All posts by Lars Walker

Non-fiction, Reviews

How Conservatism Can Rise From the Ashes, by Andrew Price

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A friend recommended I read Andrew Price’s How Conservatism Can Rise From the Ashes, by Andrew Price, in hopes of raising my optimism about the political future.

This was kind of him, but the results were not as advertised. It’s a well-written and well thought-out argument, but I found little in it to cheer me.

First of all, Price criticizes conservatives for concentrating on the wrong things, and delivering losing messages. One of the wrong things he wants jettisoned is what he calls “theology,” which I take to mean pro-life and pro-family principles. I’ve said it before – I don’t really care much if the Republicans start winning elections again, if they win by dumping conservative social values. I’d probably still vote for them, because low taxes are better than high for everybody, but I’d nevertheless consider my country lost.

Secondly, this book depressed me because Price outlines a series of radical changes in the Republican platform – an “assets tax,” toughening regulation of corporations and the environment, new retirement and health care programs, radical changes to education funding. He might be right, but I rate the likelihood of any of these changes being enacted pretty low. If this strategy is the only one by which we can win, it seems to me we’re probably doomed.

Finally, I question the logic of one of his contentions – that the public hates conservatives because we’re mean and call people names. If calling names turns the public off, why do they vote for the people who keep calling us Nazis?

How Conservatism Can Rise From the Ashes is a perfectly good, thoughtful book, but it did not raise my spirits. It might work for you, though.

Uncategorized

September song

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And so ends my first week of grad school. I have a little better understanding of what my work load will be, and I think I can handle it. Of course I’m only taking three credits this semester. The plan is to take six per semester starting next spring.

And there are the imponderables. Will my professors hate me because I’m a conservative? Will my fellow students hate me for the same reason? Would I do better to sound off on my opinions, or try to keep my head down? Will I live long enough to finish this thing?

Ah well. If you want to give me moral support, and are in the area, I’ll be with the Vikings at the Nordic Music Festival in Chanhassen, MN tomorrow. The weather is supposed to be hot.

Fiction, Reviews

Henry Wood: Time and Again, by Brian Meeks

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I reviewed Brian Meeks’ first Henry Wood novel, Henry Wood Detective Agency, not long ago, telling you that I enjoyed it very much in spite of some stylistic flaws. Henry Wood: Time and Again affected me the same way. I liked it a lot, and I suspect you will too.
Henry Wood, New York private eye in 1955, is a quiet man who occasionally gets gifts from the future, deposited inexplicably in a closet in his basement. When he gets word that his former partner and mentor, Mickey Moore, has been murdered, he sets about going through his friend’s notes in search of clues leading to a motive. Meanwhile, a beautiful woman from his past has come back into his life. She involves him in a quest for a mysterious, ancient device by means of which, the legend goes, one may speak to God.
There’s more than a hint of The Maltese Falcon in Henry Wood: Time and Again, but it’s a very different world. I tried to express, in my last review, the remarkably quiet and peaceful atmosphere that pervades these books. Even when the tension rises, there’s serenity here. I can’t explain it. Even occasional infelicities, like not knowing the difference between “part” and “depart,” don’t shake it for me. Meeks continues his odd habit, in dialogue, of avoiding contractions. I didn’t care. I also noticed that the writing, when it was good, was better than I remembered. I particularly enjoyed an idiosyncratic scene where one character, formerly a complete monster and bully, decides to turn his life around and starts acting differently. Such things do happen occasionally in real life, but you rarely see them in books.
Mild cautions for language and sexual situations. I recommend the Henry Wood books, thus far.

Religion

Enlighten me not

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I’m just dipping my toe into the boundless sea that is online graduate study, and I got involved in a discussion the other day that I thought I’d post something about. The instructor wanted us to share our feelings about the Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment, in case you haven’t brushed up your history in a while, was an intellectual movement that flourished in the 18th Century. Thinkers like Rousseau and Voltaire were leading lights. It was a reaction against the religious passions that had caused so much death and suffering through religious wars like the Thirty Years’ War. We religious types had made ourselves look pretty bad, and decent people began to think we’d all be better off if we jettisoned God entirely. But on what would we base our morality, without a God?

Oddly enough, Isaac Newton (himself a devout, if unorthodox, Christian) gave them their answer. Newton discovered what looked like absolute, immutable laws in the universe. Everything could be explained in terms of mathematics. Ultimate truth, for the fervid Newtonian, was mechanical, impersonal. Obviously morality was also a matter of eternal rules. Identify those rules and that was all the revelation you needed. Human nature was ultimately simple too, and soon we would know how it worked. Then we’d be able to establish a rational government which would permit everyone’s natural goodness to blossom like a flower.

The problem with the Enlightenment was that it was over-simple. Human beings just aren’t that neat (neither is the universe, as we’ve learned since). Human beings, and the universe, are like Doctor Who’s Tardis, bigger inside than outside. As you go deeper in, you discover new levels of complexity.

This, I think, explains the horrors of ideology in the centuries since the Enlightenment. Every tyrant thinks he’s found, at last, the simple key to human nature. It’s economics (Marx). It’s frustrated sex (Freud). It’s race (Hitler). Despot after despot tries to impose his simple solution on the people he rules, and the people stubbornly refuse to respond in a scientific way. So he’s forced to kill them, and to try to find some better people.

The difference between post-Enlightenment horrors and pre-Enlightenment horrors, it seems to me, is the industrialization of evil. The religious fanatic may kill you because he considers you evil, a tool of Satan. But the statist kills you without caring who you are. You’re just in the way, like a tree in a building zone.

Fiction, Reviews

The Return, by James D. Best

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I’ve read, and reviewed, one previous Steve Dancy western adventure/mystery by James D. Best – Murder at Thumb Butte. I found it a well-written tale with good, but somewhat irritating, characters.
The Return, another Dancy story, is another well-written tale. But it turned me off the series, not because of the writing, but because of one of the themes.
Although technically a western, The Return is actually set mostly in New York City. In the first, shorter section of the story, Steve and his friend Jeff Sharp are closing out their business in Leadville, Colorado. They’ve made a lot of money, and now they want to go east to see their friend Edison, hoping to secure distribution rights for his electric lights for use in mining. They have a little trouble – the kind you handle with a gun – before they go, but they take care of that with the help of Virginia Baker, a storekeeper with whom Steve finds himself, unexpectedly, in love.
Going home, they find that Edison is having some trouble with sabotage in his project to electrify a section of New York City. With the help of Virginia and their old Pinkerton friend, McAllen, they start investigating, and soon find themselves in danger.
It was a subplot of The Return that irritated me. Dancy is the son of a wealthy New York family, and his surviving parent, his mother, is a tremendous snob on top of being deeply involved in political corruption. She is shocked that Steve is sharing a hotel room with Virginia, and the author devotes a fair amount of time to making sure we know how hypocritical and judgmental her attitude is. Steve’s ability to defy her through premarital cohabitation is presented as a sort of moral triumph.
I’m too old-fashioned for that kind of newfangled, Victorian morality.

Reviews

Film review: Whit Stillman's 'Damsels in Distress'

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The first time I watched Damsels in Distress, Whit Stillman’s most recent (after a twelve-year hiatus) film, I thought it was very funny and full of great, surreal dialogue (Stillman’s characters talk like people in books, but then so do I, so I feel right at home), but I wasn’t sure it succeeded as a total work of art. After a second viewing, and a third with the commentary track on, I’m now convinced that it actually works very well, taken on its own terms. In fact, it’s now my favorite of Stillman’s movies.

The film (set, like much of Stillman’s work, in a universe a little loosely moored in time) starts with Lily (Analeigh Tipton), a transfer student, enrolling at Seven Oaks College in New York State. She meets the Girls With Flower Names, and accepts their offer to let her move in with them. Their leader is Violet (Greta Gerwig), who speaks with great conviction and eloquence, and is wrong in almost every factual statement she makes. But she has a great heart, and has devoted her life to helping others. She and her friends run a campus suicide prevention center, where they offer donuts and tap dancing lessons to the clinically depressed. Her great dream is to benefit mankind by starting a dance craze, like the Charleston or the Twist. She prefers to date guys who are neither especially good looking nor especially bright, feeling she can help them achieve their potential, if any. Continue reading Film review: Whit Stillman's 'Damsels in Distress' →

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The sea-road not taken

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I suppose it’s about time I started acting responsibly. I’m in my sixth decade, after all.

The other day I was offered this tremendous opportunity to lecture again on a Scandinavian cruise. As you may recall, I’ve lectured on a couple Norwegian cruises in the past, under contract with a company that allows you to buy your cruise at fifty bucks a day (now it’s $65), and you have to pay your own air fare. Not a way to get rich, but if you have a little money to spend it’s an inexpensive way to cruise.

This would have been the cruise of my dreams. Departure from Southampton, England, then oversea to Iceland. Then Norway and the other Scandinavian countries. It would have been the longest cruise I ever did, and an opportunity to lecture comprehensively on all the Viking stuff I’ve learned. And see places I’ve never seen, as long as places I hunger to see again.

But I turned it down, of course. I don’t have much money now, and anyway embarkation is September 1. I have to participate in Student Orientation at our Bible School on Sept. 2.

On top of that, that’s the week I start online classes for my graduate work in Library Science.

So, no. Continue reading The sea-road not taken →

Non-fiction, Reviews

Sheepdogs: Meet Our Nation's Warriors, by Rogish and Grossman

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If you have no capacity for violence, then you are a healthy productive citizen, a sheep. If you have a capacity for violence and no empathy for your fellow citizens, then you have defined an aggressive sociopath, a wolf. But what if you have a capacity for violence, and a deep love for your fellow citizens? What do you have then? A sheepdog, a warrior, someone who is walking the hero’s path. Someone who can walk into the heart of darkness, into the universal human phobia, and walk out unscathed.

I review a lot of books on this blog, and among those books a very small number genuinely move me – bring tears to my eyes. It was a bit of a surprise that a children’s book, Sheepdogs: Meet Our Nation’s Warriors, by Stephanie Rogish and Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, was one of those.

The passage quoted above doesn’t come from the body of the book, but from Col. Grossman’s famous essay, “On Sheep, Wolves, and Sheepdogs,” which is printed in the back. The bulk of the book (which I got free for review, for the record) is aimed at school children. It pursues the sheep/wolf/sheepdog metaphor in an extended manner, to help kids think about force and how to respond to the sheepdogs (police, soldiers, legal concealed weapons carriers, etc.) they may encounter. I didn’t care greatly for the illustrations, to be honest, but the text works very well.

If you’re the kind of parent (or teacher) who believes that guns are inherently evil, and that there is never any excuse for violence, even to save children’s lives, you won’t like this book.

If you’re a parent who wants your children to understand the legitimate and illegitimate uses of force, and who would be proud to see them grow up to be sheepdogs themselves, you will want to have it and share it with them.

You can order it from the US Concealed Carry Association here.

Fiction, Reviews

Forevermore, by Jim Musgrave

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I feel guilty about the savaging I’m about to deliver to the novel Forevermore, by Jim Musgrave. It’s clearly a labor of love. Musgrave attempts to craft a mystery in the style of Edgar Allan Poe, in which his hero, post-Civil War detective Pat O’Malley, seeks to learn the truth of Poe’s own death back in 1849, when he was found apparently drunk and dying on the streets of Baltimore.

Pat O’Malley is a decorated Union Army veteran working as a private detective in New York City. Because he knew and liked the poet Poe, and because he happens to be renting the cottage where Poe once lived with his doomed young wife, O’Malley decides to investigate the reported circumstances of his death (which were indeed questionable). He interrogates a series of Poe’s associates and acquaintances (including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow), and begins to suspect a cruel plot. This puts him in danger for his life. Continue reading Forevermore, by Jim Musgrave →

Non-fiction, Reviews

Political Thought: A Student's Guide, by Hunter Baker

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Order is not any kind of moral ultimatum. The only reason to desire order is to make something else possible. Order is a means to an end. If what order gives us is not good, then we should not continue to uphold that order. For example, a dictator may give us order, but his order may not be worth preserving as we perceive ourselves to lose more by it than we gain. This takes us in the direction John Locke went with his work. Order is there only to secure something else, and something more than mere protection from violent death. What is that something more? Is it freedom? Is it justice?

Mark Twain once wrote a story called “Political Economy,” which is what they called Political Science in his time (in that more humble age political thinkers didn’t pretend to be scientists). I memorized it at one point and used to recite it to my friends when we got together, in a bargain-basement Hal Holbrook style. It told how the author sat down to write an essay on the subject (“the dearest to my heart of all this world’s philosophy”) but kept getting interrupted by a lightning rod salesman, who eventually prevailed to the extent that Twain bought his entire stock of rods and had them mounted on his roof, so that all the lightning in that region of the heavens was attracted to his house, setting off the greatest pyrotechnic spectacle ever seen.

Our friend Hunter Baker has written a short book called Political Thought: A Student’s Guide. Though not as funny as Twain’s story, it’s one of the more lively books you’ll find on the subject. Instead of doing a historic overview, telling how philosophical ideas developed through the work of various thinkers, he starts with things that most readers have experience with – families. He describes his own and his wife’s families, and how their different habits of interaction and discipline worked in different ways. Then he imagines two very different kinds of families – a tyrannical family and a loving one – and relates them to the ideas of the great political thinkers of history, especially Hobbes, Rousseau, and Locke.

If you’re looking for an effective Christian primer on politics for young people, you could hardly do better than this. In fact, even I learned a few things, and it’s well known that I know pretty much everything. The only fault I can find with this book that I’m not quoted in it, a failing common to a surprising number of books on Political Science (or Economy).

Recommended.