Random Thoughts on the Way We are Now

I am a year older than Mitch McConnell but am a lot smarter (as well as better-looking). Same goes for Joe Biden, now and always.

The U.S. now has two holidays for African Americans (one of them fraudulent) and only one for the founders of the country.

What I have noticed recently in streaming television shows (mostly intelligent European ones): ads for HIV drugs showing gloriously happy sodomites. I have also noticed that in every show, in the first 5-10 minutes, there will invariably appear an admirable black person, no matter how irrelevant to the country or the plot. This is nearly universal for recent shows in European countries. In one Iceland police series, white supremacists were being evil to an African immigrant. Happy sodomite couples also invariably appear in almost every series as an everyday matter. Is somebody trying to tell us something?

The great Wendell Berry teaches a lesson for us in these degraded and threatening times on the difference between optimism and hope. Optimism is merely a program, hope is a Christian duty.

Just before the War for Southern Independence, the great William Gilmore Simms wrote: “The virtues of a people depend very much on the incorruptible integrity of language.” In this light consider the current babblings of our politicians, advertisers, bureaucrats, college presidents, leading clergyman, “experts.” The old idea of integrity - that you should say what you mean and mean what you say - has disappeared from American discourse. It is worth reminding ourselves who is “the Father of Lies,” the first corruptor of language.

In his nonfiction speeches and essays Faulkner made a similar point. What he was hearing in America was not words but rather “mouth sounds.”
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Speaking of Faulkner, he said his favourite things were horses, trees, and silence. While I am not remotely on the same level and have never been fortunate enough to deal with horses, I got the other two right