How Climate Change Causes Homophobia (Or Is It the Other Way Around?)

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Climate Change/Global Warming causes homophobia. No, homophobia causes Climate Change. And then Climate Change causes Income Inequality. Er, no, wait a minute–Income Inequality causes Climate Change. Ugh, I’m getting confused!

Come on–you didn’t really think I could untangle these Democrat fantasies, did you? Let’s move on to another kind of fantasy–certainly a much more edifying fantasy than any of this slop.

Have you noticed? Bell Mountain in paperback is selling at half-price on amazon.com. For less than half of what it costs you to sit through a really stupid movie, you can get the first book of my Bell Mountain Series. Popcorn is extra. If you already have the book, tell your friends about this insanely generous offer.

If you live in a country other than the USA, I do understand your problem with the shipping costs–way too high. You can get around that by ordering the book in the Kindle format.

I guarantee my books to be 100% free of current popular culture rubbish. And how many writers can say that?

A Harmless Little Fairy Tale

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Once upon a time, a man named Monty Banks came to the town of Brottwurst-am-Rhein.  He stood in the middle of the town square and blew a horn until all the townspeople had gathered round him.

“I am a full member of the Universal College of Alchemists,” he declared. “As you all know, the members of the College are the wisest men in all the world. Look, here is my diploma.

“I am here to warn you that, unless you follow the measures I advise, your town will be overwhelmed by a plague of vampire rats and everyone will die. Do not argue with me! The whole matter has already been fully debated and settled by the College.”

“But there are no vampire rats in Germany,” muttered a little tailor in the crowd.

“Denier! Ingrate!” cried Monty Banks. “You would pit your puny wits against the greatest minds in Europe?”

“Officers, throw that man in jail,” said the mayor. “Never mind him, O learned doctor. What is your advice?”

“You are to give me all your money,” said the alchemist, “and do everything I tell you from now on. Otherwise the rats will come and kill you.”

“But who will see that everyone obeys you?” asked the mayor.

“Why, my dear mayor! Who but the mayor and councilors of Brottwurst should execute my policies? Who but yourselves?”

“Oho! That’s different!” said the mayor.

And so the councilors voted to give themselves and the mayor absolute power to carry out Monty Banks’ orders, and took charge of every red  cent the townspeople had. Upon the alchemist’s advice, they forced the people to tear down their houses and live in huts, get rid of their draft animals and pull their carts with their own hands, and throw away all their fine clothes and dress themselves in rags. Very soon the entire town was utterly impoverished–except, of course, for the mayor and council.

And from his jail cell, the little tailor muttered, “There are no vampire rats. No one has ever seen one.” This got around, and soon many people were repeating it. So Monty Banks called a meeting of the whole town.

“You fools!” he said. “Of course you see no vampire rats! That’s because my measures have succeeded! My new laws have protected you from them!”

The mayor and the councilors sagely nodded their heads, and all agreed that Monty Banks had indeed saved Brottwurst.

 

Some Thoughts on Memorial Day

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Can we still say “Happy Memorial Day”? Or is that “happy holiday” now, too–just in case there’s one pencil-necked geek out there who might be offended?

John Kerry, who has built a nice career on trashing his fellow soldiers, once said it would be too bad for someone to be the last man to die in the Vietnam War. I guess so: the side he was rooting for won.

This Memorial Day, imagine being the last, or the first, to die in defense of, say, free speech zones. No free speech allowed outside the designated area. How well does that go with this? “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights…”

How about dying for Obamacare? Or same-sex imitation marriage, and the right of bureaucrats and pressure groups to destroy you if you don’t agree? Or for the right to die in a VA hospital, when timely treatment would have saved your life, because the government can’t be bothered with you anymore?

How about dying in the service of a government that screams bloody murder about “hate crimes,” but has never uttered a peep about “knockout”?

Would you lay down your life on Little Round Top, Iwo Jima, or Bastogne for any of that?

O God, who gives us the courage to die for a good cause, give us the courage never to die for an evil one.

God is Nigh

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One of the things God has done with my neighborhood, in just the past two weeks or so, is to turn it riotously green–with plenty of colorful punctuation by all kinds of flowers, wild and domestic. He does it right in front of us, and yet I can’t see it happening. Time-lapse photography would show it as it goes, but it’s too subtle for the unaided human eye to follow.

Yes, Very Wise Individuals–the kind who think that they themselves would make pretty respectable gods, much better than the real God–would say, “What do you mean, God? It’s just the mindless, mechanical functioning of nature, the working out of chance events over vast quantities of time,” blah-blah. I am convinced that what they’re really saying is, “Give us your money, and give us power over you.”

The bees know better.

An old hymn concludes, “This is my Father’s world, and let me ne’er forget/ That though the wrong seems oft so strong,/ He is the ruler yet.”

God’s own handiwork bears witness to him constantly, and is a source of comfort. The green leaves, the flowers, the infinite moods of the sky, the dance of bees in the hive–they all tell us, always, the same message:

“God is nigh.”

All the time.

A Parable for Our Time

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This is a true story; but to me it seems more like a parable.

A single man moved into the apartment next to ours, and he and his mother and his sister furnished and decorated it so that it looked like something out of House Beautiful. It was exquisite: not just the whole ensemble, but each individual piece of it.

But this man had a drinking problem.

One night, my wife and I went to bed early because we were to go off on vacation the next day, and that’d mean a lot of work loading and unloading, driving, etc. At some undetermined hour of darkness, we were awakened by a great CRASH! next door, followed by another, and another, and another. We heard glass shattering. We heard heavy objects being hurled down the stairs and snapping into splinters. And we heard a man cursing. We knew it was the man who lived there, and that he was in a drunken rage.

This went on for quite a while. You’ve never heard anything like it.

The next day, as I was taking suitcases out to the car, the door to that apartment swung open. There stood the tenant, bleary-eyed and half-dressed. Behind him lay a total shambles. All those beautiful pieces of furniture lay strewn across the floor like firewood.Every single thing was broken.

And of course I knew what happened, because I’d heard him pitching his furniture down the stairs, hurling it against the walls, and stomping it.

He greeted me, and with a profoundly sad expression on his face, stepped aside to give me a better view of the ruin of his apartment. And do you know what he said?

He said, “Look what happened!”

Not “Look what I did in my drunken frenzy!” No: it just “happened.” As if he’d had nothing to do with it.

Someday we will point to what’s left of America and say, “Look what happened.”

They’re Watching Us… Why?

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The last time I bought my cigars at Rite-Aid, the clerk had to give me some kind of disclaimer. “Other than a waste of paper,” I asked, “what’s this?” “We have to give one to every customer who buys a tobacco product,” the clerk explained. “See? There’s a camera up there, so they can check.” And sure enough, there was the surveillance camera.

Today when I went in, I had to give my date of birth. Apparently my grey hairs are not enough to prove I’m of age to have a cigar. I complained about that. “As of next week,” said the clerk, “you’ll have to show us your ID, too.” But of course it would be wrong, wrong, wrong to ask me to show ID before I can vote on who ought to be president.

I’m losing patience with this. Are they keeping a database on everyone who smokes? How many different databases do they have, for how many different categories of people? Does there have to be a camera peering at us wherever we go?

“Oh, but it serves you right! Because you’re a smoker, and smoking is a dirty habit, and unhealthy, and now that the government is taking over health care, we don’t want to be wasting public money on you dirty no-good smokers!”

Hey, you poor dopes out there who think you’re going to be given a free pass for your vices, whatever they might be–don’t get too comfy, because your turn will come. Today they’re monitoring the smokers, so they’ll know who to throw into the camps when the time comes. But they’ll get around to you over-eaters, under-eaters, sugar freaks, couch potatoes.

The only freedom our ruling experts intend to leave us is the license to fornicate without restriction.

Not because they want us to have fun, but because they want us to be as immoral as they are.

 

Can I Wake Up Now, Please?

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So it was back to the dentist’s office first thing this morning, to have my stitches out. I sit down in the waiting room. The TV is on. It compels me to look at the screen. And the first thing I see is two guys smooching–it’s an ad for a new sod show on Broadway.

Then the celebrity idiot talk show kicks in. The audience goes wild. By “wild” I mean all but tearing off their clothes and levitating. I know the studio audience is coached to do that, but I still find it a daunting sight. I would rather not see it.

I drive home. Because I’ve lived here all my life, I know I’m passing through a landscape full of ghosts–the ghosts of farms and villages, woodlands and fields that I remember, that I saw. Or did I? Did I only dream them? But the Protectors of The Environment, whom we have been electing and re-electing without interruption since the 1960s, have paved over everything. No one would ever guess that this was once a country road, or that there was ever any such thing as “country” anywhere around here.

Somehow I cannot see any of this as being what God intended for His people.

 

When is ‘Columbo’ Not ‘Columbo’?

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My wife has been assembling a whole library of Columbo episodes, and we’ve been enjoying them very much. She most recently acquired “Peter Falk’s 7 Final Columbo Mysteries”–TV specials that aired between 1994-2003.

There’s a problem with some of these late Columbo specials: they aren’t Columbo episodes at all. That is, the whole format is drastically changed.

Some of them are based on stories or novels by Ed McBain, who was famous for his “87th Precinct” police procedural tales. Having Ed McBain write Columbo is like hiring Al Hirt to play the violin, or Mickey Spillane to write an Inspector Morse episode.

Yeah, all right, we know Columbo’s a cop. But it’s jarring to see him working in a crowded squad room, as part of a whole team of detectives working on a single case–sometimes even brandishing a gun, which I find shocking. It’s like seeing the dark side of Tweety Bird.

Gone is the cat-and-mouse game between Columbo and the murderer. Gone, too, are the glamorous settings–and the whole motif of the rich, powerful, oh-so-smart individual who commits a murder and expects to get away with it. He can easily outsmart this little twerp in a tattered raincoat. I mean, look at the car Columbo drives! And he talks about his wife’s totally philistine tastes in culture, and whistles “Knick-knack Paddy-wack,” and the murderer is thinking, “I’m home free, this boob will never catch me!” And then we just lean back and enjoy it: and every self-important big shot who ever kicked sand in our faces is going down with that murder. Columbo will make sure of that.

That’s all missing from those Ed McBain-based specials. What remains is just another cop show: better produced, better performed than most, but still just an ordinary cop show with a guy named Columbo in it.

There’s a lesson in this for anyone who’s trying to tell stories in any genre. Whatever you’re writing must be true to itself. The characters, the setting, the nature of the conflict–the world of the story must be as internally consistent as the real world we inhabit.

Over the years, Columbo created a fantasy disguised as mystery, much the same as Arthur Conan Doyle did with Sherlock Holmes. Columbo’s adventures were fanciful, part of an imaginary world. His achievements were no more “realistic” than those of the Count of Monte Cristo, or Tarzan. But we believed in them. The writers and the star, Peter Falk, got us to believe in them.

And that’s what made it so much fun.

How Do Teachers Learn to be Kooks?

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Upon reading my May 17 blog post about the Oregon school calling the cops on a kid for playing “hangman,” someone asked me a very interesting question.

“No normal person calls the police because some kid is playing ‘hangman,'” she said. “I’ll bet they have to receive special training before they learn how to overreact like that. I really wonder who tells them, ‘This is what you do when you spot a child doing something normal.'”

Great point. At this site alone we have reported “teachers” going to pieces when they saw kids making silent prayer, playing cops and robbers, drawing a picture of their daddy in his soldier’s uniform, and so on. Who teaches the teachers to be such kooks?

I mean, I took teacher training courses back in the Seventies, and no one taught me to throw a tantrum and call the police if I heard a kid humming a little hymn she learned in Sunday school. Actually they didn’t teach us much of anything: New Jersey’s first $100,000-a-year teacher salary still lay some 20 years in the future. No one taught us when to tell a little kid, “It’s wrong to pray.”

The signs of culture rot are everywhere.

Enter the Ninja

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So I was driving home from the White Castle yesterday, along a road that used to be a country road until Democrats got rid of the countryside… and along the side of the road comes walking a guy in–a ninja costume.

OK, he wasn’t carrying a sword. But he had the black hood and the black martial arts pants and the belt. To make sure you understood it was a special martial arts belt, it was decorated with golden Japanese characters.

Now it can’t be that this person was a real ninja, because ninjas are supposed to be secret operatives and it would never do for people to be pointing at one and saying, “There goes a ninja! I wonder who he’s going to assassinate.” Nor was it Halloween. This was somebody dressed up as a ninja for no apparent reason.

Maybe he was going to Wal-Mart? But nobody walks in that neighborhood. It’s unusual to see any pedestrian at all, let alone one dressed up as a ninja.

When I see a thing like this, I think maybe our culture is in trouble.