Here I am, it’s approaching 7:00 p.m. I need to get to translating, and I have nothing to blog about. Today’s big challenge at work was starting the training of my newest assistant, a young man from Haiti. I shouldn’t have to train new assistants at this time of year, as the ones I trained in the fall aren’t supposed to have expired yet. But I’ve been running through assistants a little more rapidly than usual of late. One would almost think there was something wrong with my management style… No, no, that’s ridiculous.
Anyway, I praised Robert Mullin’s space fantasy novel Bid the Gods Arise a while back, and for a very short time you can get the Kindle version free here. I think you’ll enjoy it.
Sixteen tons
Jean-Francois Millet, Man With a Hoe, ca. 1860
I appear to have experienced a new “going out and coming in” (to put it in biblical terms) in my life. I have gone out of the age of leisure, and come into the age of workoholism.
For the time being, anyway.
“Workoholic” is one of those terms, like “plutocrat” and “spelunker” that I never expected to apply to myself. Ask anyone who knows me and they’ll tell you that one of Walker’s essential characteristics is languor. When the call goes out for hardy souls to lend a hand and see the thing through, I can usually be found somewhere in the vicinity of the donut table.
But here I am, in my sixth decade, living a life essentially divided up between work and sleep, with a few brief intervals for eating. Continue reading Sixteen tons
The age of the Amazon
The Nuremberg Chronicles, 1493.
What’s my reaction to the Defense Department’s decision to permit women in combat?
I was surprised at how little it roused me. Not because I’ve changed my complementarian views, you understand. It’s just that in the climate we’ve entered into – in light of all the other outrages I see around me – this is neither surprising or especially notable. I’m reminded of a guy I used to know – a self-proclaimed heathen – who used to say (I’m pretty sure he was quoting someone), “I feel so much better now that I’ve given up all hope.”
I’ve achieved the serenity of realizing that the American experiment is over and (with sadness) accepting that fact. The people who look at what is not and say, “Why not?” (insufferable busybodies all) have won the upper hand, and they’re not likely to give it up.
Can we argue back, make our case? I doubt it. I could point out, among other things, that although this probably only means a few of the beefier feminists in the armed forces getting the chance to get their legs blown off in the short run, it will not end with that. Those who believe in absolute equality won’t be satisfied until 50% of the military is female, even if they have to lower the physical standards radically in order to achieve that. Not today. Not tomorrow. But eventually. And what happens if we have a national emergency and reinstate the draft? How can the egalitarians justify a draft for males and not for females? No, your daughters – even the small, gentle ones who get sick at the sight of blood – will have to be drafted on the same basis as men. Eventually.
We can’t make our case anymore, because cases don’t get made anymore. Anywhere. In any area of life. I’ve had the experience more and more frequently with the years (I expect you’ve had the same) that when you try to make a point in an argument with someone, their response is not, “You’re wrong and here’s why,” but “Why do you hate me?”
It’s all about feelings in the world now. A vast, bottomless sea of raging emotions, where every soul battles to dominate all the others by appealing to the unassailable superiority of its own feelings over everybody else’s feelings. Our world is ruled by passions; we have become like the dumb beasts that know only what they feel. The ancient Stoics, without the benefit of Jewish or Christian Scriptures, realized that the happy life is the life not ruled by passion.
I expect a lot of blood will flow before we learn that lesson over again.
Why bother?
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Derelict Methodist Church, Walsall, England. Source: geograph.org.uk.
The old formula goes, “If a dog bites a man, that’s not news. If a man bites a dog, that’s news!”
So when one of my Facebook friends posted an article about another theologian of the Very Large Church Body Which Shall Remain Nameless denying the virgin birth of Christ, that was hardly surprising. What purposes do mainline churches serve nowadays, if not to be platforms for the proclamation of heresy?
Which led me to a question I’d never thought about before. What purpose, exactly, does a liberal church serve today? What is its mission?
Traditionally, the business of the church has been to follow the two great commandments, as taught by Christ (Matthew 22): “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and soul, and mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” So the church has understood its business to be a) worship and evangelism, and b) service to those in need.
But for a liberal, those bases are already covered. For liberals, God’s love is unconditional and given equally to all, so there’s no need (besides, it’s sometimes offensive) to proclaim the gospel. Worship as an aesthetic experience may be a function of the church, but honestly, who wants to get up on a Sunday morning when God’s happy with you whatever you do?
And as for service to the poor, well, the last election certainly made it clear that liberals don’t think any assistance is worth a thing unless it goes through government. When conservatives argue for private charity, we’re condemned as uncaring.
So why should liberal churches exist at all? Just to provide sources of income for spiritually-minded intellectuals?
The bottom line for liberals, it seems to me, is “Look to Europe.” You see how the churches are dying over there? It’s coming here, and sooner than you think.
Soft Target, by Stephen Hunter
As a hardcore fan of Stephen Hunter I am willing to stipulate that he’s pretty shameless as far as the concepts for his novels goes. He stretches credibility with the insouciance of a Hollywood producer, mixing westerns and samurai stories with the basic thriller form, and messing with his own chronologies whenever it suits him. But I think Soft Target is his first actual allegory (he admits it in the Afterword). That, my friends, takes guts. Especially when the allegory works against the current party in power.
This isn’t a Bob Lee Swagger story, but the old Marine sniper’s DNA is all over the thing. Bob Lee’s recently discovered natural son, Ray Cruz, now retired as a Marine sniper himself, just happens to be inside “America, the Mall,” a huge (but fictional) mall in suburban Minneapolis, when Somali jihadis start shooting shoppers and herding the survivors, about 1,000 of them, into the amusement park at the facility’s center. Soon, overhead, who should show up but his half-sister Nikki Swagger, now a TV reporter for a St. Paul station, in a broadcast helicopter?
Ray, of course, can’t stay hiding in the Victoria’s Secret store where he and his fiancee have taken refuge. He has to go and scout out the enemy, see what damage he can do. He’s his father’s son, a congenital hero. And having a hero there means a lot – not only to the hostages in the amusement park, but to the mastermind of the attack, who has dark motives of his own, different from those of the clueless Africans he’s exploiting.
But an even greater threat may be the head of the Minnesota state police force, a man incompetent on a massive level, who will look pretty familiar to most readers.
Bottom line – if you’re a Democrat you’ll hate this book. If you’re a Republican you’ll probably love it. I loved it. It’s not deathless work (I caught Hunter in a couple rookie writing errors – using “enormity” wrong and writing “stridden” [is that a word?] as a past perfect form of “stride”), but Soft Target is a lot of fun, with plenty of Hunter’s trademark thrills and improbabilities. Recommended.
Cautions for language, violence and adult topics.
Poor but honest thoughts
“The Pinch of Poverty” by Thomas B. Kennington (1856-1916)
Like many of my generation, I grew up with parents who had stories about the Great Depression. My mother, in particular, had experienced genuine want, cold, and hunger.
There was one thing she said again and again. “We often had to wear patched clothes. But they were always clean. My mother made sure of that.”
Mom was harkening back to a social phenomenon that began in the 18th and 19th Centuries, largely (but not entirely) motivated by Christian pietism – the ideal of the Honest Poor.
Nowadays we’re so accustomed to being told that the poor are naturally virtuous that we don’t see how shocking that ideal was in its time. Jesus Christ, of course, had said “Blessed are the poor…” but the full quote is “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” a rather different thing. The disciples were expressing more conventional wisdom when they responded to Jesus’ encounter with the rich young ruler (Matthew 19). “It is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven,” He said, and His disciples “were greatly astonished,” asking, “Who then can be saved?”
The disciples were expressing what most people have believed throughout history – that wealth and virtue went hand in hand. Everyone understood that poor people sometimes had to steal to survive, but if a rich man – who could presumably afford to be honest – didn’t have an easy road to heaven, what chance did regular joes like they have? Continue reading Poor but honest thoughts
Norwegian Folk Tune “Akk Mon Min Vei Til Kanaan”
Ak, mon min Vei til Kanaan
Endnu er meget lang?
Mon jeg kan naa det glade Land,
Som snubler Gang paa Gang?
Som snubler Gang paa Gang?
Killing Hope, by Keith Houghton
There’s much to enjoy in Keith Houghton’s thriller Killing Hope, the first in a series about Los Angeles police detective Gabe Quinn. Too much, in fact.
The story’s exciting, the main character interesting, the dialogue generally sharp and satisfying. Gabe Quinn, a cop with a personal tragedy in his past (they all do nowadays, don’t they? I used to like that, but it’s getting to be a trope), is cynical and has a good noir voice: “Like I say, I don’t believe in coincidences – especially when it comes to homicide. Coincidences are for people who think the universe is cute. It isn’t.”
But the whole thing is loose. Too many plot branches, too many characters who show up for a while and then never appear again (or do after so long that you’ve forgotten who they were). And the prose needs editing. Bad imagery like, “Flung my eyes wide open.” (Imagine doing that.) Misuse of the word “enormity.” Misplaced hyphens. Consistent misspelling of words, like “devises” for “devices.”
Also he inserts a plot point in which the FBI, most of whose agents are depicted here as thugs, beat a suspect nearly to death to get a confession, something that would have the ACLU on their backs with grappling hooks in the real world. Points lost for believability.
I have an idea – I’m not sure from where – that the author is an English native. The prose definitely supports that. He spells “gray” with an “e,” and calls a yard a garden and a scarf a muffler. But if that’s true I have to generally praise his command of American idiom. Only a few slips come through. Mostly the dialogue is note-perfect.
My uninformed judgment is that Houghton is a writer with great talent, much in need of an old fashioned editor. Such an editor would have instructed him to cut this very long book down by about a third, remove extraneous scenes and characters, and focus, focus, focus. There’s good stuff here, but I got tired of it after a while.
Oh yes, consolidate chapters. There’s too many very short chapters in Killing Hope.
Still, worth reading if you have the patience for it.
Cautions for language, violence, and adult situations.
My “absolute moral authority.” True story
It was a late summer afternoon in Minneapolis. The year was 1980. Business had been quiet at the Hiawatha Motel (not its real name). I was working the afternoon shift. Motel clerking was a good job for a student. The money wasn’t great, but it was only a short distance from my apartment, and I could sit at the desk and just read a book with a clear conscience. I’d have to do my end-of-shift report in a few minutes.
The door buzzer went off and a young man came in. He wore jeans and a tee-shirt, and a short jacket. I couldn’t see his eyes well because he was wearing a blue bucket hat pulled down, but the rest of his face was long. Kind of horsey.
He stepped up to the counter, pulled a semi-automatic pistol (about a .38, I thought), and said, “Open the door.”
This was where I nearly got myself killed. I thought he said, “Open the drawer,” meaning the cash drawer under the counter. I realized later, when it was all over, that he could have easily thought I was going for a gun, and plugged me right there. But when I pulled the drawer open, he repeated himself. “Open the door!” Then I heard his friend rattling the knob of the office door to my left.
I opened the door for him and stepped back, my hands up. Both young men came in, and the guy with the gun said, “We want money and drugs. Give us all you got.”
“There’s no drugs here,” I said. “The money’s there.” I pointed to the open cash drawer.
The sidekick went for the money, while the gunman repeated, “Where’s the drugs?”
“There’s no drugs here.”
At that point someone else stepped into the office. It was my relief, the guy on the next shift. Another student, somewhat younger than me. He raised his hands too, and the gunman gestured us back into the unoccupied manager’s apartment behind the office.
“Get down on your faces,” he said. We did, side by side on the carpet. The gunman told his sidekick to find something to tie us up with.
While waiting, the gunman said, “We just want money and drugs. Nobody needs to get hurt.”
I told him there weren’t any drugs, but otherwise didn’t argue.
His friend came back after a minute with a couple power cords from electrical devices. They tied our hands, and the guy with the gun held it to each of our heads in turn, asking one last time for drugs. I said once again that there weren’t any drugs there. “Let’s kill ‘em,” said the sidekick.
“Nah,” said the gunman. “They’ll be good. You guys’ll be good, won’t you?”
We said we’d be good.
They twisted my high school class ring off my finger, and took my relief guy’s watch. “You stay here for half an hour,” the gunman said. “We’ll be watching. If you get up before half an hour we’ll kill you.”
Then they left.
We lay there not saying much for a few minutes.
“I think we can get up now,” I said. “Can you help me get untied?”
“I’ve got some friends coming in a few minutes,” the relief guy said. “They’ll untie us.”
I got up and looked around in the office. The relief guy stayed where he was. I struggled with my bonds, but couldn’t get loose. Shortly the relief guy’s friends did show up, and they untied us and I called the police. And the owner.
After that, cops, and telling the story. Finally I went home. Didn’t sleep well. I was pretty shaken for a few weeks. Felt like a target. I loaded up my replica Civil War Navy Colt and wore it under a sport coat for a couple weeks when I went to work. I’m pretty sure that was illegal, but the wisdom of the saying, “Better to be judged by twelve than carried by six” had taken on new meaning for me.
And never – never – for one split second did I waver in my support for the right of the people to keep and bear arms.
Four Points from The Intellectual Life
Trevin Wax draws out four points from The Intellectual Life, by A.G. Sertillanges
- Recognize the Intellectual Life as a Calling.
- Submit Your Intellectual Pursuits to Truth.
- Understand the Intellectual Life Requires Considerable Discipline.
- Remember the Goal of the Intellectual Life is Virtuous Character.