The consolations of art

The savagery of this election is unlike any before — and 2004 was acidic enough. Just blogging here, commenting on others' blogs, and reading about the campaign has left me drained, feeling like Michelangelo when he painted himself as an empty bag of skin in the Last Judgment fresco in the Sistine Chapel. If I tried to follow all the developments, charges, countercharges, rumors, and commercials, as some people apparently are able to, I'd go mental.

When the world is too much with me at times like these I turn off the chatter and get immersed in good music. While The Messiah was doing his all-TV-channels, May-Day-in Red-Square parade the other night, I was in a different world, reminding myself of what my species can do at its best, rather than the norm.

My vehicle of deliverance that night was a recording of Dvořák's 6th Symphony, performed by Christoph von Dohnányi conducting the Cleveland Orchestra. The Dvořák 6 is bracingly red-blooded in places, ravishingly lovely in others. Dohnányi isn't on my short list of great contemporary conductors (which includes Mariss Jansons, Valery Gergiev, Charles Dutoit, and — if he's still active — Sir Charles Mackerras), but he seems to have the temperament for this composer.

Czech music of the 19th century is quite different in sound and spirit from others of the same period, especially the Austro-German stuff. Its tone is probably closest to Hungarian, with some of the same Slavic spice, but also a resigned, melancholy sweetness. Maybe you have to be Czech or Hungarian to fully capture that sound, and Dohnányi has it in his Hungarian genes.

The 1991 Decca recording is typically full-bodied, with excellent transparency, a fine example of the sound quality the company's production team was getting at the time. (Decca has since been swallowed by Universal, which mainly sticks to reissues from the back catalog and a few calculated blockbusters.)

Listening to the Dvořák was a cleansing, uplifting experience — a reminder that while politicians and economists are banging on about how we can live better, we can also live deeper. There is a hierarchy of meaning. This world is important, but not ultimately important.

Checking in with the Constitution Party

One blogger noted — sorry, I can't remember who it was to give proper credit — that during the debates of the presidential and vice presidential candidates, the poor old U.S. Constitution was hardly mentioned. If so, that was negligent and cowardly. The nature and meaning of the Constitution, what it allows the federal government to do and what it prohibits it from doing, has been part of the national question since the founding of the Republic. You could make a good case that it has never been more important than in this miserable election year, with both McCain and Obama (but especially the latter) seeming to recognize no limits to federal jurisdiction.

That apparently dwindling band of Americans who might be loosely called constitutionalists — those who believe that the central government is limited to certain enumerated powers, and has no business monkeying around outside those specific duties — isn't likely to get much joy out of this season.

Many constitutionalists call themselves libertarians, and while libertarians' hearts are in the right place on limiting the reach of the federal leviathan, I think they carry their anti-government, rugged individualist ideas to ridiculous extremes. But one party that kept faith with the letter and spirit of the Constitution is not avowedly libertarian, and while it is definitely on the fringe, it might be important in ways greater than its numbers or present influence would suggest. It's the Constitution Party, which has nominated Chuck Baldwin and Darrell Castle for president and VP, respectively.

I must admit to not having given Chuck Baldwin the attention he perhaps deserves. (There are just only so many hours in the day.) But with the country racing toward the wall, it might be time to take a closer look.

Here is the Baldwin-Castle web site.

My first reaction when pulling up the site is: What an ugly mess. The splash page design looks like one of those mailbox stuffers where franchise businesses proclaim, "10% DISCOUNT WHEN YOU MENTION THIS AD!" The Baldwin site almost shouts, "Cuckoo corner!"

Let us try to ignore that, and click the tab "Issues." Here are a few highlights among Baldwin's positions, with comments by your blogger.

The "Baldwin-Castle Doctrine": No foreign government or world government body or entity, not even an ally or neighbor of the US is allowed to own any portion of US roads, airports, homes, buildings, lands, waters, resources (oil, gas, precious metals, minerals, etc,), religious facilities (no matter what faith), stocks, bonds, US treasury notes, businesses, banks, military bases or military assets or manufacturing facilities in the US regardless of how much the foreign governments donate to the political campaigns or private fortunes of US officials, elected or bureaucratic, or even to the US treasury.

Well intentioned, and a worthwhile goal to work for. But right now, thanks to our hapless past economic policies, foreign governments own nearly half of our national debt. If we were to insist that they sell their Treasury paper, the market repercussions would be catastrophic. Also, the details would be hard to work out. America is still a rookie in the Socialist League, but many European governments have long owned large parts of major companies based there. Would none of those companies then be allowed to buy any interest in U.S. companies? Would all those companies that have offices and facilities in the U.S. have to sell up or leave? That would be a hard belt in the chops to our economy, the last thing we need at the moment.

Education: I oppose enactment of any federal laws subsidizing or regulating the education of children. [But later] I wholeheartedly support the unimpeded right of parents to provide for the education of their children in the manner they deem best, including homeschooling or private or religious instruction. My Administration will oppose any and all federal legislation that would interfere with or restrict that liberty. I support equitable tax relief for families whose children do not attend government schools.

Yes, education is one of those areas that should be under state and, especially, local control. The federal bureaucrats add no value and diminish administration tailored to local conditions and offering a variety of methods throughout the nation. However, tax relief for parents whose children do not go to government schools is a form of subsidy. I'm not against it, but let's be honest about it.

Foreign policy: President Bush should have supported Ron Paul's bill, H.R. 3076, the September 11 Marque and Reprisal Act of 2001. This is the constitutional way to deal with rogue terrorist organizations. This is the way President Thomas Jefferson responded to the Barbary pirates.

According to Congressman Paul, a letter of marque and reprisal is a constitutional tool specifically designed to give the President the authority to respond with appropriate force to those non-state actors who wage aggression against the United States while limiting his authority to only those responsible for the atrocities of that day. Such a limited authorization is consistent with the doctrine of just war and the practical aim of keeping Americans safe while minimizing the costs in blood and treasure of waging such an operation.

Good as far as it goes. But the foreign policy plank completely avoids discussion of threats from state actors. What should we do about Iran? A resurgent, aggressive Russia? Et cetera. Very tough questions to deal with and no easy answers. But such questions are one of the most important things we expect a president to take on. Baldwin's silence is loud.

Immigration: We will seal our borders and ports. I support construction of a fence to secure our borders, but a Baldwin Administration will not wait for the construction of a fence in order to seal and secure our borders. We will utilize whatever force is necessary, including regular military personnel, to effectively secure our borders immediately. It is lunacy to send troops and National Guard half way around the world to protect the borders of Iraq while leaving our own borders wide open. …

There will be no "path to citizenship" given to any illegal alien. That means no amnesty. Not in any shape, manner, or form. I would not allow tax dollars to be used to pay for illegal aliens' education, social services, or medical care. As President, I would end birthright citizenship for illegal aliens. There would be no "anchor babies" during my administration.

This, and other language about immigration, is far stronger and more sensible than anything issuing from the orifices of our two major candidates. Unfortunately, he is completely fixated on illegal immigration. That's only part of the problem. It ignores the overpopulation, social tension, and balkanization caused by huge numbers of perfectly legal immigrants, which the government and its globalist puppet masters promote to dilute and ultimately marginalize the indigenous European-descended population in a "divide and conquer" policy. Baldwin seems completely clueless about the calculated race replacement policies that will make the United States into a Third World country if not stopped.

Defense: Supporting the troops' means putting their interests and America's interests first and not in needlessly endangering them by engaging in "policeman off the world" military adventures all over the world. We should be the friend of liberty everywhere, but the guarantor and provisioner of ours alone. As President I will never deploy American troops into combat without a declaration of war by Congress, pursuant to Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution. Under no circumstances will the Baldwin Administration commit U.S. forces to serve under any foreign flag or command. I am adamently opposed to any New World Order, and will reject U.S. participation in or a relinquishing of command to any foreign authority.

In a Baldwin Administration, the armed forces of the United States will always serve under the flag of the United States and the mission of our armed forces will always be to provide for the common defense for these United State of America.

Excellent. Did I write this? No, I'd like to think I'd have caught the typo. And I support greater federal spending on copyediting. A Baldwin Administration should sponsor a Full Employment for Editors bill.

The "sanctity of life": The pre-born child, whose life begins at fertilization, is a human being created in God's image. The first duty of the law is to prevent the shedding of innocent blood. It is, therefore, the duty of all civil governments, and that certainly includes the office of the President of the United States, to secure and to safeguard the lives of the pre-born. I affirm the God-given legal person hood of all unborn human beings, without exception. In addition to guaranteeing the legal person hood of the unborn, Ron Paul's Sanctity of Life Act, which I wholeheartedly support, would strip the appellate jurisdiction of the Supreme Court in all cases of abortion in accordance with the U.S. Constitution, Article III, Section 2. …

Under my administration, we could end legal abortion in a matter of days, not decades. And if Congress refuses to pass Dr. Paul's bill, I will use the constitutional power of the Presidency to deny funds to protect abortion clinics.

No sale. Well, mostly no.

Certainly the abortion issue should not have been decided by the Supreme Court, on a ridiculous "right to privacy" basis, or any other that I can see that makes it a federal case. Having Roe v. Wade imposed by a court has created no end of divisiveness and bitterness. It is completely understandable for abortion opponents to be angry about this "legislation from the bench."

But. The Supreme Court has no more business outlawing abortion than it does making it a right. This should not be a judicial matter at all, other than one of narrowly interpreting legislation about it.

So who should decide about the legality of abortion? Jurisdiction should be at the state level at the very most, and possibly on a county level. To repeat: decided by legislation, not courts. It recognizes that there is an unbridgeable difference of opinion that is somewhat geographically sorted.

No one needs legislation that allows them to not undergo abortion, but my proposal would undoubtedly mean that some women would have to travel to another jurisdiction if they wanted the procedure. That's why I am inclined to favor a "county option" system, like Texas has (or used to have, I don't know the current status) for selling booze. Presumably a woman who chose abortion would have to travel in some cases, which imposes an extra burden, but a county system would probably reduce that to the unavoidable minimum. It's not an ideal solution, but we accept that laws about many things differ from state to state, which is in line with constitutional principles.

I realize, of course, that for Chuck Baldwin and many others abortion is a moral issue, and he would argue that moral issues are not subject to a mere vote count. But for many it is not, or not necessarily, a moral issue. And if we value liberty, we have to acknowledge that people can disagree about whether something falls under an absolute moral rule.

The Constitution Party's platform, including many details I haven't touched on, is worth reading as a stimulus to thought. The country would be better for it if the party were taken seriously, although the mainstream media wouldn't dream of it — one more good reason. As presently embodied in the Chuck Baldwin candidacy, the worst that can be said of the party is that it is not fully consistent and sidesteps some important problems; the best is that, unlike the Republicrats, it takes U.S. sovereignty and the federalist system seriously.

Questioning immigration in Britain gets you yanked off the air and a pie in the face

Britain's new immigration minister, Phil Woolas, has aroused the Furies against himself. What was his unthinkable misstep? Did he hint that the U.K. was destroying what was left of its own culture by importing millions of Middle Eastern Muslims and Africans who would set up their own colonies with their own social systems and laws?

Good Lord, no, perish the thought. Such ideas cannot be spoken aloud in today's Orwellian Britain. He merely said, "On a common sense level there has to be a limit to the population. You have to have a policy that thinks about the population implication as well as the immigration implication."

Cultural issues aside, large parts of Britain are unbearably crowded these days, with shortages of affordable good housing and the highways clogged. But that doesn't matter to the Open Borders fanatics, who live to keep the immigration waves pounding in.

It didn't take long for his own Labour Party to yank his chain:

The BBC's flagship programme Question Time went out last night without a member of the Government on the panel, after the outspoken Immigration minister Phil Woolas was ordered to turn down an invitation.

Less than a month into his new job, Mr Woolas has created waves through his outspoken comments on immigration and on the official status of the Church of England. He had originally accepted the invitation to be on Question Time when asked two weeks ago, but this week, sensing trouble, more senior members of the Government instructed him to pull out.

They could well have sensed trouble. The country in general and the Labour Party in particular are soused on cultural Marxism, which looks on any sane discussion of population stabilization as equivalent to that all-purpose curse word, racism. A fellow Labourite on the program, when asked if he thought Woolas was "talking nonsense" about setting a limit to the number of people the small island nation could accommodate, said: "Nonsense is a word I would not dream of using about a colleague, no matter how appropriate it might be." Up yours, colleague.

Next it was the turn of No Borders, a pro-immigration group, to express its disagreement in free and open debate:

A member of the No Borders group threw a cream pie into the minister's face while he was speaking at a debate at Manchester University. A spokeswoman for the group said Mr Woolas had been "spouting right-wing anti-immigration policies".

Just in case anyone didn't get the message that you don't question the totalitarian Left, she added, "We threw the pie because we didn't want to engage in debate and legitimise what he was saying. What he was spouting were right wing anti-immigration policies. The danger is that people like him are making such views mainstream."

The "danger," in other words, is that some of their fellow citizens might hear Woolas and be convinced. That is a chance that cannot be taken, so he must not be heard.

The minister is a very unusual man in today's U.K., willing to step outside the limits imposed by the thought controllers of the State and the seething political correctniks. No doubt he will quickly learn to toe the Party line or be given a new portfolio, minister of bus maintenance contracts or something.

We can look forward to a similar climate under The Messiah's administration.

Those only learn who suffer

Justice so moves that those only learn
who suffer; and the future
you shall know when it has come ...
All will come clear in the next dawn's sunlight.

-- Aeschylus, Agamemnon

If all goes as it is widely predicted, a little over two months from now The Chosen One, attired in royal purple that burns a hole in the air against January's gray skies, will mount his throne.

The crowd will cheer. The internationalists and appeasers who imagine every threat can be neutralized with dialogue. The leftists who believe the role of the State is to rule very nearly everything. The academics and journos for whom eloquent sophistry is the singular sign of greatness. The bureaucrats licking their chops at the prospect of millions of new dependent clients. The souls lost to God who imagine that Hope can be delivered by a man.

Lately I have thought often of St. Augustine, which is odd, because it was many years ago that I read his Confessions, and have forgotten most of it. Living in the fourth and fifth century, Augustine saw firsthand at Milan and Rome a civilization that had lost its way and its will to live. The European-American era that eventually arose from the blasted ruins of Greece and Rome seems now to be in a similar condition. The Chosen One is perfectly cast to assist at its dissolution, being acclaimed by a populace that does not believe in the virtues of the West, longing for a Great Leader to ease the transition to whatever ideology -- Marxism, Islam, nihilism -- claims it most quickly and aggressively.

Augustine converted to a new faith -- new to him, although it had been around for centuries -- and went back to his home in North Africa, where he did the work of a world outside of time, of the time that had savaged the heritage of ages.

There will be someone else in the crowd that gathers to shout the praises of The Chosen One. That person will most likely be far in the back of the throng, scarcely noticed. You might not even recognize him or her. It could be your brother or sister, your friend, or a complete stranger. Or yourself.

That person, not the one on the throne, will be a carrier of hope: the hope that is only to be found within, not in the schemes of the State; in the heart and spirit, not in futile attempts to create a heaven of this world. Perhaps those who sing hosannas to The Chosen One will soon learn through suffering that the perfect society is a nightmare, not a dream. That individuals must inspire institutions, not the other way around. That those who sell the liberty and culture, so dearly bought, for the sake of a charlatan's promises will be paid only in suffering.

Perhaps the crowd will then listen to other voices, now so anonymous, so hidden.

Not all will come clear: it never does in our human condition. But enough to welcome the next dawn's sunlight.

If you can "write" you'll "love" this

That is, Sumatran devil dolls disguised as children.

I guess we have reached the point where no phenomenon, real or imagined, lacks a blog dedicated to it.

Cats in sinks (I really like that one), clouds (that too), and … get ready … photos of signs with unnecessary quotation marks.

The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks is not one I expect to turn to with my first cup of coffee each day, but I sympathize with the blogger. The widespread, sub-literate use of quotation marks for emphasis strikes me like a blow direct from Hades every time I see it. It's especially grating because it often reverses the intended meaning by implying irony — Our fish is "fresh" suggests it's passed its smell-by date.

Having spent their education studying self-esteem and the horrors of racist imperialism — one of which they have an unjustified amount of, and the other they have no worthwhile ideas about — many of today's citizens learn language almost exclusively from hearing it spoken. So they are far at sea in comprehending the difference between to and too, or principal and principle. And they do not know you add emphasis by italics (or if they are hand writing a sign, by letter size or underlining). Instead they reach for the wrong tool, quotation marks.

It gladdens the heart, though, to see how many people have posted photos of this aggravated assault on the English language. Clearly there are still those who care.

Creature from the socialist lagoon

Khrushchev promising change:
"We will bury you"

Lewis Diuguid, an alleged journalist at the Kansas City Star, scolds McCain and Palin for using the word "socialist" to describe The Anointed One. He's not, you understand, arguing Obama isn't a socialist. No, it seems that socialist is a code word for black. Apparently we are not supposed to notice — or at least mention it in public — that Obama is black.

J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI from 1924 to 1972, used the term liberally to describe African Americans who spent their lives fighting for equality.

Diuguid mentions four of those fighters for equality, including W.E.B. DuBois and Paul Robeson. DuBois was a Communist late in his life — long after even most leftists had lost their appetite for the party — who wrote, "Joseph Stalin was a great man; few other men of the 20th century approach his stature." Paul Robeson wrote a tribute to Stalin, praising Stalin's "deep humanity," "wise understanding," and calling him “wise and good.” Both men did help advance the cause of their race, which was genuinely oppressed at the time, but their advocacy of Red tyranny is hardly anything to celebrate. And while J. Edgar should have been put out to pasture long before he acquired too much illegitimate power, Diuguid implies that there was no basis for his distrust of DuBois and Robeson, which is either ignorance or biased revisionism.

Diuguid goes on:

McCain and Palin have simply reached back in history to use an old code word for black. It set whites apart from those deemed unAmerican and those who could not be trusted during the communism scare. Shame on McCain and Palin.

How long, Lord, how long must we go on watching every word we speak for fear of some pest assuring us that we are really racists deep down and what we say doesn't mean what we say, but is some kind of occult, forbidden message? Is Diuguid his real name? A palindrome, you'll notice — could he be actually a Palin drone, cleverly planted to influence us by making us imagine that there are Obama supporters whose thinking is so warped?

Socialist = black. Up = down. Dog = cat. Diuguid = writer.

And "the communism scare"? Is that supposed to mean defending the world against Communism was just a storm in a teacup, equivalent to that "anti-Communist hysteria" phrase so beloved of collegiate leftists who think Communists were overheated liberals whose only desire was to create heaven on earth by eliminating a few stubborn reactionaries?

Listen, Mr. Diuguid: the Soviet Empire was the worst scourge in history, responsible for the death, torture, slave labor, and imprisonment of millions of innocent people, run by a paranoid schizophrenic who had people shot at random just to show who was boss, and one of whose successors told the United States "we will bury you." The Soviet Union operated a worldwide political crime syndicate that installed puppet governments in numerous states including (just to name a few in Europe) Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Bulgaria, where no dissent was tolerated. If people like you had been in charge, the United States could very well have met the same fate.

As for your "code words," go stick them where the stars don't twinkle. I'll give you a code word: Diuguid. It stands for "hate-mongering, sickbag affirmative action–hire columnist." If there is any shame here, it's yours.