Religion

‘More enthusiasm!’

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When Elisha became sick with the illness of which he was to die, Joash the king of Israel came down to him and wept over him and said, “My father, my father, the chariots of Israel and its horsemen!” Elisha said to him, “Take a bow and arrows.” So he took a bow and arrows. Then he said to the king of Israel, “Put your hand on the bow.” And he put his hand on it, then Elisha laid his hands on the king’s hands. He said, “Open the window toward the east,” and he opened it. Then Elisha said, “Shoot!” And he shot. And he said, “The LORD’S arrow of victory, even the arrow of victory over Aram; for you will defeat the Arameans at Aphek until you have destroyed them.” Then he said, “Take the arrows,” and he took them. And he said to the king of Israel, “Strike the ground,” and he struck it three times and stopped. So the man of God was angry with him and said, “You should have struck five or six times, then you would have struck Aram until you would have destroyed it. But now you shall strike Aram only three times.” (2 Kings 13:14-19)

Tonight’s topic: Underachieving kings with whom I identify.

The Old Testament passage above tells a story that’s always troubled me. I’m not saying I disapprove of Elisha. It just makes me feel awkward. Here we’ve got King Joash of Israel, a monarch who gets a mixed grade from the biblical writers. We’re told that he wasn’t as bad as a lot of other Israelite kings, but wasn’t as zealous as God would like.

Anyway, Joash hears that the prophet Elisha is dying, so he goes to visit him. (The phrase, “the chariots of Israel and its horsemen” is a metaphor – it means that Elisha’s influence was worth battalions to the national defense – as indeed it was.) Elisha gives him an assignment, which turns out to be a test. First he tells him to shoot an arrow out the window. Then he tells him to strike the ground with his arrows. Joash throws three arrows down – and quits.

This does not please Elisha – or, apparently, God either. Elisha tells Joash that he’d have the same number of victories as the arrows he struck on the ground. If he’d been more enthusiastic, he could have changed history. (“Now he tells me,” the king said, I suppose.)

That’s what bothers me. All my life I’ve felt that I’ve done the best I knew how, but it wasn’t considered good enough. Even if I did what I was told, I didn’t do it with enough enthusiasm. So I failed the test.

Same thing with King Saul in 1 Samuel 15. Saul has been commanded by the prophet Samuel to utterly wipe out the Amalekites – destroying even their livestock and property. Saul, in the flush of victory, takes some booty (and the king as a prisoner). Because of that, Samuel tells him God has rejected him as king. Saul grabs Samuel and tears his robe. Samuel tells Saul that God is going to tear his kingdom away from him in the same manner.

Seems pretty harsh, doesn’t it?

But I think my reflexive reaction misses the point. I don’t think God judged Joash or Saul simply on those single failures. I think the failures were symptomatic – they were being judged on their whole lives, and the dramatic scenes were just the moments when matters came to a head.

As Jordan Peterson (or Gregg Horowitz, anyway) says, “The way you do anything is the way you’ll do everything.”

Fiction, Reviews

‘Romeo’s World,’ by James Scott Bell

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First of all, I would like to note (with considerable pride) that there are a few review blurbs printed at the beginning of James Scott Bell’s Romeo’s World, the latest in his long-running Mike Romeo mystery series. And the very first one they use is one of mine, from this very blog, where I say that Mike Romeo is who I want to be when I get younger. This is most gratifying.

Oh, the book? You want to hear about the book too? Fine. Have it your way.

This time out, Mike is down at the beach with his new wife, Sophie, when they see a small plane crash into the ocean a little distance from shore. Mike sets out swimming and just manages to pull a young woman out of the wreckage before the plane sinks. He manages to get her to shore, and she’s in hysterics. She doesn’t want to be seen, she says. He and Sophie get her up to their house, and call a doctor for her. After the woman is cleared for health, she asks Mike to drive her to a neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley, then gets out and walks away.

Shortly after that, Mike is informed that the woman is dead, that she committed suicide. This makes him mad. The man who died in the plane crash was a successful real estate developer, an older man to whom she had been engaged to be married. Mike starts poking into his business, and finds plenty of secrets to be suspicious about. It goes on from there.

Mike Romeo is always fun – he’s a literate cage fighter, a seeker of beauty and virtue as well as justice. His employer and mentor, wheelchair-bound lawyer Ira Rosen, is especially fun to spend time with. I have to report that I saw the big plot twist coming, but still I fully enjoyed Romeo’s World and devoured it quickly.

Recommended, of course.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘The Frontiersmen: A Narrative,’ by Allan W. Eckert

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“We have given you a fine land, Brother, but you will find it under a cloud and a dark and bloody ground.”

When I was a little boy, my greatest hero was Davy Crockett. Still, I occasionally read a book about Daniel Boone. And in the Boone stories, I noticed they sometimes mentioned a man named Simon Kenton. Kenton was generally spoken of in the same breath with Boone, as a man greatly respected on the frontier, a skillful hunter and tracker, and a leader.

But, oddly, I never saw a story about Simon Kenton.

A couple weeks ago I caught a YouTube clip from an interview with Mel Gibson. He mentioned that he was reading a book called The Frontiersmen: A Narrative, by Allan W. Eckert, and that it was about Simon Kenton. “Ah ha!” I thought. “At last I can learn the story of this mysterious man.”

And golly – what a story it is.

Simon Kenton was born in 1755 in Virginia, the son of a poor Irish immigrant father. He was the kind of boy who skipped both farm chores and school to spend time in the woods. A tall and strong boy, he fled “to the territories” at the age of 16, believing he had beaten a romantic rival to death. To evade the law, he adopted the pseudonym “Butler,” under which he lived for many years – until he ran into someone from his home town, who informed him that not only had he not killed his opponent, but he himself was assumed dead.

Gradually his natural gifts for wilderness living made him a renowned hunter. He once rescued Daniel Boone from Indian captivity, and he was himself captured on another occasion – tortured, made to run the gauntlet several times, and finally adopted into the tribe. When he got the chance, he returned to the white settlements, where he claimed a lot of land (most of which he eventually lost) tried to run businesses (which all failed), and participated in the wars for Kentucky and Ohio – where he became a legend.

But The Frontiersmen is a plural title, and there’s a second major thread in this book. That thread follows the life of a truly remarkable man on the other side – the Shawnee chief Tecumseh. Tecumseh’s story rises to the level of true tragedy – he was, by all accounts, a man of great intelligence, decency, and leadership talent. Born into a happier situation, he might have become the founder of a nation – he came close to welding together Native American tribes from all over the continent, in an effort to drive the White Man back. It was likely a hopeless dream, but the extent of his success, even so, was astonishing.

I need to warn you that this story about the “dark and bloody ground” is indeed a dark and bloody story. Some of the cruelties described on both sides may keep you up at night (though one can’t escape the fact that it was the White Man who was the aggressor).

The Frontiersmen is written in novelistic form – the author uses imagined dialogue (always based, he says, on reliable reports – though I have trouble figuring out how he knows what a chief said to his wife in bed). The writing is generally good, not great – I caught some grammatical slips. Also there are a number of OCR misreadings in the e-book text.

Christianity is treated with great respect, which I appreciated. (Kenton, we are told, was gloriously saved in a Methodist church service as a middle-aged man.)

There’s a marvelous epic sweep to The Frontiersmen. I found it compulsive reading, and it moved me – often almost to tears. I highly recommend this book. Cautions for sexual situations and (especially) for scenes of appalling cruelty.

Music

Amelia sings ‘Recessional’

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You probably know about “Amelia,” the purple-haired AI girl created by the British thought police as a character in a propaganda video game. The idea was to present a despicable, bigoted character everybody would hate. Instead, thousands of people embraced her and elevated her to hero status in scores of blessed violations of copyright.

There’s a content creator called Epochalypse which puts Amelia to brilliant use. They’ve made her a singer, doing original songs (now and then), traditional British folk songs (more often), and arrangements of poems by Rudyard Kipling (to especially powerful effect). I, personally, can’t get enough of them.

Above, Rudyard Kipling’s “Recessional,” written for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee.

And I’ll address a possible objection right here — Amelia is an AI creation. I am on record as a foe of AI. Is that not hypocritical?

My answer: Maybe. I’m certainly capable of hypocrisy.

But let me make my position clear: I have credentials in the AI wars. I’m a genuine wounded veteran, someone who lost his living to the technology.

But I try not to be ruled by anger. AI is a tool — a very powerful one, but still a tool. And when I see a tool well-used (as it is here), I reserve the right to praise the tool-wielders.

We will not win the culture wars by refusing to use the tools at our disposal. Feelings don’t come into it. Ethics yes, feelings no.

Have a good weekend.

(I hope I’m not out of line in adding an appeal for prayer. Our friend David Llewellyn Dodds, the Inklings scholar who frequently ornaments our comments section, is having health problems. If you’d lift up a prayer for him, it would be a good thing.)

Uncategorized

Alcuin of York

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Tonight, a tribute to a man to whom every book lover owes an incalculable debt. But do you ever think about Alcuin of York? No, I’ll bet you don’t. You only think about yourself.

The simple video above pretty decently describes that great Englishman’s achievements in the intellectual sphere. Did you know he was the one who popularized putting spaces between words in a text? He didn’t invent the idea — I believe he got it from the Irish. But he took it with him to Charlemagne’s Cathedral School and made it the standard for western Christendom. Also punctuation marks and capitalized first letters of sentences.

The video doesn’t mention the matter Alcuin himself would have considered most important in his life — his work to spread the gospel. His master Charlemagne was essentially a jumped-up Germanic barbarian, and not above letting his sword do the talking for him. In 782 he baptized 4,500 (the number is probably exaggerated) Saxon chiefs who had reneged on an agreement, and then beheaded them on the spot. Alcuin was not pleased about that.

He lived at the very beginning of the Viking Age, and his lament over the sacking of Lindisfarne in 793 is often quoted.

When I was with you, your loving friendship gave me great joy. Now that I am away your tragic sufferings daily bring me sorrow, since the pagans have desecrated God’s sanctuary, shed the blood of saints around the altar, laid waste the house of our hope and trampled the bodies of the saints like dung in the street.

What assurance can the churches of Britain have, if Saint Cuthbert and so great a company of saints do not defend their own? Is this the beginning of the great suffering, or the outcome of the sins of those who live there? It has not happened by chance, but is the sign of some great guilt. You who survive, stand like men, fight bravely and defend the camp of God. 

(Alcuin, letter to Bishop Higbald)

Poetry, Uncategorized

‘Linger a while, thou art so fair!’

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Once again, I’m reading quite a long book, and so am forced to actually think in order to come up with blogging fodder. Consider that your warning.

A while back I did some semi-coherent posts about Art. I was trying to work out – more or less in real time – what beauty is and why it matters to Christians. I got into the similarities (only similarities – they’re not the same thing) between aesthetic experience and religious experience. It all had to do with C.S. Lewis’s Joy and mythopoeia.

But there’s a further point which is – it seems to me – the actual point, and I didn’t quite extract it then. But here it is now:

Art is the effort to eternalize a moment of beauty.

One of the most frustrating things about the pursuit of beauty is that it’s fleeting. Describing Joy, Lewis emphasized the fact that it’s temporary by nature. It comes and goes. Try to maintain it, and it slips through your fingers like a handful of water. Try to recreate it, and it’s shyer than a doe in the forest. (Try to mix your metaphors, and you produce something less than art.)

Nevertheless, the artist’s job is to attempt to recreate the moment of Joy.

He can’t dispense Joy from a container. He can’t cook it up in a pot.

But he can produce a work – it may be a sculpture or a painting or a play or a ballet, or some other example of an artistic medium – that provides an opportunity for Joy to creep in on its own. Sort of like putting seed out to attract a bird.

In Goethe’s play, “Faust,” the magician makes a bargain with Mephistopheles. Mephistopheles promises to serve him as long as he lives. But, as Faust says:

“When I say to the Moment flying; 
'Linger a while -- thou art so fair!' 
Then bind me in thy bonds undying, 
And my final ruin I will bear!”

In other words, Faust will lose the bargain and be damned the moment he experiences something so wonderful that he longs for time to stop.

That’s the artist’s challenge – to generate beauty that “tempts” the audience to desire to prolong the moment.

That puts the artist in Mephistopheles’ place, which is awkward, but we just have to live with that. Artists will never be quite respectable.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Bad Blood,’ by Blake Banner

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Over the years I’ve picked up Blake Banner’s Harry Bauer books from time to time. I neither love nor hate them, but they are entertaining. So, I purchased Bad Blood. It filled the time.

Harry Bauer is one of many highly similar heroes starring in action series these days. Think of Mark Greaney’s Gray Man books. Harry, though an American, used to be part of the British SAS, and is now associated by (yet another) secretive, extra-governmental antiterrorist unit.

As the story begins, he has decided to follow his superiors’ advice and take some down time. He decides to go to Victoria Island, off Mauritania in North Africa. He’s been told it’s a peaceful earthly paradise.

So of course, his first evening there, he witnesses a gang shooting in which a young girl is caught in the crossfire and killed. Holding her hand as she bleeds to death, he swears vengeance. It turns out that the closure of the US border has caused drug cartels to change their supply routes, and now they’re running drugs and women through Victoria Island.

Harry then acquires some weaponry and gets to work setting one gang against the other, in the tradition of “A Fistful of Dollars” or “Yojimbo” (he acknowledges the resemblance). Having wiped out the gangsters on the island, he then proceeds to Mauritania in the style of James Bond, to destroy the secret headquarters of the criminal mastermind.

The book is full of action and entertaining. I was annoyed that the only professed Christian in the story was a major idiot, and another more positive character promoted Buddhism. I suppose I should object more to the violence than to that, but this is an action thriller. I knew what I was signing up for.

Bad Blood was pretty much like every other book in its genre. My verdict is… so-so.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Scarlet Ruse,’ by John D. MacDonald

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She said, “It’s funny. You know? They’ve all said so many things so many ways, there’s nothing left for people to really say to each other. I mean I can say things, but behind it I can hear Cher saying it to Sonny.”

I first read John D. MacDonald’s The Scarlet Ruse back in the 1970s, when it was new. Back in those days you could look forward to a new McGee every year, and everything has gone downhill since that ended, as far as I’m concerned.

In The Scarlet Ruse, McGee, lanky, houseboat-dwelling Fort Lauderdale salvage expert, agrees to help a stamp dealer, as a favor to his economist friend, Meyer. Hersh Fedderman is an honest man with a small but lucrative business, selling stamps to collectors. But not all of his clients are necessarily honest. One in particular he suspects of being a gangster. For this man he has assembled a very valuable collection of rarities, steadily appreciating in value. He keeps the collection in a bank safe deposit box, which can only be accessed by both of them together. Yet somehow, he has discovered, the stamps have been switched out, low-value items substituted. It’s one of those impossible, locked room mysteries. Clearly someone stole the stamps, but the only people with access are the client, Hirsh himself, and his assistant Mary Alice, a long-time employee he trusts implicitly.

It’s a head-scratcher. As he ponders the problem, Trav gets close to Mary Alice, who is exactly the kind of woman he likes – big, beautiful, healthy, and cheerful. Trav is in love – but what about the crime? How was it performed?

Finding the answer to that question will nearly get him killed.

It goes without saying that I enjoyed The Scarlet Ruse. It hasn’t aged well in some ways – particularly in McGee’s musings, which are always engaging but heavily influenced here by his friend Meyer, who seems to be pretty Malthusian in his economics. (Meyer calls his houseboat the John Maynard Keynes, for heaven’s sake.) Also, Travis talks about being won over to the anti-handgun cause – even as he prepares a pistol or two of his own, which he’ll need pretty desperately before he’s done.

But you take McGee as a package, and mostly it’s a top quality package. Recommended, with cautions for violence and mature scenes and themes.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Washington Trail,’ by Lou Aguilar

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Lou Aguilar, like me, writes for the American Spectator (he does it at a rather higher level, though). When he mentioned in an article that he wrote detective thrillers, I thought I’d try one. (Turns out there’s only one thriller so far.) The Washington Trail was a lot of fun. Proust it ain’t, but fun it decidedly is.

Our heroes are Mark Tristan, a former Army Ranger, and Neil Cork, a former FBI analyst, now Washington DC private investigators. Cork is a family man, but Tristan is a bachelor with a pretty flippant attitude to life. He has a car, but he likes to zip around town on a bicycle. He’s a passionate fan of old Western movies, and quotes them constantly.

A beautiful young woman comes to their office and asks them to follow her artist boyfriend and find out why he dumped her. They try to put her off, but she’s insistent. When Tristan starts shadowing the young man, he quickly discovers his secret life, which will not delight their client. But hardly has he delivered the bad news than the young man gets involved in a shooting incident, and suddenly Tristan and Cork are plunged into a three-way conflict involving secretive groups they call (of course) “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.”

The prose in The Washington Trail is passable, but not memorable. The plot and action are, frankly, highly implausible. It’s the characters that lift this book above the level of the herd. Tristan, in particular, is brash and funny and brave, but also relatable (he’s a male fantasy figure, as so many great characters are).

There’s a twist at the end that I saw coming, but it was only one of several.

Author Aguilar is brave, but perhaps foolhardy in making The Washington Trail blatantly political. His conservatism is quite open here – though Trump and Biden are never named as such, references to “the last president” and “the current president” are made in contexts that render it impossible not to figure it out. Most authors would try to be a little more oblique, simply for the sake of potential sales. But Aguilar flies his colors proudly.

So if you’re a liberal, you probably won’t care much for The Washington Trail. But if you’re a conservative looking for a really fun action story, you’ll probably get as big a hoot out of it as I did.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Enemies Among Us,’ by Jeffrey S. Stephens

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A while back I read a novel by Jeffrey S. Stephens which I found entertaining and well-written. Since then I’ve read two more of Stephens’ books to see how they’d be. Enemies Among Us is part of a series starring a continuing hero named Nick Reagan.

Nick Reagan is a high-level CIA operative. One of his old enemies is an Islamist terrorist mastermind called the Handler. In Enemies Among Us, Reagan gets a chance to capture the Handler, but is ordered by his superiors to stand down. Reagan ignores those orders and manages to catch him anyway, then delivers him up in a neat package. But the Handler himself has warned him that there are traitors in the US government, and they’ll both kill him and Reagan to keep their secrets covered. For the rest of the book, Reagan fights and strategizes to stay alive, to protect his friends, and to save the country.

Was Enemies Among Us any good? I didn’t think so.

I found the prose ponderous, and the story moved (for me) very slowly. I often complain about thrillers that never give you a chance to breathe, where the protagonist shrugs off more physical damage than real humans could survive. But in this story, I felt that the action scenes were separated by endless stretches of clumsy writing. The author told us too much, and not very artfully. (He also has a tendency to misplace modifiers.)

I’m sorry to say all that, because Enemies Among Us is very explicitly conservative and pro-American. I appreciated the intention, but I was bored.

Book Reviews, Creative Culture