Urban farming nuns?

If I were in a missionary/active religious order I'd have the working part of it be urban farming in places like this.


I thought at first it was Detroit. But Kansas City? Holy moly!

Our entire modern experiment in urban life has gone off the rails and the people at the bottom of the social heap are living worse than animals. "Men beat each over who gets first run at the garbage dumpster." Good Lord! They're being literally dehumanised by the post-civilisation they were born into.

The urban farming movement can save us, in the material sense. But what about the eternal, supernatural sense? All it needs is some praying people, a daily Mass offered early in the morning before work starts. Imagine this with habited nuns doing the work. Imagine all this turned into an opportunity to show people the love of God, the love of Christ, directly and explicitly. Offering catechism and confirmation classes to the kids who wanted it. Stopping work at lunchtime with a bell and the Angelus, dedicating an urban farm to Our Lady and St. Isidore.



~

Fight 'em until we can't

There's a problem in the West, the cultural and political mega-entity that we used to call Christendom, and that the Muslim fanatics (who clearly haven't been keeping up with the news in the last 50 years) still imagine they are fighting. I read somewhere that the savages are crowing about how they've struck a blow against the "children of the cross" with the Paris shooting. (Seriously, you freaks, if you think that Charlie Hebdo had anything to do with Christianity you've got a pretty big problem with your brains.)

Where was I? The problem in the West... Yes, it's that the people in it no longer love it, no longer care enough to fight to defend it. And, honestly, it's hard to argue against this. What about the post-Christian "West" is worth fighting and dying for? Universal health care? The European Convention on Human Rights? Secularism? The "right" to have the government pay for your gender reassignment? The perpetually open maw of Europeans who have become as helpless and dependent as baby birds waiting to get fed predigested food regurgitated by Mamma-government?


As I write this, I'm listening to a CD of Maddy Prior and the Carnival Band singing their cheery versions of Medieval English Christmas carols. The work of this group has always been to reach back into England's musical and cultural and religious past and bring it forward, to remind us of its homely greatness, the humane, the sane greatness of Christian culture.

As I was listening to it, and reading ... well... all that, all that we've all been reading in the last few days, I was thinking that there is indeed something I'm willing to fight and die for. But it has nothing to do with anything the EU or its fellow travellers think they are doing, or with Charlie Hebdo's mentally and morally disordered rants. Honestly, I've always hated that stuff since it started appearing in the 1970s.

What I love, and am willing to fight and die to protect, is what I've found still surviving in this valley I've moved to. In the middle of the Apennine mountains, a hidden and almost secret place where the ancient and good things are still honoured, remembered and kept. Will I fight and die for this? Oh, hell yes.

Will I fight and die for the disgusting, drooling, squelching anti-culture we've created since 1965? No, I'm afraid that thing is on its own.

The remnants of Christendom are hanging on by a thread, assaulted on our ancestral turf by our own traitors. In our even more ancient homeland it is shattered. Is it beyond repair? I don't know, but I think all this will require more than we are able to do to restore. It will take direct Divine Intervention, and I honestly think that is where all this... all of it, including what's going on in Rome... is going. It is what I'm praying for, almost exclusively, now. That, and that the time will be short, and that souls will not be lost along with lives, or too much that is good and beautiful and precious will be burnt, bombed and destroyed.

I can offer no advice at all to the individuals, who do email me from time to time, asking what they should do, except that we must fight. We must fight the twin threats with everything we have and all our strength. How that will manifest in your own town or parish or family I have no way of knowing. Maybe "fighting" will take the form of simply resisting the secularising trends in your schools or parishes. Maybe it will mean packing your family every Sunday into an oversize van and driving an hour each way to get to the Real Mass. Maybe it will mean standing in front of an abortion mill with a giant graphic image of aborted children and replying to the hate with reason and facts.

Maybe, and perhaps increasingly, it will mean actual fighting, as it has in Iraq and elsewhere.

But I offer this conversation from a man who has studied Islam, Andrew Bieszad, with an old Coptic woman who faced down her Islamic persecutors:

"...so I sat and had begun to eat when an elderly Coptic woman sat down next to me. I struck up a conversation with her, and when I told her a little about myself and my background, she smiled warmly and began speaking in an animated and passionate Arabic.

Over the next hour she told me her life story, about growing up in Egypt, being harassed by Muslims, the threats made against her and her family, and how she eventually came to America with her adult children and their families because the persecution was too severe. She said that she was disappointed by many of her fellow Coptic priests and parishioners. In her words, because they did not take an aggressive posture against Islam and the Muslims who habitually harassed them, they worsened their own standing. She added that because Islam has no concept of love, Muslims only respond to force. That it is the only thing they understand.

She told me that one of the last confrontations she had with the Muslims was right before her family left Egypt. She and a friend were walking home when a group of young Muslim men approached them and began verbally and physically harassing them for being Christians.

“Do you know what I told him?” the woman said.

“What?” I asked.

“I did not show him any fear. We pushed him back and punched him, and we screamed at them ‘Your god is ****, your prophet is ****, and you are **** because you believe in them!’ They ran away, because all Muslims are cowards, and they are afraid when you stand up to them.”"

~

"Order is better than chaos...creation better than destruction..."

Here is Sir Kenneth Clarke's message for the ignorant savages who have, apparently, briefly taken time out of their busy days of beheading Syrian Christian children, to break into the museums and smash to powder the some of the planet's most precious cultural treasures and antiquities.





~

Anyone out there good at the Bible?

I have a couple of questions you might be able to help with.

Is there any indication, (genealogies, etc) how long Adam and Eve were in the Garden before the fall? Are there any reliable scholars (ie. saints) who have written about the state of man before the fall? Thomas, I think, right?

Apart from the Protestant fundies and creationists, are there any Catholic scholars who have thought about the time frame for the existence of the world? When it all happened?

I ask because I was discussing with someone on email the theories being put forward by some rather interesting, and rather odd, Egyptologists who say that the pyramids and the sphinx and temples built in the time of the Old Kingdom were in fact a great deal older than the academic consensus would have us believe. Someone has said, for example, that there is irrefutable evidence of water erosion on the base of the Sphinx, the sort that could only be made by many hundreds of years of heavy rain. Well, the Sphinx is in a desert... no rain. At least not for a very long time. Much longer than academia thinks is possible. But there it is.

There were lots of other things this person told me that I didn't read the details of much, but sounded damned interesting. Things about astronomy, the placement of temples to look at star patterns that are no longer in the right place. Meaning, the temples have been there so long that the star patterns they were built to map have shifted in the sky (or the world shifted under them, I guess is more accurate). Meaning the temples were built a hell of a lot longer ago than, again, academia wants us to think.

Another thing was the incredible tale, which is the academic consensus, that the pyramids were built with no tools more complex than rocks, copper tools and plumblines. Like they made millions of huge stone blocks, hauled them up the side of a man-made mountain, all within 20 years. According to modern engineers, we would have a hard time doing it in that time now, with our modern stone-cutting techniques and heavy cranes. But we're supposed to believe they did it with stone mallets and hemp ropes?

I went through my Egypt phase at about eight, the usual time, and never heard anything about this. I vaguely knew that the temples lined up with the sun rise at the equinoxes, and that some of them had something to do with astronomy. But these guys are saying that they are complex pieces of, essentially, stone machinery, technology, and that the Egyptians were way past stone tools by the time they were built, which was way before anyone thinks. Someone said just after the last ice age.

The trouble is that the people making these claims then go off all wild and wiggy about mystical energies and stuff, and totally lose all credibility (to me, anyway), but it's incredibly interesting nonetheless. And even if we don't think that the planet was once ruled by a race of super-smart space hippies, or giant-headed warring Nephilim from Planet Nibiru, some of the things they said about the age and mathematical complexity of the temples and pyramids, certainly sound plausible to this unschooled ear.

Now, I'm not up much on paleoanthropology other than the stuff I read as kid in National Geographic, but I have had the impression, from other things, that the current academic consensus actually kind of blows. I know that it does on a variety of other scientific things (pregnancy starts at implantation because we damn well say it does!) and the arrogance of the materialist Darwinians does not match the rigor of their arguments. We're just supposed to believe it because they say.

Not being a fundamentalist protestant, or still less a young earth creationist, or a biblical literalist, I don't have a pressing need to prove that the world is only 4000 years old, according to the genealogies in the old testament. So I wanted to consult the more reliable sources. What do Catholic biblical scholars, especially the ones, as Philip said, whose names start with an S, say about the time scale?

And the millions of years the world is supposed to have been capable of sustaining life is a really, really long time. If civilisation has only existed since the times of Çatalhöyük and the neolithic and chalcolithic, how do we explain a thing like Gobekli Tepe? a large stone temple complex built during what is supposed to be the paleolithic, predating pottery, metallurgy, writing, the wheel, agriculture and animal husbandry?

I've read a few books recently, not by gnostic Egyptologists, but by perfectly respectable archeologists and geologists, that suggest human civilisation is not only far older than we thought, but is actually cyclical, that is, that not just individual civilisations like the Egyptians, but the whole human endeavour of civilisation itself, everywhere, comes and goes. That we go through periods of civilisation and primitive tribal societies, every few tens of thousands of years.

So, anyone have any idea how this idea could be reconciled with the biblical accounts of the creation? (I mean anyone sensible, that is, neither a Protestant fundamentalist, a young earth creationist or a dedicated materialist Darwinian).

I don't know what relevance it has for us now, what it has to do with any of our pressing problems, but wouldn't it be cool to think that there were ancient civilisations running around building flying pyramids before the ice age?

And isn't it just a bit of a modern conceit the idea that history is a natural progression from primitive to sophisticated societies? That we're doing nothing but get better, taller, smarter and more sophisticated? That it could never ever go the other way? Or be in any way cyclical? The modern historical theory of uninterrupted progress is bollocks on the face of it. We've seen societies decay, morally, economically, even technologically. They go up; they go down. Peoples learn things and forget things collectively. Technology waxes and wanes.

Ours certainly is. It's an observable fact that a large portion of the manufactured goods available today are less useful, less enduring and less functional than the same things as they were produced 50 years ago. Right now, for example, I would not buy a new domestic sewing machine. They're crap. I'll regret to my dying day that I didn't manage to retain my mother's sewing machine, made of metal, with beautifully machined parts, weighing about a half a ton, that was never, ever going to break down. We might have fancier technologies, cell phones, but can you drop one and have it still work? Is it going to last 70 years? Or will it die if you splash your latte on it? The 1937 bakelite rotary dial phone in my room still works just fine, thanks.

I have no doubt whatever that the accounts in Genesis are true. That God made the universe out of nothing, made the earth for the animals, plants and man to live on, that we had two genetic parents who transgressed and undid their original state of primal grace, were taught to fend for themselves in a transformed creation after the Fall. I've got no problem at all with any of that. But I would like some thoughts of scholars on the exact when. How long ago are we talking about.



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Let's play a game!: name your obscure heroes

I was looking at my book shelf the other day (thinking I spend more time on the internet and less time reading them than I'd really like) and noticed that I like a great number of people whom the world would think very odd and obscure writers. It got me thinking; perhaps one of the things we can do, perhaps the only thing, to counter the evils of the celebrity-worship culture is to adopt another type of hero.

I'm betting that in our little O's P circle of readers we have amongst us a wonderful array of interesting, obscure and forgotten people who have influenced our thinking and lives who should be made more generally known.

So,

name ooooh, let's say, four, interesting writers, artists, political thinkers, philosophers, adventurers, explorers, warriors, gardeners, scientists, saints or relatives who have strongly influenced you to think and behave independently of the general crowd of our degenerate post-everything anti-culture.

I'll go first.


Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, the writer, professor and literary philosopher who I most want to be when I grow up. He more or less invented the notion of studying literature as an academic field, and instituted the chair of English literature at Cambridge. Of a long and fruitful lifetime of works, including the monumentally important Oxford Book of English Verse (of which I think I have at least two editions) Sir Arthur's work that got me thinking about literature in a new way was his address to students in 1916 that was later published as "On the Art of Writing".

He was the inspiration for the character of Ratty in the Wind in the Willows (my first literary influence) and invented the adage for all writers of fiction, "murder your darlings."


Roger Tory Peterson
whose bird books got me started as the (half-assed) amateur field naturalist I am today. When I was eight, or so, I saw a TV programme about him and knew, right then, that I wanted to be a field naturalist artist when I grew up. (Too bad real life intervened so brutally about then, but that's another sob-story).


Sir Thomas Browne
the wacky 17th century English doctor whose book Religio Medici was condemned by the Vatican and demonstrated that pure, and very endearing, bull-headed English attitude that with the right sort of education, an Englishman can just damn well write about any subject he pleases, and to hell with the facts. His description of elephants will make you fall on your face laughing.

His literary style is the very model of a 17th century Protestant gentleman, and his whimsical spelling and random capitalisations are a delight to behold. I have a very nice three-volume edition of his collected works given to me by the late, great John Muggeridge from his father's collection which I treasure. His religious ideas are proof that what we today regard as nutty liberalism, born in the 60s, has been the mainstream of Anglicanism from its earliest days. But from a literary viewpoint, he, with John Donne and John Evelyn, epitomises all that was best and worth preserving about post-Medieval, early modern Anglicanism, and will do very nicely as part of the booty when we bring them in.


Blessed Margaret of Castello
who was a dwarf, born blind and hunchbacked with a gammy leg in 13th century Italy. She was rejected by her shallow, noble parents who wanted none of their rivals to know they'd spawned such a misfit. She was locked up in a kind of hermitage for most of her childhood where she was allowed only to speak to the parish priest and the servant who brought her food from her parents' palace.

Then, when she was 20, her parents took her to the town of Castello where miraculous healings were rumoured to be taking place, and when after a day of prayer she failed to be miraculously restored, they walked away, abandoning her to the streets. She was at first adopted by beggars and street people who protected her and taught her to beg. She became known in the town for her great holiness and cheerful disposition and was eventually (after many adventures) allowed to join the early Dominican Mantellatae, the third order for widows who wore the habit and took vows but did not live in community.

As a mantellata, she cared for the sick and poor, and especially visited and talked to poor prisoners, converting all of them. She was a wonderworker, putting out house fires with her cloak and healing people of blindness and cancer and all manner of things, including one little girl whom Margaret healed after her own death, rising briefly to life from her funeral bier to stretch out her hand to heal the girl.

She remains incorrupt in her glass Snow White coffin in Citta di Castello, Italy. And just as soon as I get it together, I'm going to work out the Trenitalia route and go see her.

I adopted Margaret as my patron at my confirmation because she was abandoned by her parents and in her whole life was not bitter and was never heard to criticise them for it.

...and if I'd said seven obscure heroes, I'd have added Fr. Frederick Faber (WAY more holy than Newman), John Ruskin, and Richard Lack for nearly single-handedly rescuing Art from the abyss of postmodern nihilism.

Oh, and Roger Scruton, for telling the entire academic philosophical world they're full of shit;

And of course, John Muggeridge who didn't let his famous surname make him into a twit, and who showed me that it is possible to overcome one's personal failings and become a saint in ordinary day-to-day life. Yes, I said it; John was clearly a saint and the three years I lived in his house totally changed me and my life.

OK, now you.



~

New 'blogs: the male perspective

Dr. Helen: mostly about how sucky the feminist world is. She's written a book about how the hyper-feminized culture has excluded and systematically discriminated against men, particularly in matters pertaining to marriage, childrearing and divorce. I'd like to review it.

I'm starting a list of blogs by and about men and their view on the world, sexuality and other big issues. Some years ago, I started understanding how much damage feminism has done to men, how it has excluded them from domestic life and from the authority they should have in the home.

Apparently, there are not a few men who have noticed it as well, and the "Manosphere" is the result. There are many manifestations of this, with a wide variety of political opinion, but they seem mainly to be of either conservative or libertarian point of view in the American political sense, and among the latter, that is, libertarian end, to hold not only feminism but women in utter contempt. I think this trend, along with the execrable section of it of "Game" players - men who have dedicated their lives to a materialistic form of hedonism and the luring and using of women for short-term sexual gratification - appears to have been an offshoot of the sexual/feminist revolution in which men have said, "Fine, you want us to throw off our protective role? You've got it, honey."

There is a lot of anger in their writing at the wholesale emasculation of men and the hardening of women, which I can certainly understand, but their hatred of family and marriage seems like a dying patient hating and fearing the cure. A great many of them come across as being as childish and self-centred as the brainwashed women they criticise. Nevertheless, I think their observations about what feminism is doing both to men and to women, and to our societies as a whole, are worth reading. Food for thought, at any rate.

There are a lot of others, like our new friends Joffre the Giant and the Ignorant Redneck, who have taken a less self-harming mode. These more balanced characters seem to have one thing in common that the more angry and embittered men's writers do not; Christianity of a serious, intellectual and strongly devotional stripe.

I am still reading and collecting data about them, but as a whole, the men's bloggers are a very interesting internet phenomenon. They are very much akin, I think, to the early Catholic Traditionalist movement, who found each other and developed a network in cyberspace that helped us understand what was going on in the Church and the world. I should have been reading them for a long time, and don't know how I could have missed them until now. I'll pass on the more interesting bits to you lot and we shall see what we can make of it all.

The Private Man

The Rational Male

Alpha Game

The Spearhead



~

Convenient death

Modernity never ceases to amaze me in its incredible thoroughness. There just doesn't seem to be any tiny corner of human life that it hasn't managed to poison.


And I think it is clear that what Modernity has done to food, "poison" can be taken literally.

I think it's very significant that the woman talks (in possibly the most annoying, nasal American accent I've ever heard) about the traditional methods of food preservation. Now, ask yourself how this was possible. Who was doing the food preparation and preservation, and how did they learn these skills? Women today do not know how to cook even with the inferior processed foods available to them. Their domestic skills are limited to ironing their suit blouses before work.

It is clear that the degeneration of food-related domestic skills, and therefore the good health of children, men and future generations, is yet another victim of the feminist revolution. No one is feeding the family, and the "obesity crisis" is the result.

And the word, "convenience" is starting to become my most-hated word in the English language. I remember once talking to a young man I knew who was complaining about the expense of running his car. He also complained that he was gaining weight because he wasn't getting enough exercise. I observed that in the eleven years I had lived in Vancouver, the city had become almost uninhabitable, hellish, because of the increase of the number of cars, private vehicles, on the roads. I think the government issued a notice that the number had increased about 65% in the first five of those years. I suggested that since he didn't have steady employment, and since he lived in a city with an excellent and cheap public transit system, that he get rid of his car.

He said, "Well, it's convenient." And I think he meant that to be such a sound argument that no further disagreement was possible. And in a way he was right. He had made it clear that nothing, not money, nor his interest (which was real) in the environmental damage cars are doing in cities nor even his health, nor any other thing topped "convenience" on his list of priorities.

We are addicted to it, but it is convenience that is, literally, killing us.



~

Goofy or Great?

Discuss...



~

Buddy System

Anyone want to work on Euclid with me? It always helps to have a partner or a little group.

The edition I'm using is the Dover reprint of Thomas Heath's 1925 translation of the earlier work of Heiberg, 1888. Three volumes, kindly sent along by an O's P. regular reader.

There appear to be various online study guides as well. I've found this one from the Dept. of Math and Computer Science at Clark university. I'm sure there are other good study aids to Euclid online, but I like this one to start with because the notes, at least that I have looked at so far, are brief and comprehensible.

I've come to the conclusion that I really can't do what I hope to do without a comprehensive look at classical geometry and proportions. This, I assume, is where my stick-to-it mettle is going to be tested. I'm quite excited about the prospect of studying geometry as part of my study of classical drawing, but I know from long and sad experience that the feeling of eagerness at the beginning cannot be counted on to pull one through to the completion of a project. If anyone else has a sound reason to want to study this subject with me, I would appreciate the companionship. As we all know from our various gym and weight training experiences, it's always easier on the buddy system.

I'll be keeping my eye open on Amazon and elsewhere to see if there are any good study editions. I was commenting this evening that when I studied Latin at King's College, the text we used was Wheelock, I think maybe the 4th edition...? Since my Latin time, 1998/99, I see that Wheelock has been turned into an entire one-man Latin industry, with work books, flash cards, readers, study guides, vocabulary books, 501 tenses and declensions and even whole websites dedicated to helping you get through the 40 chapters. I was remarking that the same thing could certainly profitably be done with Euclid if there were to be a revival of classical education. I will certainly be looking around.

In the meantime, if there is anyone who would consider committing to this project, let me know. As I implied above, it would be best if someone has a good reason to want to study geometry, rather than simply thinking it is a neat idea. I have thought it would be a neat idea, and have never got 'round to it. But I am starting now because I have an actual concrete need to know. The point of having someone to do it with is to keep both people going through to the end (or at least as far as our wee brains can go), which generally requires a serious motivation at the start.

I plan on doing, or I hope to be able to do, about 1/2 an hour a day, most days of the week first thing in the morning. I've started already, a little bit of Book 1, but I'm still pretty weak, so that might take a little building-up-to.

Let me know if you are interested and have the time to devote.



~

This really happened

That young man is Joshua Bell, one of the foremost musicians of the day. The place is the metro in Washington DC.

It was a social experiment set up by the Washington Post to see what would happen. How ordinary passers by would react to the kind of music people pay top dollar to hear in concert halls.

Well, this:

The people scurry by in comical little hops and starts, cups of coffee in their hands, cellphones at their ears, ID tags slapping at their bellies, a grim danse macabre to indifference, inertia and the dingy, gray rush of modernity.

H/T to Carriere.

~

Well, that will be something to look forward to then...

Robert Pattinson didn't find anything sexy about Uma Thurman in their new movie, "Bel Ami." "The sex scenes with [her] are kind of disturbing," the "Twilight" star reveals. But he can't blame Uma for the lack of steam. Explains Pattinson: "Her character, Madeleine, kind of uses sex as a sort of weapon, and my character thinks like an animal."

Can't wait.

A while ago, I had a discussion with someone about the entertainment business and how or whether it should be taken back a few stages to consider the moral impact of its products on society. I'm really not one to advocate making only the Sound of Music and the Song of Bernadette over and over again. My favourite film - in my opinion the greatest film ever made - is the Godfather. Gangster films are my favourite genre.

I don't think that entertainment, art, should be all sweetness and light. I don't think the approach of, say, EWTN and its endless soft-focus videos of flowers and bunnies and perpetual rosaries is really the answer. Entertainment, as we have come to use the word over the last 500 years or so, is supposed to reflect, and help us reflect on, real life. Macbeth is still a better play that R&J and at the end of the play that most people regard as the greatest in dramatic history since the Trojan Women, everyone dies, most of them violently.

I will quite cheefully sit through, say, John Carpenter's The Thing (but prefer the original), or any of the Aliens films, or any number of apocalyptic/monster/zombie explosion films (though I never saw the point of the teenage slasher flicks). WWII, Viet Nam, heck, anything involving soldiers (I admit that I even liked Troy). I am always up for some gratuitous violence, car chases, fight scenes, shoot-em-ups. My favourite director is still John Woo.

I like the stuff that explores the darker end of the human soul and the chronic idiocies of our modern civilisation. (Which is why Fight Club might be my runner-up after the Godfather). I have even identified myself as a conscious and systematic student of human evil...another word for a journalist. This stuff is worth making movies and TV shows about.

But I am not the only person who prefers all sorts of blood and guts to a hideous thing like The Talented Mr. Ripley, a film that you could not pay me to sit through again. A film that even mentioning gives me the willies.

It might be difficult to find anyone who, when cornered, would honestly say that the nihilism and despair of the post-modern entertainment world has had a positive effect on people.

Can this trend be stopped? Should it be stopped?

Most people in the theatre seats aren't nihilists. Don't want to see films in which awful people do awful things in an awful world where nothing has any meaning. Indeed, in many countries, most of the people in the theatre seats are at least nominal or cultural Christians and get kind of down when the Judeo-Christian moral code is mocked or denied. Even if subconsciously.

But the entertainment industry seems to be in a little world all its own. I always thought that the bottom line was really, you know, the bottom line in these multi-gajillion dollar businesses. But I guess when you're that rich already, you start to have other priorities, agendas. To think of other things.

And they all seem to be bad things.

Should we just be letting this whole generation of sex/death maniacs finish up while we ignore them and keep downloading old black and white films until the regime change? Is there going to be a regime change?

Do we have the power to shift the focus?

Where should it be shifted to?

Is it the job of entertainment to fix society? Is it not, perhaps, a case of getting what we deserve? That we have so corrupted our society that our entertainment industry is simply showing us ourselves? Is it merely a kind of mirror in which we don't like what we see?

I'm really asking.



~

God peeks out from behind the wing of a dragonfly

Now, I am not a math person, and I am really not terribly up on the whole Intelligent Design theories, but I know that the universe is made of math.

Quite a few years ago now I signed up for a summer course in mathematics designed to help life-long math-handicapped people like me get past the elementary level and upgrade to the point where they could make a start in sciences. I then followed up with a course in basic geometry, since I had found that part of the first course so very interesting. Some years after that, I read about Euclid and bought a school-boy's version of his book and started working my way through it.

What my geometry experiment taught me is that, just as it is logically indisputable that God exists, it is geometically indisputable that there is design in the universe. Reality is mathematically explicable.

Some years after my math flirtation, I had one of the most memorable walks I have ever taken. It was after a Sunday Mass, and John Muggeridge and another friend of ours took a long walk through High Park. Our friend, who is a math teacher and a brilliant amateur woodworker, told us all about these mathematical ideas like the Fibonacci series, spirals and Golden Angles and all the mystical things of math that were known by the ancients and rediscovered by the Renaissance geniuses, that explain the orderliness of the universe and why modern art and architecture have been such flops.

Later, Fr. Martin Hilbert of the Toronto Oratory (another ridiculously smart math-person) gave a talk all about the design that is evident is the flagellum of microscopic creatures. I was again mesmerised.

Today, I am beginning a course in drawing. Instruction will be given in the classical methods that were taught to all the great artists of Europe until the Asteroid that Destroyed Everything Good Holy and True. I will be studying three hours a week at first, and I hope there will be no end.

I hope that it will move from the classical drawing and painting techniques, to a deeper study of the observable universe. I have no idea if I have any sort of talent for two-D art, and I don't care. There is something, something about these lost secrets of our Western Tradition, that have whispered to me all my life. There is order in the universe, and it can be comprehended. God speaks through creation.

The Euro's Rejection of The Real

A few days ago, I had a conversation with a colleague about the difference between the old world and the new. I mean, the world before the 1960s, that I have sometimes simply called The Before and the weird alienating and artificial wonderland we all live in now. I was explaining a theme of mine, the difference between The Real and Fantasy. Since the 1960s our culture, Western Civilization, has increasingly addicted itself to Fantasy, and the consequences have been vast and greatly destructive to the human soul. Having lived for a while now in Europe, I am beginning to understand that the addiction to Fantasy is also destructive in the material realm. At Brussel's Journal, Paul Belien, (another determined rejecter of Fantasy) writes about the threat posed to the Euro by the collapse of the Greek economy:

The EU currency was not introduced because of economic considerations, but because the European Union is pretending to be a genuine state and states are expected to have single national currencies. Hoping to become a powerful political force in its own right, the EU adopted the euro as the common currency of some 327 million Europeans, so that the currency’s economic power would prefigure the political power to be... The euro appeared to be very strong, with the value of the U.S. dollar, the British pound, and other currencies dramatically falling in comparison to it – one of the causes of Greece’s problems. Tourism is a major economic sector in Greece. For tourists from outside the eurozone, such as the Americans and British, the country became too expensive as a holiday destination. Last year, when the world economic crisis also affected Europe, with a huge drop in the numbers of EU-citizens, such as Italians, that headed for Greece, the Greek economy collapsed and the Greek government was no longer able to pay the country’s public debts.

The problem with basing an economic system on Fantasy is that it tends to create spaces of empty economic air, bubbles, that tend to burst spectacularly. The global economic crisis, I understand, was created much that way: by giving mortgages to people who could not afford houses, at rates below the standard ones for mortgages. All of this was based on an ideological principle, rather than a sound assessment of the borrower's ability to pay back a loan. We have all been fed the Fantasy that we all, somehow, "deserve" a home and that we can all have one if we just wish hard enough. This Fantasy created a bubble and the burst is the crisis we are all now experiencing. The fact that this crisis is merely an attempt by the system to revert back to a foundation in Real things (the idea that mortgage loans should go to people who can afford to pay them), merely the re-filling of the empty space created by the Fantasy, is not often talked about. 

 The problem with the European Union, as I see it, is that it is a Fantasy. It is based on things that are simply not true. As Belien points out, the people of the two economically strongest EU countries, Germany and the Netherlands, have said they do not want their money (the fact that "tax money" is the money of the people is often forgotten by EU leadership) to go to bail out the Greek economy, even though it might mean the downfall of the Euro:

Polls indicate that 70% of the Germans oppose using their taxes to bail out other countries. Despite the EU propaganda line that EU citizens share a common European national identity, this is simply not true... The German people are not prepared to lift countries such as Greece, Romania, Spain, Portugal and Ireland out of the recession at its own expense.

I imagine they must be asking themselves by this time what have they really gained by joining this new thing, the Euro. What was wrong with their old currencies? Well, to EU ideologues, what was wrong with it was that it was theirs. It was based on a Real thing, a national economy that involved the buying and selling within those countries of goods produced or imported by those countries. 

The abolition of the nation state that is being attempted in the EU, is based on something unreal. The "European Project" to unite the nations of Europe under one gigantic superstate umbrella, is based on the Fantasy that there are no significant or meaningful differences between the many different peoples of Europe. That language, commerce, culture, history, religion, genetics, geography mean nothing and can be superseded by a common "European identity". This is false. 

This European Identity does not exist. What does exist, what is Real, are language, culture, history, religion, genetics and geography and national boundaries and economies based on these things. These are the things that make cultures and nations cohere and contribute significantly to the psychological identity of the people in them. They are also, it seems, the things that make economies run. 

 Back to my conversation with my colleague the other day. I presented my theory that the problems we are facing in western societies today can all be described as a cultural addiction to Fantasy. He asked me to define Fantasy. I said that I think Fantasy is the adherence to a cherished personal preference or notion in the face of overwhelming objective evidence. I made this definition carefully, being certain to say it is not the notion or the preference itself that qualifies a thing as a full blown capital F Fantasy, but the adherence to it, the clinging to it against all evidence and the determination to live in it against the various pressures of The Real.

 Our most popular modern Fantasies include the idea that "gender" is a malleable "social construct" and that a person is whatever "gender" he or she feels like being that week. Another is the idea that there is nothing inside a pregnant woman but a "blob of tissue". Another is that people can have sex outside marriage and experience only joy and freedom. Another, that there is no significant difference in temperament or social nature between men and women. The expression, "create your own reality," popular in the 1980s, is the summation of the exchange our society has made of The Real for the three magic beans of our personal subjective preferences, whims, and wishes.

Highlights

Getting on the plane tomorrow at JFK but won't be anywhere near the net until Tuesday, so here are some highlights.

The National Gallery: rooms full of Rembrandt, rooms full of Vermeer, Van Dyke, Raphael, Goya, van Eyck, Holbein

and the only Leonardo this side of the Atlantic.



Kathleen takes in the culture.


The Dutch still lifes glowed off the walls, so beautiful they make you weep with joy.



When I was a kid, it was the Italians that did it to me, but now I think I'm all for the Dutch.


Those Prots just look so happy, and their world so clean and ordered.


Oh...

Oh...

More?

Yes, more.

I'm anti-hugging

Always have been. And, I'm glad to see, so's Judith Martin.

Then, about half a century ago, came the American huggy movement. Instant intimacy was going to solve everyone's problems by making them feel good, which, in turn, would end war and strife. It took rather vigorous forms among some, but eventually infiltrated even the most staid parts of society, where the handshake had been the greeting that fathers gave their young sons.

I shake hands. I particularly enjoy shaking the hands of people who attempt to greet me with inappropriately wide-open arms. I look people in the eye too and say "How do you do?" or "It's nice to see you."

In school in the 70s and 80s, everyone was quite militant about hugging and it got under my skin. It was the new rigidly adhered-to protocol and regularly flouting it was a quick way to get labeled weird and anti-social. So of course, I had to flout it. It's just a thing.

Oh, and by the way Mrs. Obama, I realise that you are a come-lately upstart and so can have no concept of how civilised people behave, so here's a tip for you,

YOU DON'T TOUCH THE MONARCH!

A man of unmistakable intellectual breeding

Secularists: hopelessly tone deaf.

The BBC is "thinking" about Brideshead, and wondering why everyone still thinks its so great, now that no one cares about all that Catholic stuff:

For author Evelyn Waugh, a Catholic convert, the central theme of the book was religion. As he put it, "the operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters". In an era that celebrated the Catholicism-infused novels of Graham Greene and others, there was nothing strange about such a leitmotif.

In today's Britain, the Catholic aspect is no doubt lost on many, and yet the grip of the story remains.

"There is so much in it apart from that Catholic theme," says Alexander Waugh, grandson of the author, and writer of the Waugh family biography Fathers and Sons.

"It is a very rich book - nostalgia, of fading youth, beautiful language, a bit of sentiment. We all look back with a mixture of regret and pleasure. It is very beautiful and very warming.

It is a peculiarity of the "post-modern" mind, one that cannot accept the existence of any objective or "real" or "true" viewpoint, that it cannot understand literature. Pomo literary criticism is all that is taught in universities now and students are instructed to interpret for themselves, according to whatever political paradigm is being used, whatever piece of literature they are reading. Thus we get the "LGBTQ" or the "feminist" approach to Waugh's characters in which students are instructed to "read in" the various political causes to the characters' motivations. For our postmodern barbarians, the idea of trying to find out from the text the "real" or "objective" meaning of what they are reading, what the author intended, is merely laughable, archaic. A notion that died out in academe with academic gowns and Latin grace at the college dinner and evensong in the college chapel.

To the PMBs, there is no such thing as an external reality to apprehend in literature, and therefore all literary study and criticism is entirely a matter of subjective interpolations rather than objective interpretations. I have tried to read postmodern literary criticism and found it is not only so heavily jargoned as to be incomprehensible, but also, once the meaning is excavated from the piles of gibberish, intolerably shallow. It is ironic that the modern interpolators criticised the old school as being narrow-minded. The idea that one can actually learn anything from literature has been swept aside.

I was reading Sir Arthur last night on the reason one should read and understand English literature and I realised that what he believed about literature, and truth, would have made it impossible for the great man to have been given employment in the academic field today. Examining the difference in approach to literature between this, what we must now call the "old school" represented by Sir Arthur and the new post-modern interpolative criticism, can give us a great many hints as to the difference in character and outlook between what has elsewhere been called the "Newfangled Person" and the "traditionalist", in every field of life, whether religion or politics, in grammar and usage or in table manners.

Sir Arthur was taking the then-new chair of English literature at Cambridge in 1913, and gave a speech to the learned gentlemen assembled, expounding how he would approach this nascent field of study:

"Let me, then, lay down two or three principles by which I propose to be guided. For the first principle of all I put to you that in studying any work of genius we should begin by taking it absolutely: that is to say, with minds intent on discovering just what the author's mind intended; this being at once the obvious approach to its meaning, and the merest duty of politeness we owe to the great man adressing us. We should lay our minds open to what he wishes to tell, and if what he has to tell be noble and high and beautiful, we should surrender and let soak our minds in it. [italics in the original]

...

As we dwell here between two mysteries, of a soul within and an ordered Universe without, so among us are granted to dwell certain men of more delicate intellectual fibre than their fellows - men whose minds have, as it were, filaments to intercept, apprehend, conduct, translate home to us stray messages between these two mysteries, as modern telegraphy has learnt to search out, snatch, gather home human messages astray over waste waters of the Ocean."

A man reading a great work of literature knows by instinct that something True has been uncovered. The purpose of studying literature is the same as that of studying anything True, therefore: to make a better man.

"If, then, the ordinary man be done this service by the poet, that (as Dr. Johnson defines it) 'he feels what he remembers to have felt before, but he feels it with a great increase of sensibility'; or even if, though the message be unfamiliar, it suggest to us, in Wordsworth's phrase, to 'feel that we are greater than we know,' I submit that we respond to it less by anything that usually passes for knowledge, than by an improvement of sensibility, a tuning up of the mind to the poet's pitch; so that the man we are proud to send forth from our Schools will be remarkable less for something he can take out of his wallet and exhibit for knowledge, than for being something , and that 'something' a man of unmistakable intellectual breeding, whose trained judgment we can trust to choose the better and reject the worse."

Can you imagine a modern university anywhere saying that its purpose is to create a man of "intellectual breeding" capable of distinguishing good and evil?

Didn't think so.

How then shall we live?

I've been involved in an interesting discussion in the last couple of days, which can be viewed here and here and in which it was my great pleasure to play the role of "gadfly".

It is one I enjoy enormously. There is little that bores and exasperates me faster than the usual inbox fare of these big Professional Catholic sites where someone writes an article that is meant to provoke discussion and receives a chorus of: "Great post Steve!" "Wow Steve! I've never heard it put that way before..." "I wish I were as eloquent as you are Steve, because you've really said what I've been thinking..."

Nnnggg..!

Yes, and who really cares what you've been thinking, since it is clear you have nothing interesting to say about it.

It is commbox love-ins like these that makes the gadfly in me break out of his cocoon and make a beeline straight for any exposed flesh. Given that no one in our times has been taught how to have a friendly disagreement, I find it is quite a simple matter to make things more interesting. The plodding earnestness of the New Orthodox Catholics is just too easy a target, too juicy a bit of meat, to leave alone. The fact that they, mired as they are in their own private version of political correctness, can't abide the slightest dissent and have no sense of proportion or humour, really only adds to the fun.

(Long Aside: There was, of course, simply no way at all that I could have resisted the temptation of saying What I Really Think about breastfeeding in public. It's a fairly straightforward syllogism: I hate hippies and all of their pomps and works. Hippies started the whole "lets expose our private parts in public to shock our parents and then demand that society change its attitude towards our 'natural and beautiful' body parts" movement that I remember so well from childhood. One of the major themes of the early hippies was the demand to breastfeed in public. The hippies have, through these apparently small discrete incursions, destroyed nearly the entirety of the Christian social agreement that once sustained Western Civilisation. Therefore, I think women need to keep their clothes on in public in order to preserve Christendom. So when I saw a cluster of admiring NOCs congratulating Steve on how wonderfully he had come to the defense of the practise, using exactly the same rhetoric I remember only too well from the furry-armpitted, fright-haired harridans of my earliest memories ... well, it was just too much to expect me to resist. I was certain Steve wouldn't mind.

I will grant, perhaps, the excuse that most of the NOCs are too young to remember the hippie movement themselves, and were for the most part raised in safe middle class neighbourhoods in which they had no direct exposure to the filthy hippies and their Crusade for Indecency. It is perhaps somewhat understandable that they would not realise they were dutifully reciting and defending the hippie doctrines that have slithered quietly into every aspect of our lives and destroyed Western Civilisation. But take it from me who remembers well life on the hippie West Coast in the early 1970s and her mother's grubby, patchouli-doused friends talking about their plans: the determination to force the rest of the world to accept the "beautiful and natural" phenomenon of breastfeeding in public is a manifestation of the feminist hippie movement slithering into Christianity and I won't have it.

Also, breastfeeding involves bodily fluids. Anything that involves bodily fluids needs to be kept out of public view.)

Now, wait. What was I talking about?

Oh yes, the discussion at Steve's Inside Catholic column. Jeff Culbreath is someone whose blogging I have enjoyed for some years now and with whom I've discussed many of these kinds of issues in a list we used to belong to. I would say that most of the writing by Catholics, especially traditionalist Catholics, that I find interesting and important is focused on this question of how to live, knowing what we know, in a world that knows nothing of it.

I make light of it and poke my stick into the hornets' nest because the question is an important one that needs to be taken seriously. It can't be left to the mutual admiration societies that cluster into commboxes. Steve and I and a few others have been working on this, almost as the main background theme of all our writing in the last five years. Some of us believe that it is counter productive, not to mention more or less impossible, to remove oneself off to the woods or the country to attempt to re-create a Catholic utopia where all the ladies wear long skirts and all the kids can converse in Latin.

Others disagree.

But the bigger question is one that remains.

Just how do we live as Catholics in a situation like the one we have? What is the proper "balance" of living in but not of the world? How much of the world, and which particular bits, can we take in? What must we reject and of what may we say, "yes, this is part of the human endeavour of which I am naturally a part"?

How do we get the proper perspective on a culture in which we are ourselves completely steeped, to which we owe the very shape of our thoughts?

This raises other questions. Can we have friends "in the world"? Non-Catholic friends? Can we hope for the salvation of our non-Catholic loved-ones?

Do we set ourselves up as arbiters of who qualifies for membership in the Elect? If so, according to what criteria and by whose authority?

Does it matter that we are, while being systematically forced out of public life in the secular world, at the same time deliberately withdrawing ourselves from it? Is this exclusion and withdrawal a bad thing or a good thing? Should we fight it or help it?

There are all sorts of solutions, some better than others, but none The Right solution. Many retreat. Many give up the struggle. Many join groups that help them withdraw, like the SSPX. Some go out of their way to live near a place where there is some safety and the protection of something like a monastery or an Oratory. Some just try to go it alone.

Catholics in general, and traditionalist Catholics in particular, have a habit of looking to the past for precedent to figure out a way to cobble together a method of dealing with the problem.

Is there a precedent for our current situation? I think not an exact one. As someone said, although we are indeed returning to a variation on pre-Christian paganism, complete with child sacrifice, lawlessness and philosophical fatalism, there is a vast difference between a virgin and a divorcee. A Christendom that has spurned Christ in her maturity is not the same bride that was wooed in her innocence.

So, how are we to see our times? How are we to interact with our non-Catholic, paganised neighbours? Do we approach them with disdain? Do we not approach them at all?

Is it possible for a Christian to make use of the things of the pagan world that are, through the working of the Natural Law, still under the headship of Christ, though He is unknown?

Can we read Truman Capote? Do we dare laugh at the bawdy jokes on Boston Legal, or empathise with the moral struggles of Alan Shore? Can we see goodness in films and music that is not specifically Christian?

Did the early Christians read the Classical writers?

Augustine derided the pagan entertainments of his youth, but was he entirely right? (Terribly daring, I know, to question so venerable a Doctor).

The fact is, I do not know the answers to these questions. But I believe this is the essence of our task, having been stuck in these almost inconceivably dreadful times.

I'm a child of this civilisation. I'm even a child of the hippie generation, and I'm sure am also unconsciously greatly influenced by that movement. I want to know the world, not reject it. The world is full of human beings, and there is nothing so interesting and wonderful to a misanthrope like me as human beings.

I can't help it. I love the world.

And I understand that it was not entirely repugnant to the Father either.

Capital Punishment

So far from disrespecting [not a verb! urg!] human life, capital punishment asserts the sacred character of innocent, as distinct from guilty, life.

The objections of whey-faced liberals are infantile, in the context of grim reality. Capital punishment is not “un-Christian”: Saint Paul awarded the “jus gladii” to Christian princes. It is not “barbaric”: perfectly civilised people endorse it, as has always been the case, as well as many distinguished philosophers – the true barbarism is sanctioning the collapse of society. When no judge has at his disposal the supreme penalty which every thug carries in his pocket, then power has departed from legitimate authority and resides with the forces of anarchy.

It does not “make us the same” as the murderers: we shall only become the same if we mutilate and eat children

.


I have noted elsewhere that our societies are intrinsically disordered. We have inverted the natural order of the state by allowing private citizens to murder the totally innocent without even public scrutiny, let alone intervention; and we have removed the right of the state to take the life of its guilty citizens. It is absurd to think that such a society could re-adopt any kind of systemic respect for human life until it corrects this basic inversion.

It is absurd to think, in fact, that such a society can even survive.

Ooohhh kaaaay...

I just watched Geert Wilders' film Fitma, or Fitwa, or Islams Like to have Fits, or whatever it's called, and I feel like screaming and crying and running around in little circles,

so now I'm going to take a few ragged breaths, look at pictures of the Big Bunny





and listen to some Jordi Savall

to try to remind myself that those people are not in charge yet.

Today the tag label, "Islamonausea", is not figurative. I don't feel so good. I see that Kathy has changed her blog tag again to read, "Flagrantly Islamophobic". Can I get that on a t-shirt? Can we make it Kevlar?

I saw also that the film "went viral" within moments of its internet release. I read someone today who said that in the time it took him to watch it, post it and comment on it on his blog - about an hour - the viewing stats had gone up by 700,000 hits.

Remember the other day I was saying I felt "vaguely anxious" but wasn't sure why?

I think I got it.

If you hear a news report of some woman discovered curled up in a corner somewhere muttering "bunnybunnybunnybunnybunny", you'll know not to expect any posts at O's P for a while.

The Worst Thing in the World

In the good old SCA, we have a custom of the "No shit, I was there" story. Stories of bravery, valour or the sophomoric and self-destructive insanity of one's friends.

Here's mine.

I was there and remember the day the world ended.


Melanie Philips writes this week about

an underclass which is a world apart from the lives that most of us lead and the attitudes and social conventions that most of us take for granted.

But it is an underclass which affluent, complacent, materialistic Britain has created.

An underclass composed of whole communities where committed fathers are so rare that any child who actually has one risks being bullied.

Where sex is reduced to an animal activity devoid of love or human dignity, and boys impregnate two, three, four girls with scarcely a second thought.

Where successive generations of women have never known what it is to be loved and cherished by both their parents throughout their childhood.

How can such women know how to parent their own children?

These children are simply abandoned in a twilight world where the words "family" or "relatives" lose all meaning, as the transient men passing through their mothers' lives leave them with an ever-lengthening trail of "step-fathers" or "uncles" who have no biological connection with them whatsoever.

...

The people who are really culpable are all those who, intoning the mantra of "alternative lifestyle choice", have defeated every attempt to shore up marriage and the traditional family.

In its place, they have deliberately and wickedly created over the years a legal and welfare engine of mass fatherlessness and child abandonment, resulting in a degraded and dependent underclass and a lengthening toll of human wreckage.

To his great credit, David Cameron seems to have grasped much of this.

He has consistently said he will support and promote marriage and has spoken strongly about the need for stable and secure family life, as he did once again at the Tories' spring conference over the weekend.

I've been reading about the problem in Britain with "youth crime". How it is such a big shock to all the experts and professional heart-bleeders.

It really remains a puzzle to me why anyone us puzzled by any of this.

I know perfectly well what happened and why.

No shit, I was there.

I'm not sure if the history of the Divorce Cataclysm really adequately takes into account the speed with which the change came. It came at us like a tidal wave while we all just stood on the beach watching helplessly. I have always liked movies about the end of the world, ("Huh. No shit!" I can hear you saying.) Remember that MFTV thing, Deep Impact, where an asteroid hits the earth? I always think of that scene where the reporter-girl is standing on the beach with her father watching a thousand foot high wall of water rushing at them at a hundred miles an hour. It is no wonder to me who lived through it that nothing was done about it, or even written about it, until it was too late.

Melanie Philips writes about a couple of sociologists Norman Dennis and A.H. Halsey, who produced a book "Families Without Fatherhood (Civil Society)" in 1992.

1992?!

Whatthefuh?

Is that really the first time anyone in this country noticed that the world had ended?

I know what a lot of Catholics say about the legalization of contraception (eugenics movement anyone?) but I really think the civilizational apocalypse started when we decided it was not necessary for married people to remain married. Trudeau, of course, decided that things in Canada would move along more smoothly if he got all the bits and pieces of the apocalypse into one year and so we had the Divorce Act - which, unsurprisingly, came in the Great Year of 1968 - immediately followed by the Omnibus Bill legalising abortion, in case anyone was left in any doubt as to what Divorce was meant to lead to.

Didja catch that?

1968. And it took decades for anyone to notice and start writing about what the fall out was. Was it because everyone was just having such a great time sleeping around that we were too busy to see what was going on?

I was two and three when the Acts were passed. By the time I was in school a few years later the wave was only beginning to build offshore, but it picked up speed and strength pretty quickly.

In the early part of the Divorce Wave, which started about the same time I was starting school most of the kids I knew were born to married parents. When I was in early elementary school, the first generation of hippies hadn't broken up with their first "partners" (as we call them now) and even in the hippie free school ("Sundance"... I kid you not) I was pretty much the only kid in school who had "visits" with daddy. This lasted until we, the first generation, made it to the fifth grade. In those days the partner turn-over rate was a lot slower. "Relationships" lasted years, sometimes as many as four or five and marriage was still fairly common. It would be another ten years at least before these vestigial conventions were abandoned and the turn-over was reduced to the few months or weeks we're enjoying now.

By the time I was in junior highschool ("middle school"; grades 8-10) I knew almost no one whose parents were still together and the partner turn-over meant that most of the mothers and all of the fathers were on "partner" number three or four.

Of course, abortion tidied things up quite a bit, but there was still plenty of flotsam bobbing around in the filthy waters. We, the early generation, were offered courses on the weekends at the Y with titles like "The Divorced Kids Group" (yes, that was the actual title, from memory) where the kids could come and shaaaaare how they felt about their universe coming abruptly to a halt and the lights going out.

This was short lived, however, since the people running it quickly learned that the kids had a disconcerting tendency to say things that really ran counter to the Great Plan. After that early blip, there was nothing until I was in my 20s and I started noticing articles appearing in the Emancipated Womens' Magazines about the kids who just, for some reason,

just.

couldn't.

be.


arsed. ...

about anything.

Who were in a state of near catatonic apathy and hopelessness, had no plans, had no hopes, no aspirations and were filled with cynicism and loathing for everything their parents cared about. It was about this time that the suicide statistics started to be really alarming for kids born after 1965.

Melanie writes about an entire generation, now branching into three or four generations, who simply made no plans for the future, who knew that everything their elders said to them was a lie, that no other human being could be trusted, unless it was to trust them to be self-serving and callous. That in any case, no one would help them in whatever aspirations they may briefly entertain.

Underlying this was a deep well of rage and hatred for what had been done to them.

So, actually, no.

Not all that surprised by the "youth crime" problem.

Got a pretty good idea where it is headed too.