Lee Duigon

King Arthur, if he ever existed (scholars aren’t sure), lived and died some fifteen hundred years ago. After the Bible, his story was the story of the Western world. Before the invention of the printing press, King Arthur’s story had been translated into French, Italian, German, Icelandic, Spanish, Swedish, and Russian, and hand-copied into books all over Europe. By the middle of the 20th century, King Arthur had become the subject of prose, poetry, painting, sculpture, classical music, movies, television programs, toys, board games, a Broadway musical, and innumerable works of historical and literary scholarship. I even know of a housing development where the streets are named after his knights.

But now he has fallen on hard times.

Yesterday I quizzed a 13-year-old boy and his 38-year-old uncle–representing two different generations–as to what they knew about King Arthur. Writers are allowed to do things like this; it would be considered intrusive, coming from your plumber.

The boy first: “Tell me everything you know about King Arthur.”

“Uh… Was he a king of England or someplace? He had some involvement with the U.S.?”

He came up totally blank on the Round Table, Camelot, Merlin, Guinevere, and Sir Lancelot. He defined the Holy Grail as “a big cup with a lot of jewels on it, and if you drink from it, you live forever.” An interesting response, I’d say.

His uncle did a little better.

“King Arthur… Oh, yeah, with the Knights of the Round Table.” Merlin he identified as “a wizard,” but didn’t make the connection between Merlin and Arthur. He came up empty on Camelot, Guinevere, and Lancelot. “I think I might’ve heard that name, sometime, Sir Lancelot. But I don’t know anything about him.”

So for fifteen hundred years the story of King Arthur was told, and built upon, and retold, and decorated (sometimes almost beyond recognition): it even caught on in Japan.

And now it’s lost. This great treasure of our culture, buried under an avalanche of comic books–no more Prince Valiant comics, I regret to say–and video games, reality TV and truly benighted “music” that shrivels souls. After a millenium and a half, we’ve managed to erase it in a mere two generations. The story came out of one Dark Age to vanish into another.

I don’t believe that man evolved from apes. But a lot of people seem to be working very hard to make apes evolve from man.

I’ve been reading The Fall of Arthur, an unfinished epic poem by J.R.R. Tolkien. I’ll write a full review of it in due course, once I’ve found the answer to a key question.

Does King Arthur matter anymore? And, if so, why does he matter?

Part of the answer must be that, for a very long time, King Arthur served as a model for what a monarch–or any kind of leader–ought to be: just and temperate; strong and fearless; a protector of the weak; a mirror of all virtue. It’s very easy to fit George Washington into that tradition.

My question for the time being is: who are the models for the leaders that we have today? Certainly not King Arthur. Who or what has replaced King Arthur as the very image of a nation’s leader? After whom, or what, do our country’s current leaders pattern themselves?

A cageful of hungry rats? The inmates of the sex offenders’ wing at the state prison? Lenin? Mao Tse-tung? Dracula? Willie Sutton? Nero? The Music Man? Tapeworms?

If God ever sends angels to Washington, D.C., to find ten just men, you know what’s going to happen next.

Here in this little town, two miles across, with its eight churches, we find a trendy, high-end gift shop which is about to shift to a new location a few blocks up the street from its old one. To celebrate the occasion, the owners will hold a seminar on how to get in touch with “your animal spirit guide.”

Eight churches.

A hundred years ago most people who dabbled in this sort of malarkey proudly claimed a “Red Indian” spirit guide. Sic transit Chief Running Bear. I guess that has become Politically Incorrect. So now, when you want supernatural advice, you get a hamster or whatever. You might even be lucky enough, we are told, to discover that your Animal Spirit Guide is one of your own beloved pets that has passed on.

Eight churches.

The perpetrators of this business are not poor Haitian immigrants but well-to-do, college-educated, white women. They seem like very nice women. I have patronized their store for years, not knowing that they also offered tarot readings on the side. I am very sorry to learn that they wish to be guided by pagan fortune-telling cards and the spirits of animals.

Eight churches, by cracky.

What would be going on here if there were no churches?

For the turning away of the simple shall slay them, and the prosperity of fools shall destroy them.

–Proverbs 1:32

Is there any single verse in all the Bible that better describes what is happening to our poor, fallen country?

You would think no self-respecting nation would ever hold hearings in a state house for men dressed up as women to demand the legal “right” to use women’s public lavatories. And it’s true: no self-respecting people would dream of doing that. But we Americans have abandoned self-respect, so nowadays this scene, and many others like it, is played out all the time.

Why does our representative government represent not us, but various groups of villains who prey on us? No illegal alien drug dealer, no militant sodomite, no hip-hop gangsta, no shari’a freak, no atheist ever wants for representation at any level of the government. Hence a Massachusetts State House thronged with ugly men done up as women and hideous women done up as men, and representatives elected by supposedly normal people all vying with one another to champion these aberrant characters.

If you want anyone in government to listen to you these days, you’d better leave the country, change your name, and sneak back in illegally. Or commit some other crime. Then you’ll be eagerly represented.

We Americans are used to peace, prosperity, and easy living. This has turned us into simpletons and fools. And that’s why we have a government suited to the management of simpletons and fools.

I was well enough to go on errands this morning, which took us up and down the county. I kept my eye out for children at play on a nice summer day.

Sort of like trying to spot the ivory-billed woodpecker.

Hey, this isn’t funny anymore–what have they done with all the children? No kids playing in the parks, or on the residential streets, or in the big back yards (all those swings and sliding-boards and see-saws going to waste). I did see maybe four or five very small children, all told, but I didn’t count them because they were with their mothers.

I was looking for free-range children riding bikes, playing ball, pitching horseshoes, messing around in the creeks, or just hanging out together without some adult breathing down their necks to make sure they follow the program. I couldn’t find any. Aside from the rare, lone adult pedestrian, the only sign of human life was people in cars. A visitor from another planet might mistake the car for a life-support system.

This ain’t natural, folks. I dread to contemplate a future inhabited by a generation whose every thought has been spoon-fed to it by someone else. Morlocks and Eloi, brethren. Morlocks and Eloi. God, save us.

Help me out, O readers–how should I answer an atheist who says God is cruel and unjust, on account of all those innocent people He kills off in the Old Testament–and that the Bible is not the “good book,” but the bad book?

I think his arguments are sophomoric and inane, and hardly deserving of an answer. But answer them I must, because I don’t know who else might be reading: it may be someone who very badly needs an answer.

To avoid the risk of misrepresenting my opponent, you can read his comments and mine on the “Playground Player Chessforum” at http://www.chessgames.com . Scroll down to the menu at the bottom of the page, click “Chessforums,” and then look for the little green dinosaur and “playground player.”

Adam, of course, was the first to blame God for his own sin: “The woman that you gave me, Lord, made me eat of the forbidden fruit.” (Genesis 3:12). So if we want to deny free will, which we do at our peril, we can say it’s all God’s fault for making us the way we are. It would be hard for any eight-year-old to come up with a more persuasive argument.

We might want to ask, If God is cruel and unjust, then how can Jesus Christ, God’s Son, be any better? “He who has seen me has seen the Father.” (John 14:9) But who can point to anything cruel or unjust done by Jesus? Either He truly represents the Father, as He says He does, or He doesn’t, and must therefore be a liar.

Antichrists great and small want to get rid of the Bible so they can do whatever they please without being judged for it. But if they hadn’t, in their secret hearts, already judged and condemned themselves, they simply wouldn’t care about the Bible. They would not protest so much unless they knew they were guilty. Otherwise their behavior makes no sense.

I don’t expect to convert the atheist. God has tapped me to perform this service, and I must do the best I can.