"Marxist scientific efficiency has given us in three generations what it took the royal houses of Europe sixteen generations of inbreeding to achieve"

"...an “elite” so profoundly dumb they couldn’t pour p*ss out a boot with instructions on both sides." That line ought to win some kind of award. A classic. Here's the whole paragraph. I don’t believe in grand historical conspiracies, or in designs that go on over generations. The right suffers from a bad case of “the individualists failed to organize” and the left, by now in its third generation of social dominance, is approaching the sort of behavior and IQ one saw in the last days of the Soviet Union. Or if you prefer, Marxist scientific efficiency has given us in three generations what it took the royal houses of Europe sixteen generations of inbreeding to achieve: an “elite” so profoundly dumb they couldn’t pour p*ss out a boot with instructions on both sides. Here's the link: https://pjmedia.com/trending/2017/06/24/a-cultural-revolution-in-slow-motion/ It's a quite serious article that alleges we need to be wary, because the "Idiot Left" in the US (and elsewhere, I hasten to add) looks and acts so idiotic, we have to remembe it was just such idiots -- most of them of high-school and college age, that were the foot soldiers in Mao's infamous cultural revolution. And their the spoiled rich kids of our "betters" in the U.S. (and elsewhere). And here's an very interesting document on why the Left just "doesn't get it." https://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/2017/06/25/process-vs-product-why-the-dems-keep-losing/ The prose isn't so fine as in the above article, but still, excellent insight. Here it is: Supporters of the Democratic candidate Jon Ossoff after his loss in Georgia on Tuesday night. Credit David Goldman/Associated Press In her much-read New York Times column “Donald Skunks the Democrats,” Maureen Dowd skates quite close to the truth before swerving off into mendacious Timesland fantasy. Writing in the aftermath of Jon Ossoff’s embarrassing defeat by Karen Handel in Georgia, Dowd begins by acknowledging the obvious: You know who is really sick and tired of Donald Trump winning, to the point where they beg, “Please, Mr. President, sir, it’s too much”? Democrats. Yep.  The Democrats, as Dowd, says, “just got skunked four to nothing in races they excitedly thought they could win because everyone they hang with hates Trump.” “To skunk,” verb, transitive: “to defeat someone overwhelmingly in a game or contest, especially by preventing them from scoring at all.” Why did this happen? Dowd peeps gingerly over the inky ideological carapace of the Times: “If Trump is the Antichrist, as they believe, then Georgia was going to be a cakewalk, and Nancy Pelosi was going to be installed as speaker before the midterms by acclamation.” “If.” But what if not? The Georgia race, just like all the other special elections since November 9, “turned into another soul-sucking disappointment.” Does that mean—could it be—that Donald Trump is not the Antichrist after all? The logic of Dowd’s argument hints at that awful possibility.  But that flicker of sanity is quickly extinguished by a cataract of Demspeak. Dowd quotes Democratic Congressman Tim Ryan of Ohio. Yes, it’s Trump 4, Dems zero, Ryan admits.  But why? How could this be? Trump does robo calls. He tweets. He talks about the races. He motivates his base, and he moves the needle, and that’s a problem for us. Guys, we’re still doing something wrong here because a) he’s president and b) we’re still losing to his candidates. Memo to Tim Ryan (and please pass it along to Maureen Dowd): Republicans are winning all over the country, as much or more in local and states races as in national ones, not because Donald Trump makes robo calls, because he tweets, or because he “motivates the base.” Nope, the Republicans are winning everywhere because people like what they are selling. They especially like what Donald Trump is selling: an America-first attitude that unapologetically makes the U.S. economy and U.S. national security top priorities. (Nebraska Dem. Official on Scalise: 'I'm Glad He Got Shot ... I Wish He Was F*cking Dead' See: https://pjmedia.com/trending/2017/06/23/nebraska-dem-official-on-scalise-im-glad-he-got-shot-i-wish-he-was-dead/ ) This is the hard truth that Dowd skated close to but couldn’t quite face. According to Dowd, The Republicans have a wildly unpopular, unstable and untruthful president, and a Congress that veers between doing nothing and spitting out vicious bills, while the Democratic base is on fire and appalled millennials are racing away from Trump. Yet Democrats are stuck in loser gear. The Dems are in “loser gear,” alright, but this fact is puzzling to Dowd because 1) she can’t grasp the deep popularity of Trump’s central policies and 2) she somehow believes that the appalling behavior of the Democratic “base” is a net positive.  It isn’t. Dowd says that “Trump’s fatal flaw is that he cannot drag himself away from the mirror.”  But who is the more egregious narcissist, Donald Trump or a Democrat like Rahm Emanuel, the mayor of Chicago, who told Dowd: “We congenitally believe that our motives are pure and our goals are right”? I think Rahm is right about that cluster of beliefs. It’s a species of self-infatuation that owes a lot to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who was always going on about his superior “virtue” even though he behaved in a disgusting way.  He nevertheless believed that because he was saturated by the emotion of virtue and was convinced by the purity of his motives it didn’t matter (to take one example) that he deposited the five or six children he fathered with his mistress in an orphanage. Just so, Rousseau’s great disciple Maximilien Robespierre was also “on fire,” which is why he could speak in glowing terms of “virtue and its emanation, terror.”  Who can doubt that all those CNN broadcasters who spew obscenities about Donald Trump, the comics who pose for a photo with a bloody severed head in the likeness of the president, the “ethics” professors who attend rallies and bash Trump supporters over the head with bicycle locks, the disgruntled Bernie Sanders supporters who try to murder Republican congressmen as they practice for a baseball game—who can doubt that they and their fellow-travelers would relish a turn operating the guillotine as did Robespierre? Rahm Emanuel went on to say that “you’ve got to run a good campaign. In elections, politics matter. Oooh, what a surprise.” That’s supposed to be the worldly-wise, bracingly cynical voice of experience.  “See what a grown-up I am: I know you have to win elections to wield power.” But what Rahm, Tim Ryan, Maureen Dowd, and the other anti-Trump Wise Hats  don’t see is that the fundamental issue is not “motivating the base,” running a slicker campaign, and figuring out how to the game the polls, the focus groups, and the public’s credulity. The central issue is solving the problems that people have in their everyday lives.  Pace Maureen Dowd, Trump is actually doing that. Sure, everyone she “hangs with hates Trump.” But even as she screams about how “pathetic” and “nuts” Trump is, his administration is moving ahead on the issues that actually matter to people, from immigration and jobs to taxes, health care, and national security. The Democrats believe that process, sufficiently leavened by the emotion of virtue, is enough to win power.  Trump has understood that product matters more than process and that professions of virtue are hollow when unsupported by results.

Romantic Love? Osían and Niamh

Romantic Love?

A Hittite story from the earliest Indo-European language extant, describes a human man who was "abducted" by a goddess, and who so missed his wife and children, or at least his clann and city, that she grew cross with his pining for them and tossed him out of paradise. I'd have to try to search the details out, but it wasn't a happy story. 

It's also the story of Tithonus, the human lover of the dawn goddess Aurora. She asked Zeus to make Tithonus immortal, which he did, but didn't make him forever young as Aurora didn't ask that – she forgot; so here Zeus was behaving more like a lamp genie or Loki than anything else). Revolted (or perhaps feeling pity in the ancient gods' way, to the extent they could feel pity) Aurora turned him into a cicada. Cicadas are big bugs, not remotely beautiful, that feature in many mythologies, and are supposed to be carefree; the actual bugs spend most of their time underground not fully developed, and get eaten by predators – including humans – when they do show up. But the ones in the trees where I grew up somehow had a soothing sound to me. Long afternoons, late summer, especially September, conjure the memory and invoke immortal times.

Haloed in diamond gossamer
And deep summer silence,
The muddy stream meanders
In casual ebbings amongst the water grasses,
Sunlight mirrors the furnace of stars
While dragonflies hover,
Antediluvian flashes,
Live-coal emeralds hoarding aeons.

The Hittite story is the story of Oisín meeting up with Niamh, of the Tuatha Dé Danann. An Irish music group did the story some decades ago now, in a sort of pop-rock type of song that's not bad at all. (And I say that as a mostly sean-nós duine meself.) You can find a translation of it here:
http://glen_imaal.tripod.com/Legend1.html

It's one of the great tales of Éire, Scéalta na bhFear Éireann. Scéal grá. (Doesn't Irish have a great word for love? Grá?) Love, Romantic Love, never lasts, never fulfills, even when you're with one of the divine race. Physically a perfect beauty, and wise, knowing more than mere mortals know. What's not to like?

Something profound, apparently. And the Irish version had a distinct love of country that is significant for the Irish today, or ought to be. It's a story full of meaning, of how men and women will do the most profound things for one another (Oisín giving up everything he loved) and yet this Romantic love never lasts, even in Tír na nÓg.

Sir Walter Scott got in on these types of tales himself, so he did, with his Thomas the Rhymer. Go here:
http://www2.open.ac.uk/openlearn/poetryprescription/thomas-the-rhymer.html for the full poem, but these staves are the best known:

O see ye not yon narrow road 
So thick beset wi’ thorns and briers? 
That is the path of Righteousness, 
Though after it but few inquires.

And see ye not yon braid, braid road 
That lies across the lily leven? 
That is the path of Wickedness, 
Though some call it the Road to Heaven.

And see ye not yon bonny road 
That winds about yon fernie brae?
 That is the road to fair Elfland, 
Where thou and I this night maun gae.

William Butler Yeats at least referenced the Osían story in his Hosting of the Sidhe:

THE HOST is riding from Knocknarea 
And over the grave of Clooth-na-bare; 
Caolte tossing his burning hair 
And Niamh calling Away, come away....

Perhaps the most famous of these Man-Meets-Goddess was Brian Mac Giolla Meidhre (Brian Merriman's) The Midnight Court. A masterpiece of pre-Famine Ireland. But that grand poem should be the subject of another essay. Or a number of essays.

The Celtic soul seems to have that old paganism in it. Ceol na gCon, the music of the hounds. I'll never forget their "ceol" when my brothers took me 'coon hunting in southeast Ohio in the Fall, "back in the day", walking up the old canals, through the trees, moon flirting with the running clouds, hearing the hounds' song over the hills.

Or walking just in Ireland at night. What with the modern traffic, alas, that's not the best idea perhaps, but the old land comes to life then, the old world. It's still there. Though I must say my visit to the retreat at Loch Dearg is the most "Celtic" thing I've ever experienced. "Love of place", of land, ancestral-rootedness, perhaps that is the most Celtic of things. Lose that, and we'll find ourselves, what? Cast down from paradise?

I see it in the Catholic Church, too, in the sense of the iconoclasm since Vatican II: it's like so many Catholics have suddenly acquired a fatal amnesia, trashed out their ancestral house – old church buildings they grew up in, and I mean not just the buildings, but the liturgy too – and for what? Polyester and pastels. Be warned, though: Heaven is Absolute Place, rooted, filled with memory long before those of us who are going there ever get there, and if we don't know how to love place now, if we're spiritual tumble weeds, how are we going to love it then?

Anyway, Romantic Love. Ephemeral? It never is enough, or so it seems, though somehow we all long for a "True Love" story such as so immortally told in The Princess Bride. As some wrecked poet sang:

Leprosy-numbed fingers push words along
The cloudy page, etching the uncertain
Boundaries of smudged thoughts and uncaught love.
Romantic love that cannot be is my leprosy,
A catalepsy that palls the soul
And harlequins the mind.
Love leprosy stupefies the heart
With rusty shards of iron,
Breaking the fingers of poets, one by one.
A leper poet, I write of my love
With finger stumps, broken of spirit
And staved in with wine:
A banished immortal, son of Li Po,
Full of myself and the gritty dregs
Of the wild, weed-throttled vine.

Or does it? If it is "never enough" somehow yet we seek it, ever. Midir has pursued Etain (using the older spellings of their ancient names) for centuries. If that's not True Love, what is?

A forgotten poet wrote, I think, of Midir, in his modern avatar:

        I waited for you,
        By the window I watched;
        Rain and the walnut tree's leaves applauded,
        A lone sparrow began the morning rite,
        And my body felt
        Like coal
        Without you.

An Préachán

Reivers, Catholicism, Protestantism: Elm Trees Meditations

(Trees in County Mayo; all the photos here are from Pullathomais, Co. Mayo)

June 9, Feast of St. Columba, Colum-cille

There were once two huge elm trees; they lived on the farm I was born on in Ohio. Pretty near the road, but when they were planted back in the Dreamtime, that road was a dirt track. Or perhaps a mere trail between the then endless forest that luxuriated between Lake Erie in the north and the Ohio River in the south. A cabin stood there, at some point, a log cabin cornered on four large boulders that only had their tops showing. Two of them you could run the mower over, the other two were high enough you had to mow around them. But by the time I was born, and the elms were gone.

The Dutch Elm Disease killed them.

But when my parents and older brothers moved to this location, the elms stood. And what elms there were. 80 feet high, or 24 meters, and 100 feet or so across, 30.5 meters. They shaded everything in the yard as well as the house (the house that had replaced the cabin ages ago). But they died, killed by one of the three species of ascomycete microfungi. Their stumps remained for years, though, and I remember those well enough.

(One of the reasons I don’t want to go to Hell is there, in Hell, I’d never see those trees, whereas in Heaven I’m sure they’re still growing, and in the deep shade of God’s Beatific Vision.)

All that reminds me of the lost Latin Mass of my youth, something I don’t remember either, not consciously. I grew up haunted by those elms and that lost Mass. As I walked about, breathing, living, taking up space and spinning out time, I knew, just knew – as when you know you’ve left your keys behind but can’t remember what you’re missing – I just knew there was something gone astray. Something misplaced, something lost and longed for.

I suppose it’s my fate to be haunted. The Irish language was the other thing missing from my life, but more on that in another essay, for it is the biggest ghost of all, as we can speak together, it and I.

At any rate, I’m familiar with ghosts.

But imagine walking up to an elm tree like one of those and staring up at its arcing branches, for an ulmus americana often develops in the shape of water shot out of a hose directly upward, beautiful branches in arcs angling out from a straight stem. And the leaves: I’ve looked at, rubbed, collected ulmus leaves since childhood and they’re ‟hairy” on top, but an ulmus americana’s leaves were hard on top, smooth, almost like plastic. Imagine their voices – I’ve heard this noise all my life, in the sounds of sugar maple leaves sighing in the breeze – the susurration of thousands a leaves rustling on the wind, emerald banderoles of the Living God. Imagine starting up at such a glorious, living thing, and then whipping out a chain saw, firing it up, its ratcheting guttural grind pitching high into a speed-of-light roar, and then attacking that tree.

Picture yourself attacking it, sawing away, ‟getting into it” with aplomb and adrenaline, glorying in the cracking and crashing sounds of the great limbs falling to earth. And eventually, you’ve most of it cut down – not all of it, but what is left is mostly cut away: there you stand, in sweat, sawdust, and numbed arms and hands, and there you gesture to the poor horror and say in a triumphant voice: NOW I’ve gotten down to the TRUE tree! I’ve cleaned away the clutter and this is the heart’s core of an elm!”

You’d be mad. Madder than any hatter. Were any druids still around, they stab you to death with stone knives and foretell the future from the way your blood leaped forth in freedom from your hide.

That’s what Luther did. (The tree-cutting, not the druid part – he had the wrong ancestry for that.) It’s what Calvin did. The formidable Huldrych Zwingli did, too (I say ‟formidable” because Luther, on hearing that Zwingli was killed in battle, said, ‟Good! I’m glad he’s dead!” because Luther met him and got the sense that here was a potential Protestant Alexander, a Swiss Caesar, and such ambitious, capable men are clearly feared by ambitious but less than capable men).

All the original Protestant reformers were like Muhammad himself in wanting to ‟get back to basics”, pare it all down the the root of the issue, go back to the pure and unsullied faith held by the Patriarchs at the beginning. And Muhammad is a good metaphor. Though the Arabic Muslim ‟Muhammad” probably didn’t exist at all, or if he did, not as anything (much) like his legend (the very name ‟Muhammad” is a title, not a name per se, and means ‟the praised one” and had been originally applied by Arab speakers to Christ. But Muhammad the Legend is a great metaphor because he cleared out the idols from Mecca but left the most important, dangerous idol of all, the black meteorite, so the Reformers threw down and smashed the statues and overturned and broke the altars and shattered the heavenly stained glass windows, but left the black stone of Unbelief that lies all too close to the heart of every honest believer, and to those especially on very steps of the altar (that last is from C. S. Lewis).

So the Protestants cut down the 2,000-year-old elm tree of the Church, or tried to. And asked why, they said, ‟We’re just doing a little trimming! Getting rid of the bark! The leaves! The outer wood! Because we want to inner, true root to flower!”

I don’t want to ‟pick on” Protestants, or at least, not on the honest Christian believers I grew up with and among whom I still have a friend or two, but rather the ‟true, inner Protestant” is my quarry, the iconoclast, the merciless Reivers. We have them in Catholicism too. Hordes. ‟Back in the day,” in Luther’s day, the various states, kingdoms, republics, free cities, and the Holy Roman Empire, all had a say in ‟church-state” relations, and these either embraced the Protestant Revolution or banished it, so therefore Luther & Co. all had to ‟get out” of the Church.

In the time of Vatican II, the various states could not possibly care less what the Church did, or didn’t do, and so the ‟Protestants”, the iconoclasts just stayed on, ‟reivering” away even still, the infamous "Wreckovators" who destroy old churches, to a day when Hans Küng and Edward Schillebeeckx and that roman-collared sex-fiend fornicator Karl Rahner realized they would all have to do a naked fertility dance in St. Peter’s Square, AND do such a dance on naked ladies invocating Dionysus himself, to get excommunicated. (Even Küng, of whom it could be said Luther was more Catholic, was never excommunicated, just ‟reprimanded”, whatever that consists of in such a context.)

Druidism must run in my blood. Or at least I’m somehow kin to the Ents. For I loath Tree Reivers wherever they ply their uncivilized, mordant trade.

An Préachán