In Which Dark Gallows Humor Alternates with the Wry Wit of Victory - LOTR 71
Or, Removing the Last Stain of Honor, and Blood, Off the Shire's Heart
Have you noticed that Saturday Night Live is having a hard time, these days? It's tough being a satirist, when Reality trumps you at every turn. The Babylon Bee has confessed that it may be getting into the prophecy business, but averred it would rather not. Only they seem to be able to keep abreast of the madness. The rest of us struggle to keep up...What, What?
How to Survive Inflation if You're a Pathetic Poor Person.
And Satan asks them, Could We Tone Down the Evil a Notch?
In the Beginning was the plan.
And then came the assumptions.
And the assumptions were without form.
And the plan was completely without substance.
And the darkness was upon the face of the workers.
And they spoke among themselves saying:
“It is a crock of shit, and it stinketh.”
And the workers went unto their supervisors, and sayeth:
“It is a pail of dung, and none can abide the odor thereof.”
And the supervisors went unto their managers and sayeth unto them,
“It is a container of excrement, and it is very strong, such that none can abide it.”
And the managers went unto the directors and sayeth,
“It is a vessel of fertilizer, and none can abide its strength.”
And the directors spoke amongst themselves, saying one to another:
“It contains that which aids plant growth, and is very strong.”
And the directors went unto the vice presidents and sayeth to them,
“It promotes growth, and is very powerful.”
And the vice presidents went unto the president, and sayeth unto him,
“This new plan will actively promote growth and efficiency of this company, and certain areas in particular.”
And the president looked upon the plan, and saw that it was good.
And the plan became policy.
And this is how shit happens. Link
Sound advice. I guess this makes clear what "You will eat bugs and be happy" really means, in case anyone needed the translation. Although, Charles Hugh Smith suggests that it means, "you'll appear to own things you don't actually control and be happy."
Liberals think it is funny that people might need hunting rifles to protect themselves. Thirty-To-Fifty Feral Hogs is one of their slap-happy, smug memes. This once again proves they cannot Meme well, as they really need to get out more. Apparently, they've never seen a dead hog laid out in the back of an F250. Or stumbled up on three coyotes in their back yard, that weren't afraid when they locked eyes with you. I still wish that I had been carrying a staff that day. Also, 30-50 feral humans are not completely out of the picture, either. But you're not supposed to think that way.
Meanwhile, King Charles (the titular and symbolic head of the fading Anglo Empire) has managed to come off looking suitably surreal. Was this his intent, to help subvert what's left of the legitimate Crown of Isildur? King Charles was always a bit of an ambiguous customer. It's rumored he is a Guenonian Traditionalist. If he survives this painting, he can survive anything, I suppose...
They are comparing Charles to Vigo the Carpathian on Ghostbusters...Link
Jonathan Yeo is an enemy, not of the state, but of anyone he paints...
This is a very strange world we live in. As First Earl Beatty was reported to have said, as he peered through his binoculars at the German fleet savaging his own ships, "There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today!". Of his boss, Admiral Jellicoe, Churchill opined that he was the only man in the British Empire who could possibly lose the war in one day. This is what decay, disorder, degeneracy and collapse look like.
Jacques Barzun defined it long ago:
All that is meant by Decadence is "falling off." It implies in those who live in such a time no loss of energy or talent or moral sense. On the contrary, it is a very active time, full of deep concerns, but peculiarly restless, for it sees no clear lines of advance. The loss it faces is that of Possibility. The forms of art as of life seem exhausted, the stages of development have been run through. Institutions function painfully. Repetition and frustration are the intolerable result. Boredom and fatigue are great historical forces.
Disorder and Detached-from-Reality Bubbles seem to carry the day, these days. It makes for fun and interesting times. Yet, there is a worsening, as we approach the Shire. "History repeats itself twice - once as tragedy, the second time, as farce" (Karl Marx). So all of this blossoming of petty Evil (which seems so potent, is just Sharkey's Last Hurrah).
The hobbits know this, or at least Frodo does, as they enter the despoiled Shire. Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin have returned the long way home, to the Shire. They are tired, worn, and happy, flushed with the relief and victory of finally ending their impossible struggle with titanic evil, through recourse to spiritual victory. This victory was brought about through sheer grit and crowned with the Eucatasrophe from on high, signaling the authentic mandate from Heaven. Since it ends one Epoch, and starts another, it ain't just Politics, or messing around, but Heaven's power, for real.
Link It's a big Cosmos. Nature can shake off the Shadow. It always has Heaven's Mandate.
It sure ain't no "mandate from the masses". It's the mission of the "little people", and they are the ones Heaven uses to thwart the high powers that be: Ghan-Beri-Ghan, Treebeard, the Hobbits, Aragorn (the outcast and rejected true King), the forgotten rangers, the besieged elves of Lothlorien, Gandalf (also sneered at as "Stormcrow" and a dabbling, decrepit old man), the almost-doomed Faramir, Eowyn the almost-hopeless shield maiden, and a host of other "small characters". Even old Tom Bombadil, though primally mighty, is just along for the ride, a rudimentary, creaturely being of "thisness" and finitude, unequal to the Shadow in a truly Aristotelian manner.
Like these small characters, against all odds, the Shire endures. It prevails. It remains. It abides. Yet here, at the end, unaccountably, the fresh, spreading bloodstain of a deadly wound appears, soaking through the snow white tunic of the lovely Shire. Will our heroes overcome this? Will they save the Shire? Will they save the Shire, even if they manage to save themselves?
Did we not defeat The Shadow? Why is there more to do? Still looks scary...
Under The Shadow, Truth is never a defense. That was the core of the Western Tradition, for millennia.
Of course, a lot, rather any one thing in particular, has gone off the rails within Western intelligentsia — which was once, a long time in the past now, the noble vanguard of the Renaissance and Enlightenment and the envy of the civilized world. So this isn’t anything like a holistic autopsy of the institutionalized pursuit of knowledge, as that would fill volumes longer than the Bible....Moronic Social Justice™ inventions like “malinformation” and “epistemological violence” are total subversions, by the way, of the longstanding Western common law tradition that the truth is always a defense.
Truth is no longer a defense. There is no longer Justice, just "Social Justice". Justice, is no longer blind. So the evil left in the Shire (our home), will have to be confronted. We fought a lot of wars against great Evil, & there's work on the homefront, it appears. Adrastia, come quickly.
Our government agencies are all worthless, providing no real services other than to begrudgingly pay us back the money they stole from us (Social Security, Medicare, and Unemployment Compensation), or provide the benefits they promised (military personnel). But, like savage beasts that are always hungry, they must be fed. Paid better than those who pay them, and with much better benefits. While conservatives bemoan “welfare,” which was altered significantly under Bill Clinton, so that fewer people receive less money, they fail to see the federal government itself for what it is: a gigantic, entitled welfare recipient. Think of Reagan’s mythical Welfare Queen. Living it up with house money....And then there’s the populace. Sure, there are millions of people awake now, to varying degrees. But millions more are sound asleep. If you try to act as their alarm clock, they can quickly become violent. Against all reason, they appear to like the present situation. They seem to feel there is hope for the future. They recoil at our re-pilled and black-pilled proclamations like we were holding them up at intellectual gunpoint. As e.e. cummings once chided his fellow poet Ezra Pound, who was obsessed with Jews, the Federal Reserve, and unnecessary wars, and involuntarily committed to a mental health facility for a decade by the government, “You bastard- you’re trying to get them to think!” Most people desperately don’t want to think. It’s an ignorance is bliss thing, you wouldn’t understand. Link
Americans have long been dimly aware that there are better ways to spend your life, than propping up the single biggest welfare recipient of all, our very own USG.
Reflecting more deeply, one can’t help but wonder precisely why American cities feel so different. The American way of life revolves around perpetual advancement: the undying pursuit of the fabled ‘American Dream’, amounting essentially to the banality of material wealth. In what are commonly deemed as ‘third world’ countries, the lack of widespread ‘opportunity’ for profitable careers tunes life to a different cadence. People are apt to simply ‘settle’ into basic, lower tier jobs as a way of life and be satisfied for it; the lack of alternative brings quiet contentment...Reflecting more deeply, one can’t help but wonder precisely why American cities feel so different. The American way of life revolves around perpetual advancement: the undying pursuit of the fabled ‘American Dream’, amounting essentially to the banality of material wealth. In what are commonly deemed as ‘third world’ countries, the lack of widespread ‘opportunity’ for profitable careers tunes life to a different cadence. People are apt to simply ‘settle’ into basic, lower tier jobs as a way of life and be satisfied for it; the lack of alternative brings quiet contentment...In ‘underdeveloped’ countries, this phenomenon is blunted. Since people aren’t fed hopeless illusions, they’re apt to simply settle into an existence of contentment: the tranquility of present living. They know nothing ‘greater’ awaits them, so they make do with what they have, appreciating the small things and fleeting moments. This is why when visiting such countries, Westerners often experience a slowing of time, one they usually don’t have the vocabulary or training to articulate. They’ll use euphemisms like “things feel dreamy” or “relaxed”, understanding at the instinctively cellular level that this is how things were meant to be, how life was meant to be lived. Link
Defeating Sharkey (in our home turf of the Shire) will require changing the way we think, and ultimately, changing our consciousness. It is simply no longer the case that trying to save The System, or working on The System's terms, will conduce to anyone's benefit, short or long term. This is a difficult Truth. And remember, The Truth is no longer a defense, so pointing this out, is considered Hateful, Heretical, and Heinous.
What is the alternative? Not just "More Shadow", but ultimately, More Misery, Suffering, and Exponentially Worse Outcomes. We can face our own Shadow. The Truth is indispensable, here.
The greater problem in terms of famine is not that individual Americans are not aware of the threat; many of them are. The problem is that our infrastructure and logistical systems are designed to fail and there’s not much the average citizen can do about it...Link
Defending the Shire, Defeating our own Shadow, will require that we initiate our own, personal change. We will have to confess the painful Truth. People don't like to work, they certainly don't like to work on themselves, and they never enjoy working on themselves, when it's not a sure bet as to outcome. Especially so, are the pragmatic Americans. So it's hard to face the facts. But once that Shadow is overcome, defeating the external Shadow will be a piece of cake.
Most real policy in the modern West is decided within the vast and overlapping realms of government, corporate, and nonprofit bureaucracies, and then pushed through the formalities of the legislative branch as an afterthought. That doesn’t mean that nothing can be done. It means that nothing can be done by relying on tools that have long since lost their edge, or playing games that the house has rigged so that it never loses. You don’t succeed in a challenging environment by doing the things that everyone else expects you to do. Nor do you succeed in a challenging environment by competing on the other guy’s ground, where he gets to set the rules and can change them at will. You win by doing the unexpected, and by moving the struggle someplace else, where you can set the rules and tilt things in your own favor. One of the eternal verities of lenocracy is that nobody in a managerial bureacracy is ever willing to consider taking home a smaller paycheck. Another is that nobody in a managerial bureaucracy is ever willing to consider having fewer subordinates. A third is that the stockholders, too, always expect their shares to gain in value and their income to go up. As a result, year after year, the share going to the people who actually do the work dwindles, while the share going up the ziggurat bloats. This is among the major factors driving impoverishment and immiseration in today’s America, though of course the corporate media doesn’t mention that. Link
When Liz Truss can figure out what is happening, you know things are bad.
If you look at the history since the turn of the millennium, the left have had the upper hand. And it’s not the old-fashioned left who used to argue about the means of production and economic inequality. It’s the new left who have insidious ideas that challenge our very way of life. Link
The West increasingly begins to plainly resemble this arrangement, and we are gaining weight
So What is to be Done?
Nothing. It's like getting that hot tip about the races, when you are the shoeshine boy. If even we know, if even Liz Truss knows, it's already too late to help the patient. There are some things we can't "stop". There are Limits. Aircraft carriers can't turn on a dime. And that's Good News. It frees you up for...Freedom. Do we really wish to be chained to the corpse of the Third Age? Can we not let the Dead bury the Dead?
Instead, whatever you see, in yourself, and in the world around you in your local Shire, that needs doing, do that as unto the Lord. If it's individual, creative, & free, and if it takes place in your own heart and the vicinity of the heart in the sphere of the neighbor and The Shire, you can be sure that the Holy Spirit is the instigator, not The Shadow. This is the New Creation, and following the great Gardener, who is God.
We need The Shadow, in order to face the darker parts of ourselves. Having faced them, we can begin to Cultivate Our Garden. I hate to end with a Voltaire quote. So I will quote the prophet Micah instead.
But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid: for the mouth of the LORD of hosts hath spoken it. Micah 4:4
Hobbits, Unite. We have nothing but a world to win, by making it anew. This time, it will be made on the model of our Shire.
Next Time...we will look at more practical stuff...and consider even more hilarious evasions of the Shadow, to avoid the inevitable...
Also, coming up...does Industrialism have an inherent link with Totalitarianism? Does saying this make us a Luddite?