Big Brother is Listening

Get over to the Drudge Report today and check out the stories at the top of the page: under the leadership of our First Voter Fraud President, the federal government is hauling in millions of telephone records a day.

They say they’re doing it to protect us from terrorists.

The only problem with that is, this bunch in Washington thinks we are the terrorists, and those guys over in the Middle East, with the turbans, and the bombs strapped to their bodies, are their friends. We know that because cadets at West Point are taught to view Baptists and Catholics as every bit as bad and dangerous as al-Qaeda, and the “president’s” adviser on “religious diversity” in the military, one Mikey Weinstein, is on a jihad to purge Christianity from the armed services. We know it because they’ve got the IRS harassing non-progressives and demanding to know the content of our prayers.

Now they’re studying our phone calls.

Because I don’t believe it’s possible that there might really and truly be “millions” of potential terrorists hiding in our midst, I’ve got to believe Big Brother is spying on a lot of us who aren’t terrorists. And we just let him go on doing it.

You can be sure that, hundreds of years from now, when people look back on the history of the United States, they will most certainly not say, “This was their finest hour.”

 

Now That’s Writing!

Who is the most prolific novelist of all time? Do you know? Can you guess?

I always thought it was John Creasy. Born 1908, died 1973, Creasy wrote under 28 pseudonyms and had over 600 of his novels published–mystery and crime novels, spy thrillers, romances, and westerns. His first book was published in 1930, and he was only 65 when he died. So that’s 600 books in 43 years, for an average of almost 14 novels per year.

And lest you think he just cranked out a lot of rubbish, in 1962 he won an Edgar Award for Gideon’s Fire, and in 1969 was voted a Grand Master Award by the Mystery Writers of America.

But I was wrong. The most prolific novelist ever was not John Creasy.

It was Barbara Cartland.

Dame Barbara (1901-2000) lived longer than Creasy and had a longer career, and more than 700 (!) of her novels were published, starting in 1922. She started with flashy, controversial, “sex among the rich and famous” novels, then settled down to write historical romances.

In fact, her career is still going on–she left at least 160 unpublished novels, which ought to be enough to hold her fans for the next few decades.

In 1983 Barbara Cartland wrote 23 novels.

I must remember this, the next time I feel moved to describe myself as a productive and prolific writer.

Back to Narnia!

Today I don’t care to write about any of the disgusting things that are being done to our country and our culture. We get it by now, don’t we? Good is evil and evil is good, the bad guys always win, boys should want to be girls and girls should want to be boys… Yeah, yeah, we get it.

I have a book to write, and I don’t need the kind of inspiration provided by the headlines. And having just returned from another visit to Middle-Earth, I have decided to pass on to Narnia. This time I’ll read the books in the order in which Lewis wrote them.

I don’t know quite how to say this, but there’s something realer about the great castle at Caer Paravel than there is about this week’s Gay Day at Fenway Park in Boston. To know my own imagined world of Obann better, I visit C.S. Lewis‘ world of Narnia. To know my own Lord better, I kneel before Aslan. I have learned that this, for me, is a way to get closer to my Savior and my King, Jesus Christ. Through these imaginary doors I get entry to the heart of what is real.

Open up the wardrobe, Lucy…

Teaching Kids to be Cowards

A Greegie Award this week, for egregious stupidity in government, goes to the dolts who run Sir John A. Macdonald Jr. High School in Calgary, Canada.

As reported in the National Post, May 31, a 13-year-old boy saw two of his fellow students having an altercation. When one kid pulled a knife, the boy charged into the fray, knocked down the Jack the Ripper wannabe, and disarmed him.

For which he soon found himself in trouble with the school officials. Instead of saving someone from a knifing, school officials said, he should have run off and hunted up a teacher, explain the situation, yatta-yatta… and meanwhile some kid is doing a Ginsu demonstration on his classmate’s abdominal cavity. But the school, said school officials, “doesn’t condone heroics.”

Yes, this is the spirit of the Ecole Polytechnique Massacre of 1989, Montreal–in which a crazed gunman invaded a college campus with the loudly announced intention of killing women. He permitted the male students to flee for their lives while he shot the females: and flee they did. Perhaps the Ecole Polytechnique didn’t condone heroics, either. They certainly didn’t get any.

Please bear in mind that Canadian public educators do teach children that, potential fatal stabbings notwithstanding, when they see something really awful going down, like gender-stereotyping language or homophobia, they’re supposed to swing right into action.

You don’t have to be a president or a prime minister to destroy Western civilization. Every public school vice principal can do his bit .

The Book of Judges

Once again my daily Bible-reading program has brought me around to Judges, and through it. I don’t know how many times I’ll have to revisit it before I can truly say I understand it.

There are a lot of stories in Judges that really aren’t very nice: the book is a history, so that’s what we should expect. Ehud smuggles a weapon in to a private audience with the king of Moab, and assassinates him. Sisera takes refuge in Jael‘s tent, and after she lulls him to sleep, she drives a tent-spike through his head. The tyrant Abimelech murders his brothers, puts down a rebellion, and comes to a shameful and violent end. We read of the tragedies of Samson and Jephthah.

And then at the end come two truly awful stories. A man named Micah steals his mother’s silver, then restores it to her–so, naturally, they melt it down and make it into an idol! And of course a wandering Levite agrees to become their personal household priest, ministering to the idol. And sure enough, a big gang of Danites, seeking a new homeland, steal Micah’s graven and molten images, threaten to kill him if he tries to get them back, and the Levite is more than happy to go along with then and be their priest–complete with idols.

The last incident in the book tells the story of a gang-rape committed by the inhabitants of a town belonging to the tribe of Benjamin, and how all Israel went up against Benjamin. And Benjamin refused to surrender the guilty parties, and fought against all the 11 other tribes of Israel at once, and was almost made extinct.

Is any of this any way for God’s people to behave?

They must have known better. They had the Ten Commandments. The Ark of the Covenant was among them. Note: the actions of Ehud and Jael, although they may seem to us unsavory, are presented as righteous actions to deliver Israel from oppression. And Samson and Jephthah, while they had their faults, fought mightily against God’s enemies.

But what are we to make of these last two stories in the book?

Pray, ponder, and meditate…

Can I Wake Up Now, Please?

All of a sudden the freaks who shape our popular culture want girls to turn into boys and boys to turn into girls. What that is supposed to accomplish, who knows?

But in order to spur it along, they’ve come out with a new cartoon show pitched to children aged 2-11. Uh, the headline says it all: “SheZow brings gender-bending fun to Hub Network” ( http://www.channelguidemagblog.com/index.php/2013/05/31/shezow-brings-gender-bending-fun-to-hub-network/ ). The idea is, there’s this 12-year-old boy who puts on a magic ring so he can turn into a superhero who’s a girl… feh.

To quote from the article, “SheZow not only defeats the bad guys, but his new identity also helps Guy in his attitude towards the opposite sex.” Barf-bag, please!

This particular abomination originated in Australia.

My question is, why is this “gender-bending fun”, etc., such a swell idea? What benefit are we supposed to derive from having this kind of thing rammed down our throats? If there is some crackpot out there who can explain what great good this is to confer upon the human race, I’d be keenly interested to hear your reasoning.

Maybe it’s just a bad dream.

Majoring in Idiocy

A bunch of college students at the University of Colorado Boulder–that state is going to pass Massachusetts on the way to rock-bottom–gleefully signed what they thought was a big “thank-you card” to the IRS. Their actions have been immortalized on video ( http://dailycaller.com/2013/05/30/college-students-thank-irs-for-illicitly-targeting-conservative-groups-video/ ).

OK, the thing was a hoax set up by a College Republican who wished to give liberal students a golden opportunity to make fools of themselves. They pounced on it. Meanwhile, former celebrity Bette Midler tweeted her thanks to the IRS: “Thank you! Thank you for denying 501 c-4 to any group who hates,” with her own Amen Corner in the background.

Apparently there are a lot of people who would just love to see the United States turned into a banana republic where the law is so fluid as to be no law at all, and the ruling party makes the rules from day to day. It’s called “fundamental transformation” and our first Voter Fraud President has pledged himself to it.

But the real issue here is that, in return for exorbitant tuition payments and a virtual guarantee of lifelong debt and problematic employability, students attending the University of Colorado have been thoroughly instructed in the fine art of clueless idiocy. All right, maybe a few of them signed the thank-you card for a goof. But who was Bette Midler goofing on?

Well, as the saying goes, freedom-schmeedom–as long as our guys are on top, who needs freedom?

Will a Pastor Really Say… Anything?

I’m not at all sure I can keep the following post entirely G-rated. If you are easily offended or grossed out,  please come back tomorrow. I’ll have gotten this story out of my system by then.

Anthony Wiener, who resigned from Congress in disgrace after sending photos of his genitals to a number of women who most definitely had not requested them, is now running for mayor of New York City. A few days ago, he turned up at the Greater Springfield Memorial Church, in Queens, to kick-start his campaign.

We are indebted to the pastor of this church for his extremely simple explanation of Wiener’s way off-the-wall behavior. The ex-Congressman, said the pastor, just plain “made a mistake.”

Nothing was mentioned about making the same one over and over again. Showing up late for a movie because you misread the schedule, or locking yourself out of your car–those are mistakes. Sending obscene pictures of yourself to women–again and again–seems more like something you would do on purpose.

But, no, it was just a “mistake,” said the pastor in the pulpit. And he went on to say, “Moses and St. Peter made mistakes, too.” He also likened the disgraced politician to the Prophet Ezekiel.

We are beginning to wonder just who is making mistakes. What kind of pastor raises a notorious pervert to the level of Moses, Peter, and Ezekiel? Is this man quite all there? Or was he trying to bring Moses, Peter, and Ezekiel down to Wiener’s level?  Imagine yourself sitting in a pew, knowing what Wiener did (again and again) to bring shame down on his head, and listening to your pastor liken him to Moses. And St. Peter.

I mean, what’s he going to say next week?

I think I’d better leave that to your imaginations.

A Treasure Rediscovered

Cleaning out my closet, I found an old paperback copy of The Jungle Books by Rudyard Kipling.

Once upon a time, I guess just about everybody read The Jungle Books. There was even a movie, starring Sabu. Mowgli‘s adventures in the Indian jungle, being raised by wolves and tutored by a bear, a panther, and a python, all told by a master storyteller–it just doesn’t get any better than that.

When I was a little boy, my Aunt Millie gave me for Christmas an illustrated edition of the first part of The Jungle Books (there are two parts). How I loved that book! It fell apart from overuse while I was still a child; but reading the stories now, over 50 years later, I can still see those illustrations as clearly as if they were on the page in front of me. The only difference is, I think I love the stories even better now.

(They’re getting under my skin, too. Last night I dreamed I was going to marry a black-and-white cat who talked and smoked cigarettes.)

If The Jungle Books are not fantasy fiction, very strictly speaking, they certainly share in the spirit of fantasy. Kipling creates something fantastic, something totally at odds with reality–a world of talking animals who have laws and customs–and by the greatness of his art, gets the reader to believe in it. And in visiting this unreal world of his, we wind up seeing the real world more clearly.

If you haven’t read these stories in a while, read them again. If you’ve never read them, and are going to read them for the first time… Well, I envy you!

Why Is It So Hard to Write Good Fantasy?

I’m always looking for more fantasy fiction to read, to inspire my own work and, hopefully, to teach me how to do it better.

I’ve read hundreds of mystery novels of all kinds, and can count on my fingers the ones that have been truly awful. It’s not hard at all to find a good mystery. But with fantasy it’s the other way around.

Why should that be? There are authors who have made prodigious amounts of money writing fantasy that is at best half-baked. And there are lesser fantasy writers who produce stuff that’s hardly fit for the bottom of a bird cage.

Good fantasy fiction, obviously, will have things in common with quality fiction in any genre: an interesting plot; well-drawn characters who have some depth to them; situations that engage the reader’s emotions; a smooth flow of the language. But in fantasy–and in science fiction, too, by the way–books that lack those features are, well, plentiful.

In addition to those indispensable qualities mentioned above, what should a fantasy have that would make it a really good fantasy? I can’t write a monograph here on this blog, but quickly glancing at a few of the greats in the field:

C.S. Lewis, in his Chronicles of Narnia and in his science fiction trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength) had a vision–a deeply Christian vision–underlying all these stories: that is, they have something very important to say to the reader. As an artist, Lewis was able to deliver his message without clubbing the reader over the head with it. As one of the visitors to this site has observed, Lewis drew his readers in because he left so much unsaid. The reader finds himself building on what he has read–you can’t help it.

In The Lord of the Rings and other works, J.R.R. Tolkien, too, built his stories on a foundation of faith. The stories mean something. Nor did it hurt that he literally spent a lifetime exploring and charting his fantasy world. He believed in it, and that’s why millions of readers wound up believing in it.

E. R. Eddison wrote one great fantasy novel, The Worm Ourobouros. Its outstanding feature is a unique and creative writing style: no one but a fool would try to imitate it. He has a great story to tell, populated with interesting and multi-dimensional characters–but the thing that makes it work is his wild and crazy use of English. If you can get into his language, it’s like getting into Shakespeare’s language. If you can’t, the book probably won’t work for you.

I’m sure I’ll want to return to this topic more than once. This time I really want to receive feedback from my readers. What makes a fantasy speak to you? What in a fantasy turns you off? I really want to know!