Our Money’s Worth… of What?

Our town’s municipal budget was released this week: $15 million and change. This pays for a police force and its up-to-date equipment, the Dept. of Public Works and its equipment, street-cleaning, a whole passel of street festivals, and nice salaries and fantastic pensions all around.

Of course, in a small town like ours, taxes have to be pretty high to raise that kind of money. Some of the stores on Main Street are boarded up, and have been for a while. Some of the residents have been chased out of town by taxes. Fifteen million bucks is a lot of money.

But it ain’t as much as $30 million, is it? And $30 million is this year’s budget for our local school district. There are only four schools in it, but the budget is twice as high as the budget for all the rest of the town.

I’ll bet it’s just as bad for your town. And on top of that, our paychecks have to support the county, the state, and the federal governments. Our paychecks are going to get hernias. The higher up you go, the bigger a bite they take out of your dollar.

For what we’re paying for it, we ought at least to live in Paradise.

At the rate it’s going, America is going to run out of money. Gonna go broke. And then what?

Can’t we stop and turn around?

Tolkien on Politics

J.R.R. Tolkien, world-famous as the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, wasn’t much for politics. Nevertheless, he did have some strong opinions on the subject.

The following is from one of his letters, quoted in Secret Fire by Stratford Caldecott (pg. 124):

“I would arrest anybody who uses the word State (in any sense other than the inanimate realm of England and its inhabitants, a thing that has neither power, rights nor mind); and after a chance of recantation, execute them if they remained obstinate! …[Government] is an abstract noun meaning the art and process of governing and it should be an offence to write it with a capital G or so as to refer to people.”

And this from another letter, quoted on pgs. 124-125:

“I am not a democrat, only because ‘humility’ and equality are spiritual principles corrupted by the attempt to mechanise and formalise them, with the result that we get not universal smallness and humility, but universal greatness and pride, till some Orc gets hold of a ring of power–and then we get and are getting slavery.”

Hmm… I wonder what he’d think of current revelations that the Internal Revenue Service, an organ of the government funded by all the taxpayers of America, used its auditing powers, and other powers, to place obstacles in the way of conservative groups while at the same time smoothing the path for left-wing organizations.

Tolkien thought the ruling class was getting way, way, way too big for its britches in the 1950s. He should see it now that the Orcs really have gotten hold of it.

Deport the Good, Amnesty the Bad

While our glorious ruling class contemplates an “immigration reform” bill that will cost American taxpayers more than $9 trillion (estimated by the Heritage Foundation), with amendments to include special benefits for the same-sex partners/catamites of illegal aliens, a suicidal policy to flood the country and its overburdened economy with millions of illiterate, impoverished persons who will have to go on welfare… While all this is going on in Washington…

The Sixth Circuit federal court yesterday ruled that a German homeschooling family may not have political asylum in America. After all, they only want it because they’re Christians. And doesn’t America already have enough peaceful, law-abiding, educated, and productive Christians? Don’t we need to import more gang members, homosexuals, and drug users?

So the government proposes to deport this one harmless German Christian family, while at the same time amnestying multitudes of persons who cannot benefit America in any way, and whose only calling here will be to vote for Democrats in perpetuity.

Attorney General Eric “Fast ‘n’ Furious” Holder says the Romeike family can’t have asylum because they aren’t really being persecuted. Germany makes homeschooling illegal; the German Supreme Court says it must protect the state from people who might create a “parallel culture”–und zen, kamerad, zey might not do vot der fuhrer tells zem to!  Old Fast ‘n’ Furious says it ain’t persecution as long as Germany stops everybody from homeschooling, not just Christians. As long as the state is an equal opportunity oppressor, it ain’t oppression.

What our pseudo-Christian president and his henchmen want, of course, is to put an end to homeschooling in America. You start by establishing the principle that as long as nobody is allowed to homeschool, you’re not just picking on the Christians–even though in America, as in Germany, it’s the Christians who have the strongest motivation to homeschool their children and the highest likelihood of doing so. The great impetus for homeschooling, in both countries, is the urgent need to remove children from an “educational” environment dedicated to the advance of homosexuality, atheism, abortion, and overall Godlessness: to wit, the public schools.

Bear in mind that in Germany, the Romeikes are apt to be fined, imprisoned, and have their children taken away from them and placed in the custody of the state–all because they want to school their kids at home. Deutschland uber alles, jawohl.

For more information on this travesty of justice, visit the Home School Legal Defense Association website, http://www.hslda.org .

Tolkien Was Deeper Than I Thought

I am reading a book which I discovered accidentally and which is blowing me away. It’s Secret Fire: The Spiritual Vision of J.R.R. Tolkien, by Stratford Caldecott (2003). The author with the unusual name is Director of the Chesterton Institute for Faith & Culture in Oxford, England.

This book explores the deep Christian roots of Tolkien’s fantasy writings. You hardly need to be told that fantasy may often serve as an indirect approach to truth. Sometimes you can see truth more clearly if you look at it from a funny angle.

This morning I read how, sometime after the publication of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien was visited by a man, a stranger, who showed him “certain old pictures that seemed almost designed to illustrate The Lord of the Rings, but which Tolkien had never before seen. The man remarks after a silence: ‘Of course you don’t suppose, do you, that you wrote all that book yourself?'”

I read this to my wife and she said, “Hmm! Sounds like another fantasy writer I know.” Meaning me, of all people.

But it’s true. On one level I suppose we can’t deny that we “make up” the stories that we write. But on another level, we simply can’t shake the sense that the stories were there all along, somewhere, and that we have been shown them and given the privilege of writing them. Shown by whom? By Our Lord the Living God–who else?

I’ve only just started on this book, and can hardly wait to see what else is in it.

‘Ice Floes Crush Homes’: It’s Global Warming

Despite what the nincompoops who misgovern us say, Global Warming is still the all-time biggest fantasy ever perpetrated by the human mind, dwarfing the imaginative fictions of the likes of Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, or Edgar Rice Burroughs.

But then where does fantasy end and full-blown delusion begin?

As reported May 12 in The Winnipeg Free Press, huge ice floes have been squeezed out of the water to crush a bunch of lakeside homes in Manitoba (see http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/local/giant-ice-floes-crunch-homes-207099381.html ). You gotta click the link and see the pictures.

Manitoba is neither the North Pole nor Antarctica. It is contiguous to the U.S. And here, while the whopper-mongers in Washington and Ottawa go on and on about the threat of Global Warming, we have a lot of houses uprooted or smashed flat by… ice.

Duh… hello, hello? Anybody there? Does this look like Global Warming to you? Think there’ll be any tropical rain forests springing up in Manitoba anytime soon?

But who are you going to believe–your own lying eyes, or our glorious and trustworthy ruling class?

A Greegie for Obama

An official Greegie Award, for egregious stupidity in high places, to our first Voter Fraud President, who earlier this week told graduating students at Ohio State not to listen one little bit to all those silly persons who warn you to beware of government tyranny.

Nope, not a lick of truth to it–absolutely no grounds to fear our loveable federal government. “Unfortunately,” said President Golfball, “you’ve grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that’s at the root of all our problems.” Gee–you mean it isn’t? “Some of these same voices also do their best to gum up the works.” Nobody gums up the works like you do, ace. “They’ll warn that tyranny [is] always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices,” yatta-yatta.

Man, I get paid for writing fantasy, and I can’t compete with this guy. But there he goes again, Mr. Uniter, warning Americans that other Americans are out to get them and he’s their only hope.

But it’s all clear: there is no lurking tyranny. Just the IRS admitting it harassed conservatives. Just the odd “human rights” commission or two, coming down like dynamite on this or that individual who somehow failed to jump when some “gay” told him or her to jump. Just Health & Human Services forcing Christians to pay for abortions. Just the Army deciding that American Christians–that is, the vast majority of the people in America–are a bigger threat to America than bomb-happy jihadists. Just the prez and his henchmen in  Congress trying to confiscate everybody’s guns, trying to amend the Constitution without going through the amendment process… when they’re not forcing you to buy health insurance that you don’t want.

Oh, no–there’s no threat of tyranny from this government!

Besides which, it shows a distinct lack of class to lie to such a credulous audience as college students. Like shooting fish in a barrel.

Ray Harryhausen works…

1961’s Mysterious Island:

A Great Artist Passes: Ray Harryhausen, R.I.P.

The best special effects scene ever: Ray Harryhausen’s skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts

“Nobody goes to the movies to see a sinkful of dirty dishes.”

This quote, maybe apocryphal, is attributed to Ray Harryhausen, the special effects wizard who died this week at 92. He was a giant in the field of fantasy, an inspiration to many (including myself). And boy, did you not get a sinkful of dirty dishes when you went to a Harryhausen movie!

Mighty Joe Young was his first feature film, in 1949; his last was Clash of the Titans, 1981. In between, he cranked out masterpieces like The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Mysterious Island, and my own favorite, Jason and the Argonauts. I have asked my crack technical support staff–her name is Jill–to post some video samples, if possible.

Harryhausen was a master of the painstaking stop-motion process–you film models one frame at a time, subtly adjusting their positions with every shot, and when you speed it up, the models appear to move: not unlike the old-fashioned way of making an animated cartoon. He made some refinements to the technique and called it “Dynamation.”

Stop-motion has largely given way to computer-generated effects. Most of those look like they were spat out of a computer. But even compared to top-of-the-line computer effects that don’t look crappy, Harryhausen’s work is magic. To this day, in my opinion, no one has ever created a special-effects scene to top the fight with the skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts–a movie that is now some 50 years old.

Harryhausen was much more than just a techie. He had an artistic vision. He was determined to create fantasy that really was fantasy. To that end, he consciously avoided what we might call excessive realism.

“If you make things too real,” he said, “sometimes you bring it down to the mundane.”

Zingo! Bull’s eye! In a mere 14 words he describes the whole challenge to the fantasy film-maker; and to the fantasy writer, too. If it’s not real enough, you’ve got nothing. But if it’s too real, you’ve got a sinkful of dirty dishes.

The Most Trusted People in America

In a poll taken by Reader’s Digest recently, Tom Hanks was exalted as the #1 Most Trusted Person in America.

Can I please wake up now?

It was a long list, and some 40% of it was actors. And lots and lots of TV “personalities.” Do you think Americans might have difficulty distinguishing between actors and the characters they play?

Almost everybody on the list was a big fat lefty, politically, with a very small sprinkling of “moderates.” This is extraordinarily hard to believe. Where did they take the poll–in the faculty tea room at Harvard? Nary a Republican on the list, but bunches and bunches of Democrats. Funny–I can’t think of a single Democrat for whom I have even an iota of respect. And as for trust…

I dunno. I guess most of the people I have a lot of respect for are dead. Moses. Paul. George Washington. King David. St. Athanasius. Their words still live. Their service to God still lives.

I’ll put my list against this Reader’s Digest list of midgets anytime, anywhere.

By the Creator of Tarzan…

I have discovered an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel that I am sure I’d never read before.

Burroughs is best-known as the creator of Tarzan. I read him regularly, because no one ever did a better job of juggling complicated plots and keeping the action moving forward. Some reviewers have said I do that rather well. If I do, I learned it from ERB.

I Am a Barbarian, written in 1941 but not published until 1967, 17 years after Burroughs’ death, is a first-person “memoir” by Britannicus, a lifelong slave to the mad emperor Caligula. As a depiction of the life and politics of ancient Rome, it was based on fairly extensive research and is vivid and convincing. But that’s not why I’m telling you about it.

This story is written with a savage bitterness that one does not generally associate with ERB. Indeed, as a lifelong Burroughs fan, I would have trouble recognizing Barbarian as his work if his name weren’t on the cover. What was going on in his life to make him write like that?

Despite being one of the most popularly successful writers in American history, ERB had a terrible habit of investing his hard-earned money in various real-estate and other get-rich-quick schemes that never bore fruit. He’d been poor for most of his young adulthood, and now he wanted to be rich. Very rich. Which he would have been, if he’d only stuck to writing and left the other stuff alone!

In 1941 his second marriage was falling apart–his fault, by all accounts–resulting in a 1942 divorce. The wife, a former silent movie actress 28 years younger than he, Burroughs married on the rebound from his first wife, by whom he had three children. It must have been a very bad time in his life: the tone of I Am a Barbarian shows it.

ERB died in 1950, only a year after I was born, so in spite of all I owe him as a writer, there’s nothing I can do for him. The Bible teaches us that we don’t have to live in bitterness, we don’t have to screw up our own lives. (There are plenty of individuals out there who’ll be only too glad to do it for us.) I suspect ERB wasn’t much committed to the Christian life.

Too bad. He would’ve done better, if he had been.