Resistance is Not Futile

If the following words do not make inimitable common sense to you, more's the pity. From Dale Ahlquist's enormously important G. K. Chesterton: The Apostle of Common Sense:

Big government and big business have used machinery to push us toward consolidation and a rather flat world of standardization. The problem is that big government and big business are both soulless. They are in revolt against the normal and the ordinary. "They are in revolt against the Citizen." They do not want the common man to have power.

They are willing to give him a vote, because they have long discovered that it need not give him any power. They are not willing to give him a house, or a wife, or a child, or a dog, or a cow, or a piece of land, because these things really do give him power. (Outline of Sanity, 208f)

To combat all this, says Chesterton, we need a moral movement. We have to be able to criticize ourselves. We have to be able to resist the tendencies toward consolidation. We have to resist monopolies. We have to resist endless and invasive bureaucracies. We have to resist the mentality that does not trust the common man to be able to take care of himself and his family.

Let that last sentence of Chesterton's sink in: They are not willing to give him a house, or a wife, or a child, or a dog, or a cow, or a piece of land, because these things really do give him power. Since when has popular culture - so largely a product of Madison Avenue and slick advertising - employed by big business and (now) big government - said such things are "hip", "cool", or will lead to human happiness?

Neither socialism nor big business proclaim the moral imperative of the gospel. Pope Leo XIII did that and inspired Hilaire Belloc, Chesterton, Father Vincent McNabb, E. F. Schumacher and a host of others to resist both as wrong-headed and wrong-spirited.

Do not sell Distributism - Subsidiarity - short. It is a call to sanity, human happiness, and ... much more. It is the Church's social teaching, it is definitive, and it is a path to human happiness in this world.

Not Like Him

This is not quite the same as today's fawning sycophantism. For one thing, there is this. Americans may be filled disordered passions, resembling Flannery O'Connor-esque rubes, but they rarely let a mere political figure harbor delusions of grandeur too long.

Kozinski - Saruman @ ND

The comparison that was just waiting to be made. Thaddeus Kozinski at Mercatornet writes, Saruman at Notre Dame.

'America has a new pope'

Father Z pretty much spells out the battle plan.

Neither President, Jenkins nor Obama, needed to say much of substance. And they didn’t. All they had to do to vindicate the inevitable rightness of their agendas was to sound reasonable.

Fr. Jenkins, throbbing with emotion after these weeks of persecution, cuddled the students and their adorers, inviting them into his sufferings.

President Obama, wise realist, offered astonishing insight. For example, you surely noted his stunning admission that the two sides in the abortion debate – wait for it – have irreconcilable differences!

In the final analysis we heard various expressions of "can’t we all just get along" even as we were being told to "shut up".

[ ... ]

In an era when emotion trumps reason, facts are just plain mean.

The progressivist side knows they will not win by arguments. They win by projecting the image of deep-caring, of brow-furrowed nuance, of struggling with those hard decisions.

Remember: If you will have first "struggled" you are thereafter justified in anything you chose.

So, Sunday was pretty black for Catholics who are waking up to a clearer Catholic identity in continuity with our Tradition. It was a great day for adherents of Catholic-lite, especially in the many long-subverted institutions of higher learning. They are sure to be revitalized.

[ ... ]

Among the reactions I gathered from the smart people I talk with about pivotal events – and we witnessed something pivotal on Sunday – I heard grim assessments and forecasts.

One person said, "America has a new pope".

Therefore, after pondering this for a day, my response is finally to return to a basic premise of this blog.

More than ever, we must have what the Church really says, what Holy Church really has to offer.

Read all here.

Seiyo - Mugged by Reality

Almost no one can scare by stating the facts of the downward spiral of the West as well as Takuan Seiyo. Here is the latest in his From Meccania to Atlantis series (#11) - Mugged by Reality.

Connect the Dots

This and this should be read carefully and cool-headedly, remembering that Dr. Jeffrey Burke Satinover, formerly of both the Harvard and Yale medical schools, laid out the political reasons that the APA did not include homosexuality as a character disorder any longer in its Diagnostic and Statistics Manual IV. The multitudinous scientific reasons for including it were over-ridden by the shrill caucus claiming victimhood, but the scientific reasons now politically incorrect are voiceless and unheeded.

The unfettered adulation of the human will and worship of the instincts is now the highest good in dying western culture, gaining power by law and in negative imitation of Magisterial truth. Where it will end, and where it has always ended, is the place of sacrifice.

Condoms a solution do not make

For the record, I stand with the Holy Father.

Many more do too, according to the Curt Jester in The Pope’s still Catholic.

UPDATE: Pope Benedict XVI hits the nail on the head in one.

FURTHER UPDATES:

March 19, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Edward C. Green, director of the AIDS Prevention Research Project at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, has said that the evidence confirms that the Pope is correct in his assessment that condom distribution exacerbates the problem of AIDS.

"The pope is correct," Green told National Review Online Wednesday, "or put it a better way, the best evidence we have supports the pope's comments."

MercatorNet’s Michael Cook takes up the standard.

In Government We Trust

The I Won is continuing his inroads into replacing government as the ultimate security blanket. Why not? After sweeping up traditional Catholics into his fold in November's election, he believes he not only can but will lead the charge for a progressive (sic.) agenda that includes the abominations you have read about constantly in the first weeks of his presidency.

W. Bradford Wilcox at Mercatornet examines what this will mean for the United States as it follows the secularist path already taken by the Old World here.

We Don't Need No Catholic Bishops

On Gordon Peterson's Inside Washington this evening, regular panel member Colby King of the Washington Post blandly noted that the discussion regarding stem cell research (no mention of embryonic) needs to be calmed down. Why? Because there are bio-ethicists involved. So have no fear.

Keyes - Warnings

Alan Keyes who ran against O in Illinois sees danger and speaks out here.

Choice the Dragon

Anthony Esolen looks at tales from The Quest of the Holy Grail, written by an unknown Cistercian monk of the 12th century, and sees a dragon that still devours hoards today.

Choice is the dragon of our day. It smuggles into its charcoal-smelling barrow not goblets and gilt pommels but human souls, one after another after another, enticing them there with “choices,” all of them more or less trivial, while it sits upon the hoard and snores away in its inhuman sleep.

We like that dragon. We eat the fruit of the land in season, out of season. We surf the speckled Internet for spiky games and delights, or for the sheer satiation of ennui, only a click away. We shop for schools, we demand “electives.” We shop for churches (alas that we should have to shop for churches), even shop for creeds. We will give the dragon our gold for the privilege of wider choice in how we may put our brain waves to sleep for a couple of hours a day, irritable and unaccountable as those brain waves are.

We find arranged marriages abominable. What, no choice? And after we marry, we retain a fail-safe, lest married life prove to be married life and not the predictable scripts of our own writing. We are the first people in the world who expect that our children will live far away from us and from each other. Why should anyone be subject to the geographical accident of having been raised in Bag-End, near a certain hill or beside a certain brook?

We even believe in the “freedom to choose,” a lizardly slogan that darts past the silent object of the infinitive: as if we feared that the children of our own wombs would be reptiles themselves, now come to prey upon our precious choice. We like that dragon. We like our choice ...

The dragon has a name; it is Choice. [ht: Mary Victrix]

Biden Time in Church

"Somebody call security."

"Wherever applause breaks out in the liturgy because of some human achievement, it is a sure sign that the essence of liturgy has totally disappeared and been replaced by a kind of religious entertainment." Ratzinger, Spirit of the Liturgy

On Abortion, the Silence was Deafening

Pew Study Finds Less Than One Percent of Election Coverage Included Abortion.

In other words, it is what I said all along.

I'm truly beginning to think that the culture of death folk are using mimetic theory for all the wrong reasons.

Save It for Football Games

Don't you just love mass gatherings, devoted crowds shouting mindless twattle, vast spectacles in real-time, just like the good ol' days?