Beautiful day, if a little windy. The temperature is in the 70s, and it looks like tomorrow will be much the same.

Walking through the park this evening, I saw a man standing all by himself, practicing some kind of dance that called for stomping his feet with his knees bent and making elaborate motions with his arms.

I envy him his lack of self-consciousness.

But only that.

Sherry at Intellectuelle has tagged Phil and me with an Eight Things meme. These are the rules:

Each player lists 8 facts/habits about themselves. The rules of the game are posted at the beginning before those facts/habits are listed. At the end of the post, the player then tags 8 people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know that they have been tagged and asking them to read your blog.

Hmm, that’s a challenge. Not to write eight things about myself, it goes without saying, but to try to think of eight things about myself I haven’t told you already. Two or three times.

But let’s give it a shot.

1. I’m not a genius. That ought to be a no-brainer (to put it weirdly), but some people seem to have gotten that impression, probably because of my intellectual arrogance. My IQ, at the last testing, was 126. A nice, comfortable upper-middle range figure, but nothing that would get me into MENSA.

2, I have a rather nice singing voice. Indeed, I spent nine years with an obscure Christian musical group. However I have a lousy ear and no ability whatever to play an instrument.

3. I’ve visited Norway 4 times, and have gotten as far north as the North Cape. I’ve also visited Iceland once, and I’ve been to the Leif Eriksson archaeological site at L’Anse Aux Meadows, Newfoundland.

4. On the American side, I’ve visited Abraham Lincoln’s birthplace, his childhood home in Indiana, and his home in New Salem, Illinois. I’ve also been to Ford’s Theater, and the Peterson House across the street where he died. Oh yes, I’ve also visited a house in Tennessee built by Davy Crockett, and Wild Bill Hickok’s grave in Deadwood.

5. In community theater, in Florida, I played Mordred in Camelot, Prof. Moriarty in a Sherlock Holmes play, the leads in both Larry Shue’s comedies, “The Foreigner” and “The Nerd,” Tony in “You Can’t Take It With You,” Crichton in “The Admirable Crichton,” and Clive in “Write Me a Murder.” I also did a local TV commercial for kitchen fans.

6. My personality is almost entirely synthetic, by which I mean it’s man-made. I wasn’t born programmed to be the man I am. As a child (I’m told), I was happy, outgoing and talkative. I grew up to be depressive, introverted and famously taciturn. The difference came because certain people in my life didn’t like my original personality and set about changing it, with complete success.

7. I once read the entire Lord of the Rings out loud (to my roommate). But not in one sitting.

8. I can wiggle my ears.

As is my custom, I shall not tag anyone with this meme.

I hate to admit it, but I actually had a pretty good weekend. I know that’s a disappointment to those of you who come to this blog for a daily fillip of angst, alienation, futility and despair, but even I can’t maintain perfect consistency all my life.

Saturday was quiet and uneventful, which suits me just fine. Picked up a couple needed items at Kmart and had lunch at my regular Chinese buffet. Took my renter’s door off its hinges and shaved the top down so it would close better. I discovered then that there remains yet another problem—the latch won’t engage in the hole in the striker plate. Which means I’m going to have to figure out how to move that hole just a whisker.

Whoever painted that door has much to answer for.

Sunday was, as I mentioned on Friday, Norway Day at Minnehaha Park. I first attended Norway Day in 1980 (I remember because I was attending Brown Institute of Broadcasting at the time). I was living in an apartment house just up the street. I walked down there on a Sunday afternoon just to get some fresh air, and lo and behold, My Own Tribe had gathered. It was a pretty big event, with lots of vendors and food stands, and they’d brought in a folk dancing group from Norway for entertainment.

I went back the first year I was back from Florida, and it was much the same.

But in the years since, the event has shriveled visibly. I don’t think it’s just because the old people are dying off and the young people are all half German now. I suspect there’s some tragic story of organizing groups finally reaching the breaking point and saying what they really think, and people taking their fish balls and going home.

I hope the decline hasn’t been due to the presence of the Viking Age Club & Society in the last few years.

At this point our encampment is almost half the event.

We’re crowd-pleasers, though. Our combats gathered enthusiastic crowds, and I think we gave them a pretty good show. It was only Eric and me this time, and I’m happy to report that I was on my game and beat him about three out of four bouts in two presentations. He missed the chance to get his revenge in the third, when the sky darkened, somebody opened a giant refrigerator door, and heavy rain cut loose on us and set everybody to tearing down tents, packing vehicles and driving away.

We needed the rain, though.

I also did a decoration job on the sheath of my new saex. I’m pretty happy with the results:

As a final note, I’d fail in my predictability (and render this post’s title meaningless) if I didn’t note that this week is the 50th Anniversary of what many consider the greatest cartoon short ever made, “What’s Opera Doc?” featuring Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny doing Wagner. They tell me it’s much more impressive on a big screen. But it’s funny even on YouTube.

The bulls have been slaughtered and their entrails carefully examined by the meteorological priesthood. The shamans declare that we are entering into a period of heat and drought. This isn’t a tough call in Minnesota in July, but we always hope we might catch a break, and it’s their job to dash that hope.

I plan to potter around Blithering Heights on Saturday, staying indoors as much as possible. On Saturday I shall imprudently join the Viking Age Club & Society for an encampment at Minnehaha Park (it’s the annual Norway Day celebration). Stop by if you’re in the area. (I actually have a strong suspicion that I’m our only reader in the Minneapolis area.)

I always enjoy our events at Minnehaha Park, having lived in that part of town, off and on, for several years in the aggregate, sometime back around the time when Minnehaha Falls was brand new.

Here’s what I’m worrying about today:

As you’ve noted, I worry about everything. And I’m confident that everything I worry about will happen, even though several of them are mutually contradictory. I operate on the theory that just because the guy on my right has punched me, that doesn’t mean the guy on my left can’t follow up with a kick to the kneecap.

Anyway, I was worrying today.

Here’s what’s bothering me. Back when the American Founding Fathers were hammering out the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, they were working off a shared, common world view. You frequently hear people insisting that “all the Founders were Deists.” This is a) a considerable exaggeration, and b) irrelevant in a sense. Because for all the theological differences between the Deists and the Christians, they shared a basic agreement on the operation of reason and the nature of truth. They believed that if A is larger than B, and B is equal to C, then A must also be larger than C. They took it for granted that reasonable men would always agree on such things. It was an honorable thing, a sign of great-mindedness, to yield to the weight of logic.

This was a primary reason for their insistence on freedom of speech. It wasn’t (regardless of what you may have heard) because of their concern that pornography should always be freely available, but because they believed that if all the facts were stated, and all opinions heard, Reason would force all men of good will to agree in the end on the correct solution. Because Reason had objective existence, and followed scientific laws.

This is not believed much anymore.

Today, you have one side screaming its own set of facts, and the other side screaming its set of facts, and these sets of facts bear no relation to one another. The Iraq War that I follow in the news is nothing like the Iraq War that most Democrats follow in the news, for instance.

And there’s no place in our culture for the two sides to find common ground. We both suspect everything the other side says—because we’ve all been lied to too often, and we’ve come to suspect that any “fact” or news report we disagree with was probably doctored. And in the case of the Left, many of them doubt that there is such a thing as objective reality in any case.

We face a situation where the Left and the Right live in entirely different worlds, and can hardly communicate. And it’s not just a matter of Left and Right. There are an infinity of positions out there (this is one of the things that makes the Fairness Doctrine unworkable), and each opinion builds, as it were, its own self-contained universe.

I don’t see any solution for this problem.

Have a wonderful weekend!

I’m reading Stephen Hunter’s Point of Impact right now. I picked it up because I’d heard Hunter interviewed on the radio, and he described himself as “libertarian/conservative.” So far I’m enjoying it quite a lot. I’ll probably review it when I’m done. That’s not what I want to talk about tonight, though. I want to talk about the movie they made from the book. A movie I haven’t seen, and have no plans to see.

The main character in the book is Bob Lee Swagger, a grizzled, taciturn, moderately crippled Vietnam veteran. In the war he was the second top U.S. sniper. Now he lives alone in a shack in the western Arkansas hills, subsisting on his military pension, maintaining a precarious sobriety, tuning his guns and keeping his shooting skills sharp. There are three people in the world he talks to (plus his dog), and he keeps out of the way of the rest of mankind.

So when Hollywood decided to turn this book into a movie, whom did they cast to carry this interesting character role?

Mark Wahlberg.

Think about that for a moment. Ponder the genius of the mind that made such decision.

Isn’t obvious to the meanest intelligence (which, needless to say, puts it beyond the reach of most of Hollywood) that a role like that simply screams for Sam Elliot?

Sam Elliot can’t carry a major motion picture, you say? He’s too old to play a lead, you say?

I say that kind of thinking is what’s wrong with America today.

I say that if Hollywood had a lick of sense, they’d be turning out a string of big Sam Elliot movies. These movies would be like the films John Wayne made at the end—improbable action flicks about big old men (Elliot even has the advantage of not having gotten fat) who buffalo the young punks and charm the ladies, who never lie or say die, and by thunder they get the job done.

If they added a little jingoistic Americanism that wouldn’t hurt either. (I don’t know what Elliot’s politics are, but if he knew his best interests he’d do the lines and take the money.)

That would get me back into the theaters.

But will anyone listen? Ha!

I try to help. I really try.

I’m in no position to tell you what to do, but I’d like to go on record as saying I’m flying my flag today. And if you’re an American, I urge you to do the same. Dennis Prager’s column on the need for an “American seder” pretty much sums up my views.

Someone recently sent me a quotation I’ve read before, and like very much. It’s attributed to a scholar named Sir Alex Fraser, and it goes like this:

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, (which is) always followed by a dictatorship.”

An excellent sentiment and (I think) indisputably true. Unfortunately, according to both Snopes.com and truthorfiction.com, the statement cannot be found in any of Sir Alexander Fraser (Tyler)’s writings.

Which is very odd. It would appear that somebody came up with this extremely perceptive statement, and instead of taking credit for it himself, distributed it under the name of a long-dead scholar. Which shows admirable humility, but doesn’t really do much to promote his purposes, since once the false attribution is known, the whole thing loses credibility.

Or maybe somebody just remembered wrong.

I’ll leave that puzzle in its knot, and close with one of my favorite quotations from John Adams, our second president and one of our most brilliant and amusing, if not the most likeable:

“We have no government armed in power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Our Constitution was made only for a religious and moral people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.” (Address to the military, Oct. 11, 1798)

Which is essentially the same point, I think.

Just about a perfect day today. The temperature was precisely right for my personal comfort—which means it would probably be a little warm for most people. I’m a cold-blooded beast. The thermometer usually reads about 98.2 when the nurse pulls it from my mouth and reads it. I blame this condition for my inability to endure cold. When my brothers are thumping their chests and saying, “Isn’t this great? It’s so bracing!” I’m cupping my hands over my ears to keep them warm (cupping them very carefully, though. Touching them too forcefully might shatter them like cheap plastic cups from a convenience store pop machine).

We could use some rain, but if it were raining it wouldn’t be a perfect day, would it? “Seek not contrary pleasures,” said Dr. Johnson.

One disappointment I’ve suffered during my afternoon walks down to Crystal Lake and back has been the lack of girls in bikinis sunning themselves along the shore. Crystal Lake has been sorely deficient in the sunbathing girls department. More often the shore has been encircled by an unbroken ring of Hmong people, all of them with fishing poles, pulling sunfish 2 centimeters long out of the water for supper.

But today that was remedied. I didn’t get an ideal look at the girl (no doubt that was her intention) as she was lying on a fairly steep slope that runs down from the street to the water’s edge, but she seemed to be not ugly, and she was in a bikini.

Maybe it’ll be a good weekend.

There was another form of beauty too—butterflies. I suppose it’s unmanly of me, but I love butterflies. They seem to me an entirely useless addition to the environment. I’m sure their ecological niche could have been filled by something brown that looked like one of the more undistinguished moths. But God gave us flowers that flew, just as a treat.

That’s how I think of butterflies. They’re a gift. A grace note. A cherry on top of the sundae of summer.

Have a good weekend.

Roy Jacobsen, over at Dispatches from Outland, Dispatches from Outland, Dispatches from Outland (I repeat it three times in penance for getting it wrong last night) succumbed to my passive-aggressive hint and posted the pictures of me this morning, here.

He mentioned it in the comments on my last post, but I’m saying it out here in the sunlight to make sure YOU NOTICE IT.

Man, I love attention. That might surprise some people, because I make a fetish of not calling attention to myself or promoting myself, but all the time I’m trying to find oblique ways to get that notice, either by some achievement or other, or by passive aggression.

So thanks, Roy, for being my enabler.

(The blog is called Dispatches from Outland.)

So, the immigration bill went down in flames.

I never knew what to think about that issue. Most of the talk shows are against it, but when Michael Medved came on to defend it, I thought he made a lot of sense too. So I was utterly at sea, and not sure enough of any position to badger my senator.

But here’s what I do think.

I think there’s a movement (not a conspiracy. No council of plutocrats is strategizing in a secret room. It’s more of a state of mind abroad in the land) that wants America to be anything but what it has been in the past.

The people who hold this view love America, but they love it in their own way. They love America the way parents love a drug-addicted teenager—“You’ll always be our son and we’ll always love you, but you have to clean up your act.”

These people don’t love America’s origins. They don’t love its history. They don’t love its traditions (especially its religion).

What they love about America is what they see as its potential to become something they could be proud of.

Because they hate America’s history and traditions, they see no reason why anyone should be expected to go through a regularized naturalization process, to learn about America. Why learn about something we’re going to erase anyway?

Because they hate America’s culture, they don’t want immigrants to assimilate. They want to see Balcanization—a country built up of thousands of ethnic enclaves, peopled by folks who can’t communicate with one another, because there’s no common language.

Because they’re ashamed of America’s history, they want to enable (not cause, but open the door to) the partition of America, so that the Old Southwest either goes back to Mexico or becomes an independent Hispanic nation.

I think they lost a fight today, but they win a little by carrying on the status quo too. So I’m not celebrating.

You know what I see for the future (putting on my prophet’s hat here)? I see—certainly in Europe and very possibly in America—ethnic conflict on a scale never before seen in history. Bloodbaths, deportations, genocide and terrorism.

Until somebody charismatic and ruthless rides in on a white horse to impose order.

And I don’t like the thought of him either.