Year: 2013

Happy Labor Day

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Today we celebrate a national holiday dedicated to the labor movement–something that was once good, but is now way, way bad; something that was once necessary, but has become an extravagance that America can no longer afford.

I come from a union family. My grandfather published a union newspaper. He once put up his house as security to bail out a couple of women who had been jailed for trying to organize their co-workers. (Family tradition has it that my grandmother was not amused.) He would not have done these things if he hadn’t thought they were both necessary and right.

Today public employee unions are strangling local, county, and state economies. The primary function of unions today is to launder money for the Democrat party. Unions have driven many companies out of business, thus totally failing in their stated mission to protect “the workers” and their jobs.

Labor Day is also the last holiday before public school starts a new year of corrupting children and indoctrinating them into wickedness and folly.

So what’s so happy about it?

Hey, a holiday’s a holiday. If there were no Labor Day, there would still be unions on America’s back like the Old Man of the Sea, and lousy schools. So we ought to enjoy any and every holiday we get!

Have a family picnic, a cook-out, or just enjoy some well-earned rest and relaxation. Enjoy every good thing that the Lord puts on your table, and give Him thanks for it. Amen, amen!

 

My Favorite Sunday Color Comics

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

After coming home from church or Sunday school, for most of my childhood, one of my favorite Sunday pastimes was to read the color comics in the newspaper. Here are a few of my all-time favorites.

1. Prince Valiant by Hal Foster, launched in 1937 and continued to this day by Foster’s successors (he died in 1982). Was there ever more gorgeous artwork in any newspaper or magazine? I loved just to look at this strip; reading it was almost an afterthought.

2. Mark Trail, by Ed Dodd and his successors, first appeared in 1946. The Sunday version took a break from the weekly story-line to educate readers about wildlife, helped along by beautiful color illustrations.  Boy, could you learn a lot about wildlife by reading this! It helped instill in me a lifelong fascination for wild animals.

3. Peanuts, by Charles Schulz, ran from 1950 to 2000. In its time it was the most famous and widely-read cartoon on earth. Charlie Brown’s perpetually futile efforts to kick the football continue to symbolize all sorts of real-life tribulations for all sorts of people. But I think the strips from the 50s and early 60s, before “Peanuts” became a global phenomenon, were the funniest and most creative.

4. Mandrake the Magician, by Lee Falk, who also gave us The Phantom, first appeared in 1934 and is still being produced by Falk’s followers. Who can forget that dramatic phrase, “Mandrake gestures hypnotically…”? Don’t you wish you could do that! (Well, you can–but nothing much will happen except to make people think you’re a kook.)

5. The Teenie Weenies was cranked out every Sunday by William Donahey from 1914 to 1970–a good run! You’ve gotta love the idea of these little tiny people living just out of sight: a whole little world, with everything that that entails. Imagine what they could get up to today, if they had access to our computers while we were asleep.

I could go on, but I’d rather let you, faithful readers, expound on some of your favorites. To be nine years old, and spread the color comics section on the floor, and lie down to revel in it for an hour–it’s hard to beat those simple pleasures.

C.S. Lewis on the Untold Narnia Story

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

I’ve been reading a book on the Chronicles of Narnia, The Lion’s World, by the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. I’ll be writing a full review later on. Meanwhile, this book has surprised and delighted me, so far. And I had spent years thinking Archbishop Williams was just another politically correct chucklehead… But he has said some wise things in this book. So far.

Like some of you, I’ve long thought there was a Narnia story yet to be written (see “The Missing Chronicle of Narnia,” March 13, 2013). Like many of you, I was shocked when Susan, one of the original Kings and Queens of Narnia at Caer Paravel, is left out at the end–despite the fact that Aslan himself made her a queen and declared, “Once a king or queen in Narnia, always a king or queen in Narnia.”

Among the gems stored in Archbishop Williams’ little book is this excerpt from a letter from C.S. Lewis to one of his young readers, written in 1960, just three years before his death:

“Not that I have no hope of Susan’s ever getting to Aslan’s country, but because I have a feeling that the story of her journey would be longer and more like a grown-up novel than I wanted to write. But I may be mistaken. Why not try it yourself?”

As I felt sure must have been the case, Lewis did know there was a story he had not yet written. It seems he just wasn’t ready to write it: hadn’t quite decided how he ought to write it: knew what he didn’t want, but couldn’t yet see how he would have made it the kind of story that he wanted.

I wonder if he left it to each of us to write it for ourselves.

P.S.–I now understand that Lewis mentioned the eventual redemption of Susan in other letters, too.

Don’t Their Parents Care?

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

This week on News With Views I published a column, “This Best Book is the Worst” ( http://www.newswithviews.com/Duigon/lee215.htm ), about a book called Boy Meets Boy that was chosen Best Book for Young Adults by the American Library Assn. A brief descriptive blurb will suffice: “Paul’s simple high-school life is confused by his desire for another boy who seems unattainable, until Paul’s friends help him find the courage to pursue him.”

I thought that was pretty sickening. But a reader from New Zealand has alerted me to an even filthier book that also won a big award, the New Zealand Post Children’s Book of the Year. This is a book about teenagers at a boarding school, boys having sex with their male teachers and with each other, taking a whole lot of drugs, cursing and getting cursed at… I mean, what’s not to like? It’s called Into the River–which is possibly the best place to toss it.

This is Young Adult fiction, these days: a boiling cauldron of filth. Earlier in my lifetime, anyone who tried to purvey to minors the kind of stuff that gets Best Book honors today, would have been arrested and thrown into jail.

And my question is, simply, this: Don’t the parents care? Are you guys all right with your 14-year-old sons reading this stuff? You seem to be all right with your children being “educated” by persons who think this garbage belongs on a students’ recommended reading list. Is this what you want being pumped into your children’s minds?

Oh, we care! We care plenty! But we continue to send our kids, five days a week, to schools where Boy Meets Boy and Into the River are on the reading lists, on the shelves of the school library with golden stickers on their covers, and deeply imbedded in the ideology of our children’s “educators.”

It just doesn’t look like caring.

What Is Truth?

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

If something was right yesterday, but wrong today, which is the more unstable–our standards, or ourselves?

If we change our minds because we are shown, and can see, that our opinion was based on wrong or incomplete information–as when we look at an unfinished jigsaw puzzle and think it’s going to be a merry-go-round, but the finished picture turns out to be a bandstand–we are being reasonable, using our brains as God intended.

But if a lot of college professors, movie stars, and politicians tell us, authoritatively, repeatedly, that the finished picture is not a bandstand after all, but a cageful of monkeys; and that if we continue to see it as a bandstand, we are wrong, hateful, stupid, and deserving of some penalty: what are we, if we wind up believing them and not our eyes?

Properly trained Americans, I guess.

Suppose the completed picture of the bandstand has been on display for thousands of years, and looks exactly like every bandstand that we’ve ever seen; but then today a federal judge rules that it’s not a bandstand. Suppose we are bombarded with media messages endorsing the judge’s ruling, every night and every day on television. How long will it take us to concede that it’s a picture of a monkey cage? And what does that make us, when we do?

There is no freedom without truth. Just a little point to ponder.

Why the Good Guys Always Lose

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

If you want to see a sterling illustration of why the “pro-family” side never, never comes out on top in any struggle with the anti-family Left, visit townhall.com today and read Rebecca Hagelin’s column, “Culture Challenge of the Week: Public School Culture.”

After using three-quarters of her space to prove that public schools today are in the business of actively promoting homosexuality to children, she goes on to suggest a plan to keep your own children from being brainwashed. Here it is, in brief.

1. Warn your children about the propaganda which they’ll be fed at school; and after every school day, de-program them.

2. Make sure the school’s teachers and administrators know your concerns. And, when they pick themselves up off the floor after laughing hysterically and rolling around with tears in their eyes,

3. “Educate teachers… about the religious and speech rights of all students.”

I’ll have more to say about this in next week’s Newswithviews column. But in the meantime, could I please have a sip of whatever joy-juice it is that Ms. Hagelin is drinking? It must be powerful stuff!

With all due respect (she seems like a nice lady) to Ms. Hagelin, you have hopelessly, totally failed to understand the nature of your enemy. You couldn’t be more wrong if you wanted to be.

Do you think you’re dealing with honest, fair-minded people who play by the rules and respect other points of view? Well, you ain’t!

The only way to protect children from the public schools is not to put them in the public schools. Period.

‘The Price of Citizenship’

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Did you know that being forced to act against your religious beliefs is “the price of citizenship” in America? It must be true: a federal judge says so. ( http://www.redstate.com/2013/08/22/losing-the-battle-winning/ )

This he said in regard to a case in New Mexico, in which the state punished a Christian photographer–she and her husband are a mom-and-pop business–for not obeying a demand by a lesbian to film her mockery of a marriage. Religious beliefs, said the judge, are always trumped by “tolerance.”

There is no give and take here. Homosexuals win, Christians lose: every single time. This is what our ruling class calls “tolerance.” To be “tolerant,” to be a “citizen,” means to do things you believe to be sin whenever a homosexual or a bureaucrat or a judge demands it of you.

I am a writer. I write books for money. What if a homosexual were to say to me, “I will pay you to write a novel about two men falling in love and [censored] each other till the cows come home”? Naturally, I would consider that a monstrous abuse of my God-given talent, and I would refuse. I would have to refuse, just as I would refuse to worship an image of a president. Would the devouring state wipe me out for that?

In a New York minute, brethren. In a New York minute.

My Iguana

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

When I was 12 years old, I got a baby iguana for a pet. I had him for 17 years, during which he grew from this spindly little thing that could sit on my finger to an immense big lizard four feet long and as hefty as a large, full-grown cat.

The books said iguanas grow up to be short-tempered and not much fun to handle, but mine was as tame as a well-behaved kitty. I took him everywhere–even to school when I taught an art class, because the kids enjoyed drawing him, petting him, and feeding him wild strawberries. My mother, and later my wife, liked to do up fancy salads for him. He had the run of our apartment because he always went back into his open cage to do his business. He liked to cuddle up with cats and dogs.

He had his peculiarities. When he outgrew his old wooden perch, and couldn’t even come close to fitting on it anymore, I took it out and replaced it with a nice, new perch more his size. He sat on the floor of the cage and sulked–until I put the old perch back in. Then he climbed onto the new one and lovingly draped his tail over the old.

It would be eccentric to say a lizard is a man’s best friend. But this lizard was a mighty good friend; and after all these years, I miss him.

Late Night TV, Circa 1958

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

When I was old enough to read, but not old enough to stay up and watch all the cool stuff on TV that my mother and father were hogging to themselves, I used to pore over the TV listings in the paper to find out what I was missing. The following examples fascinated me–maybe because I never got to see them.

1. Jai alai, pronounced “Jay allay”–what in the world was that? It must’ve been really something special, to be on so late at night. Maybe Jay Allay was a guy who told lewd stories.

2. To Be Announced. I never had a clue as to what that show was about. Unlike all the others, it came on at different times and on different stations. I don’t think it’s available anymore.

3.Scudda-hee, Scudda-hay, or whatever it was called. I’m told it’s a movie about mules. I could easily look it up, maybe even watch it on youtube. But why give up a lifetime of wild speculation?

4. The Naked City. Imagine that: a whole city full of nudists. Supposedly there was a nudist colony near where my cousins lived, but we never ran into any stray nudists. Maybe they wound up on TV.

5. The Boy With Green Hair. This movie was always on one channel or another, always very late at night. I thought it might be a science-fiction movie. Little did I know that, later on in life, green hair would be commonplace, along with tattoos, earrings on men, and bits of metal piercing various parts of the body–like the stuff you’d see on the old Lowell Thomas travelogues about New Guinea. Only those people, of course, were primitive and didn’t know any better.

 

An Open Letter to My Critics

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Here is an open letter to the handful of critics who object to “all that religious stuff” in my Bell Mountain series. I write with all the respect I can muster for their opinion.

Dear Ignorant Peabrains:

It has probably escaped your notice that, except for the little corner of our own present age occupied by radical secularists, there has never been a human culture without “religious stuff.” There has never been an atheist civilization. So if I’m going to write realistically about human beings, even in a fantasy, “religious stuff” must be included in their way of life. To leave it out would be to amputate a big chunk of who they are.

Yes, I knew we find hardly a trace of “religious stuff” in contemporary fiction of all kinds. That’s because those works are produced by only a microscopic portion of the general population. Those works also conform to certain conventions that no one ever questions.

One of those conventions is to ignore the religious dimension of human life. Whether one is producing a sitcom, a movie screenplay, a detective story, or any kind of fiction whatsoever, one leaves out “religion.” After all, eternal truths and immutable moral laws might offend some thin-skinned dork out there. The American Library Association, the teachers’ unions, and Scholastic Books won’t like it: that’s for sure.

I’ve chosen to ignore that particular convention. The civilization I write about is inhabited by people for whom religion is an important part of daily life. That is, the lives of my fantasy characters conform to a virtually universal characteristic of the human race. In that respect my fantasies are more realistic than the goings-on at any Democrat dum-dum on TV.

I daresay my Bell Mountain fantasy world, for all its faults, is a far sight better than the prison-world you’re constructing for America, in which the devouring state is the god and crooked, mad, and wicked politicians are its prophets–where “diversity” means a coerced uniformity of opinion, and “inclusion” means the exclusion of everyone and everything that won’t conform.

Do us all a favor, and exclude yourselves.