Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Poetry Interlude: The Second Coming, by W.B. Yeats
What if Trump wins, and disappoints?
Many are predicting he’ll ditch all the positions that have gotten him this far; in fact, perhaps he already has:
But over the past few months, there has been a lot of evidence that Trump’s populist-nationalism is disintegrating. In September he released a tax-reform plan that is much beloved by the most anti-nationalist conservative thinkers around. In fact it is the very thing that Beltway creatures like Stephen Moore of the Club for Growth cite when they try to explain their sudden and perplexing support for Donald Trump.
Trump has also sounded completely out of his depth on immigration, much to the chagrin of his restrictionist fans. In a debate in Detroit, where Trump would supposedly have some of his most nationalist-minded fans, Trump said, “I’m changing. I’m changing. We need highly skilled people in this country, and if we can’t do it, we’ll get them in.” He described his position on immigration as “softening” and then long-windedly explained why Americans would not take seasonal jobs on some of Trump’s American properties. One of the reasons he offered was the weather. That’s right, the pro-American-worker Trump says that America is just too hot for American workers. Trump also pushed “touchback” amnesty, where illegal immigrants are granted legal status if they go home and obtain a guest-worker pass from an employer. Suddenly the “big beautiful door” in the Mexican border wall sounds a lot bigger. As Trump has begun to emphasize about immigration, “everything is negotiable.”
Trump’s non-interventionism also seems to be on the table. In the Detroit debate he talked about creating “safe zones” in Syria to stem the refugee flow. And in the Miami debate he said he would commit ground troops to Syria and Iraq: “We really have no choice, we have to knock out ISIS… I would listen to the generals, but I’m hearing numbers of 20,000-30,000.” It is unclear which generals have Trump’s ear, but the number of troops he cited sounds remarkably like he has been told about Frederick Kagan’s white paper on defeating ISIS. Essentially, Trump endorsed the plan for Iraq and Syria that has been promoted lustily by Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio. In other words, gone is the America-first foreign policy, in comes the non-credible plan to transform the region again through force of arms, with America leading a mythical, and surely quite moderate, Sunni fighting force.
As Ben Carson aptly put it last week, “There are two Donald Trumps.” Indeed, Trump has confessed he plans to change from nationalist caterpillar into establishmentarian butterfly. “When I’m president I’m a different person. I can do anything. I can be the most politically correct person you have ever seen.”
Indeed, the transformation is already showing. On policy, Trump is caving to normal Republicanism. He’s trying to get elected by pining for someone to finish the dang fence but has amnesty on the mind. He’s promising to protect American workers from unfair competition, but angling to pass a plutocratic tax reform. By the end of his campaign the only thing he’ll have added to the Republican Party is a reputation for crudity and disorderly violence.
His nationalist challenge to the status quo is disintegrating before our eyes. Instead of the inevitable transformation of the American right, Donald Trump is just the most successful huckster, selling gold coins and survival seeds to a scared public.
So, if that happens, that he completely dashes the hopes of those who vote for him by doing nothing of what they believed he would?
Again, they’ll become dis-illusioned. They’ll lose their illusions, and stop the farce of bothering to vote, unless someone arises who actually gives them a reason to vote.
They’ll henceforth withdraw their consent, and show the system to be the farce it already is…
Something will have to give; the ruling class will have to give people a reason to believe in liberal democracy, or they’ll stop doing so, and with good reason.
Then things will get really interesting. There will be some sort of resolution, though it may not be what many would like.
Bring it.
Two interesting posts about Trump at Chronicles Magazine
Friends of mine have wondered aloud how evangelical Christians, and a sizeable number of Catholics, can support a man who has been married three times. They didn’t ask the same question four years ago about Newt Gingrich, who has done The Donald one better.
True, my friends say, but how can these pro-life Christians trust a billionaire businessman who has donated money to politicians (including Hillary Clinton) who support abortion? Yet many of those asking that question (especially my Catholic friends) still trust Rick Santorum, despite the fact that Santorum endorsed the radically pro-abortion Arlen Specter in the 2004 Republican primary for U.S. senator from Pennsylvania. This wasn’t a pro forma endorsement of a fellow Republican who faced no serious opposition; Specter’s primary opponent, Pat Toomey, had impeccable pro-life credentials. So why did Santorum endorse Specter? The Bush White House regarded Specter as an important ally—not on the life issues on which Santorum had built his conservative reputation, but on the war in Iraq. Santorum set aside his pro-life principles because he was just as pro-war as Specter and Bush. Indeed, after he lost his own seat two years later, Santorum delivered his final speech on the floor of the Senate not on abortion or euthanasia or gay marriage but on the need for the United States to go abroad, searching for monsters to destroy. He then promptly decamped to the neoconservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he established and directed the “America’s Enemies” program. (That program, as you may imagine, wasn’t set up to promote social conservatism.)
All right, my friends say, but shouldn’t it bother pro-lifers that Trump has only recently converted to their cause? Isn’t that a sign that he would be unlikely to do anything to curb abortion if he were elected president? Tell me—what did George W. Bush do? For six years, the Republican Party controlled the White House and both houses of Congress, yet they advanced not a single significant piece of pro-life legislation. When Republican congressmen, Ron Paul among them, attempted to remove state legislation restricting abortion from federal court review (an effective constitutional procedure known as “stripping”), President Bush refused to back it. Yet the administration successfully pushed through a law stripping cases involving the detention center at Guantanamo Bay from the federal courts. Waterboarding merited Republican protection; 1.3 million unborn babies each year did not.
Yes, my friends say, we didn’t support the war in Iraq, either, and were critical of the Bush administration for prosecuting it. Yet surely it should bother evangelical Christians and Catholics that Trump’s Christianity seems only Two Corinthians deep. But remind me—whom did the Republicans nominate in 2012? Joseph Smith, while adopting much of the language of Christianity, created a polytheistic (hence non-Christian) religion. Mitt Romney was pro-abortion until it was politically necessary not to be so. And his healthcare plan in Massachusetts was, in fact, one of the models for ObamaCare. And oh, by the way, Arlen Specter, reelected with Santorum’s endorsement, abandoned the Republican Party and then cast the deciding vote in cutting off debate on the Affordable Care Act. (Sixty votes were needed; with Specter’s vote, the Democrats got 60.) Obama Care passed the Senate the very next day.
Since 1989, when the George H.W. Bush administration successfully scuppered a Supreme Court case (Turnock v. Ragsdale, originating here in Rockford, Illinois) that was widely expected to lead to a reconsideration of Roe v. Wade, the Republican Party nationally has paid little more than lip service to pro-life Christians. The Bush Junior administration had the opportunity to strip state marriage laws from review by the federal courts, which would have prevented last summer’s Obergefell decision; they chose not to, because Karl Rove wanted Republican candidates to be able to campaign on the issue in 2004. Politics and the prosecution of the war in Iraq, which bankrupted this country and destroyed our international reputation, took precedence.
Perhaps, then, the real story of the 2016 primary season is that evangelical Christians and Catholics are finally recognizing that they have simply been used. Since George H.W. Bush’s betrayal of pro-lifers in 1989, and his subsequent nomination of “stealth justice” David Souter, I haven’t voted for a single Republican nominee for president. (Needless to say, I haven’t voted for a Democratic candidate, either.) There’s a bit of schadenfreude in watching other Christians come to grips with the reality that the national Republican Party does not really care about the moral issues that we do.
Yet does Donald Trump? That the answer is almost certainly no—look at the man’s (very public) private life—hardly matters. If he does not, then social conservatives are in no worse position than we have been in for the past 25 years. We may, in fact, be in better shape, because, despite Trump’s nods to Christians and social conservatives, their issues haven’t been central to his campaign. It’s the national issues—trade, the economy, immigration, an end to foreign adventurism, confronting the threat of Islam not so much abroad as here at home—that have animated his supporters.
And it’s Trump’s patriotic positions on those national issues that have neoconservatives left and left threatening to leave the Republican Party, to back either a third-party candidate such as Michael Bloomberg, or even Hillary Clinton—despite the fact that both are anathema to the Christian and social conservatives whom the GOP has taken for granted for the better part of 30 years. Open borders, trade policies that have gutted the American working and middle classes, foreign wars that have bankrupted this country, killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, destabilized the Middle East, and swamped Europe under a wave of migrants—these are the policies that the neoconservatives who control the Republican establishment want the next president to continue. The fact that they believe they are more likely to get their way under Clinton or Bloomberg than under Trump is telling.
Trump speaks to a similar American body politic that is also frustrated and doesn’t believe anything any professional politicians say. They believe America needs a president who is not beholden to special interest groups—that is why Trump’s self-funding candidacy resonates so well with them. They also want a president who is committed single-mindedly to the goal of creating prosperity for all Americans, while maintaining traditional values based on the delicate balance between order and liberty. They believe we need a leader who is unwilling to risk our country’s future on the social experiment of effectively open borders—not even to please the high priests of anti-Western multiculturalism, or corporate CEOs who profit from cheap labor in a shadow economy, or avoid the (false) criticism that secure borders are based on racist impulses. They want a man who will protect Americans at every economic level, not merely high-dollar investors with getaway homes on foreign shores. Americans are also war-weary and want a president who promises better care for grievously wounded veterans of the Iraq War Trump repeatedly calls a tragic mistake.
I appreciate that Donald Trump’s personality and temperament differ from Ronald Reagan’s. There are valid reservations to Trump from reasonable people, as there are to other candidates. But the objections we are hearing from the pundits in the US to Mr. Trump, and which are now being echoed in Europe, are conspicuously similar to those we heard about Ronald Reagan, who was regarded by media groups—incorrectly—as an unsophisticated low-brow and, in foreign policy, uninformed neophyte.
There are many differences between the two men in deportment, background, style, experience, personal history, and, notably, how they approach political opponents, but we should not overlook striking similarities. Reagan was once pro-choice, before experience and reflection changed his mind about abortion on demand. He once favored high immigration, until he saw what it was doing to our country. He was accused of being overly simplistic, lacking substance. Ronald Reagan’s stated plan to win the Cold War was stark: We win, they lose. He made his share of enemies among the powerful—the fiercest being in his own party. In the media, there were legions of critics, full of mockery and vitriol. But, he was a brilliant choice for president.
Like President Reagan, Mr. Trump is an ex-Democrat. In his role as a highly successful entrepreneur, he has contributed to Democratic politicians over the years and even said nice things about some of them—this is taken as a sign of inconsistency. Those who know the current American scene understand that prominent business people today contribute to both parties as a kind of insurance against being singled out by the regulators and enforcers of the big tax and regulatory bureaucracies. For these very individuals and the firms they represent, such contributions and compliments are, sadly, regarded as normal costs of doing business.
Custodian cuts down Mary Poppins figure suspended from cathedral ceiling; gets arrested and fired
Not the place for Mary Poppins.
On the first morning of the 31st annual Cathedral Flower Festival, with its theme of “A Night at the Movies,” an agitated church custodian made a bold move.
Mark Kenney, 59, who grew up in the parish, had worked at St. Cecilia Cathedral for three years. Around 8 a.m. on Jan. 29, he went to a work shed, picked up a pair of heavy-duty bolt cutters and ascended to a catwalk high above the mostly empty nave, or main sanctuary.
He looked through a peephole, he said, to make sure he wouldn’t hurt any people. And then he cut a steel cable, which sent a suspended, umbrella-carrying, hat-wearing Mary Poppins figure crashing to the floor.
Kenney then went downstairs and removed a cardboard Buddha figure from the Nash Chapel, which also featured costumed mannequins from “The King and I.” He threw the Buddha out one door and proceeded to toss costumed mannequins out two other doors.
Someone alerted the pastor, the Rev. Michael Gutgsell, who ran from the rectory next door to the church and saw Kenney.
“Mark,” he called out, “did you see who did this?”
“Father, it was me. You need to call the police.”
Gutgsell had known that his custodian had misgivings about secular displays in the church but says he was dumbfounded and didn’t understand why Kenney would take such drastic action. In a brief meeting that week, the pastor said, he had asked for Kenney’s promise not to be disruptive.
Now the priest was shocked, saying, “You promised!”
In response, Kenney said, he lashed out. “I started screaming, ‘Father, this is bullshit! We can’t have this in the church. This isn’t culture, it’s Disney crap!’ ”
Kenney — who has served three terms of up to six months in federal prisons for crossing security lines at military bases in protest of nuclear weapons — then knelt at the communion rail and prayed until officers arrived and handcuffed him.
He spent a night in jail before he was bailed out and pleaded no contest. He said he is scheduled for sentencing “on Holy Thursday,” March 24.
Damaging items at the flower festival was wrong, and Kenney said in an interview this week that he will make restitution. But he says secular items such as movie characters are inappropriate in the sacred space of the cathedral and amount to sacrilege and idolatry.
Gutgsell, a former chancellor of the Omaha Archdiocese and a Catholic University-licensed “canon lawyer,” an expert in church laws and rules, disagrees.
“Obviously, context is everything,” the priest said, noting that the cathedral also is home to about six concerts a year. No sacrilege or disrespect is conveyed, he said, in the concerts or the dozens of exhibits at the flower festival.
“Cathedrals,” he said, “are kind of the epicenter for culture presentation and development.”
Eileen Burke-Sullivan, a theologian and vice provost for mission and ministry at Creighton University, said she sees no problem. The cathedral and the archdiocese, she said, have supported the arts in Omaha for many years.
“In mixing thematic popular culture with the beauty of God’s creation in flowers,” she said, “I don’t think there’s any inherent idolatry.”
The flower festival is produced by the nonprofit Cathedral Arts Project. Its founder and director, Brother William Woeger, each year informs the archbishop of the theme.
Archbishop George Lucas was out of town this week and unavailable for comment. But spokesman Tim McNeil, the current chancellor, said the archdiocese will review the festival to make sure it is staying within bounds.
He said he sees nothing in “the broad language” of the catechism that would preclude such displays as Mary Poppins being suspended from the ceiling of the cathedral. But he said it would be good to know more specifics in advance.
Kenney’s actions aren’t the reason for a review, he said, adding that he has heard of no other complaints.
Why, then?
“The flower festival is evolving,” McNeil said, “and there are other types of props — mannequins and figurines. Everything has to be given a careful look.”
Woeger said next year’s theme is the 150th anniversary of Nebraska’s statehood. About 10,000 people attended this year, and he said volunteers had to scramble to repair the damage Kenney inflicted.
“I learned three years ago that he didn’t approve of the flower festival,” Woeger said. “It creates an awkward situation when you’ve got someone walking around negatively in the middle of what’s going on. It’s a big stretch to do $6,000 in damage and say you just wanted to make a point.”
Kenney won’t be walking around there anymore, at least not on the job. He was fired, and his archdiocesan “safe environment” certificate was revoked, meaning he no longer can work or volunteer when children are present.
So who is Mark Kenney?
He grew up fourth in a family of eight children, graduated from Creighton Prep in 1975 and attended the University of Nebraska at Omaha for two years.
He signed on for six years in the Navy but served only four. He worked as a mechanic in the nuclear program, but then saw actual missiles and believed they were immoral. He went AWOL several times, he said, and spent time in the brig before receiving an honorable discharge that cited his “unsuitable eccentricities.”
Kenney returned to Omaha and has worked blue-collar jobs, including the $12-an-hour position that he lost at the cathedral. He now is a custodian at a nursing home. His wife of 32 years is a pharmacy technician, and they care for her 62-year-old sister, who has mental disabilities.
In a letter of termination two days after the festival incident, Gutgsell wrote to Kenney: “None of the florists and none of the volunteers, any number of whom took time off their work or traveled some distance, had the slightest intention or reason to dishonor the Cathedral. You assigned the word ‘desecration’ to the entire project and as a result slandered anyone associated with it.”
Dwayne Ibsen, who provided the costumes, said Kenney tossed out an “Elizabeth I” outfit that had won six awards at national costumer conventions. Insurance companies are assessing the damage to mannequins and costumes, Ibsen said, adding that it appeared to be between $5,000 and $6,000.
“None of it was his property, and he went through it like a streak of lightning,” Ibsen said. “It was a beautiful show, and nothing was inappropriate.”
Kenney, who said he confessed his sin to a priest at another Catholic church, feels “closer to God than ever.” He could have handled things differently, he said, and recalls walking through the cathedral in the immediate aftermath and thinking, “What did I do now?”
But he says he is at peace with it, and in a letter to the archbishop objected to “pop art” and “absurd, secular cultural icons” in the cathedral.
Kenney hopes that people who agree with him will speak up and that the incident sparks “conversation” about what is appropriate in a church.
Christ overturned the money-changers’ tables in the temple, and eventually He was arrested, too.
There is a time and a place for direct action.
The time is now.
The place is everywhere.
To Christians who whine about Trump’s moral character and lack of real faith
So what?
Moses was a murderer; David was an adulterer; Samson was a fornicator.
But God saw fit to use such unworthy vessels for His holy purposes: to lead His people Israel.
By contrast, this here is just a temporal, secular office, the United States presidency. It is not a holy calling.
And so if God can choose men who have lived ungodly, unworthy lives for holy purposes, how much more can a mixed group of Christians and unbelievers together decide, if they please, to choose a man who has lived an ungodly, unworthy life for a secular, temporal endeavour, the United States presidency?
Stop throwing pissy, sissy, hissy fits.
The silver lining
Rod Dreher is despairing:
The depressing truth, as it seems to me this afternoon:
1. If Trump becomes the GOP nominee, it will mean chaos and violence. Same as if he becomes president. He generates an atmosphere of thuggishness.
2. If the Social Justice Warriors prevail in shutting down Trump rallies, it will mean chaos and violence. It is chaos and violence. They are thugs, even if they are praised by the media.
3. I want Trump to beat the SJWs at their game. They are making America ungovernable.
4. But it is not sufficient to cheer Trump for opposing these idiots. Whatever my heart says in the moment, my head tells me that I don’t want Trump to win, because I don’t think he has any plan to govern America, and his provocative attitude would help make America ungovernable.
5. I don’t want the Republican Party to beat Trump, because it will mean the same old same old.
6. I don’t want the Democrats to win, because the Court, and because they will empower SJWs even more, and marginalize cultural conservatives even further.
7. There is no way everybody can lose.
8. Whatever happens, the next four years in our country are going to be miserable.
True.
But… On the bright side:
A lot of people will lose their illusions about politics being able to actually accomplish anything truly worthwhile in our times, when whoever is elected or thwarted being elected by the Establishment means their political hopes and dreams are dashed.
As they become thus ‘dis-illusioned’ (in the truest sense of that word, which is actually a positive thing, to lose one’s illusions), they will rightly ask, “What’s the point in voting?”, and quit doing so – unless someone can give them a reason to do so.
They will stop the farce of propping up the two-headed hydra ruling machine, by withdrawing their consent.
Democracy will become increasingly more of a sham (yes, even more than now), as less and less people vote.
And more people will join the reactionary camp, on the right side; and more prog Millennials will join the socialist side of the likes of Bernie Sanders.
The stupid moderates on both sides – the neocons and the warmongering Hillary Clinton neolibs – will be squeezed, and hopefully shrink.
The Antithesis will become clearer and clearer, as time progresses.
Bring it on!
‘Luscious Lesbians’: Candace Cameron Bure Takes Part in Racy ‘Dirty Dancing’ Scene in ‘Fuller House’
‘Luscious Lesbians’: Candace Cameron Bure Takes Part in Racy ‘Dirty Dancing’ Scene in ‘Fuller House’
Despite her regular profession of being a Christian on television, talk show host and actor and sister to Kirk Cameron, Candace Cameron Bure recently let loose in an episode of “Fuller House”—a restart of the 80’s show “Full House”—pulling out her “dirty dancing” moves with her best friend in a lingerie-style dress, the two being referred to as “luscious lesbians.” The episode, which is the third for “Fuller House,” is raising concern among Christians who had looked up to the actor as a Christian role model.
In “Funner House,” Cameron Bure, who plays D.J. Tanner, spends the evening drinking and dancing at a night club with her best friend Kimmy Gibbler and sister Stephanie Tanner.
“When Stephanie, Kimmy and D.J. have a girls’ night out and leave Joey in charge of the kids, things get wild out on the town and at home,” the show description outlines.
As the women are preparing to leave the house, Tanner comments about her low-cut, short black dress, “I don’t know if I should be tugging this thing down or pulling it up.”
The women, who refer to themselves as the “She-Wolf Pack,” go to a night club called “Euphoria,” where they decide to order tequila shots. While at the club, Tanner tells Gibbler about her idea to do the “Dirty Dancing” routine together, and sister Stephanie Tanner speaks to M.C. Macy Gray about performing the song to get back at Gibbler’s “two-timing ex.”
During the dance-off, which also includes two men dancing suggestively, Tanner concocts a means to win by “bust[ing] out our big Dirty Dancing lift.”
“Sure that’s not the tequila talking?” Gibbler asks.
“Well, yeah, it totally is,” Tanner replies.
As the women win the dance-off, they are announced by Macy Gray as “luscious lesbians,” at which neither Tanner or her friend bat an eye.
“And the winners are these two luscious lesbians!” Gray declares. “Get up here you sexy people!”
“We’re the sexy people!” Tanner proclaims as she hurries to the stage and grabs the microphone. “I was just gonna stay in tonight, but my friends insisted that I go out and have some adult fun. They knew I needed to take care of me. Oh, I love you guys so d*rn much! Thank you, Euphoria! And the wait staff and the bartenders!”
“Shots for everybody! She-Wolf Pack is buying!” she announces.
[…]
One of the episodes of “Fuller House” shows Kimmy Gibbler and Stephanie Tanner locking lips for several seconds until Gibbler’s ex-husband pulls them apart, and another contains a scene with heavy sexual references.
I never liked ‘Full House’, but at least it mostly tried to be good, clean entertainment, if corny along the lines of the Brady Bunch…
Guess the Full House gals have all ‘grown up’ into modern-day Ameriskanks…
P.S. How does doing a saucy dance routine with another chick ‘get back’ at a cheating ex-? Only a young woman would be so fricking stupid as to think said ‘ex-‘ would even give a shit…
