A journalist in search of a paper
On stopping swords, with swords
This will have to be a short post. My new publisher is finally calling on me for input in getting my book put together, so I can’t give my topic the word count it deserves.
But here’s tonight’s Provocative Thesis™:
All liberals are Christians.
Even if they’re atheists. Even if they’re Jewish or Buddhist or New Age or “Spiritual, Not Religious.”
They’re Christian heretics, but they’re Christian heretics. Continue reading On stopping swords, with swords
Ugly Imagery
Thomas Jefferson, who was not always right about things but is still a pretty quotable leader, gave us this bit of ugly word imagery: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”
In related news, things in Iraq are on the upswing.
The Power of Words
Thomas Sowell has a good article on word usage. He writes, “The expression, ‘It goes without saying. . .’ is a fatal trap. Few things go without saying. Some of the most valuable things in life may go away without saying– whether loved ones in one’s personal life or the freedom or survival of a nation.”
The time is overdue for saying things.
The Forge by Seamus Heaney
All I know is a door into the dark.
Outside, old axles and iron hoops rusting;
Inside, the hammered anvil’s short-pitched ring,
The unpredictable fantail of sparks
Or hiss when a new shoe toughens in water.
The anvil must be somewhere in the centre,
Horned as a unicorn, at one end square,
Set there immoveable: an altar
Where he expends himself in shape and music.
Sometimes, leather-aproned, hairs in his nose,
He leans out on the jamb, recalls a clatter
Of hoofs where traffic is flashing in rows;
Then grunts and goes in, with a slam and a flick
To beat real iron out, to work the bellows.
Read more from this great Irish poet here.
Sigrid Undset on Russia
Today at The Brussels Journal, Thomas F. Bertonneau gives a synopsis of a fascinating report written by author Sigrid Undset (one of my favorites) following her escape from occupied Norway through Russia and Japan during World War II.
At least one western intellectual wasn’t duped by Stalin.
HUUUUGE NEWS!!!!!!!
At least, it’s huge news if you’re a Viking buff. Or a Viking buff particularly interested in western Norway, anyway. Karmøy island, specifically.
OK, it’s huge news if you’re me.
You’ve certainly seen pictures of the Oseberg Viking ship. It looks like this.
The Oseberg ship, along with the Gokstad ship, were both discovered in remarkable states of preservation in grave mounds in the eastern part of Norway in the 1880s. They were painstakingly reconstructed, and are now viewed by thousands of visitors annually in the Viking Ships Museum in Oslo. Two women had been buried in the Oseberg ship; a man in the Gokstad.
But nobody knew the Oseberg ship’s secret history. Now it appears that history is coming to light. Continue reading HUUUUGE NEWS!!!!!!!
Today’s Question
So let’s talk about politics and civil government a bit. Do you hope he fails?
Preserving Imagination
Disturbing Certainty
Moral relativism has distrubingly clear results when applied by national leaders. Historian Paul Johnson talks about it in context of a feature in The New Criterion. Johnson asks:
What are the salient evils of our time? They are two-fold. One is social engineering, the idea that human beings can be changed, improved and moved about as though they are quantities of cement or concrete. Today, virtually all regimes, whether democratic, dodgy or outright totalitarian, practise social engineering. Not least Gordon Brown’s crumbling New Labour set-up, where virtually all the innumerable quangos it has created are designed to engineer the population in a direction designated by government. However, this, in turn, is made possible by the second and far more serious evil, moral relativism — the belief that there are no absolute standards of right and wrong, good for all human beings everywhere and in all ages, and that there is no such thing as unconditional truth.
Introducing The New Criterion feature, Roger Kimball writes:
It wasn’t that long ago that a responsible educated person in the West was someone who entertained firm moral and political principles. When those principles were challenged, he would typically rise to defend them. The more serious the challenge, the more concerted the defense.
Today, as the Canadian writer William Gairdner reminds us in his little-noticed but excellent new study of relativism, the equivalent educated person is likely to have a very different attitude towards whatever moral and political ideas—”principles” is no longer the right word—he lives by. When those ideas are challenged, deference to the challenger rather than defense of the principles is the order of the day. “While perhaps more broadly learned” than his less forgiving predecessor, such a person, Gairdner writes, “is more likely to think of him or herself as proudly distinguished by the absence of ‘rigid’ opinions and moral values, to be someone ‘tolerant’ and ‘open.'”