Cultural Decline

As I was leaving Walmart with a small bag of purchases, a polite young woman in a blue apron was waiting at the exit door, trying to reduce shoplifting.  I met her eyes and looked expectantly with a friendly expression on my face, waiting for some word from her.

(Please understand, I seldom patronize Walmart, so I don’t automatically know the rituals.)

She said something, but I couldn’t make it out.  I kept walking toward her, assuming that I’d be close enough when she repeated herself in response to my raised eyebrows.  Then I heard her say “C.R.E.C.”

I knew that I must have misunderstood, so I was now in her presence and apologetically begged “I’m sorry, what was that?”

She didn’t slow down, but she increased her volume a little and said a third time “C.R.E.C.”

Then it clicked in my mind.  “Oh!  May I see your receipt, please?  Certainly!  Certainly!” and I handed it to her.

I’m sure that she was glad to get that over with, but I doubt that she got a blog post out of it.

On Leaving a Hospital AMA

My wife was under the care of a local hospital for about eighty hours at the end of April. We walked out at 2:00 a.m. on a Monday because the new floor we’d been moved to happened to have a staff that declined our request for pain management, stonewalled, lied, and delayed until bringing us yet another ineffective dose of Tylenol, expecting us to just shut up and behave. We went home and I nursed her back to health.

Our particular complaint isn’t the subject of this essay, though. Sick people usually complain, and that will tempt any nursing staff to dismiss complaints. It is the prerogative of the patient, though, to decide whether or not he will submit to the judgment of the medical attendants, so this essay applies to all patients.

Although walking out was frightening to my wife (who is quite obedient to authority), it was a tremendous relief to us both to be back home. We used leftover oxycodone and experimented with the dosage (as we have through earlier surgical recoveries) according to her pain levels and durations. She slept in her own bed, chose her own diet, used her own toilet, wore a nightgown that wasn’t degrading, and was at peace. Her original ailment was kidney malfunction due to dehydration; but that had passed and she was in recovery, so going home was not dangerous.

The nursing staff (on the previous floor) had botched an IV and a calcium drip had extravasated into her arm. Calcium is quite an irritant over time and it became very painful as the night progressed; hence our complaints to the deaf ears of the affirmative-action caregivers we last encountered.

At home we were responsible for ourselves and to ourselves, meaning that, although we were willing to take the blame if we failed, we at least had the dignity of not being yanked around as though we were in prison.

The emergency room staff had probably saved my wife’s life with their swift diagnosis of kidney failure (which was merely temporary) and their administration of various infusions to remediate the potassium, acid, and calcium levels. I give them full credit with gratitude.

It makes little sense to blame a hospital for the failure of an IV insertion on an elderly patient with dilapidated veins, so I had no hesitation in returning to the same institution when my wife’s arm wasn’t healing properly at the end of May. Obviously our earlier dissatisfaction was prominently displayed in her record, for we got the royal treatment at every turn. They treated her with antibiotics and she’s now (another month later) under the care of a wound specialist, with yet another month to go.

Most of this information is to give context for you, the reader, to understand my stance on leaving the hospital Against Medical Advice. Don’t hesitate much to do it if you wish to. You have available a limitless number of providers of medical services, but you have only one soul.

The Hellish Darts of Hymn Desecration

The second verse of Isacc Watts’s “When I Can Read My Title Clear” says:

Should earth against my soul engage
And hellish darts be hurl’d
Then I can smile at Satan’s rage
And face a frowning world

A judicious person would automatically expect himself to be the inferior of Isaac Watts when it comes to hymn versification. Such persons, though, are not in charge of publishing hymnals. Almost universally now you will find the expression changed to “fiery darts,” as if Watts didn’t know what he was doing, or didn’t know that Eph. 6:17 of the Authorized Version of the English Bible used the wording “fiery darts.” This changed version can be found in songbooks 200 years old, so hymn improvers have a rich heritage.

Very good people desecrate hymns. They, like toddlers, think that they are helping. Often they mangle a hymn to make it, supposedly, more suitable for the current year. They are quite incapable of writing a hymn with lines like:

Great Father of glory, pure Father of light
Thine angels adore Thee, all veiling their sight
All laud we would render, Oh, help us to see
‘Tis only the splendor of light hideth Thee

Yet, like the aforementioned toddlers, they take their wax crayon and scrawl “praise” over the word “laud.” Why? They think that they’re helping.

One of my favorite lines in all of hymnody is “Heaven and earth may fade and flee, firstborn light in gloom decline, . . .” It is well-wrought poetry, as is most of the rest of “I Am His and He Is Mine.” (On the other hand, I could do without the third of four verses, which begins “Things that once were wild alarms.”) In some ill-fated hymnals, an improved version reads “Heaven and earth may pass away, sun and stars in gloom decline.” I suppose the reviser was trying to help.

“Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah” is among the greatest of English hymns. But like pigeons who see a statue of a great man, the desecrators cannot leave it alone. Commonly these days, the classic final verse,

When I tread the verge of Jordan
Bid my anxious fears subside
Death of death, and Hell’s destruction,
Land me safe on Canaan’s side

will be changed to say “bear me through the swelling current, land me safe on Canaan’s side.” The earlier words would teach the singers, with some instruction from their ministers, the doctrine of the Harrowing of Hell. The more recent, altered version happens to be truer to the original Welsh, but it is still a step down.

Charles Wesley knew his Bible, his Greek, and the history of theology thoroughly. Those who think that they can correct him need to realize that they are stepping into the boxing ring with a heavyweight champion. When he wrote

He left his Father’s throne above
So free, so infinite his grace
Emptied Himself of all but love
And bled for Adam’s helpless race

he captured the meaning of Philippians 2:7 accurately and beautifully. Let the correctors bring their studies of the doctrine of kenosis and lay them out for the rest of us to see. They might merit display on their mothers’ refrigerator doors for a few days — if they could be found at all.

“Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing” has been disgraced more than most. The well-crafted line “Here I raise mine Ebenezer, hither by thy help I’m come” is easy enough to explain to someone unfamiliar with the Bible. A monument called “Ebenezer” was raised in 1 Samuel 7. The word means “stone of help” and Israel marked the occasion by saying “hitherto hath the Lord helped us.” American Christians are not stupid. They don’t need a children’s version of the hymn that takes out the hard words. The prize, however, goes to that dear saint who changed “And I hope, by thy good pleasure, safely to arrive at home” into “And I know, by thy good pleasure, safely to arrive at home.” This corrector, bless God, had a know-so salvation and had no room in his thinking for a Bible word like “hope,” even if changing it made grammatical hash out of a formerly beautiful song.

A particularly egregious instance of effrontery is the change (within the last forty years, as I recall) of Charles Wesley’s “My God is reconciled” to “I now am reconciled.” It is true that, in the New Testament, “reconciliation” is used only of the sinner being reconciled to God, and not God being reconciled to the sinner. Well and good. But does it ever occur to the corrector that Charles Wesley might actually have known that just as well, or better, than he? Apparently not. Like a halfback who has been passed the football, looks for an opening in the line of scrimmage, and “runs for daylight,” the corrector’s only goal is to employ his superiority to Wesley in God’s service.

The line in question occurs in the last stanza of “Arise, My Soul, Arise.” The five verses of the song form one coherent whole; they relate to one another. Monkeying with the fifth verse throws it out of kilter with the previous four, and it makes the fifth verse itself internally incoherent. A common worshipper will probably never see the problem with the altered line. A hymn corrector could easily see it if he weren’t a barbarian.

A cursory reading makes plain that the song is about the sinner’s fears that he might die eternally under the righteous wrath of God, but “the bleeding sacrifice” appears before the judgment bar of God. Christ, the sacrifice, prays and pleads that the ransomed sinner might be forgiven. Then, the work is done! God’s wrath is satisfied, the sinner is pardoned, and he can now draw nigh to God confidently and cry “Abba, Father.”

Is this scriptural? Certainly (unless you hold some esoteric doctrine that the elect, from birth until conversion, are never under the wrath of God). Psalm 7:11 says that God is angry with the wicked every day. If this be so, and if God stops being angry when a sinner repents and receives salvation, saying that God is reconciled is altogether correct.

In contrast, suddenly changing the subject and announcing “I now am reconciled” (I’m no longer a rebel against God) is literary barbarism. That wasn’t the topic under discussion in the first four stanzas and it doesn’t fit with the remainder of the fifth stanza (see above).

In conclusion . . .

Sometimes a hymn may legitimately need correcting. The poetry can be clumsy or the imagery may be unsuitable for the congregation’s culture. An Arminian line may be unsingable in a Calvinist church, or vice versa. Such things are matters of necessity and might be agreed upon by all people of good will. The correctors and desecrators, on the other hand, display an arrogance, a carelessness, and a level of ignorance which bodes ill for the future of Christianity since it reveals the decline of Christian culture not only on the part of the barbarians, but more alarmingly on the part of those who publish their barbarisms.

Dr. Rooter’s Router

Nothing lasts forever. I’ve had one Internet router for fourteen years. In computer years, that’s, like, forever.

Netgear Rangemax WNDR3300

This thing had good reviews and a good price, so I bought it and it worked wonderfully.

Lately, however, it’s been showing its age. My Internet speeds would slow to a crawl and I found that I could reboot the router and get back to normal. (Little did I know how pathetic my “normal” had become.) In the last week or two, even rebooting didn’t help.

Yesterday, in desperation, I bought a replacement at Best Buy.

Linksys Max Stream AX1800

I paid the same price as I’d paid fourteen years ago. It had good reviews and was nearly the cheapest one in stock.

According to speedtest.net, performance is thirty-to-ninety times better, depending upon where I’m sitting when I run the test.

So, gentle reader, cable your laptop directly into your router and run a speed test. Then run the same test over wi-fi and compare the numbers.
You, too, might be a candidate for a life changing router replacement.

Anti-Mandate Rant

Anger over COVID Mandates

I recently contracted some kind of flu-like bug. My head got stuffy overnight and I woke up with severe vertigo. I slept about three extra hours and the vertigo went away. I stayed home from work the next day and slept another three extra hours. That was pretty much the long and short of my symptoms.

Immediately I encountered a chorus of “You need to get tested.” When I asked why, the response was some form of “it will help others.” And I asked in return, “How do you know that me getting tested and having my life shut down in quarantine would benefit others?”

This masquerade has been dragging on for twenty months now. There are a lot of statistics and graphs and history now. There have been draconian clampdowns and mask mandates and distant socializing. There have been places where the tyranny was relatively benign and there have been societies where there was high compliance with stringent mandates.

One thing is overwhelmingly documented in all of this: there is no correlation between the mandates and the spread of COVID-19. There are places that do very little and the virus behaves a certain way and it is all recorded and graphed out where anyone can see it. Then there are the draconian tyrannies where nothing is allowed and the public complies and everyone wears a mask and isolates himself — and the virus does exactly as it did in the places that were one tenth as restrictive. There are places with high rates of vaccination and their graphs look just like the places where there are low vaccination rates.

The data have been covered here for a long time.

The majority of people, it would appear, have been tamed by the tyrants. They just obey and get on with their lives. That hasn’t been the case with me.

I’ve seen people driving their cars with their masks on. Alone, windows rolled up, and a mask on. Ask them what it’s for. They don’t know.

A friend of mine went out of town to visit his daughter and son-in-law. When he came downstairs one morning, he found the son-in-law sitting alone in his own living room, wearing a mask.

In my neighborhood, kids get off the school bus and walk two or three blocks to their homes in small groups, talking to their friends. Most of them still have their masks on.

Very few fast food joints have opened their dining rooms around here yet. When I can get inside to use the restroom, signs are everywhere about wearing a mask and keeping your distance. Then there may be no soap at the lavatory sink.

Presumably vaccines are beneficial, but it has been firmly established that (1) it won’t keep you from getting the disease and (2) it won’t keep you from spreading the disease. Those two facts should be enough to stop the tyrants from requiring the Mark Of The Vaccine to buy or sell. But, of course, it doesn’t.

People die of COVID every day. (Other people die of cars every day.) But nearly everyone below 80 years of age survives COVID. It may be that some who have died would have survived if they had been vaccinated; we can’t really know. Probably some who have died in car wrecks would be alive if they had never gotten into cars.

Life comes with risks. Humanist governments offer security: “Huddle together under this tyranny and we will protect you.” But some of us would prefer to die on our feet than live on our knees.

An Article by Dan Conaway: “In Memphis, There’s Just Something in the Water”

This article is a copy & paste from the Daily Memphian, 10/15/21. Check them out and consider subscribing at https://dailymemphian.com .

Back in the day — hot days after school in the spring — we played left field ball in a vacant lot on Poplar Avenue.

If you’re wondering what lot, it was across Poplar from the street where Laura Lewis lived. She was in my class at White Station. She had twin little brothers. Big sister named Tancie. Remember? Yeah, that was the lot.

If you’re wondering what left field ball is, it’s baseball when you don’t have enough guys for a whole game, or enough room for a whole game, or a tree in center field, so you play where you can with what you have. Yeah, it was a lot like that and lots of afternoons like that.

Back in the day.

One out. The Poindexter brothers were up next, Chris batting followed by Duke on deck. The Lewis twins — Harris and Lawrence, just freshmen — some glove, not much bat — were on that side. I’m playing between second and third — sort of a combo shortstop and third baseman. Chip Jenkins is behind me — the whole outfield. Pete Bale is pitching.

We will get these guys out. Because it’s getting late. Because it’s hotter than the hinges on the gates of h—. Because my mouth is full of cotton and I, and everybody else, needs a drink of water. Not water we bought. Not from a plastic bottle. We need a drink of water from the hose on the side of that house right over there.

We didn’t know whose house it was, but we knew they wouldn’t mind if we used the hose.

Not when I was growing up. Not from the hose on a hundred houses. Unless they had a fence and a dog. And the hose and the dog were behind that fence. The only dogs behind fences when I was growing up were the kind who would mind if you climbed that fence and headed for the hose.

Back in the day.

We’d turn it on after the game, let it run a bit until it goes from hot to cold, then we’d all fill up, and run some over our face, maybe spray each other a bit, and all pile into a couple of cars and go home. Along with a couple of our dogs. Maybe in Duke’s Nova, or Chip’s electric blue Super Sport, or my mama’s convertible. The twins would ride their bikes home. I don’t remember, but probably followed by a dog.

All full of some of the best water in the world. All at the end of another very East Memphis afternoon.

All evidently come to an end.

That lot, and that house behind it all became Bud Davis Cadillac, and that became Cadillac of Memphis. The house on the opposite corner from that lot is now the Blue Plate.

And water these days has become a luxury item like those Cadillacs.

I was thinking about all of that, remembering that, as I strolled through the water showroom at Kroger for a look at the latest models and to kick the tires. Water in the front and at the back. Water stacked in the end aisle displays. Pallets of shrink-wrapped cases of bottled water on the floor, 50 feet of bottled water on shelves. Water with names evoking mountain streams, sunsets by springs, sunrises in orchards, and health and fortunes and life itself improved.

One can get lucky right here in aisle 20, male or female, after just one sip of this water and one wink. One can throw one’s cane aside and run from here to frozen foods after just one swallow. One needs a sommelier to sort the subtle fruit enhancements, the nuance of peppermint or chocolate or cinnamon, domestic or foreign.

One brand is even called Smart Water and can be yours for three dollars for 30 ounces.

I’ll refer you to a meme I saw about that recently: “If you’re paying three dollars for a bottle of Smart Water, it’s not working.”

On this particular day, Smart Water was on special for a buck fifty.

I’ll refer you to the definition of that in the Urban Dictionary: “a buck fifty” – to the point: straight forward.

Here it is in usage: I’ll go a buck fifty with you; we’re not drinking from the hose anymore, we’re getting hosed.

These days.

<strong>“A bezillion” gallons of water roll by Memphis every day on the Mississippi River.</strong> (Mark Weber/The Daily Memphian file)
“A bezillion” gallons of water roll by Memphis every day on the Mississippi River. (Mark Weber/The Daily Memphian file)

For a couple of millennia, water below Memphis has not only been good enough to drink, it’s been good enough to become known as the Memphis Aquifer, good enough to be known around the world as some of the best water in the whole world, good enough to be the envy of the world … even the envy of Mississippi, who is trying to go all the way to the Supreme Court to steal it, or to make Memphis pay Mississippi to use water from the Memphis Aquifer.

I mean, really, could I even make that last part up?

Even still, our cavalier and careless attitude about our water, our lack of understanding about the value and fragility of it, almost allowed TVA to tap into our aquifer and take millions upon millions of gallons of it to cool a power plant — wasting a bezillion gallons of our “drinking” water when a bezillion gallons of the Mississippi roll by every second.

If it hadn’t been for my friend Ward Archer and others who started Protect Our Aquifer, TVA would have done just that.

And if it hadn’t been for Protect Our Aquifer and concerned citizens of Memphis and people in threatened neighborhoods, an oil pipeline would have been built right over the aquifer. It wasn’t and it won’t be.

Something as seemingly ordinary as water is the stuff of life, something as extraordinary as ours demands vigilance.

Memphis water ­— right out of your hose, right out of your tap— is already better than 99% of all of that bottled water in Kroger. I only say 99% instead of 100%, because some of that coconut or mandarin orange stuff is OK, but not one drop of any of it is worth what you’re paying for it. Here’s the complicated formula:

Bottled water — costs more than just something, as in a rip.

Memphis water — costs close to nothing, right out of the tap.

And there’s this, that bottled water is, well, bottled.

The water that supposedly comes from cold mountain streams or tree-shaded springs? Bottled in plastic, shrink-wrapped in plastic. Processed and manufactured in plants, stored in warehouses, stacked on loading docks, shipped in trains and trucks. And if it’s supposedly from Alpine meltwater or some other exotic source faraway? Add ocean shipping, customs, and waiting in sweltering rail containers in shipyards.

And those plastic bottles and packaging in our landfills and rivers, lakes, and oceans? Thrown out our car windows, gathered in our parking lots and yards and streets, along our curbs and trails in the woods?

Even recycled, it all comes back to haunt us again and again.

Even the plastic bottles that claim to be “biodegradable even the caps” are pouring water down your leg and telling you it’s raining. If Cro-Magnon man threw one of those out of the cave 35,000 years ago, it might just now be disappearing, if a Mastodon stomped on one or a whale shark spit one out 10,000 years ago, you might just now not be able to read the sell-by date.

These days.

Every year, Americans are swallowing about 45 gallons of water per capita from either plastic or glass bottles. That means folks around here, people literally sitting on top of famed Memphis water, are getting soaked by paying for about 54,240,000 gallons of bottled water a year.

At the price of Smart Water — 10¢ an ounce times 128 fluid ounces times 54,240,000 — that’s $694,272,000 every year. Even if you buy Smart Water on special at half that, or water of reasonable intelligence at half that, it’s still hundreds of millions of dollars. I’ll go a buck fifty with you again, that’s stupid money in a town that doesn’t have a lot of it.

Put another way, a family of four is spending from $1,152 to $2,304 a year on bottled water.

These days.

Kids aren’t playing left field ball where I grew up on Highland Street or on Perkins Road or anywhere that I know of, or much of anything else for that matter outside of the watchful eyes of organized sports and activities, outside of the circle of their parents and their SUVs, outside of fear of the world and its consequences. Maybe that’s safer, maybe its worth the loss of kids learning how to take care of themselves, how to explore and discover on their own. Maybe so. We’ll see.

When kids aren’t going anywhere on their own, their dogs aren’t going anywhere either. Not outside a fence. Not without a lease. Certainly not in neighborhood packs. But they’re not fighting either, or biting either, or dying in the street like several of my dogs did. That’s definitely better.

As much as I write about not trying go back, about memories as treasures not destinations, Memphis water is an exception. Try some.

Instead of throwing away that plastic water bottle, start a recycling program of your own — fill it from the tap. Turn on the hose, let it run a bit to cool off and lose the taste of hose, and then take a pull of one of our city’s great assets.

Then spray a little on each other. On the kids. On the dogs.

While the taste of Memphis water will take some of us back, it will win some of us over.

I’m a Memphian, and some of what that means is in the water.

–Dan Conaway, https://dailymemphian.com

Nicky Chavers, R.I.P.

Nicky ChaversI met Nicky in the fall of 1974 when I attended an audition for his summer drama ministry. He had launched the Academy of Arts in 1971 after earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees at BJU, but I knew nothing about him. I went to the audition on a whim, having heard about it from my college friend Alan Behn, who also was auditioning. Somehow I was chosen for the team. Alan wasn’t. I know that Nicky regretted his decision occasionally, but he never said so. Despite my immaturity and “wild and crazy guy” posture, he saw something in me that he wanted.

I toured with the drama team in the summers of ’75 and ’77. At other times Nicky would routinely call me to come help him on some project, usually as a voice actor. One time he recruited me to fly up to Louisville, Ky. to retrieve a van that a team had left for repairs. I’m not sure that he realized this, but his operating principle was “You do everything you can for me and I will do everything I can for you.” That could result in misunderstandings or disappointments. Various people parted from him over the years, finding the arrangement intolerable. Others stayed. The ministry flourished.

At a coffee shop

He was very much like a father to me. When I had problems or needed advice, I turned to him. His mind was very quick and his grasp of the Scriptures was sure and deft. For years afterward I would approach problems thinking “What would Nicky do?”

Once I finally grew up, we had an unusual consonance of outlook. There was probably no one whose views about the root causes of things impressed me more than his did. Likewise he expressed profound appreciation for the analyses I offered on the basis of my scholarly attainments. He told me that he wanted me to come and teach at his ministry for a week some time, but that never materialized; he was largely retired by then.

As 2020 drew to a close, the thought often came to me that I needed to visit Nicky again. Finally I decided in February to take a road trip and head to Greenville to see if I could scare up him or some other friends. (As it turned out, I encountered there the aforementioned Alan Behn, whom I hadn’t seen for forty years — but that’s another story.) Much to my surprise, I found Nicky on his death bed, failing with liver disease. His condition was no secret to his supporters across the nation, but it hadn’t been mentioned in the emails I received from the ministry, so I was unaware.

Quite a few friends and admirers visited him in those final months, so I was little more than a paragraph in that day’s page; and every day was a new page filled with visitors, cards, and well wishes.At his death bed We weren’t able to converse like old times, due to the presence of others, but we still shared a laugh when I reminded him of our first meeting at the audition and he couldn’t imagine why he would choose me over Alan (who later served for years as an important staff member of the ministry). I hadn’t a clue, either.

He saw something in me, and it made a real difference in my life to have him in my corner. He mentored thousands through the summer teams, the Christian School Drama Seminars, his pastorate and school and conservatory, and his plays, songs, and books. I’m like a dwarf in comparison, and grateful to have been his friend.

Larkin Kelley Bryant, R.I.P.

In the spring of 2002, two musicians, Larkin and her husband, Andy Cohen, encountered me in the bicycle co-op in the basement of a Midtown church. The kid who was teaching me how to build a bicycle, Anthony Siracusa, introduced me to them and told them that I did a lot of plumbing for the church. A few days later I got a phone call: “This is Andy Cohen, the Yodeling Jew. We’d like to have you look at a few things at our house.”

When I entered the venerable grotto at 95 N. Evergreen a few days later to do some work on a ninety-year-old toilet, only Larkin was present. (Andy was often off touring somewhere.) We immediately began talking about the power of music to touch hearts and she set up her hammer dulcimer near the bathroom to demonstrate what she meant. Like everyone else, I was entranced by her playing. Thus began an intense friendship that continued through our last visit together this past Sunday afternoon. Brain cancer killed her three days later.

Larkin Kelly Bryant

Larkin got me interested in folk music. I bought a McSpadden dulcimer from her Riverlark business. She sold me her old Dana Hamilton hammer dulcimer. Andy taught me the rudiments of clawhammer banjo and, while on tour in Utah, procured a 19th century instrument for me from Intermountain Guitar & Banjo. Larkin got me started on autoharp and on sacred harp singing. These instruments and the old time music I learned to play have probably been the greatest influences in my life for the past twenty years.

Larkin wrote the book on mountain dulcimer in 1982. It has been common through the years to see knowledgeable people refer to it as the standard against which other books should be measured. She was a highly-sought-after teacher at the major festivals. For years here in Memphis she held the nation’s preeminent dulcimer festival annually, attracting the finest teachers and players. Her CD Lark in the Twilight is a masterpiece.

I sort of worshipped her. At festivals or other performance venues I would attend to her like a bond slave: meeting her in the parking lot and carrying her instruments, setting them up, fetching whatever or whomever she needed, helping her pack up, and then sitting with her luggage for upwards of an hour sometimes, alone in an empty hall, waiting for her to finish talking to all of her other admirers so that I could escort her and her stuff safely to the parking lot.

Anywhere I went in the old time music world, if I were a complete unknown, all I’d have to do was explain “I’m Larkin Bryant’s plumber” and I’d gain instant prestige.

I summoned the utmost intensity when I watched her perform. Afterwards I’d talk to her about the fine details in what she had done. Several times she replied with some combination of wonder and thankfulness, “Kevan, you’re the only person who hears these things and understands.” If that was true, it was because I realized what a treasure she was and I paid more attention than some casual listener might have. Everyone wants to be understood.

For all that, I was never really her confidant. There was much of her present and past life that she chose not to share with me, although she spoke freely of those things to other friends. We were quite different in some ways.

Her brain was only barely working during my visit with her this past Sunday. Our last conversation, such as it was, had been on Easter Sunday. I sat with her at her piano, trying to get her to play something simple, but she just couldn’t get her hands to obey, nor could she maintain a line of thought for long. Her condition was reminiscent of a person who hadn’t completely awakened from sleep.

After an hour, I rose to go and bent over to put one arm around her bony shoulders and give her a gentle hug. Always underweight, she was becoming literally skin and bones. My head was down by her chest and she managed to bring her two hands up from her lap so that her forearms could curl against my head in a feeble hug. Her voice swelled with emotion as she uttered, “Oh, Kevan, if I could only express . . . .” Her power of speech was also limited by the brain disease and she could say no more.

But she didn’t have to.

I understood.

Thoughts on the Allegations of Election Fraud

Election violations are always occurring, roughly comparable to traffic violations. The question with both is, “How much and how important?” I’ve seen minor violations at polling places where I’ve voted, both deliberate flaunting of the laws and inadvertent violations through carelessness or ignorance. In no cases did those violations affect the outcomes of the elections. The deliberate flaunting could have contributed to long-range erosion of respect for the laws, but the same could be said for traffic violations–and I am very sure that traffic violations have not increased since I began driving in 1971, so the likelihood is faint.

The president’s legal team, represented by Rudy Giuliani and Mrs. Sidney Powell, are alleging that, to use Tucker Carlson’s words, “the single greatest crime in American history” took place during this recent presidential election. Tucker has complained that they have offered no evidence, and that has gotten him roasted by partisans who point out that Powell has an impeccable record.

As much as I hope that something can keep Harris from becoming president, I am highly skeptical of Powell’s claims.

First, she offers no proof; she just claims that it’s on the way. If she had the kind of evidence of which she boasts, it would be a small matter to list a few things. I’ve seen a whistle blower affidavit that said little more than that the irregularities of our vote counting were eerily similar to what he claims to have seen in Venezuela years ago. That’s very flimsy. Why hasn’t she produced something more substantial?

Second, she’s alleging something that is unbelievably large. It reminds me of the allegations that the moon landing was faked–as though hundreds of participants from the astronauts to the film crews all lied in unison and kept the secret with no leaks for fifty years.

Third, things just don’t add up. The Dims were claiming they’d have a landslide. Instead, the popular vote was a squeaker. They really needed the Senate if they were to implement their revolution, pack the SCOTUS, etc., and their chance of getting that is very thin. The results of the House races were very disappointing to them. Is it really that hard to flip a few more votes in machines being controlled from somebody’s laptop in Dominion Voting System’s offices? Powell is saying that Trump’s votes were so overwhelming, it crashed the nefarious software and the count had to be stopped until it could be remedied. Gimme a honkin’ break!

With all that said, I also observe that a lot of serious fraud was observed and a lot of gaslighting from the mainstream media poured forth in response. It is claimed now that Harris/Biden got more votes than Obama did in 2008. That’s preposterous because nobody was excited over Biden, but all the nation was ga-ga over ushering in a nonwhite. Some of the most damning evidence lies in the actual numbers. Engineers and other mathematicians have demonstrated to one another’s satisfaction that many numbers and statistics are falling out in impossible distributions, which indicates fraud.

We shall see.

Wrong Again

I’ve always enjoyed the slogan “Often wrong, never in doubt.” I’ve become more mellow in my dotage, but I fully identify with the urge to be dogmatic. Likewise, though, I’m pretty reliable when it comes time to admit a mistake.

Four years ago I was nearly alone among my associates in thinking that Trump would win. I saw that the conventional wisdom said that he didn’t have a chance, but I also saw his rallies on YouTube and realized that the conventional wisdom was responding to a media blackout. “There’s more going on than they are admitting,” I said.

I didn’t see that this time. Yes, the rallies were still there, but everybody knew it now. I didn’t perceive any stealth movement afoot. And the polls showed a seven-point spread in the popular vote.

After a hard day’s work, it didn’t take long for me to tire of watching the election returns last night. I did wake up at 2am and took a few minutes to see how things played out. Contrary to my expectations, Trump has done well and might even win. According to the polls, he should have gone down in flames.

I saw a headline this morning: ‘Election Day asteroid’ predicted to come close to Earth likely has passed already, astronomer says. My sentiments exactly, but it would have fit better four years ago.

I think that Trump has mishandled his presidency pretty badly. For the first two years his party had the majority in both houses of Congress. We radicals watched in tears while he frittered it all away, never implementing the agenda he ran on, except for appointing Gorsuch and Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Then the reactionaries handed him his head in the midterm elections and he lost the House. And we just barely missed losing the Senate yesterday. (Thank you, Antifa and BLM!)

One might say that gaining three seats in the SCOTUS is hardly “frittering away,” and I’d be willing to concede the point on the basis of lexicography, but the point that has to be made (and nearly no one is making it) is that Trump’s original issue, immigration, is paramount. As a vivid example, look at this election. If Harris had won (and she still may) and the Senate had flipped, of what use would the conservative majority be in the SCOTUS? You can bet your sweet bippy that those revolutionaries wouldn’t be tweeting and playing golf while their clock was ticking; they’d have had the heavy equipment roaring and we’d be seeing, in Obama’s words, the fundamental transformation of the United States. Specifically, third-world immigration would achieve record levels, and immigration determines who can vote. Immigration, therefore, determines the disposition of every other issue. Trump could have made a massive interruption in America’s demographic suicide. He didn’t. How he won Texas yesterday is a mystery to me–but it won’t happen again with the trends we’re seeing.

A tipping point, by definition, means a point of no return. All of my adult life I have faced “the most important election ever.” It’s always been hype. Indeed, elections have consequences and issues can be very important to a lot of people’s lives. Our society has been declining and we have averted disasters despite some bad election outcomes. But we’ve never been at a tipping point until now.

Will Trump Win?

What’s left of the election takes place tomorrow. (A good chunk of it is past, thanks to “early voting,” a measure I find revolting.) Will Trump win again in a heroic comeback against all odds as he did in 2016? I think not.

Numbers are of the essence. Although Trump and his supporters put on a good show, they still only get one vote apiece. I am very impressed by the size and fervor of the rallies, but 50,000 people at a rally cannot move the needle in a state’s electoral college. Does the huge crowd indicate that a huger following is coming behind them? Of course it does. There are 330 million people in the USA, and more than half of the votes in 2016 went to Clinton–but she still lost.

Numbers are of the essence. In 2016 we chortled over how the polls were wrong, the polls were fake, the polls showed Crooked Hillary with a 92% probability of beating Trump, ha, ha, ha. In fact, though, the polls were very accurate. They indicated that her share of the popular vote was 3.3% higher than Trump’s. As it turned out, she led by 2.1%. Unfortunately for her, that 2.1% lived in red states, and Trump won the electoral college. I think that the 1.2% error in polling shows a high level of accuracy. As of this morning, Biden is ahead by 7.6%. I know of no numbers anywhere that give me hope.

Pundits like Scott Adams and James Woods believe that the numbers are faked by mendacious researchers and Trump supporters are lying to the pollsters. I’m not close to the polling industry, so I can’t speak as an insider. I do know that “the establishment” took a holy vow in 2016 never to let this happen again and they’ve made good on their promise as they’ve had opportunity. For four years I’ve never heard one good thing about Trump in the mass media–not one! I see lies heaped upon lies in every column by every hate-filled commentator (e.g., “very fine people,” ” ripped from their mothers’ arms and locked in cages,” et al.), so I’m fully aware that nothing is beneath them. But I still don’t think that all of the pollsters are faking their data, knowing that the final results would make them look incompetent. Instead, I believe that the pro-Trump analysts are engaged in wishful thinking.

In 2016 Trump could make any promise he wished. Now such promises ring hollow. Ted Cruz warned us of this, saying that Trump was a pathological liar who could make three different, contradictory promises in one day and believe all three, and who was going to break every promise he was making during the campaign. Despite some exceptions, Cruz was quite right, but Trump’s base still doesn’t see it. They’re holding signs at rallies: “Promises Kept.”

Trump won some battleground states with those promises. An unlikely coalition of different interests saw in Trump a chance to return to sanity and make America great again. Today a lot of those people are either deceased or disillusioned.

I’ve been wrong before and I don’t claim to be deeply studied in this campaign’s data, so my opinions are available here free of charge. I just wanted to go on record: we are doomed.

Nicholas Vieron, R. I. P.

Fr. Vieron teaching. The large poster is the Lord's Prayer in Greek.

I was cleaning a drain at the home of Mrs. Karas back in the early ’90s (I regret that I’ve lost her first name) and I began asking her questions about the Greek language. I had accumulated probably twenty-seven semester hours of Greek by then, reading both the New Testament and the church fathers, (I say probably because it was in a previous life which I haven’t revisited for a long time), and I had a keen interest in the subject. She showed me her modern language Greek New Testament and spoke glowingly of “Father Vieron’s Greek Class,” a fifteen-week course he offered once per year. I kept it in my mind, saw it advertised one day in the newspaper, and decided that I would look into it.

I was quite busy already, working for Roto-Rooter full time (and more) and fulfilling PhD study requirements to the tune of twenty hours per week. But thirty years ago I was thirty years younger, and so I figured that I’d just work it in somehow.

After some delay, I eventually pulled into the Annunciation parking lot, found my way to the office, and was greeted by the secretary and Father Vieron himself, who was standing there talking to her about something. I announced my desire to sign up for the class and he told me with no small regret that all of the available seats were taken already.

I persisted in my request. I could tell that he really hated to turn me away. “I could sit on the floor. I’m a plumber, I’m down there most of the time anyway.” Oh, how sorry he was that he just didn’t have the room. “Well, then, I could sit out in the hall and listen; I have several academic degrees and I know how to learn.”

He was in agony. “Oh, please, don’t do this to me, you’re making me feel so bad. I just can’t take another student.”

Then I told him that I loved the Greek language because I was a minister and had studied it in seminary. He now thought that he had found his escape! “Oh, then, this wouldn’t be for you anyway. This is for beginners. You already know all of this.”

I responded quite honestly with my main reason for wanting to take the course: “But they don’t teach Greek as a language. They teach it as a code. It’s as if the English Bible had been put into a code and we are taught how to decode it and get it back into English!”

He was well familiar with what I was talking about. “Oh, that is such a travesty! Its not a code! It’s a beautiful, wonderful . . . oh! I can’t stand it! I can’t stand it! Sign him up! Sign him up!” and he gestured toward the papers on the secretary’s desk with a tone of surrender and abject defeat. His dramatic ability was superb. So she signed me up.

That course was a milestone in my life. I’d be studying at the seminary library each Tuesday night, I’d break away to attend Greek class, then return to seminary or, perhaps, home. It was fascinating to watch this master teacher hold the class in the palm of his hand and teach us about Greek history and culture and worship and language. As I had hoped, it opened up a whole dimension to the language which I’d never seen before.

He was lavish in his praise. One of the goals he set before us was to be able to recite the Lord’s Prayer in Greek. One night I raised my hand and volunteered to take my turn. I did my best to imitate his pronunciation and accent and to offer the prayer sincerely. When I finished, he said solemnly and hesitatingly, as though searching for the right words, “What I heard just then was the voice of a metropolitan bishop in a patriarchal cathedral and the faith of a little child at his bedside. No one could have recited it better. Thank you.”

He gave us a tour of the church sanctuary one evening, explaining the distinctives of Orthodox worship and somehow he made reference to a little memorial of some kind, commemorating one of his parishioners. He began to say, almost as an aside, “When you minister to one community for thirty five years . . .” and then his voice cracked and his eyes moistened. He never finished the sentence.

Some years later I was conversing with a customer about some Memphis topic or another and, wanting to introduce an anecdote (which I’ve now forgotten), I asked “Do you know Father Vieron?” She answered me with a patronizing, “Everybody knows Father Vieron.” It was nearly true. He was a great guy, loved people, and made it a point to go around meeting new ones. He lived like that in Memphis for 65 years.

Well he died this morning just short of 95 years old. I encountered several news stories about him on Internet, TV, and radio as I went about my work today. Everybody knew him. All men spoke well of him.

He made a difference in my life. His class set me on a path of study and appreciation for Orthodoxy which enhanced my scholarship palpably. In the forty years he taught that course, I wonder just how many students might have focused on the material more intently that I did. Few, I’d expect, because my background had given me a big mental storeroom with hooks lining the walls where I could take what he was offering and save it in an orderly way. Although he met thousands of Memphians, I still count myself lucky to be one of them.

A few weeks after the course ended, I attended the midnight Easter service and I managed to greet him during the meal that followed. He didn’t recognize me at first (I was dressed differently, to be sure). “Do you remember me?” He managed recall enough to say, “Yes, you were my best student.” His dramatic ability was superb.

A Nation of Stupid

If you give a bum a dollar for “food,” well, you’re just wrong and maybe a little naive. But if you give a bum a hundred dollars because he tells you he will come back soon and give you a new iPhone in return, you’re not just wrong or naive. You’re stupid. S-T-O-O-P-I-D stupid!

H. L. Mencken referred to the common people as “the booboisie” and observed “No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.” I genuinely used to think that he had overstated his case. The last three weeks have convinced me otherwise.

I know that you haven’t read Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds; it’s too long, and people don’t read long books any more. But the title itself points out a certain fact well enough: when a crowd gets moving, there’s no limit to the delusion they can undergo.

Great masses of Americans are standing by quietly while mobs tear down statues of honored heros, burn cities, loot stores, assume control over six blocks of downtown Seattle, and spout Marxist nonsense through bullhorns. Instead of stopping the criminals, millionaires and corporations are throwing billions of dollars to them and crawling on their knees, begging the thugs to forgive them.

The criminal activity, the non-criminal protesting, the billions in tribute, the slander, and the apologizing are all based on lies — easily exposed lies. That millions of people believe these lies reveals that there is a deep undercurrent of stupidity moving the masses. I cannot solve that problem. I can only expose the lies for the sake of any non-stupid reader who could benefit from the lesson.

Trayvon Martin was rightfully killed. He jumped George Zimmerman and was beating his head into the concrete when Zimmerman managed to shoot him. The jury acquitted Zimmerman because he had acted purely in self-defense and had done nothing wrong. See here.

Eric Garner (“I can’t breathe”) was not choked to death by a cop. The cop held him by the neck, but didn’t choke him. We know he didn’t choke him because Garner can be heard speaking on the video. A person being choked cannot say anything. If he can say “I can’t breathe,” he is breathing. Garner weighed 400 pounds and had a heart attack because he was resisting arrest, even though he’d been arrested thirty times before and knew the routine. That’s why the Grand Jury didn’t indict the cop. The Department of Justice decided to conduct an independent investigation, and the investigators also decided that no charges should be brought.

Michael Brown (Hands up, don’t shoot) was rightfully killed. Brown was attacking the policeman and trying to get his gun. He did not raise his hands and plead “Don’t shoot.” Those who intone this motto are repeating a lie.

Ahmaud Arbery was not ambushed by white gunmen. He wasn’t shot for “jogging while black.” He got shot because he charged a man, grabbed the man’s shotgun, and thought that he could take it away. One may question the wisdom of the white men for confronting a suspected burglar, but their actions were legal. And what choice do you have when a suspect is trying to snatch away your shotgun — give it to him?

George Floyd was not choked/strangled by a knee to his neck. Pinning an opponent with a knee on the back of the neck is a well-known grappling move. It doesn’t choke the recipient. Just like Eric Garner, Floyd was speaking while he was being held. In fact, he was using the now-nearly-ubiquitous plea “I can’t breathe” while still standing, before he ever began resisting and struggling against being put into the squad car. He died of a heart attack, a man with severe health problems and a user of fentanyl, methamphetamine, and marijuana. And yet, everyone left and right says without the slightest hesitation that he was murdered. When someone called for restraint and patience, the response was that there was no need for investigation because we already know everything. In other words, they favor lynching.

***

The claim that police are mistreating blacks is a lie. The statistics are readily available and show that whites are actually treated a little worse than blacks. If it looks like blacks are getting a worse deal, it is probably because blacks commit crimes at a profoundly higher rate than other races. See here.

Without this tissue of lies, the rationale behind the mayhem disappears. I suspect, though, that the rationale is unimportant. Mayhem and indignation and power are intoxicating, especially to sick twisted freaks whose lives are otherwise fit only for the dumpster.

How to Fall off a Ladder

Back when people lived in the country, they developed a saying, “It’s as easy as falling off a log.” Unless you have experience with logs, however, you may not realize just how easy that is. Take it from those who know: it’s easy.

You would think that falling off a ladder might be easy, too, but it’s really not. If you’d spent as much time on logs as I have, you’d have countless times in your memory of losing your balance and having to dismount suddenly. But I’ve been climbing ladders and/or working from ladders on a daily basis for over thirty years now, and I’ve only fallen twice. Ladders are much better than logs.

Ladders do have an intrinsic shortcoming, though, and that is their habit of being underneath people who are high off the ground. Logs tend to be under people who are low to the ground. When you fall off a ladder, even if you only do it at fifteen year intervals, it can rearrange your life, not to mention your skeletal structure.

I knew of a Christian minister who had such an accident around 1977. It crippled him up pretty noticeably, but he recovered. He still limps a little. Through the grapevine he eventually learned that a fellow minister in another state had fallen off a ladder on the very same day as he, and also sustained serious injury. This moved some wag to refer to the two of them as “ladder day saints.”

The first time I indulged in this diversion was about twenty years and fifty pounds ago. I was frolicking around on a drain job, running up and down the ladder like a squirrel with my usual zest for life, and the ladder disappeared somehow and I suddenly found myself up in the air like Wile E. Coyote. All parts of me hit the driveway, but my head was last. I didn’t lose consciousness, but I had a headache for a week.

That accident did not make me more careful. To be honest, I’m not sure of what went wrong. The ladder may have given way and bent. But I continued my standard methods of setting up the ladder and judging when it was safe enough to climb. That worked fine until three weeks ago.

On Jan 27th I misjudged my situation. I set the ladder on an old red brick patio (smooth) covered with old wet leaves (slick) and leaning up against an old rusted out rain gutter (ready to collpse). Then I sent an old fat plumber (me) up to clean a sewer through the roof vent.

As I began to step off the ladder onto the roof, the gutter collapsed and the jolt caused the feet of the ladder to lose any grip they had on the brick patio. After that, I quit paying attention, so I can’t be specific. I do know that I found myself in one piece with no broken bones, but the side of my right thigh was badly injured from, apparently, having struck a short brick wall that formed a flower bed. I had numerous other minor injuries. It also lowered my self esteem.

Although I could barely walk and the injury eventually laid me up for a couple of weeks, I did manage to climb back up on the roof, finish the job, load the truck, and go home. You gotta be tough to be a sewer man.

From this I have learned that I must do better. Despite the fact that I have successfully judged the safety of my ladder habits for thirty years, those habits are insufficient. They nearly got me killed. That’s a fact.

You can search for “ladder safety” and get all the specifics you need. I’ll just summarize my personal perspective. How do you fall off a ladder? By overconfidence. Let me explain by a couple of examples:

Every responsible gun owner knows that “them things’ll kill you.” We handle guns very carefully. We follow strict rules that inexperienced onlookers might consider excessive. We refuse to keep company with anyone who handles a gun unsafely. Otherwise a mistake would be easy to make and the results would not be pretty.

To a lesser extent knives have to be handled with strict care. I knew a very experienced farmer back in the ’80s who put a knife through his leg and nearly bled to death. When I asked how it happened, he said that he had gotten careless while cutting a plastic drum open and the knife had slipped. That’s usually how it happens. I’ve always taught beginners to ask WHEN this knife slips (not “if”), where will it go? If the answer involves some part of your body, stop! Change what you’re doing and assume a safe position. Knives slip; that’s the way of the world.

A ladder fall can maim or kill you. Don’t think it won’t. My first fall didn’t interrupt my life, but this last one has cost me a couple of weeks of work/income and will continue to cost me as I am currently declining jobs that are too hard for my limited capacity. I’ve probably done permanent damage to my leg, although it won’t keep me from living and working normally. But had I hit the patio a little differently, I could easily have been killed or, worse, paralyzed.

Easily.

As easy as falling off a log.

Trump’s SOTU Address

I’ve been away for a while. This blog experienced technical difficulties. (If you were my age, you’d recognize the allusion there.) I finally got the host to straighten out some problems that arose when his system was hacked and my blog (and backups) erased. Most of it is restored now and the national disaster averted.

Trump delivered a speech last night. There’s no telling who wrote it, but it claimed that everything’s coming up roses. A smart person would know better than to go out on a limb like that. Bad things happen; and if they happen during this year’s campaign, the braggart will have a hard time evading the blame.

If you are sufficiently brilliant and highly educated, perhaps you can imagine how a family would fare if, in addition to their household income, they were given a credit card with a $100,000 spending limit and the assurance that somebody else would pay the bill. Every year. That family would appear to be sittin’ pretty, you reckon? I congratulate you on your economic prowess.

The federal government, in addition to their household income (from taxes, etc.), adds a trillion dollars per year to their credit card balance. They spend that money in the marketplace one way or another; those who receive it, in turn, spend it somewhere else; and so on. Eventually the plumber gets a phone call from somebody who wants to remodel their bathroom because they now have more money than they did a couple of years ago. The plumber says, “Trump’s doing a good job with the economy; business is good.” That’s how elections are won: I’ll give you free stuff and I’ll make some other poor slob pay for it.

I remember hearing Larry Burkett say on the radio that going into debt is a blast; it’s the most fun you’ll ever have! The bills eventually arrive, though, whether it be for a household or a nation.

Trump has done some good things such as getting onerous regulations removed from businesses. I’ll vote for him again, I assume. I’d vote for the Republican candidate even if the candidate were a yellow dog; and that’s not because I have any affection for the party, it’s because the Dims are even worse.

And they’re so stupid! I’ll give two small examples. First: didn’t Nancy Pelosi know that ripping up Trump’s speech would make her look bad, not good? Second: the party somehow cannot see that Tulsi Gabbard would defeat Trump if they’d just nominate her instead of these circus clowns they are allowing to be front-runners.

Printer Error

I’m cleaning up my home computer workstation. This is somewhat like cleaning out a refrigerator: if it hasn’t been done for a long time, it can be pretty repulsive. I’m a junk collector by nature; I save stuff. “This might come in handy one day.” Or, as my father once muttered about some worn out work boots which he’d long since replaced, but was reluctant to discard, “Them things would’a been like gold in the Depression.”  It’s hard to throw away good stuff.  Hence, it accumulates.

It accumulates; it becomes disordered, it collects dust by the cubic yard; it becomes the habitation of devils and every hateful and unclean bird; and in the case of a computer workstation, it develops a Gordian knot of cables and power cords.

I rented a Bobcat down at Home Cheapo and managed to get everything off the desk and the corner cleaned out and the cables untangled and wiped down.  Carried the dirt out back and filled in some low spots.  Got the walls vacuumed clean and everything shiny.  Now it was time to set things back in place.

As it turns out, I’ve had more on that desk and in that corner than I really had room for.  Some might say I had more than the Gross Domestic Product of a small Latin American country.  In any case, I needed to discard stuff, which isn’t easy.  See paragraph [1] above.

I decided I don’t need my printer, a hulking mammoth called an “all in one” model.  I seldom use it, it usually has a bad ink cartridge when I need it, and I wind up using Wonder Wife’s printer via the network.  So I got its original packaging from the attic (“See?  I told you it might come in handy one day!”) and boxed it up nicely with a note taped to the outside to remind me of its condition.  When I carried it back up, I got to looking at a large collection of computer equipment that I’m saving until needed.  I counted seven other printers.  Down in my “closet office” (which is now only a storage closet, but I still refer to it as Fort Cloffice), I have two more.

*Sigh*

The Incoherence of Wayne Grudem on Trump

A buddy disagreed with my last post and said that I was too smart to fall for the idea that Christians should vote for Trump.  I smilingly replied that one should avoid the term “too smart” when disagreeing with the likes of theologian Wayne Grudem, whom I’d mentioned as an advocate of the position I was taking.  Grudem is scary smart.

At the end of last July, Grudem published his now-famous article “Why Voting for Donald Trump Is a Morally Good Choice.”  He stated the essence of the article in an early paragraph:

I did not support Trump in the primary season. I even spoke against him at a pastors’ conference in February. But now I plan to vote for him. I do not think it is right to call him an “evil candidate.” I think rather he is a good candidate with flaws.

This article provoked a firestorm of opposing articles, blog posts, etc. in the Christian cybersphere.  After reading about ten of them, I saw that I could dispense with the other two hundred; they all said the same things.  A major objection was that Trump is bad in a way that the world doesn’t like rather than, for instance, Hillary Clinton, who is bad in ways that the world celebrates.  For nigh on seventy years, by my reckoning, Christian leaders have repeatedly been exclaiming “Oh, horrors! We can’t do/say/think that!  Why, what would Satan say if we did that???”  Subsequently, Christianity has become so conformed to the world now that its major distinguishing point seems to be how cheesy its rock & roll is.  So everybody jumped on Grudem (who, by the way, has a long history of standing against the decline of Christianity).

This presidential election campaign season has been the most entertaining carnival that has ever come to town. Repeatedly, when you think the show is over and you’ve seen it all, another act comes dancing across the stage and the frolics resume.  Last week the nation was shocked, shocked! to discover that Trump has lived as a sexual libertine who uses vulgar language as though he were a common plumbing contractor.  True, he bragged about his behavior in his books and broadcast media appearances for decades, but the Democrat-media confederacy has somehow managed to republish the data with enough fanfare now to trick the booboisie into thinking it’s a game-changing revelation.

On cue, a swarm of Republicans called for Trump to withdraw from the race.  Among them was Wayne Grudem.  His explanation is here.

I’ve never called Trump a good candidate with flaws (as Grudem did); I’ve consistently called him a bad man who doesn’t know much and isn’t very smart.  Despite that, my position is essentially the same as was Grudem’s.  He went to great lengths to demonstrate why a Trump administration would be preferable to a Clinton one.  The voter is faced with the choice of favoring the better option or not favoring the better option.  If he chooses to favor the better option, it will entail certain actions, although individuals might disagree over exactly what those actions are.  (Ordinarily, the entailed action would be to support Trump.)

This brings me to the accusation I make in this post’s title.  With his recent article, Grudem has adopted an incoherent position.

He begins with a condemnation of Trump’s 2005 remarks about sexual aggressiveness, and similar vulgarities on–who would believe it?–Howard Stern’s radio show.  Grudem states that such behavior is “hateful in God’s eyes” and that it “turned my stomach.”  On these bases, he calls for Trump to withdraw.

So far, Grudem’s position is coherent.  Trump is, indeed, deplorable; and if a voter realizes that he no longer favors a candidate (be the epiphany ever so tardy), he is at liberty to favor a different outcome.

However, for the remainder of the article, Grudem restates the patently obvious fact that a Trump presidency is seriously preferable to its alternative.   (And readers, please keep clearly in your logic the fact that Eggan McMuffin is not a third possibility.)  He asserts that he cannot and will not vote for Clinton.  In other words, Grudem as much as admits that his upset stomach hasn’t changed anything.

Grudem himself, though, has indeed changed something: he has changed the vote of thousands of Christian fence-sitters who were looking for a leader to confirm their gut instinct that Trump is preferable to the alternative.  Headlines immediately peppered the landscape announcing Grudem’s great reversal, part of a much grander narrative that the Dems have pushed for four months–that Trump is losing his support.  In fact, Trump has gone up and down in the polls and the recent trends were upward, apparently because Ted Cruz and others were finally admitting that someone they deplored was, sad to say, their only hope for avoiding a Clinton presidency.  Grudem’s move served only to decelerate any momentum that the idea was gaining among Christians.

That’s what is incoherent about Grudem’s present position.  He avers (still) that a Trump presidency is a better option than its alternative, but his actions favor the alternative.  To call upon Trump to withdraw is not an option because (1) obviously Trump will not and (2) if he did, his successor couldn’t possibly fare as well; so such a call is substantially a move to favor what he claims not to favor.  Even with the publishing of the vulgar recordings, and with the even more recent unsubstantiated (and highly suspicious) accusations of assaultive behavior, Grudem, I, and everyone else are left with the same choice we always had.  We may favor one of only two outcomes (any third outcomes are imaginary).  For weighty reasons (see Grudem’s original article) the preferable outcome is a Trump election.

Unfortunately, Trump Is Our Best Option

Norman Geisler, a major Christian scholar and intellectual (now retired), recently came out for Trump, as did Ted Cruz.  They join an impressive list of people who, for various reasons, want Trump to win the election.

It is my opinion that we conservatives/Christians need to drop our opposition to electing Trump.  We have stood bravely, but our position is collapsing on all sides.  It’s time to sound the retreat so that we may live to fight another day, enduring a President Trump rather than a President Clinton.

Hundreds of articles and posts have argued against voting for Trump.  The objections amount to (1) he’s a bad man, (2) he doesn’t know much, (3) some of his positions aren’t conservative, and (4) his latest spouse, a model, has posed for some sexually improper photographs.

I would reply, “And, using that list, what objections against Clinton and her spouse can you mention?”  Even with the magnitude of Trump’s reprehensibilities, I think the comparison is laughable, myself.

Despite his outlandish claims, Trump is well aware that he doesn’t know much.  As president, he would hire knowledgeable people and delegate–as all businessmen do.  Look at his friends.  Look at the people he surrounds himself with and goes to for advice.  Now look at Clinton and her crowd.  Which crowd do you prefer?

And by the way, this “nuclear codes” business really, really needs to be put to rest.  The anti-Trumpers are trying to dupe people into picturing Trump practicing golf putts in the Oval Office, noticing a big red button on his desk, and muttering, “I wonder what this does?”  And whoosh, World War Three is underway!  It is mere scaremongering horse dung.  No president has the power to launch any attack without the concurrence of the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

It is sometimes alleged that evangelical Christianity will be besmirched unless we loudly disavow Trump.  I deny this; I think that it is an expression of the never-ending technique of guilt manipulation.  I certainly think that Christians would make a grave mistake if they should tout any candidate as “the Christian candidate” or “God’s choice,” but merely choosing Trump over Clinton does not tell anyone what we think about his character.  Understand this: for the rest of your life, you are going to encounter people who say, in essence, “Do as I say or I will call you a bad Christian.”  You cannot satisfy a guilt manipulator; ignore him.

Millions of people today are gung-ho on Trump.  If he wins, I’m afraid that many of them are going to be somewhat disappointed.  I don’t trust Trump to deliver on his promises.  He might; he might not.  Either way, I’d prefer him over Clinton (and he and she are the only real options).  Wayne Grudem was certainly right when he wrote “there is nothing morally wrong with voting for a flawed candidate if you think he will do more good for the nation than his opponent.”  In our situation, we might substitute the words “less damage” for “more good.”  The principle remains.

Deplorable Me

... Day 2014: Don’t miss ‘Despicable Me’ on ITV 2 | Unreality TV

This is the best election ever.

For years I have avoided election seasons.  I mean that literally.  I have refused to play the radio (I have no television) because I don’t want to hear the ads and I don’t want to hear pundits telling me their versions of whatever lies the candidates are spouting.  I sink my attention in books and music and audio lectures and wait for the idiocy to pass.

This time, however, I’ve been entertained like never before.  The Trump phenomenon is unprecedented and Hillary’s crookedness makes the average politician look like Pollyanna on a good day.  It’s like a three-ring circus that never ends.  I look forward to reading or listening to the news every day.

A week ago, Clinton spoke at a “LGBT for Hillary” fundraiser in Manhatten and said that half of Trump’s supporters could be grouped into a “basket of deplorables” and were, for the most part, irredeemable; but the other half just felt that government had let them down, and the Democrats needed to understand and empathize with that basket.

She wasn’t specifically talking about me.  I’m not a Trump “supporter.”  I intend to vote third-party.  Yet I’m sure that she deplores me all the same.

Hillary defined her deplorables as “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it.”  I think that her speechwriters did a fine job that day of restating her unending campaign theme in a new and arresting way: “basket of deplorables.”  I think it’s funny myself, and I think that I would have laughed right along with those poor, oppressed, and marginalized millionaires who can be heard on the recording laughing at the remark.

A campaigning politician is a revolting sight for many reasons, but a salient reason is their pattern of seizing upon something their opponent said and pitching a fit as though the remark deserved it.  For example, when President Obama (whom I deplore, by the way) said to businessmen “you didn’t build that,” anyone interested in the truth could perceive that he meant to say (but garbled it) that the businessman didn’t build the infrastructure of roads, utilities, etc.  That is different from, say, Michelle Obama saying

“Let me tell you something, for the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country. And not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change.”

Those words are plain.  Likewise, when her husband said “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it,” nobody has to twist it to make it a calculated and blatant lie.

Antihillarists are feigning shock and disgust that Clinton’s speechwriters would refer to some hard working Americans as a basket of deplorables.  But for Hillary to call Trump’s supporters names is quite unremarkable.  Appellations like “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic” and that fearsome badge of shame “you name it” are as common as graffiti in bathroom stalls.  Some of them are just stupid (homophobic: fear of the “same”), some defy rational analysis (racist is never defined so as to apply consistently to both whites and nonwhites), and some are just attempts to smear normalcy (sexism: too many male Minions in Despicable Me).  But despite the childishness of dismissing an opponent by calling him names, it’s done all the time — particularly when a leftist cannot answer an argument with facts and logic.

Me: The policeman was right.

Other: That’s racist!

Me: Homosexuals shouldn’t be Scoutmasters.

Other: That’s homophobic!

Me: Don’t draft women.

Other: You’re a sexist!

Hence my objection to considering Hillary’s insult newsworthy and somehow harmful to her campaign.  Even though she “apologized” the next day, she went right on to repeat the same insults in altered syntax.  Of course she deplores ordinary Americans with ordinary views.  She and the whole multicult have been reading that Holy Liturgy Of The New State Religion every morning and evening for thirty years.  Average folks have been cowed, which allows the multicultists to pursue the fundamental transformation of the United States nearly unopposed.

Trump scares them.  His political positions don’t scare them (for those are all negotiable); Trump himself scares them because he has no respect for political correctness and he has no fear of their insults.  Many are following his lead and stating plainly “We no longer care if you call us names; name-calling is not an argument.”

Those people, too, scare the multicultists.  Maybe we could call it normalphobia.

Dog People

“Dog people” are like gravity or sunlight or something: they just are
and there’s nothing that will change it. I’m not a dog person. I like
dogs, just as most people do, but I have no desire to adopt one. I
have enough problems already.

Dog people tend to think that the world and humanity were made for
dogs, and their own dogs particularly. If it comes down to it,
humanity must give way so that the dogs can flourish. I’ve seen this
a hundred times in my travels through the tri-state area. Someone
will have a psychotic beast that barks viciously at me when I am
working in the next yard. Do they come out and correct the situation?
Hahahahaha! Of course not! They blame me for being there and bothering the dog.

People will walk their dogs on a leash and allow it to excrete its dung
on my grass where, quite obviously, I have to mow.  As I walk down the
street, they allow the beast to come up to me and plant its slobbery
muzzle in my crotch and on my hands, as though either (1) I like it or
(2) the dog has that right and it doesn’t matter if I want the
attention or not.

And, of course, dog people talk to their dogs as though they were
human. If I had a dog I’d do the same, but such behavior is
irrational. I don’t talk to my computer. I give it commands, but I
don’t pretend it converses with me and I don’t wish to get started
pretending that a dog is conversing with me.

We love dogs because they love us. They’re easier to get along with
than humans. We are tempted to ask “Why can’t so-and-so accept me the way my dog does?” The answer is that so-and-so is smarter than your dog.  Rather than flee to a dog, I think my responsibility is to mend my relationships with other people.

Americans spent $14.4 billion on dog food and treats in 2014, according
to the Pet Food Institute.  Since the annual trend was upward, I assume that it was higher in 2015 and will be higher still in 2016.  The SPCA says it costs about $1,400 to properly keep a dog for a year, including grooming, vet visits, and kenneling while you’re gone on vacation.  I suppose a few million also go into medical care for dog bites.  Doubt me?  Google “dog bite injury” images.

Why do people do this?  Oh, there has been a library’s worth of books extolling the excellencies of dog companionship — millions of pages to justify the billions of dollars — but I summarize it by simply observing that dog people are and there’s nothing that will change it.