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.
Comments