I heard of this book recently, and it appears you can read it online. If not, you can at least read several pages of John McWhorter’s Doing our own thing: the degradation of language and music and why we should, like, care. I think the media-saturated world has given great influence to people who care more about being cool and comfortable than being eloquent, educated, or edifying. How did valley girl slang spread throughout the country? Because the pretty, young hedonists live near one of the media-centers of the world.
Loving the Unlovely
Amy Henry has a post on the new book, Same Kind of Different as Me. I doubt this kind of Christian unselfishness can be taught in sermons. It has to be modeled, challenged, and inspired by those around us.
“This is what warriors did.”
I’d meant to review Dean Koontz’ Your Heart Belongs to Me tonight, but it’s Veterans Day, and instead I’ll share a short excerpt from Grossman and Frankowski’s The Two-Space War, which I reviewed not long ago.
Across the countless centuries warriors have taken their cues from the “Old Sarge.” There was always an Old Sarge. He was the veteran of twenty battles, and he was calm. Weeping and becoming emotional at the memory of combat was not acceptable because, across the centuries, warriors found that the way to continue performing the desperate, wretched, debasing, dirty job of combat was by controlling your emotions, dividing your pain, and making friends with the memories. Every night, around the campfire, or over hot food with their messmates, this age-old process continued.
In these sessions the men also sorted out what had actually happened. In Alexis Artwohl’s twenty-first century law enforcement research, almost a quarter of the combat veterans she interviewed had memory distortions. They actually “remembered,” sometimes with vivid intensity, something that did not happen. And half of these veterans had experienced memory loss, with significant gaps in the memory of what happened. Left to their own devices, there was a tendency to “fill in the gaps” with guilt-laden acceptance of responsibility, sometimes even with a greatly exaggerated sense of guilt. “It’s all my fault.” “I let my buddies down.” “I was a failure.” These were the kinds of responses felt by many men after combat. Only their mates, the ones who shared the event with them, could help them fill in the holes accurately. And only their friends, their comrades who had shared the searing experience of combat, only they could give understanding, acceptance, and forgiveness of the events that had occurred.
Every day, day after day, this is what occurred. This is what warriors did.
Martin Luther, founding father
Our friend Dr. Gene Edward Veith quotes a letter from James Madison today, in which this “Father of the Constitution” credits Dr. Luther’s Doctrine of the Two Kingdoms as an inspiration for the American religious model.
It illustrates the excellence of a system which, by a due distinction, to which the genius and courage of Luther led the way, between what is due to Caesar and what is due God, best promotes the discharge of both obligations.
Top 10 Marine Corp Movies
Kurt Schlichter, an Army guy, of Big Hollywood gives us a list of recommendable movies staring characters in the U.S. Marines.
Socialism: Perpetual Civil War
Wednesday is Veteran’s Day, first observed as Armistice Day because on that day World War I ended. “World War I, then normally referred to simply as The Great War (no one could imagine any war being greater!), ended with the implementation of an armistice [temporary cessation of hostilities in this case until the final peace treaty, the infamous Treaty of Versailles, was signed in 1919] between the Allies and Germany at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of November, 1918,” according to a history page on the U.S. Army’s website.
Continue reading Socialism: Perpetual Civil War
Happy birthday, Martin Luther
No hidden message is implied by my noting that today is Martin Luther’s birthday. I am a Lutheran, and am grateful to God for the work He accomplished through the man from Eisleben. He had plenty of flaws and committed his share of sins, but he was God’s man.
“All who call on God in true faith, earnestly from the heart, will certainly be heard, and will receive what they have asked and desired, although not in the hour or in the measure, or the very thing which they ask. They will obtain something greater and more glorious than they had dared to ask.”
That’s probably all you’ll get from me tonight. I have a late appointment.
Autumn’s best
I got off a line today that I thought was pretty good. Over at Threedonia, Mike Kriskey had posted a link to this article about all the trouble scientists have been having with the Large Hadron Collider. The article quoted Dr. Holger Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute, who, along with Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan wrote a series of articles over the past year and a half in which they (semi-seriously) suggested that the project wouldn’t work because God “rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them.”
I wrote in a comment that, according to recent reports, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is drafting a resolution to bestow its blessing on Higgs particles.
Well, I thought it was funny.
What a nice weekend. I don’t think I’ve been able to say that a single time before since last winter. Finally now, when the kindly part of the year is almost past, we’ve actually gotten a stretch of good days.
Saturday was especially nice for me, as I did absolutely nothing in the way of chores or maintenance (except for washing clothes, which is a Friday night job and therefore doesn’t count). Instead I spent the afternoon with four other Vikings at one of the guys’ houses, training for live steel combat. We have a new guy, a college student, who seems to be as unhappy as I am to be stuck in this millennium, and was champing at the bit for some cold steel action.
But it was a good exercise for all of us, and did my spirit a world of good. Afterwards our host made hamburgers and brats, and we watched the almost good Viking movie, The Viking Sagas (better than most on authenticity, weak on story, characters and acting). It was the kind of guys’ outing I haven’t had enough of most of my life, because of my peculiar tastes and interests. How bully to have a gang of like-minded sociopaths to hang out with in my old age.
WWI Reading
Here’s a link to an archive of World War I poetry.
And here’s what soldiers in trenches were reading.
Artwork Remembering the Victims of Communism
On this day, the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall:
(via The Heritage Foundation)