Repent ye…

I am grieved, disgusted, and enraged by the murder of two—of two more—young Israelis, as I am by all the evils going unchecked in this day: the assailing of Israel and of the Jewish people not least, whom the Almighty shall doubtless vindicate and avenge in accordance with His ancient promises and which wickedness we are all of us called to combat.

More broadly, the illiberal Left and the un-American Right must accept responsibility for creating the current crisis, the celebration of violence and murder, the disdain for the Courts and the rule of law. THIS. MUST. CEASE. Now: at once.

Bluntly and (intentionally) crudely put, the Left must abandon its longstanding—or kneeling—eagerness to fellate assassins whom it approves, from Sacco and Vanzetti to Mangione and Rodriguez, and must cease and renounce its devoted praise (it’s not merely excusing and palliating this: it is positive celebration) of political violence; and the alleged, Euro-style, ‘blood-and-soil’ so-called ‘Right’ absolutely must stop spreading its legs for any and every authoritarian and brittle ‘strong man’ it sees, from the Kingfish of old to Trump, Putin, Orbán, Xi, and Erdoğan—and must, having turned from that sin, go forth and sin no more. Both, and all, and everyone, absolutely must renounce and repent of that ancient recurrent evil, Jew-hatred. The commandment and promise in Ps. cxxii, Laetatus sum, vv. 6-8, O pray for the peace of Jerusalem : they shall prosper that love thee. Peace be within thy walls : and plenteousness within thy palaces. For my brethren and companions’ sakes : I will wish thee prosperity, equally sets out by implication that those who set themselves against Jerusalem and its peace, and against the Jewish people, shall not prosper.

Someone is sure to whine, here, ‘You can’t kill an idea’… That may—may—be so. But we can and ought to ‘kill’, politically, socially, economically, so many of those holding it that the irreconcilable, scattered, handful remnant who cling to evil notions are frightened even to whisper their wicked beliefs, to gather to plot together in a phonebooth which should comfortably hold them, and to act upon their base desires. Read them out of both parties; let them say what they like to the very limits of free speech and then confront them and destroy their arguments, humiliating them utterly; cut out the illiberal Left from every major Left of Center party and the statist, kleptocratic ‘Right’ from every major Right of Center party; harry them, denounce them, and give them no houseroom; render them irrelevant; cull the herd. Abandon this ‘no enemies on the Left’ and ‘no enemies on the Right’ horseshit, then see how the little bastards fare. Defend those with whom you have no common view or interest or skin color or religion from those who will them harm. Stand for liberty as in the olden times, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.

It is generally conceded that the Blessèd Margaret of Grantham, the Rt Hon. Margaret, The Baroness Thatcher, of Kesteven in the County of Lincolnshire, LG, OM, DStJ, PC, FRS, HonFRSC, is my distant cousin in consequence of her mother’s having been the natural daughter of that predatory sod my twelfth cousin six times removed Harry Cust (who also fathered Diana, Viscountess Norwich, my eight cousin thrice removed, amongst others). Let me then advert you to Cousin Maggie’s words from 1991:

Americans and Europeans alike sometimes forget how unique is the United States of America. No other nation has been created so swiftly and successfully. No other nation has been built upon an idea—the idea of liberty. No other nation has so successfully combined people of different races and nations within a single culture. Both the founding fathers of the United States and successive waves of immigrants to your country were determined to create a new identity. Whether in flight from persecution or from poverty, the huddled masses have, with few exceptions, welcomed American values, the American way of life, and American opportunities. And America herself has bound them to her with powerful bonds of patriotism and pride. The European nations are not and can never be like this. They are the product of history and not of philosophy. You can construct a nation on an idea; but you cannot reconstruct a nation on the basis of one.

What Jewish Americans need to know, and what Gentile Americans need to demonstrate, is that even when we disagree on a position, they are not alone.

When my ninth cousin eight times removed George Washington wrote to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island:

All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.

It would be inconsistent with the frankness of my character not to avow that I am pleased with your favorable opinion of my Administration, and fervent wishes for my felicity. May the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid. May the father of all mercies scatter light and not darkness in our paths, and make us all in our several vocations useful here, and in his own due time and way everlastingly happy:

he meant it, and the United States pledged itself, its fidelity and its full faith and credit, to his words: and the keeping of that pledge is a national interest of the United States of America.

What Jewish Americans need to know, and what Gentile Americans must and have a duty to demonstrate, is that even when we disagree on a position, they are not alone.

It’s past time we stood beside them on the parapets, as family, and endured the sting of battle with them.

Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished…

—Isaiah xl. 2.

Now let’s get cracking and clean this place up.

Magnificat

Today being a red-letter feast day, that of the Annunciation, I pop by to check up on y’all before resuming my Lenten silence.

And, as I’m here, let me remind you that, although we are to pray daily for our various heads of government, that does not mean we pray that their policies, aims, ambitions, plans, platforms, personal profits, or parties succeed, but that they be granted ‘wisdom and strength to know and to do [God’s] will’ in place of the follies they are pursuing, and that they be ‘fill[ed] … with the love of truth and righteousness; and [made] ever mindful of their calling to serve this people in [God’s] fear’. As Jack Lewis said, when we ask that God do what is best for ourselves or for anyone else, that may in extremity mean even His calling us or them immediately, not by any human agency, to our or their judgement by the severe mercy of death; or mean our or their removal from the power to do damage and harm others; or mean our or their imprisonment in which to repent.

Malice, incompetence, and then lying about it, may be temporary personal successes for a politician false to his oath, but they are bad for what remains of a politician’s soul, and we not only not required to pray for their success in wrongdoing: we are called to pray for their correction, judgement, and removal in such cases. For the Collect, in asking that heads of government and those in authority be aided in knowing and doing right, predicates that intercession upon this petition: ‘we commend this nation to thy merciful care, that being guided by thy Providence, we may dwell secure in thy peace’.

An apt reminder on the Feast of the Annunciation, whereupon the Blessed Virgin accepted the Divine Will by saying, ‘Behold the handmaid of the LORD; be it unto me according to thy word’: that is, that things befall in accordance with God’s word, not the words of a party platform or a party leader.

Here endeth the Lesson.

Another day, another Ambush By Handel.

Quiet, ordinary Saturday, week of the Third Sunday after the Epiphany … and what are the Lessons appointed for Mattins on this unremarkable day of the Kalendar? Oh, only the following from Messiah HWV 56: I.5-6 (‘Thus saith the Lord’ with its ‘The Lord, whom you seek, shall suddenly come to his temple’, and then ‘But who may abide’—‘for He is like a refiner’s fire’) in the First Lesson and, in the Second, III.47-51: ‘Behold, I tell you a mystery’, ‘The trumpet shall sound’ (as Master Samwise might say, ‘Glory and trumpets!’), and ‘Then shall be brought to pass’ that ‘death is swallow’d up in victory’, upon which one exults, ‘O death, where is thy sting?’—wherefore ‘But thanks be to God’.

Just another weekday (merely another workaday Daily Office—‘Worthy is the Lamb that was slain, Amen’—), brought to you by GF Handel and the Book of Common Prayer and the Anglican Lectionary…

‘For all the saints, who from their labours rest’:

Every day has its saint—commonly a right smart of them: including this, the Second Sunday after the Epiphany. The Anglican Kalendar is more parsimonious than is the Roman, or the Orthodox, so far as red-letter observances go; but every day has its saint.

Between—for example—, and inclusive of, 15 to 23 January, there are amongst others SS Ceolwulf, Ilar, Llawddog, Sawyl, Blaithmaic, Fursey, Mildgith, Nennius, Wulfstan, Ulfrid, Agnes, and Elli: Roman, Sub-Roman, Welsh, Irish, Scots, and Anglo-Saxon saints who in this life might well have found their mortal and ephemeral nations at one another’s throats.

But this life is fleeting, and the Earthly City passeth away. Their true and final home was and is the Civitas Dei.

What, after all, is a saint? One of the faithful departed, removed from the Church Combatant to duty with the Church Triumphant. We have a general feast-day for All Saints—for All Hallows—: meaning, the blessèd company of all faithful people now with God; and, because He, and He only, uniquely, knows who is and who is not a saint unrecognized, the day after is the Feast of All Souls.

But what, after all, is a saint? A sinless and perfect person? Absolutely not. It is a fundamental principle of Christian orthodoxy that there has been only one sinless and perfect person in all human history: Christ, Our Lord, who was both fully man and fully God. Our elder brethren—we are adoptees only—of the Covenant, not seeing Jesus as the Messiah, necessarily deny that there has ever been any sinless and perfect person. Islam refers to Mohammed, sometimes, in translation, as ‘the perfect man’, but we are free to doubt that translation or its connotations, and it may be that it should better be translated as the man who was, they consider, perfected.

Every saint we know and commemorate, and all we do not know, was—in the time of this transitory life—imperfect: a sinner saved by grace, a brand snatched from the burning. None was faultless; none, sinless. In that fact indeed is a hope for us: for saints are examples to follow. If they overcame their failings and follies by grace, so may we.

This year as every year I think at this time of three men who deserve commemoration. All three in this life were American Southerners, sharing a culture more deeply than one might think, regardless of superficies and the accidental. Each was indeed a sinner saved by grace, a brand snatched from the burning. All sinned. as we all of us do sin; and each fell short, as do we. Yet they are to be remembered all the same.

Two were soldiers and educators. One was a minister and a voice for peace. Two lived in the Nineteenth Century, the third in the Twentieth. One, a dedicated Anglican vestryman, deprecated slavery, did all which the law allowed to disentangle himself and (still more) his wife’s family from dealings with it, rejoiced in its ending, insisted upon honorable warfare, worked for national reconciliation, and single-handedly by quiet example desegregated the altar rail at S Paul’s Richmond. The second, baptized an Anglican, became as an adult a Presbyterian deacon; he defied legal and social sanction to teach literacy to African-Americans in bondage and was the driving force behind a Sunday School for them. The third, a Baptist minister, was a warrior for civil rights and a martyr to that great cause.

And they are now in eternity free of all the earthly quarrels and jars of their days, united in one body in the immediate presence of God, ‘kindly affectioned one to another with brotherly love; in honour preferring one another’, in charity and communion one with another and—I believe in the Communion of Saints—with all those yet living and in the heat of battle, the Church Combatant.

(Purely coincidentally, each is also a distant cousin of mine: respectively, my ninth cousin six times removed by our common descent of my 14th great-grandfather Walter Lindsay, Master of Edzel and nephew to the 3rd Earl of Crawford; my 12th cousin six times removed by our common descent of Sir Thomas Wyther of Whalley in Lancashire, my 17th great-grandsire; and my 14th cousin once removed by our common ancestor the Hon. Edward Rede, Mayor of Norwich in Norfolk, my 14th great-grandfather.)

Let us then as yearly remember all their manifold and manifest earthly faults which by grace they overcame, attesting that we may do the same; and remember also all which, living ever on, was good and praiseworthy, then, in R E Lee; Thomas J ‘Stonewall’ Jackson, and the Revd Dr Martin Luther King Jnr.

As we have therefore opportunity, let us do good unto all men, especially unto them who are of the household of faith.

—Gal. vi. 10.

For all the saints, who from their labours rest,

Who Thee by faith before the world confessed,

Thy Name, O Jesu, be forever blessed.

Alleluia, Alleluia!

The heresy of entryism

Let God arise, and let his enemies be scattered : let them also that hate him flee before him.

—Ps. lxviii, Exsurgat Deus.

Today is the Feast of S Hilary of Poitiers, Bishop & Confessor. A patron saint of lawyers, writers, and controversialists, Hilary stands for—and ought to be emulated in standing for—the principles that

heterodoxy and heresy ought to be identified and condemned, with reason, charity, and some degree of politeness, but utterly implacably; that

definitional orthodoxy matters as a matter of intellectual honesty, and that people cannot be allowed to profit fraudulently and to insist upon undeserved respect by calling themselves things they aren’t; that

we must not live by lies and must call things what they are, including by not accepting taxonomic nonsense in the entryism of those claiming to be a member of a group whilst not accepting its definitional principles and bleating about ‘big tents’ and ‘minor concessions and accommodations’ until they have a plurality and seize control and expel the actual what-and-who-evers who founded and defined the group; that

politics are an adiaphoron, but dishonesty even in claims of partisan affiliation is dishonesty, and mere passing power does not extend to rewriting facts and definitions; and that,

because earthly politics are an adiaphoron if honestly engaged in (ha! some hope), it’s absurd that people make it their entire identities. For example, I’m not flouncing off in a huff from EffBee or TwXtter and ‘taking my marbles and going home’, precisely because my use of such is purely transactional and apolitical. One doesn’t trouble about the private life or views or politics of one’s grocer or tailor, after all: that’d be daft. It’d be as daft as making an honest political affiliation one’s whole identity.

But what entryism does is to misuse the notions of ‘congenial company’ and ‘freedom of association’ and ‘fairness’ and ‘minor concessions to the conscience of the minority’ to get the noses of a whole herd of camels under the tent … so that they may crowd the tent-owners out and run off with the tent. It was entryism which gave the Bolsheviks power; Hitler’s successive and unending assertions that X, Y, or Z was the ‘last territorial demand I shall make in Europe’ (Putin is his apt pupil) were all entryism; the entryism of ‘just give us this one last indult, this alternate service-book, this exemption just for the few’ is what has—lex orandi, lex credendi, let’s be trendy—destroyed Cranmer’s prose, wrecked the apostolic succession and led to a bunch of deaconesses in togs above their station running about claiming to be in priest’s or even in bishop’s orders, and ruined the Anglican Communion; and it is entryism which has made W&L to be no longer W&L. In far less important spheres (for the Earthly City is ephemeral as the grasses of the field), it is entryism which has allowed Jefferson’s and Jackson’s party to be taken over by shrieking idiot Leftists and has allowed Lincoln’s and Teddy Roosevelt’s and Ronald Reagan’s party* to be taken over by simps for a would-be caudillo.

Heretics and fundies and all the heterodox claiming to be, to be The Only Real, and to speak for, Christians and Christianity; Trumpshirts in the Elephant Party; leftists in my party (the party definitionally of Thomas Jefferson, my ninth cousin seven times removed, of Andrew Jackson, my twelfth cousin six times removed, and Harry S Truman, my fifteenth cousin): all are engaged in fraud, trading under the old name to impose upon the confidence, credulity, and good will of the public.

It must stop. And we like S Hilary are called to oppose it in all spheres, religious and earthly, to point laughingly to the imperial nakedness and to call attention to false pretenses and to insist upon honesty and upon calling things by their right names. A good day to remember this duty: and every day we must remember—and do—that duty.

___

* In strict fairness I may as well say that Lincoln is my eighteenth cousin twice removed; TR, my tenth cousin four times removed (well, his mother was a Bulloch from Georgia); and Reagan my thirteenth cousin.

Morons, murders, and manifestos

I believe in the presumption of innocence: and that we ought all to give it. Right now, the Mangione kid has that presumption (he may or not be a murderer; he is quite evidently an utter shit). All the same, a few things…

Whoever is found guilty of the murder of Brian Thompson can cite whatever he likes as ‘justification’, but there is no justification. None. And whoever is convicted gave no such presumption to the victim. Rather, on whatever feigned grounds, the murderer acted as judge, jury, and executioner, without hearing or process. That is intolerable—and inexcusable.

Those attempting to palliate, excuse, or justify this murder, and those fawning upon Mangione and his puerile manifesto, ought to be—were they capable of shame—ashamed of themselves. And they certainly ought to be despised and condemned openly and repeatedly.

As to the accused… Such faith as I retain in the young is not bolstered by his alleged actions or by the perverse support being given to whomever the murderer may be found to have been.

(If Mangione is found guilty, that shall merely confirm my opinion of the sort of people currently being turned out by the American university, and today’s Penn not least.)

One thing mystifies me. Yes, Mangione, the suspect, went to Gilman, and presumably there is money in the family. Well, I had classmates at W&L who’d gone to Gilman. (Mostly large, gruntingly monosyllabic, and obsessed to the exclusion of all else with lacrosse.) I can’t imagine them in this position.

And the press keeps describing him as the son of a ‘prominent Maryland family’: which baffles me.

I’m a Carroll on both sides of the family, a cousin to the Blenheim Lees, the Steuarts, the Johnses, Hopkins, Calverts, and Crosslands, a connexion of the Chews and the Howards… Perhaps my standards of prominence are different. It’s a minor point in all this, but this trope does seem poor journalism with a (perhaps unconscious) agenda. Murderers appear in all classes.

And this matters. For this sort of thing ought never to obscure what matters: the presumption of innocence; the necessity of due process; the duty of doing justice; and the brute and brutal fact of murder.

Here endeth the Lesson.

Initial thoughts on an election.

Right. Well, here we are. I shall doubtless have much to say in the coming weeks—if I am spared, which is never certain. (I have, if I can afford it, a stress test later this month. The Constitution has four years of it come 20 JAN.) For now, I suggest soul-searching to the Criers of Wolf and the Belloc’s Matildas (‘Matilda told such Dreadful Lies, / It made one Gasp and Stretch one’s Eyes … For every time She shouted ‘Fire!’ / They only answered “Little Liar”! / And therefore when her Aunt returned, / Matilda, and the House, were Burned’). This is self-inflicted on your parts. Thanks for the sour persimmons, damn you.

Meanwhile, I advert you to these:

https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-dawn-of-the-trump-era

and

https://www.persuasion.community/p/an-unthinkable-plunge—at once.

When, after the Soviet archives were opened, a vindicated Robert Conquest issued a new and revised edition of The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties, he titled it, The Great Terror: A Reassessment … denying himself the pleasure of releasing it, as Kingsley Amis suggested, under the title, I Told You So, You Fucking Fools.

The Democratic Party has finally succeeded in its long suicide. (Those in charge have risked taking down the Republic with them.) The Republican Party was smothered with a My Pillow in 2015-2016. The Constitution survives. Thus far. To ensure that it does survive is our duty. To do that, the Left must be read out of the Democratic Party before we turn to snatching Republican brands from the burning: everyone to the Left of Classical Liberalism must be defenestrated. They can hold somnolent protests around a diverse drum circle in the reek of stale bong-water and be ignored. There are good, decent, Liberty-loving Republicans: I know many of them, from State district judges in Texas to—speaking of thankless tasks—town selectmen in Connecticut; and they are needed. Both parties must be purged of their scum; only adherence to the Constitution as we have received it and to the principles of the Founders can effect this.

You’re damned right I’m kicking people while they’re down. To get them on their feet. Stop whining, damn it. There’s work to do.

For S Luke’s Day

This the Feast of Luke: Evangelist, artist, and physician. The world is clearly ill and in want of care and healing. We are all unwell and stumbling on a precipice, we are all cast down; we are all in need of good news, of medicine, and of the news and the hope of our cure. This day especially, let us give thanks for all healers and carers, all subcreators—I prefer Tollers’ term to YouTube’s—, and all who bring news and good cheer of the means of grace and the hope of glory. Let us pray for all who are infirm or ailing, the old and the dying, those facing, undergoing, or recovering from medical intervention, all who are battling or in recovery from addiction, the downcast, and those in mental or spiritual darkness; and that all carers, healers, artists, writers, and messengers of Good News be strengthened. By the wholesome medicines of the doctrine delivered by S Luke, may all the diseases of our souls be healed. Amen.

I have been remiss in not mentioning this here.

Come for the fireworks. Stay for the eviscerations. Follow the analysis. And join in the anathemata. My latest—which is to be an appendix to the forthcoming The Conscientious Conservative—, which disposes of the claims of Trump, Trumpism, and the followers of either, the Trumpshirts, to be either conservative, in the Anglo-American sense of that term, or Christian, in any small-‘o’ orthodox, small-‘c’ catholic sense: the sense which my tenth cousin four times removed, CS Lewis, called ‘Mere Christianity’.