A Rebuttal

     I exhort you to patience, Gentle Reader. This rant will be rantier than most.

     Francis Turner has a good piece up on the virtue-signaling “Sons of Mary” versus the get-it-done “Sons of Martha.” Rather than excerpt it, I’ll simply direct you to it, as it’s more than worth your time. (There’s a bit of Kipling in it, too.) It got me to thinking about the least discussed of all disjunctions among men: the impassable cleft between those who take responsibility and those who disdain to do so.

     “Responsibility for what?” you may well ask. And that is, indeed, the question. Allow me to provide a little more stimulus to thought. Regard this piece from Ammoland:

     Sadly, no Thomas Jefferson has appeared among us (yet) to articulate and encourage the Constitutional faithful and our message wide and far enough to shut these fools down.

     With subversive scum like George Soros, the morons in the entertainment industry and the willing idiots in the media pushing this insanity, our resistance to this plague of lies, distortion, and hostage-taking of ignorant youth has to be strengthened and elevated nation-wide....

     I want many more of you, whether having served, fought, or simply are a loyal American, to begin to stand up, be articulate, put forward logical and sensible arguments, and give these ignoramuses some lessons in truth and honesty.

     The author of the above seems to think that our right to keep and bear arms is endangered because we haven’t argued for it strenuously enough. I’d ask him what planet he’s from, but I probably wouldn’t like his answer.

     What’s the missing element here? The Constitution of the United States, specifically the Second, Ninth, and Tenth Amendments thereof, explicitly guarantee the right of the people to keep and bear arms against infringement. That’s inarguable, though the Left will continue to throw mud at it on various specious grounds. Still, the relevant text remains as it was from the ratification of the original Bill of Rights. So what’s missing? Anyone? Bueller?

     Compare the two pieces cited above. What would Francis Turner say to Timothy V. of Springfield, Oregon?

     Here’s another tidbit: Ever since Andrew Breitbart opined that “politics is downstream from culture,” conservative commentators have bemoaned the paucity of conservative cultural contributors. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to any of these wordsmiths that they could take a hand in the thing – that they could employ their oft-demonstrated eloquence in a fictional setting. Oh, there have been exceptions. William F. Buckley wrote a number of novels. Kurt Schlichter has written two books that have been fairly well received. And of course there’s this hack, though why anyone should pay attention to his crap, no one can say.

     The rest of them simply sit on their fat asses, collect fees for their columns and articles, and bitch.

     Finally, one from the domestic front: My wife Beth (a.k.a. “the C.S.O.”) complained for several months about a habit Zoe, one of our cats, had formed. Zoe likes to “bomb” Beth: i.e., she mounts the hutch above Beth’s desk and throws things down at Beth with a flick of her paw. Beth griped about that for quite some time without doing anything about it. I said nothing. I knew she’d bitch at me if I were to tell her what to do about it. As is the way of women, she wanted sympathy, not solutions.

     However, just two days ago, Zoe flung a small statuette that landed dead-center in Beth’s coffee. One of the consequences was a ruined keyboard. That finally moved Beth to implement the solution to her complaint: she cleared the top surface of her hutch of anything small enough for Zoe to use as ammunition. The bombardments have ceased, and only Zoe appears unhappy about it.

     “Sons of Mary,” indeed.

---

     There is exactly one person your decisions and actions can command. It wouldn’t matter if you were the Emperor of Earth; anyone could defy you if he were willing to pay the price. The implication “should” be “obvious:”

If you want it done that badly,
Get off your ass and do it yourself.

     Of course, if you’d rather whine about it, that’s your option. It’s our option to ignore you – or to mock you.

     It’s mind-boggling how little there is to know about ourselves that we don’t know already. I keep coming back to these hoary old maxims, these “sturdy wisdoms,” this folklore. It’s all there, Gentle Reader. If there’s anything new under the sun, it doesn’t include any brilliantly original ways to get other people to do what you want them to do so you won’t have to do it.

     What’s new – to Americans, at least – is the proliferation of bitchers and whiners. “We want this!” they scream, and expect that the rest of us will deliver it to them gift-wrapped. Maybe it’s tied up with the (relatively) new notion that you can make something into a “right” by demanding it loudly enough. Whatever the genesis, it’s made our relations – especially our relations with our progeny – near to unendurable.

     Allow me a citation from one of my novels. Christine D’Alessandro is preparing to go to war: a war her late mentor Louis Redmond could have made unnecessary, but didn’t:

     “How do you think he’d feel about this, Chris?”
     She sighted along the blade of the K-Bar, saw no burrs or chips, and sheathed it carefully in her boot.
     “I don’t know, Malcolm. Probably, he’d hate it. For all that he could whip a whole regiment with nothing but a handful of pine needles, he didn’t like himself better for it. He said he let Tiny live to send a message to the rest of them. I always figured it was just as much because he didn’t have the heart to kill him, once the bastard was down and helpless.”
     The old warrior nodded. “He was a good man.”
     “Oh, the best. There’ll never be a better one, take it from me. But he let Tiny live, and now I have to do this. I figured something out today, Malcolm. Want to hear it?”
     Loughlin’s head came up, and she looked him in the eyes.
     “Once you know a man deserves to die, you have to kill him. If you don’t, you’re committing a crime against everyone who doesn’t deserve to die. If you get him down but can’t bring yourself to do it, and he gets up off the mat and kills you instead, you’re only getting what you deserve yourself.”

     Tattoo this on your eyelids – on the inside of your eyelids:

If you know that it needs to be done,
Do it yourself.

     Tattoo it on the insides of your kids’ eyelids, as well.

Preparations

     A great deal of one’s ability to feel secure – i.e., prepared for likely developments rather than threatened by them – depends upon the stability of one’s surroundings, both physically and conceptually. You can be the biggest, toughest, meanest SOB in all of Creation, armed to the teeth, ready, willing and able to fight a grizzly barehanded and utterly confident that you’d prevail, and you’ll still value the sense that things around you won’t change too swiftly or too radically. This is especially the case with persons who have loved ones to support, nurture, and protect.

     Conservatism in politics arises from the sense that things must not be permitted to change rapidly. The political conservative holds, with the two great Thomases (Aquinas and Jefferson), that stability in the law is valuable in and of itself. Even if some change in the law appears necessary or highly desirable, he’s loath to introduce it in a fashion likely to destabilize the settled arrangements of millions. He recognizes both the tendency of men to adapt to their surroundings and the stress and fatigue that rapid adaptation engenders. He’s probably experienced some of it himself.

     The Constitutional design embeds respect for those wisdoms. The bicameral legislature and the requirement for presidential approval of a new law were put in place to slow the rate of change. Even the most dramatic alteration to the legal landscape must pass all three gates. That makes it possible to see a change coming and ready oneself for the eventuality...in theory, at least.

     Changes in the social order aren’t nearly as well buffered. In recent decades there have been a huge number of truly radical alterations in our social customs. This especially concerns the poorly defined thing called tolerance and the efforts of various persons, institutions, and agencies of government to compel it. A considerable amount of linguistic legerdemain is involved, most of it originating from the political Left. The phenomenon reeks of the delusion that alterations in language can effect alterations in reality itself.

     It would be bad enough were the demands for mandatory “tolerance” to pertain to things that are genuinely tolerable. In fact, we’re being required to tolerate increasing amounts and degrees of the intolerable. The most recent demands for “tolerance” include open invasion, outright madness, and undisguised, rampant violence. It’s supremely difficult to prepare for a world in which such things reign.

---

     Early in the 1980s, Herman Kahn, one of the preeminent geniuses of the Twentieth Century, conducted an offhand survey, of persons in decision-making roles in government and the military, about whether nuclear weapons would be used in the foreseeable future. There emerged a strong consensus that they would be. Kahn proposed that that consensus alone was a sufficient reason to study nuclear weapons: what they can do, how they might be used, whether particular situations could justify their use, and what the consequences of various uses would be. As reasonable as Kahn’s statement was, nevertheless it evoked a hurricane of denunciation, some of it from normally sensible persons.

     The typical human mind creates barriers within itself to the consideration of developments it regards as “unthinkable.” (As a riposte to persons who were desperate to define Kahn’s studies as “unthinkable,” he titled one of his most important books Thinking About The Unthinkable.) Yet “unthinkable” has no meaning. Indeed, it’s a one-word contradiction in terms. Its de facto meaning is “I don’t want to think about it.” That response, of course, has no bearing on whether the “unthinkable” will actually occur.

     I’m not about to open a discussion about the use of nuclear weapons, the relevance of international arms-control negotiations and treaties, the quests of gangster-states such as Iran and North Korea for nuclear weapons and delivery systems, and whatnot. I do take an interest in those things – I have for a very long time – but most people shy away from them as “unthinkable.” My conjecture is that the prospect of a war, or a terrorist strike, that employs nukes horrifies them too greatly to engage their reason. They’d rather believe that it can’t happen...and therefore that it won’t.

     Americans have had that very reaction to other developments that have already taken place:

• The nullification of the Constitutional order.
• The rise of totalitarian rule by unelected bureaucrats.
• The dismissal of the principles that once undergirded the law.
• The emergence of delusions that afflict millions, especially among the young.
• The invasion of the United States by persons openly hostile to its laws and norms.
• Demands for the acceptance of deviances that threaten the basis of American society.
• And of course, demands for legal privileges and “free stuff” by identity-politics groups.

     These things have already set the foundation of the nation quivering. Ordinary Americans, accustomed to the norms and arrangements of earlier times and desperate to believe that they’ll resume and continue, are being challenged to prepare for what might come next. So they narrow their focus; they concentrate grimly on only what’s immediately around them. It’s just one more way of saying that “it can’t happen here.”

     Persons in the preparationist community – “preppers,” for short – do as they do because they’re aware that “it can happen here” – that America is not divinely protected against disasters, especially disasters its people might bring upon themselves. The degree of dedication and the fraction of his resources any particular prepper puts to his preparations are determined principally by his estimate of the speed of transformation and the ugliness of what it portends. His physical arrangements might be impressive, but his mindset is the really important thing. He has taken responsibility for his own well-being and that of his loved ones. He may be wrong, but he’ll be prepared for his estimate of the (survivable) worst the future might bring.

---

"The world's in a bad way, my man,
And bound to be worse before it mends;
Better lie up in the mountain here
Four or five centuries,
While the stars go over the lonely ocean,"
The old father of wild pigs,
Plowing the fallow on Mal Paso Mountain.

[Robinson Jeffers]

     It’s impossible to be adequately prepared for everything. The only possible response to some developments is death. Yet the will to prepare, to brace for a foreseeable eventuality, is among the most valuable of human traits. It’s an essential component of the virtue of fortitude.

     My friend Remus has invested a large amount of his considerable intellect and energy in preparing, in a generalized fashion, for the terminus of our handbasket’s journey. He’s issued several maxims of great value to just about anyone. The one that comes to mind this fine July morning is quite brief:

Stay away from crowds.

     Another friend in Virginia, cognizant of the danger of crowds from his years in law enforcement, has built himself – quite literally; he built it himself — a mountain redoubt: a compound well stocked with all the necessities and defensible against anything short of a national army or an airborne assault. He and Remus might not have prepared for every possible eventuality, but they’ve surveyed the visible developments with open eyes, have assessed what they threaten as credible, and have braced themselves for what seems most likely to come. (Yes, they’re among the many who’ve exhorted me to move off Long Island.) They regard their preparations as the responsible things to do – the measures appropriate to the protection of whom and what they love.

     Disaster might not come. My friends’ preparations might prove unnecessary. (I certainly hope so.) Ultimately, that doesn’t matter. What’s most important is the demonstration of how responsible persons act when their worries begin to surge.

     Not enough Americans would consider them models.

---

     I don’t intend to beat this into the magma. What I want to emphasize is the great value of taking responsibility for your own well-being, and for the well-being of anyone who happens to be under your protection. That virtue has been badly weakened these last few decades. It’s been displaced by the belief that our Big Nanny in Washington, in concert with the lesser nannies in the state capitals, will make sure everything comes out all right.

     They won’t. More to the point, they can’t.
     What you foresee and fear is yours to deal with.
     Your neighbors might assist you; “your government” won’t.
     That’s the way things are, regardless of anyone’s contrary opinion.

     Plan accordingly. And do please stay away from crowds.

     UPDATE: To those who believe that “the police will keep order,” I offer this item of evidence to the contrary. Don’t imagine that the police in your district, if faced with the same sort of situation, would prove any more reliable.

Which Of Us Are “Secret Special Snowflakes?” A Sunday Rumination

     Apologies for the lack of an essay yesterday. I got caught up in a short story I conceived, early in the day, and I wanted to get it as close to completion as possible before my energies flagged. Anyway, here we are again.

     This emission on Gab got me thinking:

     Part of the problem with society today is that some women forget real men deserve to be spoiled too.
     Tell him he's handsome.
     Thank him for the things he does.
     Let him know he's appreciated.
     If he treats you like a queen, treat him like a king.

     Now, I have no problem with appreciating your spouse. (I certainly like it. Not that I get it from...oh, never mind.) But there’s more complexity to the malaise that men – especially married men – suffer than that.

     I replied to the above:

     I must quibble a little. Part of our current problem is that too many people (both sexes) feel "unappreciated" because no one is thanking them for doing what they're supposed to do: i.e., their duties and responsibilities. It's a big part of “special snowflake” syndrome.

     For saying that, a lot of people would flag me as “hard” or “harsh.” But seriously now: If you have a responsibility to discharge – one you freely accepted, perhaps by marrying in the first place – how can you deserve thanks for doing so?

     Give that a moment on your cranial carousel while I fetch more coffee.

---

     I want to think of myself as a good person. Don’t you? But we’re all fallible. We all fall short sometimes. Unless you’re the Blessed Virgin Mary, you have something – perhaps a lot of somethings – to regret.

     But what is a good person, anyway? One approach would be to say that he’s one who:

• Does everything he must or should;
• Does nothing he mustn’t or shouldn’t.

     Those are individualized lists. Most of us couldn’t compose perfectly exhaustive, perfectly accurate ones of either sort; life in contemporary society is too complex. An honest person would have to doubt the completeness and accuracy of his recollection of all the various times he’s faced a duty or a temptation and done exactly what he should, when he should. We’ve been told far too often, by far too many “self help” gurus, to think well of ourselves. We’re much too prone to do so in excess.

     Now, as with all things, there’s a limit proper to self-criticism. One must not go beyond the recognition of one’s objective defaults. Perhaps we should call that the limit of self-condemnation. G. K. Chesterton criticized it harshly in The Defendant:

     There runs a strange law through the length of human history — that men are continually tending to undervalue their environment, to undervalue their happiness, to undervalue themselves. The great sin of mankind, the sin typified by the fall of Adam, is the tendency, not towards pride, but towards this weird and horrible humility.

     Grotesquely undervaluing oneself, failing to see one’s life not merely as a gift from God to oneself but to others as well, is something to avoid. You were important enough that your mother spent nine uncomfortable months producing you and eighteen years cooking for you, cleaning up after you, and wiping your nose; therefore you must count for something, at least to her. However, our primary failing – to slough consideration of the times we have not done what we should and have done what we shouldn’t – remains important enough to deserve frequent attention.

---

     I can’t help but think of this subject through the lens of approved roles.

     (About 15% of the audience read the above and said to themselves “Oh boy, here he goes again.” Those persons should contemplate whether that might just be an indication that the subject makes them uncomfortable because it should. You know who you are.)

     Despite all the condemnations heaped upon the standard roles men and women have played in Western society – most commonly, husband, father, and provider; wife, mother, and homemaker – they remain important to many persons: persons who embrace them sincerely and strive to live them faithfully. Moreover, many of those who speak scornfully of those roles do so insincerely: i.e., because they secretly know that they lack the fiber required to fulfill the responsibilities attached to them.

     Specialty roles – e.g., priest or minister; employer; statesman – are more demanding. Most of us don’t have the fiber to fulfill their responsibilities. He who knows that about himself cannot accept such a role in full sincerity, though there will always be some who’ll do so anyway.

     (Are there “general” responsibilities that lie outside such roles? Yes, but they’re not imposed on each of us every day. We have a duty to be courteous in ordinary social and commercial intercourse; a duty to refrain from inflicting ourselves on others unwanted; a duty to contribute, albeit minimally, to the maintenance of public cleanliness and order. Occasions that invoke those duties are irregular, though when they arrive, they’re as imperative as the duties of one’s chosen role, if any.)

     In short, a role consciously embraced defines the responsibilities of him who accepts it, just as the script and stage directions define the responsibilities of an actor in a play. Here are your responsibilities, the role says: to do thus and thus, but to avoid doing thus and thus. They make plain the specific conditions under which one can consider oneself a good person.

     The reverse of the coin is just as important: he who sloughs his responsibilities is not a good person, for he has not kept his end of the bargain. He might not hear about it from those around him; these days it’s rather risky ever to criticize anyone for anything. But if he owns a conscience, he’ll hear it from a Critic Wo stands above all reprisals.

---

     Recent trends in the promotion and pursuit of that most horrible (“O horrible, O horrible, most horrible!” Hamlet, Act I, scene 5) of all social shibboleths, “self-esteem,” have completely confused many younger Americans. They seem to have been convinced that they deserve not merely to feel good about themselves just for being alive, but to deserve approbation and praise from others. But if that were so, what reason would they have to do anything, or to deny themselves any indulgence? Why not lounge about lifelong, leaving others to see to the grubby work of existence while slave girls ply fans and feed us peeled grapes? (Seedless grapes, of course.)

     Put that way, it should be plain:

Existing entitles you to nothing.
Everyone has a row to hoe.

     Neither is it obligatory for others to thank us for doing what we should, any more than they owe us their thanks for not doing what we shouldn’t. They need not offer it and we should not expect it. Whether we receive such appreciation and approbation or go completely unremarked, even scorned, makes no difference to the imperativeness of our personal dos and don’ts.

---

     Yes, there’s a religious aspect to this. I’ve just taken a while to come to it.

     “A man pays his bills, keeps himself clean, respects other people, and keeps his word. He gets no credit for this; he has to do this much just to stay even with himself.” – Robert A. Heinlein, Time For The Stars

     The Decalogue:

1. I am the Lord thy God; thou shalt have no other gods before me.
2. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.
3. Remember thou the Sabbath day and keep it holy.
4. Honor thy father and thy mother.
5. Thou shalt not murder.
6. Thou shalt not commit adultery.
7. Thou shalt not steal.
8. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.
9. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife.
10. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s goods.

     ...constitutes the set of “general responsibilities” to which we are all bound, regardless of anything else about us. The roles we choose for ourselves go atop those responsibilities. No one is exempt from them because of “other duties.”

     Why are there no escape hatches that would permit us to kill indiscriminately, or to cuckold one another, or pilfer from one another, or so on? Because the Decalogue is The Law of Stable Society. No society that flouts the Decalogue, in whole or in part, can flourish. Even chiseling along the edges – e.g., abandoning the support of our aged parents to the State rather than seeing to it ourselves – does great harm to the social order, as should be plain to anyone with eyes to see.

     God did not prescribe or proscribe for us on a whim. His laws are the laws of human nature, the rules for getting along and staying even with ourselves. Had He never delivered the Decalogue to Moses, those laws would be just as imperative as they were when Moses descended from Mount Sinai with the tablets.

     Good thing they’re simple and easy to remember, eh?

---

     I could go on, of course. I could tie the above to the terrible deterioration of both the masculine and feminine virtues. I could delineate how the enervation of the concept of responsibility has parted generation from generation and sibling from sibling. I could demonstrate how the notion that “I should be thanked for what I do” leads directly to the sort of spousal friction that’s rendered contemporary marriages as fragile as spun glass. But my Gentle Readers don’t come here to read drivel that obvious.

     Do what you should and must.
     Refrain from doing what you shouldn’t or mustn’t.
     Having discharged your responsibilities, expect nothing and say nothing.

     May God bless and keep you all.