I have a new disaster to report.

I had my semiannual visit from the AC/Heating guy today. He discovered that my 1984-model air conditioner is down for the count. Dead. Defunct. Gone to join the Choir Invisible. “It had a heart attack,” the service guy said. In technicalese, the condenser blew and it’s not worth replacing in such an old unit.

So now I have to go through the hassle and expense of replacing the thing, through my homeowner’s warranty company. Much mirth to follow, I’m confident.

If you were worried about my Mock Bløtkake last Friday, I’m almost sorry to have to report that it went pretty well. The Cool Whip didn’t slide off the sides of the cake, downward into oblivion like my writing career. It was pretty much a success. So where’s the humor in that?

I noticed something interesting in my reading of Vol. 3 of The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, edited by Walter Hooper. Hooper includes biographical sketches of a number of Lewis’ most important or prolific correspondents. Among them is the late Kathryn Lindskoog, who spent much of the later part of her life accusing Hooper of creating fraudulent Lewis stories, which he then passed off as Lewis’ own work.

In the sketch about Kathryn Lindskoog, Hooper says nothing at all of that aspect of her career.

However, in the sketch on scholar Alistair Fowler, he details how Fowler has given personal testimony that Lewis showed him the Dark Tower fragment “as far back as 1962.” The Dark Tower is the document that Lindskoog particularly singled out for attack.

But again here, Hooper is silent about that side of the matter.

I consider this very classy on Hooper’s part. If I’d taken the heat he’s taken, I fear I would have found some way to make the connection explicit, to do a little victory dance.

But I’m a small vindictive man, who relishes petty vengeances.

Hooper has earned even more of my respect.

I’m in a rantin’ mood today, buckaroos. There shall be links. There shall be outrage. There shall be metaphors strained like gnats and camels. There shall be depressive, hopeless prognostications about how the world is going by hand to a h*llbasket.

But stay with me. I plan to end on a positive note. If I survive.

First of all, why should I be the only Minnesotan with (or in) a blog who isn’t writing about the decision of the Minneapolis Star & Tribune (better known locally as “the Strib,” or “the Star & Sickle,” or “the Red Star”) to cancel James Lilek’s daily column and move him to a reporting gig.

This is the kind of innovative, forward-looking thinking that’s got the paper buying more barrels of red ink than black these days. At the rate the Stars & Garters is devaluing, I’m saving up my own spare change against the day when I’ll be able to buy it myself.

I can’t cancel my subscription, because I haven’t subscribed in decades. The last time I bought a copy of the paper, shortly after I returned to God’s Country from Florida, I read the following in the newspaper ombudsman’s column (quoted from memory):

Q: Why didn’t you ever refer to the Unabomber as a “left-wing radical,” since you regularly call abortion clinic bombers “right-wing radicals?”

A: It would be inaccurate to call the Unabomber a left-winger. He criticized the Democrats as much as he criticized the Republicans.

Me: And we all know abortion clinic bombers never criticize Republicans.

It’s bad enough reading people who can’t reason any better than that. It’s insufferable to be lectured to by people who can’t reason any better than that.

But Lileks’ll do OK. He’s already bigger than the Strib. He’ll be able to write his own ticket.

And it’ll be a funny one.

So, the pro-American won the election in France. This is a good thing, but I’m cautious.

It seems to me the real solution to France’s problem is the mass deportation of millions of unassimilated immigrants. And that ain’t gonna happen.

My uncle Orvis alerted me to this excellent article from Brussels Journal: The Rape of Europe by Paul Belien.

The German author Henryk M. Broder recently told the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant (12 October) that young Europeans who love freedom, better emigrate. Europe as we know it will no longer exist 20 years from now. Whilst sitting on a terrace in Berlin, Broder pointed to the other customers and the passers-by and said melancholically: “We are watching the world of yesterday.” Europe is turning Muslim.

As Broder is sixty years old he is not going to emigrate himself. “I am too old,” he said. However, he urged young people to get out and “move to Australia or New Zealand. That is the only option they have if they want to avoid the plagues that will turn the old continent uninhabitable.”

Hal G. P. Colebatch posted a great piece today at The American Spectator, (the best darn conservative journal in the whole durn world, after all), about the lack of seriousness with which our present war is being conducted:

In 1940, during the most desperate part of World War II, amid an avalanche of disasters, a British ship named the Lancastria was bombed and sunk as it was evacuating British troops from the collapse of France. It is thought that more than 3,000 soldiers died aboard this one ship — the equivalent of an entire brigade gone at a stroke.

Newly-appointed Prime Minister Winston Churchill, not knowing how many more disasters Britain could take, at once ordered that the story be suppressed. Nothing was said about it in Britain during the war, and it has remained little known to this day.

Very insightful, as Colebatch’s stuff always is. I’m proud to say that he’s a friend of mine, at least by e-mail. He’s a fellow Baen author as well as a fellow Spectator columnist.

I just worked up the courage to start reading The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis. (I think this volume has reached the actual physical size limit for a book that a man can be expected to actually carry around and read on the bus or in a coffee shop. It may be above the maximum for most women. It’s 1,810 pages.) Lewis is a congenial spirit for me, not least because he’s constitutionally pessimistic, always expecting some kind of disaster to knock at the door. One of the first letters in this collection [covering 1950-1963] is to his friend Cecil Harwood, on the news that Harwood’s wife has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. “Still love to both: I wish it were of better quality—I am a hard, cold, black man inside and in my life have not wept enough.” That problem would be remedied.

It’s interesting to note the things Lewis worries about, writing in the early ’50s. He worries about China, in relation to the Korean War. He also worries about Persia, the place we now call Iran, interestingly enough, but he’s worried about the Communists operating there, not radical Muslims.

There’s comfort in this, I think. One obvious lesson is, as Roseanne Rosanadana used to say, “It’s always something.” The halcyon days we look back to, when the world was safe and secure, never really existed.

But there’s another lesson, I think. And that’s that Lewis, for all his obsessive worry, didn’t know what was going to happen. The things he feared never took place. The Russians didn’t roll over Europe. Communism, in fact, was doomed. No one could guess it back then. The challenge we face today is arguably worse, but it’s a different challenge from the ones Lewis and everyone else expected.

We don’t know the future. Unexpected disaster may be on its way, but it’s equally likely that rescue may be coming from a direction we never guessed.

And you know what? If we just mope around (as I tend to do) and say, “It’s over. It’s done. Europe’s lost. America’s going. Prepare for the end,” we’re doing precisely what I’ve criticized the Democrats in Congress for doing—telling the enemy they’ve won.

They’ve only won if we let them. The only war they’re winning is the morale war. The wonderful thing about a morale war is that all you have to do to win is decide to win.

How am I today? Better, I think. A little better.

For one thing, the long-awaited third volume of The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis finally arrived. Each volume has been longer than one before, and this one tallies in at 1,810 pages, including the index. It’s going on the shelf for now, but the next time I’m laid up with a multiple fracture of the leg, I’ll have my reading material ready.

I know it’s silly to look for divine signs in the day’s events, but on the way to work this morning I tried to fill up with gas at The Station That Usually Has the Lowest Price. I noted that the toll seemed to have gone up from yesterday, but I was there, and they’re usually the cheapest, so I assumed everybody else had jumped too, and I tried a fill-up. But the lock on my locking gas cap was frozen, and I didn’t have any spray to loosen it, so I drove off in a huff (actually I drove off in my Tracker, but you know what I mean).

This afternoon I stopped at Another Station That Sometimes Has the Lowest Price. Not only did my gas cap open (it was a little warmer today, so it probably melted in the sun), but the price was a full dime a gallon lower than my previous stop.

This undeserved bounty pleased me inordinately. I took it (for no rational or biblical reason) as a sign that God isn’t against me. Not completely, anyway.

Perspective is important, but it’s not my strong suit. There are probably people reading this entry who face the loss of loved ones, to disease or war. What are my problems compared to theirs? I’m sure they’d gladly have a mortgage foreclosed on them if it meant the restoration of their friend or family member.

And when I think it out, my situation isn’t so awful. I got notice in time so that I can still place an ad in the February issue of the Minnesota Christian Chronicle. That means it’s possible I could have a replacement sometime next month.

In storytelling, the dynamics of plot are always the same, whether it’s a literary story about an intellectual with writer’s block (unless it’s something experimental and self-indulgent), or a thriller about international counterterrorists and nuclear devices. The point of the story is always to change somebody. And the change always comes through pain and struggle.

You never read a story where somebody gets good advice, from a friend or from a book, and decides, “Hey, that’s right! I’m going to change the way I handle my life!” and everything is resolved right there.

The change always comes through conflict and hard times. I don’t think that’s only because it makes for a more interesting story.

I think it’s because it’s the way life is for real people.

God is trying to teach me something. So He’s doing what I’d do if I were writing my life—He’s making things hard for me.

Hope it works.