upstairs downstairs – Lee Duigon

Whose Name Is It, Anyway?

leeduigon(patty)May 8, 2024

[Note: Four pages of my book written today, hoorah! Off to a good start.]

What happens if your hubby is a billionaire, and you, through marriage, now have the same name as someone else on Instagram–and you want to use that name? (John Smith, Jim Johnson, call your offices!)

Katherine Asplundh’s husband owns a huge tree service. You’ve probably seen those Asplundh tree-grinders around town; surely you’ve heard them at work, they’re very loud.

Well, Katherine wants to go on Instagram but Kate Asplundh, no relation, is already there. No problema–just offer to buy Kate’s user name. Except Kate says that Instagram will ban her if she sells her name, so it’s thanks, but no thanks.

At this point Katherine gets nasty (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13394253/Billionaires-glamorous-new-wife-goes-viral-trying-bully-woman-shares-new-surname-selling-Instagram-handle-just-days-tying-knot-entitled-messages-make-furious.html). Maybe she can bully Kate into giving up her name: worth a try, at least.

What is this–an Upstairs, Downstairs episode? Lady, Kate was there first. This is America, you can’t just force her to give up her user name to you.

Our country is special. At least, it was meant to be. Money can’t buy everything. It can’t buy your name if you don’t want to sell.

How long can we keep it that way?

Did He Say ‘Insubordinate’?

leeduigon(patty)May 28, 2020

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee announces run for 3rd term

“Government’s the only thing we all belong to.” –DNC video, 2012

Democrat governors throughout America seem to be taking this motto literally.

Once upon a time we had “public servants.” Remember those? Now we’ve got masters.

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee has publicly complained about “insubordinate” citizens in his state (https://www.wethegoverned.com/they-cant-arrest-us-all-so-they-will-bankrupt-us-inslees-plan-to-suppress-insubordination/). They’re supposed to be subordinate to him. For Upstairs, Downstairs fans, this would be like Mr. Hudson the butler ordering Lady Margery to take out the garbage.

Inslee’s mightily cheesed off at the Snohomish County sheriff for not carrying out his plethora of lockdown mandates and wants him recalled from office. There’s no room for properly legislated laws in Mandateistan. And because he can’t count on the sheriffs lately, he has ordered his state Dept. of Labor and Industry to enforce his mandates, threatening small businesses with $10,000-a-day fines for noncompliance. He ordered this radical change in L&I’s function without any debate or public hearings. Louis XIV couldn’t have done it better.

Another one of his bureaucracies, not too long ago, got snookered for “hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars” by a Nigerian fraud ring. You’d think anybody, by now, wouldn’t fall for one of those scams. Gov. Inslee is angry because this resulted in some of his insubordinate citizens making jokes about him. Ah, well, easy come, easy go.

What strange new mutated kind of America have we become, when governors can rule like 18th-century despots and not only get away with it, but be applauded for it by more than a few of their drunk-on-socialism citizens? Who more resemble subjects than citizens.

Again, shame on us.

The Lost Souls of London

leeduigon(patty)August 3, 2015

Just how degraded is our culture?

I’ve just read a 2012 novel by the late Ruth Rendell, The St. Zita Society, which reinforces my conviction that the Western world is in serious trouble. Its culture has become toxic.

Rendell for decades wrote about weirdos and their twisted lives, and won every mystery writers’ award you can think of. As if that weren’t recognition enough, she was also promoted to the House of Lords. She was not a person to dismiss lightly.

St. Zita is about life in an upscale London neighborhood, the lives of rich folks and their servants–sort of an Upstairs, Downstairs presentation. As often happens when I read a Rendell novel, I wound up asking myself, “Why am I reading this? These characters are horrible!” To which my wife always replies, “You can’t blame Ruth Rendell for that. She’s just showing you a photograph.”

Okay, the doctor and the Muslim nursemaid are nice people; but aside from them, this Hexam Place is a valley of lost souls. When the Lord demanded of Ezekiel, “Can these bones live,” the same question might have been asked of this bunch of walking dead in London.

Here are the characteristics shared by the servants and their employers, with a few exceptions not enough to matter.

They are interested in other people only to the extent of how they can make use of them.

At all times, their chief concern is how to obtain some sort of gratification, usually sexual, as soon as possible.

The only sin they seem to recognize as sin is to say anything which might violate political correctness. Otherwise, they are devoid of any moral standard. A thief or a murderer will be less despised by them than a person guilty of “homophobia”–a sin which did not exist when Rendell began her career as a writer.

They show no awareness of or interest in anything beyond the immediate here and now.

If this is a photograph of British culture today, it’s a photograph by Diane Arbus.

To make sexual libertinism the centerpiece of life is a modern experiment enthusiastically pursued in all the Western countries. Those who pursue it are spiritually dead.

“Can these bones live?”

To which Ezekiel replied, “Lord, thou knowest.”

I doubt anyone else knows the answer to that question.

But if they do come back to life, it will have to be God’s doing. Not ours.