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Sunday Prayers And Curses


Warning: The names of some persons mentioned below are fictional; the persons, unfortunately, are all too real.


An Old Irish Saying

May God Bless’ye and the Devil take’ye.


The Law as a Tyrant

Men and women – let us not forget the women – sometimes lay down the law, and sometimes the law lays them down.

The law in our time is not a tyrant who snuffs out his enemy with a hobnailed boot. Its methods are far more subtle. It takes a piece of you here, then another piece there. It dines on you. It stretches itself out like a cat in a sunlit window. It knows that time is on its side: “Time, there will be time to murder and create.”

Bit by bit, you are eaten up.


Enemies Lists

It is very important in the 21st century – which is not so much ideological as given to prolonged bouts of infantilism – to keep your enemies list current.

What shall be the principle of composition?

Not every idiot can make the list. One must discriminate. And there are different kinds of enemies, some helpful, some not so helpful, all indispensable. The enemy is the one upon whom, like a whetstone, the knife is sharpened, and not all enemies are worth the bother.

Cormac's enemy is -- all things Catholic. But then Cormac is a Buddhist transcendentalist; so, what do you expect?

Most Connecticut “Catholic” politicians are profoundly anti-Catholic, not because they see no benefit in a Catholicism they have shucked off in the 8th grade, but because it is more beneficial to them to surrender to a kind of theologically heterodox Catholicism, a confection of their own making that will allow them to claim they are Catholics -- and so reap votes -- at the same time they loudly approve of marriage for priests, late term abortion on demand and euthanasia for medically impaired dispensables – and so reap votes.

Cormac’s anti-Catholicism is disguised by humor. One never knows whether a comic is serious, and comedy for Cormac is a prophylactic that protects him from critical scrutiny. When you are accused of stupidity in print, it is an unanswerable riposte to say, “I was only kidding.”


Discomforting The Comfortable?

We are bidden to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

Yes, but who are the comfortable journalists, here and now, in Connecticut?

Perhaps the rule, concocted by Finley Peter Dunne, is not meant to be applied to members of the club. But those lying outside the precincts of journalism would be hard pressed to understand the selective application. Journalism, as non-journalists understand the profession, remains a conspiracy against the laity, because every profession, as George Bernard Shaw says, is a conspiracy against the laity.

The average Joe, if there is such a beast, cannot understand the hypocritical exception to the rule. He feels that journalists should be at war with each other in the same newsrooms. The frisson would make sleepy newspapers, now fallen on hard times, far more interesting --  and less conspiratorial.


A Revolutionary Word

The most revolutionary thing a citizen may say to his government is – No.


Slavers

The slaver will never be content with a portion of your liberties; he wants all of them. More than that, he wants you to approve his solicitude for you, because such approval signals the death of liberty; it means you have acquiesced, that you have chosen security over liberty, that you have looked your oppressor in his eye and nodded “Yes” to his perfidy.

Liberty is the pearl purchased at a great price. Sam Adams, Boston’s apostle of liberty, knew well its cost when he said at the Philadelphia State House on August 1, 1776:  “If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.”


Fascism

Fascism is the doctrine of the preeminence of the state in all things, large and small.

Mussolini best defined fascism as: “All things in the state; nothing outside the state; nothing above the state.”

And by “nothing,” Mussolini meant – NO thing; not the habits and venerable customs of the land, nor the church, nor written constitutions, nor the natural law, which entails the most venerable of laws, the law of self-defense. The citizen must be content with his helplessness, and his conscience must rest comfortably in the notion that the state provides all goods, material and spiritual. The citizen under a fascist regime becomes the object of the state’s solicitude. Note well: He is not even a subject misused, but an object; which is to say, he is dispossessed of the rights the natural law assigns to the human person. He is the state’s pet.

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