the ecstatic throes of my own conversion, I was well warned by, of all people, Uncle Screwtape, who told Nephew Wormwood that all new converts forget that the honeymoon of emotion does not last. Either the dull march of reason will carry you through the dry gulches and arid heights of the post-enthusiasm period, and your infatuation will turn to love, or the march will fail, and your infatuation evaporate. Since I knew dry days were a-coming, I did not wince nor complain when they came, nor did I mistake enthusiasm for faith.

Enthusiasm, like infatuation, is a gush of emotion, a gift of happiness from on high. Love, like faith, is an orientation of the soul toward reason, the consent of the will toward its proper and due object.

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

Anarchy and Tyranny

Stephen J comments:

… I don’t disagree with the primary point of the original post.

You may be correct in claiming that my warning is redundant, but it is my experience that it is precisely when we dismiss warnings as redundant that they have the greatest tendency to be most urgently apt. I’ve talked before about reimagining “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” as a tragedy about an honest but paranoiacally overreactive shepherd, rather than a cautionary tale about a dishonest, foolishly mischievous one; or, for a more Classical example, consider Cassandra. And if the modern age is far more reflexively inclined to consider rebellion against authority more virtuous than submission to it, can we really say the history of the 20th century has not provided copious good reason for such a perspective?

That said, the tradition of modern thought varyingly called here Antifatherism, Antinomianism, Radical Progressivism, Leftism, Libertinism etc. is not in practice against all power or authority — only certain very specific forms of it (mostly Judeo-Christian religious, cultural or familial traditions), and only in certain very specific areas (mostly sex-related). So you are undoubtedly correct in noting that if my cautions are legitimate, they should nonetheless be much more productively directed elsewhere.

My comment:

Let us contemplate an observation from C.S. Lewis’ Uncle Screwtape:

“The use of Fashions in thought is to distract the attention of men from their real dangers. We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is least in danger and fix its approval on the virtue nearest to that vice which we are trying to make endemic. The game is to have them all running about with fire extinguishers whenever there is a flood, and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gunwale under. Thus we make it fashionable to expose the dangers of enthusiasm at the very moment when they are all really becoming worldly and lukewarm; a century later, when we are really making them all Byronic and drunk with emotion, the fashionable outcry is directed against the dangers of the mere “understanding.” Cruel ages are put on their guard against Sentimentality, feckless and idle ones against Respectability, lecherous ones against Puritanism; and whenever all men are really hastening to be slaves or tyrants we make Liberalism the prime bogey.”

In this case, what is it that Uncle Screwtape wants the modern age to be hysterical about avoiding?

Obviously I will not disagree with any man who calls for a balanced judgment and coolheaded consideration of the dangers of leaving the happy medium which (or so Aristotle assures us) is the source of a contented and virtuous life. The twin dangers of anarchy and totalitarianism confront the Twentieth Century with an impending immediacy not seen since the turmoil leading to the downfall of the Republic and the rise of the Imperium in Rome.

I urge you to notice what both anarchy and totalitarianism have in common: neither one accepts the notion that authority is not power.

Anarchy holds that all authority is illegitimate exercise of raw power, or, in other words, that authority as such does not exist; and totalitarianism holds that raw power is the only reality, and that all acts whatsoever are authorized for the good of the state, or the people, or the glorious revolution, or whatever this season’s excuse is, or, in other words, that authority as such does not exist. Both are attempting to dismiss the notion that authority has limits beyond which it is illegitimate, and within which it is legitimate.

All modern philosophy, and I do mean all, renounces the concept that there are legitimate versus illegitimate uses of the will, either on the grounds that the free will does not exist, or on the grounds that limits to the will do not exist. It is, in other words, anarchy and totalitarianism again, this time in the sphere of the volition. Only in Catholicism is there a foundational belief in the authority of God and the authority of the human will. God Himself is not authorized to over-ride or over-rule our free will, not even to save us from the fires of hell. Even He cannot compel you involuntarily to enter into paradise, the realm where all obedience is voluntary because loving.

What makes the topic confusing to Americans, is that we are rebels and the sons of rebels, and we tend to forget that our mutiny against the British Crown was based on the idea that the Crown had legal and natural limitations on His Majesty’s Authority, limitations imposed by the God who granted men innate and inalienable rights, and His Majesty’s abuse of authority permitted, nay, required rebellion in the name of obedience to God. The French and Russian revolutions did not have this religious character, did not have the correct view of authority, and the result was the Terror and the Gulag and the mass-murder of the Kulaks. The Italian and German reaction kept the appearance of law at first, raising fascist and national-socialist dictators to positions of totalitarian power, but totalitarianism is innately lawless, since it governs by the power of the man who claims to represent the people, or history, or destiny. Totalitarianism is theocracy without God: the enthusiasm of religion, but faithless, idolizing the state or the Fuhrer. That was the mere opposite of the career of George Washington, who is the Cincinnatus of the New World.

Thus Americans, who tend toward the anarchic, have a wise fondness for rebellions like their own, legitimate rebellions against overreaching authority, but also a foolish fondness for rebellion antithetical to their own, French and Russian rebellions against the entire concept of private property or established churches, and Utopian blithering which rebels against the very concept of public peace and public order.

Any age which does not understand the concept of Authority cannot understand the difference between anarchy and liberty, cannot tell the difference between a democratic yet limited government and mere ruthless empire.

My suggestion is that in an era which enjoys a greater contempt for authority than any of which history speaks, particularly masculine authority, especially clerical authority, and most especially the clerical authority of the Roman Catholic Church on whom all Western civilization, like it or not, is based.

Authority by its very word refers to that which an author authorizes, which means, a definition or delimitation.

My assertion is that modern outbreaks of totalitarianism are not symptoms of love of authority but of hatred of authority and its constitutional limits due to love of unbridled power.

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, and Americans, more than any people in history, should be quick to see and decry abuses of power or encroachments of the state beyond the strict limits of the Constitution, and should be quick, even reckless, to resort to mutiny and bloodshed against our public servants lest they forget who is master here.

It were better to fight a useless war in the name of liberty than to slumber like Gulliver and awake to find ourselves tied down by the countless threads of the patient Lilliputians, unable despite any strength to stir. Those who say we must avoid such war at all cost, even at the cost of our liberty, in effect say it is better to live as a slave than die as a free man.

Liberty is the bride of Authority, not his enemy and not his concubine. The eternal rebellion of Lucifer against all forms of authority is one and the same was the eternal tyranny of Lucifer, for Anarchy is the bride of Tyranny.

Let us return to my question. What is it that Uncle Screwtape wants the modern age to be hysterical about avoiding?

Uncle Screwtape is not trying to get the anarchists of the Left to rebel against the Totalitarians of the Right, in the name of social justice and sexual liberation and Occupy Wallstreet; nor is he trying to get the anarchists of the Right to rebel against the Left in the name of the First and Second Amendments and rule of law and the Tea Party; nor again is he trying to get the totalitarians of the Left to squash the Right in the name of Socialized Medicine; nor again is he trying to get the totalitarians of the both parties to use war hysteria to torture prisoners of war, spy on America citizens, and kill innocent civilians with drones; nor again is Uncle Screwtape favoring the top-hatted plutocrat over the wild-eyed bomb-throwing anarchist or the pot-smoking pinko university professor; nor again is he aiding the tinpot dictator with a chest of medals over the pompous Colonel Blimp or the lunatic Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper.

Uncle Screwtape is trying to get all of these things done because he wants none of them. It is not Right against Left or even Elitists against Popularists. That is not the real conflict.

(A digression: My friend Mark Shea says over and over again that the Right is no longer against the Left in this nation. The real struggle is the Rich and Powerful of both parties, against the Rest of Us, the dispossessed. Much as I admire him, I think his analysis is wrong. The Stupid Party and the Evil Party are indeed in cahoots in major ways, but they are at odds in just as many, and the Elite have more in common with their constituencies than they have with each other, even while the Elite of opposite factions make alliances against their constituencies to keep all the sheep in line. The example of the marriages of convenience in Europe during the Ancient Regime spring to mind, where all the royalty of the continent were cousins and second cousins, brothers and sons — and yet they all went frequently to war with each other to their mutual destruction, and also at times took up arms against their subjects and serfs.)

The darkness where no distinctions are made between right and wrong, power and authority, is in rebellion against the light in whose light all distinctions are clear. That is the real conflict.

The marriage of Anarchy and Tyranny is against the marriage of Liberty and Authority. That is the real conflict.

Uncle Screwtape wants divorce. He wants Tyranny to oppress Liberty in the name of Authority, and for Anarchy to rebel against Authority in the name of Liberty.Uncle Screwtape wants every man to be a morally retarded sophomore who cannot tell the difference between legitimate and illegitimate uses of force.

The Tyrant of Hell is in rebellion against the Father in Heaven. That is what is behind everything that is really going on here. That is what has always been behind the surface appearances of the world.

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.