Shattering and Binding

Two days. Forty-eight hours it’s taken me to articulate my reaction to Obama’s election. So many calls for conservatives to be adults, to put country first, to look at the bright side.

Wordless rage. Obama won through deception, dishonesty, and with the full-knowing falseness of the media and academy. Much of the journalistic and intellectual realms have betrayed America. They know what they have done; they know they hid inconvenient truths and propagated harmful lies.

Why should I stand up and be a good citizen? I will only be destroyed, my voice ripped out, my character fed into the industrial shredder should I dare speak out for my beliefs. Why should I continue to guard and feed those who have slammed the picks and axes of irrational hatreds between my shoulder blades? Please explain how Obama was duly elected in the midst of possibly hundreds of millions in illegal campaign cash, voter fraud, the dumping of military ballots, and so many other attacks on election integrity? Please explain how an America who was intentionally blinded to the truth about her candidates made a legitimate choice of leader?

Again I had to ask: Why should I stand up and be a good citizen when America has so grandly rewarded being a bad one?

I was trying to study, deciding my own victory lay in what I could achieve, what I could do. I am becoming part of the academy, and just like the Left took it, I will be part of the next revolution. I had to stop to sift through events and bodies of sense. I wandered into the next room where CNN was showing reactions to the election.

There was singing and dancing in Harlem, a sea of black faces in bright garb, drums, and joyous voices. A black man was front and center saying he could now tell his children they really could be anything. A black woman said “Obama isn’t just a black president, he’s the president of whites and everyone.” The scene shifted to champaign corks popping in France, to the people of the city of Obama, Japan, singing their silly “Obama” song.

Confucians believe that ceremony is an inherent part of being human. Rituals mean something, symbols carry power, and acting in accordance with those ceremonies brings us into harmony with those meanings, that power. Ritual allows that power to use us for righteousness and us to use it for strength and direction.

The elation on the faces of my fellow Americans, my brothers and sisters who have for so long been estranged in spirit from this country I love, brought salt water to my face. I think Michelle Obama was wrong for never being proud of her country before her husband was raised up before it, but I understand, and I can’t hold that against her. I hope all these people, from Harlem to Paris to Obama City, have felt the power and meaning of the rituals we are enacting. I hope their joy brings their spirits into harmony with ours, because we need that. It is most difficult to fight a brutal enemy while divided from those who are your family.

In Classical meanings, the meanings of function and reason, America lost this election. In Romantic meanings, the meanings of symbol and ritual, America won.

As my heart has wandered these brick canyons and alternate realities of the academy, it had no choice but to align with the force field of Love. Not some dewy-eyed emotionalism that weakens knees and spine, no, not that hippy toke trip. Rather, Love as the righteous and terrible twin of Hate: unifying love for the One who Drew us all in breath and dirt, compassionate love for the good-hearted soil of humanity, proud love for my nation — the tribe of the free, sensuous love for this glorious Created world in which we are all given merely a few brief moments to shudder in Awe at the Divine incarnate, and violent love for all-consuming combat against Evil and its demon horde of injustices. This is why I must be a good citizen, not only now, but until my last breath, until I can no longer wear the armor and swing the sword and shout the battle cry of freedom.

*

a few notes while fishin’

There seems to be a consensus that McCain has already lost. Non-Obama pundits are planning what-next scenarios, and all of it sounds ugly. [See update below.]

Dr. Helen asks, “Is it time to go John Galt?”

Do you ever wonder after dealing with all that is going on with the economy and the upcoming election if it’s getting to be time to “go John Galt”? For those of you who have never read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, the basic theme is that John Galt and his allies take actions that include withdrawing their talents, “stopping the motor of the world,” and leading the “strikers” (those who refuse to be exploited) against the “looters” (the exploiters, backed by the government).

Vodkapundit talks about “fighting words.”

If (when?) Obama is elected, by my estimation there’s an at least even chance that the newly-reconstructed FCC will reverse course and attempt to apply the New Fairness Doctrine to blogs.

If (when?) it happens, I’ll break that law. I will break it with all due malice and in full knowledge of the possible consequences. I’ll shout “Fire Obama!” in a crowded theater. And then, for the first time ever, I’ll ask for reader donations. Because I’ll going to need them, lots of them, to pay for the lawyers.

Primordial Slack declares “Obama will not be my President” and links a number of others with similar views.

I join VodkaPundit, DailyPundit, GuyK, Dogette, and a host of others who will, at the last, refuse to sit idly by while Freedom erodes.

Put my name on your list, Communist Nanny-Staters, it’s not too early.

Obama will not be my President. Nor will Hillary “for the common good” Clinton. Nor will anyone of any skin color or sex that embraces the deconstruction of Capitalism and Freedom as their political platform.

What’s up? What did I miss while reading dusty old documents? The blogosphere isn’t connecting with middle America and the Big Bad Media message is getting through? Duh. I don’t know the number of times I’ve read someone going on about how the MSM has dug its own grave, how it knows it won’t have any influence in the future so it’s squandering it all now to get Obama elected. Nonsense. They still buy ink (and pixels and airwaves) by the barrel*, and they still control what most of middle America reads, sees, and hears.

So what to do? Get in on it. “What?” you ask. Get in on it. We have to become the MSM, get in on the ground floor as reporters, work our way up. Get in on the fight, people. Cyberspace is important ground, but it’s not the main battlefield, it’s only one hill from which we can observe and call in artillery. We have to get down in the mud and the blood, get real ink, real video, real news all over us, and push back on the main field of battle. Win there, or lose.

Where else? Where are the other battles? Worried about all the big-government politicians? Worried about the lefty academy? Two more big battlefields. Stop whining, sign your name on the line, get elected and start leading or get a Ph.D. and start teaching.

That’s exactly how the left got where it is today, and that’s the only way that ground can be retaken.

Back to the ol’ fishin’ hole for me.

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*Sorry for the mixed metaphor, but the alliteration should please you. Oh, sorry. I left my alliteration in the worm bucket when I came up the hill to write.

Update: The post hasn’t even been up for 10 minutes and Dana H. takes me to task in the comments over claiming the Dr. Helen post was part of the “McCain’s lost” movement. And rightly so, in all likelihood. Maybe it’s a broader, “Well, we’ve lost” attitude that I’m sensing, in the big, “our movement” way.

Update 2: Grim has picked up on the apocalyptic language as well.

There is a remarkable amount of ‘end times’ language surrounding the Obama candidacy, and as we’ve discussed, some of it is really his own fault. Obama is a scion of the Alinsky movement, and Saul Alinsky did dedicate his book on “community organizing” to Lucifer.

…

I hope Jim Webb is right, and I’m wrong: and it is comforting to find that there are people I respect who are Obama supporters. I know I can put some faith in them, even if I have none in the man himself. Jim Webb is out there, Phil Carter of Intel Dump, retired General Zinni — these are people I respect, whether or not we always agree and even when we rarely do. That’s comforting.

warriors, pacifists, enchanters and Christianity

Grim has an interesting post up today on the breadth of the Christian faith.  I cut this bit out to discuss:

The interesting thing about Christianity is the degree to which it accepts men as they are: the Christian law is not the Ten Commandments, but the Great Commandment: “Love each other as you love yourself; forgive everything.” If I am to love a man, I must love him as he is; yet if I am to love him as I love myself, then I may fight with him to the degree that I would fight myself. I may even kill him, if there are things I would rather kill myself than be guilty of having done.

If I can but forgive his soul, I am doing all that is asked in the Lord’s Prayer: “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” If I can do that, then we may fight each other as hard as needs be — and we may even love the chance to strike a blow for what is right, best, just. Even the most wicked man is therefore lovable, insofar as he gives us the greatest opportunity to create good in the world. Even our own capacity for sin is lovable, for the same reason.

This is quite a new idea to me, or rather, a sharp twist on some old ideas, and I need some time to mull it over.  But, first thoughts (very bloggish of me, eh? shoot first, think later . . .):

1. Are Christians called to forgive everything?  If so, then we must forgive even those things we would kill someone for?  That seems a bit contradictory, but let’s see.  CS Lewis in Mere Christianity says this about loving one’s neighbor as oneself:

In my most clear-sighted moments not only do I not think myself a nice man, but I know that I am a very nasty one.  I can look at some of the things I have done with horror and loathing.  So apparently I am allowed to loathe and hate some of the things my enemies do. . . .

The real test is this.  Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper.  Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true . . .  Is one’s first feeling, ‘Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that,’ or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies as bad as possible?

. . .

Does loving your enemy mean not punishing him?  No, for loving myself does not mean that I ought not to subject myself to punishment — even to death. . . .

If I didn’t know better (and, well, actually I don’t), I’d say Grim had been reading CS Lewis.

2. Then, the idea that we may kill for those things we would wish to be killed for is a brainbender.  However, let’s do a thought experiment.  Let’s say I flipped out, bought guns and ammo, and was on my way to a place to kill a bunch of people.  My sane self would certainly hope someone stopped me, and given the choice between my insane self carrying out that act and some armed citizen or police officer killing me, I would choose to be killed.  That is true; I would rather be killed than commit an act like that.

What about an immoral war?  I presume Grim’s rule would mean that soldiers should only participate in wars they believe are moral, and should only kill enemies who are doing things, or working towards aims, that the moral soldier himself would rather be killed than accomplish.  We have faced this in Iraq, with Watada and others refusing to go for moral reasons.

CS Lewis (MC again) had this to say about the Christian warrior:

All killing is not murder any more than all sexual intercourse is adultery.  When soldiers came to St John the Baptist asking what to do, he never remotely suggested that they ought to leave the army: nor did Christ when He met a Roman sergeant-major — what they called a centurion.  The idea of the knight — the Christian in arms for the defence of a good cause — is one of the great Christian ideas.  War is a dreadful thing, and I can respect an honest pacifist, though I think he is entirely mistaken.  What I cannot understand is this sort of semi-pacifism you get nowadays which gives people the idea that though you have to fight, you ought to do it with a long face and as if you were ashamed of it.  It is that feeling that robs lots of magnificent young Christians in the Services of something they have a right to, something which is the natural accompaniment of courage — a kind of gaiety and wholeheartedness.

I have often thought to myself how it would have been if, when I served in the First World War, I and some young German had killed each other simultaneously and found ourselves together a moment after death.  I cannot imagine that either of us would have felt any resentment or even any embarrassment.  I think we might have laughed over it.

3. I certainly agree that Christianity is much more broad and open than it is often portrayed, and that it has often accommodated itself to the peoples and times it finds itself among.  Some see this as a weakness, but I see it as a strength.  There is always the danger of bending so far the branch breaks and one particular effort is no longer part of the tree of Christianity, but I think we can bend quite a bit before we reach that point.

4. Oh, I have more to say, particularly about Grim’s choice of poem for his post, but I suspect this post is long enough.  I’ll save “The Last Hero” for later days.