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The sandwich that swims upstream, and more

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I can’t believe it. My side won in the school tax referendum. It seems like a very long time since I voted on the winning side in anything (although it’s not really that long. On the other hand, this is Minnesota, sometimes known as California Northeast).

Now comes the really ugly part—the part where the educational establishment takes its revenge. We know what they’ll do. They’ll do what all hostage-takers do. They’ll say, “We told you not to call the cops, but you had to go and call the cops. Now we’ll have to cut one of the kid’s ears off. We don’t want to cut his ear off. It breaks our hearts, frankly. But you’ve made the choice. It’s out of our hands. You forced us to do this.”

I’m not feeling terribly well tonight. I think I may have a cold. Or perhaps I’m coming down with the flu. I never get flu shots. I prefer the thrill of danger. And let’s face it, even the worst case consequence isn’t that bad. I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m not really very well gifted for this living business. I’d probably employ my time better in some other form of activity.



News From Norway: According to the November issue of Viking Magazine, the publication of the Sons of Norway, McDonald’s of Norway added a new menu item last August. It’s called the McSalmon, and is a fish filet wrap available “in honey and wasabi” (what the heck is “wasabi?”). At the present time it’s only available in God’s Country, but it may go global if it’s a success.



Here’s an idea I came up with today for a bumper sticker. I give it to you at no charge:



“IF YOU’RE NOT PART OF THE SOLUTION, YOU’RE PROBABLY MINDING YOUR OWN BUSINESS. THANKS FOR THAT.”

Authors, Fiction

The Books are Dark, but the Movie May Not Be

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File this under Waiting to See. I gather that several people have seen the Snopes article on the upcoming movie, The Golden Compass. The outcry is that the movie will be as atheistic and anti-church as the books are, but I don’t know that to be true yet.

Months ago when we first talked about this, I remember reading the spiritual themes of the movies would not be like the books. That belief is backed up by this EW article, in which Catholic actress Nicole Kidman says, “The Catholic Church is part of my essence. I wouldn’t be able to do this film if I thought it were at all anti-Catholic.” The article reports, “Conspicuously absent, for instance, is any reference to Catholicism; instead, the malevolent organization that snatches children to surgically remove their souls is referred to in the movie only as the Magisterium.”

So the movie may not be the atheist tract some are thinking it is, regardless what the author says about the books. It is the movie coming out in December, not the books, which have been around for several years, so (perhaps this is a point too technical) Pullman did not write the movie just as Tolkien did not write the adaptation of The Lord of the Rings. Scriptwriters adapted both works for the big screen, which means there will be differences.

So will the movie be a hateful diatribe? I don’t know. The books are another matter. Note this summary from a 2001 story in Crisis Magazine:

That is because Lyra is, as Mrs. Coulter learns from a witch she has tortured to death, Mother Eve reincarnate, destined to bring about a redemption from original sin.

Pullman’s treatment of the Catholic Church in his fantasy-Oxford world is at times imaginative (he names one of the popes John Calvin the First). But it is also unflattering. Mary Malone, a physicist introduced late in The Subtle Knife, says, “I used to be a nun you see. I thought physics could be done to the glory of God, till I saw there wasn’t any God at all and that physics was more interesting anyway. The Christian religion is a very powerful and convincing mistake, that’s all.” What is a seven-year-old to make of that?

Note also the blasphemous quotation at the beginning this article. For a lengthy consideration of Pullman’s writing, see this Touchstone article by Leonie Caldecott, in which she calls Pullman “anti-Inkling.” She sums up the books (not the movie) this way:

Pullman may be a spellbinding magician painting an awe-inspiring scenario of hugely ambitious scope, but I suspect that in His Dark Materials he is trying to remodel the universe to his own taste. It is a kind of Luciferian enterprise to try to do in his story what Sauron tries to do in The Lord of the Rings. Or indeed to believe one can co-opt this power for good, as those whom the Ring has tempted, like Boromir, or even Frodo at the end of his quest, try to do.

Reviews

The Forgotten Man, by Robert Crais

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Today I voted. In my little corner of the republic, we were faced with only two decisions, both of them education related. One was the election of school board members. I voted for none of them, since their bios in the local giveaway newspaper made them all look indistinguishable to me. Margaret Sanger crossed with John Dewey.

The big question was whether we wanted to approve a property tax increase for education. According to our lords and masters, our school district will soon be reduced to teaching the kids in one-room schoolhouses with dirt floors and wooden benches.

Come to think of it, that might not be bad. The kids who went to those one-room schools generally learned to read and do their sums. Our present system can’t make the same boast.

Of course my true reason for voting “No” is my selfishness and bigotry. As a bloated member of the plutocracy, my true fear is that the brilliant plans of the National Educational Association will be brought to fruition. If that should happen, all our children will become geniuses and paragons of postmodern virtue. In short order they will end poverty, cure all diseases, stop global warming, abolish war, and prove scientifically that there is no God. This threatens my vested interests and entrenched power, so I’m fighting a vicious, yet futile, rear guard action against the tide of history.

The Forgotten Man is another Robert Crais novel. It really isn’t my intention to review a string of Crais novels all in a row. If I were following my inclinations alone, I’d be reviewing a string of Stephen Hunter novels all in a row, but just at this point in my life I’m cutting back on book buying. So I’m only reading stuff I can check out of the library or find at Half Price Books. My library carries no Hunter, and I’ve bought everything HPB has by him at this point. So I picked up some Crais, and that’s no form of suffering at all. The more Crais I read, the better I like him.

Once again in this book, detective Elvis Cole is forced to deal with the shadows of his dysfunctional childhood. His mother, who was loving but psychotically delusional, always told him that his father (whose name he’s never known) was a human cannonball in a circus. In flashbacks we see how the young Cole ran away from home time after time, searching carnivals for the right daredevil, without any success.

But now, a possible father has come to him (sort of). An unidentified older man, bizarrely tattooed all over his body with religious pictures, has been murdered in an alley. The policewoman who heard his last words says he told her that he was Elvis Cole’s father, come to Los Angeles to find his son.

Cole has been elevated to public hero status by his last case, in which he rescued the kidnapped son of the woman he loves. But in the aftermath she moved away, deciding (and Cole knows she’s right) that being with him is too dangerous a life for a mother who has a child to protect. Since then Cole has been in a funk. He hasn’t even visited his office.

The one thing that could draw him out, though, is the chance to at last learn the identity of his father. He gets permission from the police to assist in the case. But the man is a ghost. He seems to have no name, no past. All Cole learns at first is that the man made several outcalls to prostitutes.

Not to sleep with them. To pray with them. To pray for forgiveness for sins he wouldn’t name.

The story also offers healthy helpings of familiar supporting characters like Joe Pike, Cole’s Psycho Killer Friend™, and Detective Carol Stark, the heroine of Demolition Angel (Crais fixed her up with an FBI agent at the end of that book, but apparently decided he could make better use of her if he had her shamelessly throwing herself at Cole, so he unattached her again).

I’ve been impressed, as I’ve read the Elvis Cole books, by the way in which Crais has deepened and enriched what started out as a fairly shallow, perpetually adolescent character, the kind of detective who wears Hawaiian shirts and decorates his office with Disney collectibles. But maybe I failed to recognize that this was Crais’ intention from the start. The clock on Cole’s wall is a Pinocchio clock, and the figurine on his desk is Jiminy Cricket. And what is Pinocchio but the puppet who needs to learn moral lessons in order to become a real boy?

Religion

Curable Romantics

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The weather has turned on us, like a girlfriend (I’ve read about such people) who suddenly won’t talk to you, and you ask her what’s wrong and she says, “If you don’t know, there’s no point in me saying anything.”

What I mean is, the weather turned to the winter side today. Oh, it’s not freezing (not quite). And it’s not snowing (although Lileks says a few flakes fell this morning). But the winter attitude is there. We’ve got a wind, sharpened with a carborundum stone. It wants to blow my hat away. It wants to give me a cold, or the flu if I let my guard down. And in combination with sunset coming an hour earlier now, we all know it’s time to stop lying to ourselves and to admit that summer was an aberration, a parole. This is the real world. This is Life, unpainted and raw.

Once again we have offended God with our ingratitude. That’s why we schedule a day at the end of the month for giving thanks, as a student gives the teacher an apple or a box of chocolates toward the end of term, in hopes that his previous slacking will be forgotten.



Iowahawk has posted scans of a book by Munro Leaf, most famous for the pacifist classic, Ferdinand the Bull. In 1942, Leaf sang a much more martial tune.

Dinesh D’Souza offers a spirited rebuttal today to the argument that “Hitler was a Christian,” noting quite properly that Hitler hated Christianity but adored Darwin.

In my novel Wolf Time, I noted that Nazism was compounded of Darwinism and Romanticism. I’m a big fan (as was C. S. Lewis) of much of the stuff that went on in the Romantic period in art and literature. That was the age when the Icelandic sagas gained thousands of readers, when the Grimms collected peasant fairy tales and Edvard Grieg worked Norwegian folk music into haunting orchestral works. Various European ethnic groups rediscovered their cultural histories, and—and this was very important—began to look at the common person, the peasant, as something more than a beast of burden. This helped to advance education and democracy.

But there was a downside. The celebration of the ethnic too easily overflowed into plain racism and xenophobia. The Norwegian, reading an Icelandic saga and saying, “We are as great as the Romans,” often went on to say, “…and we’re much better than the Poles.” The Darwinian idea of the survival of the fittest provided a scientific veneer for theories of racial superiority, and Nazism was born.

I’ve read that there are strong elements of neo-Nazism among some (not all) groups of Asatru (Thor and Odin worshippers) today. I’ve known several Asatru. We used to have them in our Viking Age Society, before our Great Schism. Some of them were people I liked, and some I didn’t like so much. I never heard any of them express racist views, but I never discussed the issue with any of them, either. So I can’t accuse them in this matter.

But I will say this. There is, within the Christian scriptures, ample authority for rejecting any view of human superiority on the basis of race. I see no such authority within the traditional documents of Norse mythology. I think that the Asatru (and all moderns who reject Christianity) are depending on the basic goodness of themselves and their friends to protect them from racism.

I don’t believe in the basic goodness of myself or my friends. I believe in the restraint provided by the authority of the Word of God.

Uncategorized

Maybe Treebeard Should Speak Up for Sherwood

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Sherwood Forest is now 450 acres, down from 100,000, and come Britons are concerned, saying the forest is one of England’s essential features. Only 450 ancient oaks are still alive. I wonder what that ancient shepherd of trees, Treebeard, would say about this.

Goofing

Look Out!! They’re Coming to Your Town Too

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The Springfield, Oregon, police have been overrun by gnomes among other things. “Somebody stole 75 lawn ornaments from around town and placed them meticulously on and around the lawn of one house on Oct. 17,” reports the AP. Now they are at the police station.

“We need to get them out of here,” Capt. Richard Harrison said.

Oh, yes, you do, Captain Harrison, but that won’t be the last of them. They will come again, and they will come here too. The gnomes are on the move!

Fiction, Reviews

The Dark River by John Twelve Hawks (JXIIH)

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I agreed to review The Dark River, second in the Fourth Realm trilogy, in part because I had not read the first book. I thought I could give a unique perspective. Most reviewers would have read the first book, wouldn’t they? After I agreed, I thought I may have made a mistake. I read somewhere that the plot was so complex a reader should start with book one, and if I had picked up The Two Towers without any knowledge of the rest of The Lord of the Rings story, I’d be lost at the start. But I didn’t have any trouble following the story. There are many times the narrative recalls past events, all of which could be part of book one, but I don’t know and not knowing didn’t hinder my enjoyment of the story here.

The story begins exploring the black hats’ attempts to eliminate the white hats. The black hats in this story are The Brethren, a high-tech, international organization that wants to virtually imprison all free people through data networks, security checks, and surveillance cameras. They believe that once everyone in the world agrees to being watched or recorded for security reasons then everyone will become fairly controllable. The Brethren believe people are fundamentally products of their environment, so if the environment can be completely controlled, then everyone in it can be controlled. This belief earned the black hats the label Tabula by the white hats, who are Travelers and Harlequins. Continue reading The Dark River by John Twelve Hawks (JXIIH) →

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Set Clocks Back

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“To wake the sleepers high and low,

And rouse them to the urgent hour!”

Daylight Saving Time ends tonight, so if you are affected by the time change, turn your clocks back one hour. By way of encouragement, I pass on this news:

Pedestrians walking during the evening rush hour are nearly three times more likely to be struck and killed by cars than before the time change, two scientists calculate. Ending daylight saving time translates into about 37 more U.S. pedestrian deaths around 6 p.m. in November compared to October, the researchers report.

Have a good weekend.

Fiction

I Am Legend Coming Next Month

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Will Smith is in another sci-fi novel adaptation, this time I Am Legend by Richard Matheson, which has been adapted twice before. Apparently, a four writer team undertook this adaptation. Either that or two writers adapted a previous two-writer adaptation. Matheson has many stories in the public mind, in part because he worked on The Twilight Zone, in part because authors like Ray Bradbury, Stephen King, and Dean Koontz have praised his work highly. Another adaptation from him, one of a script seen on The Twilight Zone, is coming in the movie The Box. Still another in The Incredible Shrinking Man.

From what I understand of the story, I Am Legend can’t be called a vampire tale, though there are vampires in it. It’s better described as a post-apocalypse story, focusing on a man as a representative of all mankind. Speaking of the Matheson’s book, Dan Schneider says it focuses “on human loneliness. . . Its insights into what it is to be human go far beyond genre.” (Spoiler warning on that link.) It could be a good movie. Probably is a good book.

Book Reviews, Creative Culture