John Nolte on Oliver Stone: “As long as your politics are in order, no ‘Jewish domination of the media’ comments can hurt you.”

Here’s a little story from the proprietor of The Black Sphere. “The election of Obama reminds me of years ago, when I bought a fake Tag Heuer watch while visiting Manhattan.”

I meant to share some pictures of my weekend in Decorah, Iowa, but I can’t seem to upload anything to Photobucket today. Not sure if it’s their fault or mine. I’ll try again tomorrow.

I rode down with one of the other Vikings, who has relatives in the area with whom we bunked. The festival actually starts on Thursday, but we only took Friday off, and arrived a little after noon. Viking Sam was there with his Viking boat, and a small contingent from the Skjaldborg group from Omaha.

Friday was an amazing day for me. It was stinking hot—tropical hot, southeast Asian hot and humid, as it so often is in Decorah at the end of July, most especially in the little hollow behind the Norwegian immigration museum where the Viking camp has been located for the last few years.

First of all a couple ladies, sisters as it turned out, came into the camp and talked about a Viking festival they’d attended in Norway. Turned out it was Vikingfestivalen Karmøy, which I’ve been trying to get to for the last decade or so. It further developed that they were descendents of Karmøy, home of my great-grandfather, and their family had come from a neighboring farm.

Later, when I went up to Main Street to scrounge up some lunch, a total stranger stopped me and asked, “Are you Lars Walker, the author?”

I expect that’s the only time that’ll ever happen to me in my life, so thanks, whoever you are, for making me feel like a big shot.

Finally, a couple from Illinois wandered into the camp. She was, as it turned out, the president of the organization devoted to saving and preserving The Viking, the replica Viking ship that was sailed from Norway to America for the Columbian Exposition in 1893. It’s been gradually allowed to deteriorate ever since.

As an added bonus, they’re Christians. He’s a retired employee of Moody Broadcasting.

Saturday was OK, the weather actually pleasant (following thunderstorms which soaked my stuff) but my normal insecurities returned, and—oddly—although traffic was heavier, I sold fewer books.

But you can’t have everything.

Thanks to Sam and Skjaldborg for making it possible for me to be there.

Last night I confessed on my Facebook page that I love butterflies and dragonflies. I think my love for butterflies is easily understood. If there are any butterfly haters out there, I’ve never encountered one. Dragonflies, for their part, are cool because they’re beautiful in a sleek, deadly, Viking ship kind of way. As an extra bonus, they devour mosquitoes in large quantities. Every time I see a dragonfly, I want to show my support in some way; buy him a drink and say, “Thank you for your service.” Haven’t worked out a way to do that yet.

Did you ever ponder the word “butterfly?” Where does the butter come in? I did some web searches and discovered (to my delight) that nobody really knows. There are, thank goodness, a few mysteries left in our world. Some say that it’s a confusion of the original name, “flutterby.” That seems to me a little precious, and there seems to be no actual evidence for such a word in history. Some think the word originally only designated the yellow ones, and then expanded to embrace the entire genus. Others say that it’s because butterfly droppings are yellow. Take your pick, or make up one of your own.

By the way, the Norwegian word for butterfly is sommerfugl, which means “summer bird.” What a lovely, poetic name. Illogical, as they have lots of birds in Norway in the summer, but apt.

Much summer heat is being generated by Andrew Breitbart’s story on Shirley Sherrod and her speech to an NAACP meeting. I defended Breitbart in a discussion over at Threedonia earlier today, but on consideration I’ve come to the conclusion that he had a fair point, but bungled the story badly. He was trying to make the reasonable argument that the NAACP shouldn’t call other people racist when its own members laugh and cheer at a story of reverse racism. But he went ahead without having the full story, and should have been aware that Ms. Sherrod, who seems to be a decent person, would be caught in his line of fire.

Talleyrand is supposed to have once said of a political assassination, “It was worse than a crime. It was a blunder.” This was worse than a blunder. It was a sin.

I confess I can imagine myself committing the same sin. Doesn’t make it right, though.

Athol Dickson writes on beauty.

Beauty is not always comfortable. Consider forest fires and lightning. Think of the summit of Mount Everest. Are they not beautiful in their own ways? Yet aren’t they also terrifying? Remember the great white shark again, or a black widow or a lion. Some beauty makes us so uncomfortable we feel the need to set ourselves apart from it. And our desire for distance from some kinds of beauty isn’t only due to danger. We were created to care for the garden. To work it. To organize it and arrange it. This explains the impulse many of us feel to make some kind of change in nature. We trim hedges. We separate flowerbeds from lawns. But what of those who take that impulse further? Who set fire to forests simply to destroy them, hunt for animals they do not eat, and fence off land they do not use? Beauty sometimes makes us sense our smallness. It reminds us we are not in control. It whispers “You are only mortal, and none of this is really yours.” Beauty is not always comfortable.

I read O’Connor’s short stories “The River” and “A Circle in the Fire” recently, and a phrase from the praise on the back cover resonated with me: “some of the most powerful and disturbing fiction written this century.” I normally interpret disturbing fiction as morally ambiguous or reveling in perversion for its nihilistic glory, but O’Connor’s fiction is disturbing in that it requires you to work on it and some of the details are ugly. It isn’t easy, and these two left me asking what I should think about them.

I think part of what disturbed me was my desire to see white and black hats.

In “The River,” a little boy, age 5, is taken to hear a rural preacher who speaks from the muddy river in which he baptizes his listeners. He talks about the kingdom of Christ being a river and entering that kingdom through the river. His message is confusing when he gives it and complicated when repeated by his congregation, but the idea of the river sticks with the boy, and it changes his life. He leaves his family, for whom everything was a joke, and embraces the theology presented by the river preacher.

At first, I thought it disturbing that even a poorly stated gospel message doesn’t result in hope or life. The preacher’s theology is bad. He’s flattered when people say he has healed the sick and wants that to be true, even though he claims he can’t heal anyone. What he says does point to Christ, but he appears to want the signs and wonders, those visible clues to the power of his ministry, so badly that he is willing to fabricate them. Maybe this desire to point to himself is what muddles his sermon. So the preacher and woman who takes the boy to have him baptized don’t wear white hats. They’re more flawed than that. Continue reading White-Black Hats →

This morning on Bill Bennett’s radio show, they interviewed a spokesman for the Special Olympics.

Nothing wrong with that. I have no objection to the Special Olympics per se.

However, I found the spokesman irritating. He never said “mentally disabled”–that’s no surprise. People are expected to say “mentally challenged” nowadays (I think. I may have missed a memo and be a step behind).

But he didn’t say “mentally challenged” either. He used some circumlocution like “people with intellectual differences.” And he kept talking, again and again, about how people with intellectual differences were NO DIFFERENT FROM ANYONE ELSE.

I’m getting tired of this.

Logically, it seems to me, there are only two choices.

You can say, “I want to be treated just like everyone else.” Great. That’s fine. Then don’t ask for special accommodations.

Or you can say, “I need special accommodations.” That’s fine too. But if that’s what you want, don’t pretend you’re NO DIFFERENT FROM ANYONE ELSE. People who are no different from anyone else don’t need special accommodations.

I have a mild handicap. I suffer from an emotional disorder. I don’t hide this, and I let the people who become my friends know about it. I expect them to cut me a little slack, to have different expectations of me, because certain things that normal people can do easily are very, very hard for me.

I’m different from everyone else.

A lot of people in this country seem to think they can change their neighbors’ attitudes through silencing certain words that offend them. It doesn’t work. It just drives people’s attitudes underground, and breeds resentment.

I would never call a person with a mental disability a dummy. But I might use the word to describe some of their advocates.

Stopped at KFC for supper tonight. They were playing mariachi music. I suppose that’s the new normal. Even in Kentucky.

I don’t like mixed metaphors in my dining, though. Of course, my regular Chinese buffet plays Classic Rock. The last time I went there, the hostess, for some reason, was asking me if I knew the names of the various songs that were played. (Probably because there was nobody else in the place.) I think she was trying to assimilate. I only knew one of them (“We Are Family” by the Pointer Sisters). I guess I need to assimilate myself.

I re-wrote my review of the film “Elling” for The American Culture blog. You can read it here, if you want mostly the same thing, with extra pretentiousness.

Finally, here’s Andrew Klavan’s latest “Klavan On Culture” video. I liked it.

From the previously linked article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (they should lengthen their name, don’t you think? How about Atlanta News Journal-Democrat Constitution Dispatch Herald?), here’s a bit common language abuse. Bobby Williams of Smoothie King is quoted.

“McDonald’s is the 900-pound gorilla in the room,” he said. “Whenever they roll with something, it creates a halo effect.”