...FOR THE NEXT TWO weeks -- this in a one-month edition cycle effectively shortened 25 percent by the loss of Thanksgiving week -- and will be blogging only minimally as a result of the need to serve my freelance client. Hence I'll do as I did last month, mostly posting links to other sites, with the links typically accompanied by short commentaries.

Meanwhile, with a hat-tip to Lucianne.com, here is an essay from Commentary magazine on what happened to the Left to seduce it into becoming a willing bedmate of misogynistic Islam. This analysis is wholly secular in focus and is thus very different from my own, but I think is vital reading nevertheless, particularly if we are to develop the broadest possible understanding of the problem -- especially the potential for the misguided Left to devolve further into an Islamic Fifth Column.

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...who is the blogger who nominated me for "Best Essayist" in the international 2004 Weblog contest, and to the judges who picked me as one of 15 finalists, I am now in a position to ask for your votes. Those of you who wish to support me for this honor should please remember to vote for me once per day until the contest closes on December 12. The link to the contest is here. Thanks again to Anchoress (linked below in "Recommended Reading"), to the Weblog judges, and to every one of the rest of you for your deeply appreciated votes.

Posted by: Loren at 12:33 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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...TO A PIECE OF work, I fail to see an obvious flaw until too late, and that is what happened with the essay below – a telling illustration of why all writers need editors. As a friend of mine pointed out, I had ended the text in such a way many readers were left dangling. To solve the problem, I added two sentences to the conclusion, which I believe not only pulls the whole piece together, but makes my hypothesis far more accessible, especially to those who dismiss mythology as mere superstition.

Also I completely overlooked the fact it is Friday. Hence my customary but previously neglected wish you all have a good weekend. Presumably I'll be back Monday as always.

Posted by: Loren at 03:41 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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THE TWO BIGGEST ANOMALIES of the Terror War are that so many feminists (and leftists in general) support Islam despite its theocratic tyrannies and misogynistic horrors, and that even though the Left is feminist-dominated, it stubbornly refuses to acknowledge the root cause of Islamic rage: the genuinely liberated (and liberating) role of women in Western Civilization and America in particular.

Several days ago I set out to write, mostly from my own background as a former leftist, an explanation of the Left’s perverse behavior in these matters, and though the cause seemed obvious – three decades of incessantly chanting “abortion now” render you blind and stupid – the protocols of editorial exposition soon mired me in the necessity to explain my mental shorthand to those who had not been adults (or were not conscious) during the 1960s and ‘70s. These were allegedly the Left’s halcyon years, when Richard Nixon was still in peak form: when the intellectual requirements of Marxism, other forms of socialism and especially liberalism all proved too demanding for Baby-Boomer faddists; when the initial libertarianism of the feminist renaissance was suppressed and supplanted by matrifascist zealotry; when the Old Left dwindled and died and the so-called New Left rose up angry; when the New Left subjugated itself to authoritarian-feminist leadership, embraced the feminist doctrine of “the personal is political,” and as a result promptly began deteriorating into a coalition of victim-identity cults. Yes indeed: “those were the days, my friend; those were the days.”

As it turned out, what this writing needed more than reminiscence was a preface adequate to support its conclusions. The trouble was that no other essayist, at least as far as I could tell, had critically explored the political realities arising from the historical fact the matrifascist brand of feminism (aka female supremacy) is now the core ideology of the entire Left here in Enron Nation – and has been so for at least three decades. When the question is posed in such terms – that ideas have consequences – ten byproducts of matrifascist domination seem obvious, and since they all contribute to the two Terror-War anomalies, I will list them here (with apologies to anyone for whom they might be old hat):

(1)-that the Left’s call for “free abortion on demand” is the only non-negotiable expression of its matrifascist-shaped doctrine;

(2)-that from the perspective of matrifascism, one’s stance on abortion is the only valid political litmus test, replacing the old (and much more revealing) liberty-versus-authority yardstick – the debate about the proper relationship between the individual and the state – that formerly indexed one’s position on the Left/Right spectrum;

(3)-that (because even the most liberal forms of Christianity and Judaism demand abortion be considered from spiritual and hence moral/ethical perspectives) matrifascist absolutism on the question has forced the Left to a stance of unprecedented malevolence toward Christianity and Judaism;

(4)- that this malevolence is absolute proof of the extent to which the Left has been taken over by the matrifascist brand of feminism;

(5)-that the feminist/leftist support of Islam is the direct consequence of the matrifascist hatred of Christianity and Judaism that has arisen from the abortion controversy;

(6)-that the feminist/leftist hatred of Christianity and Judaism is so intense, it blinds its proponents to the many variations in Judaeo-Christian theologies, with the result that – unlike the Left of yesteryear – today’s Left is unable to distinguish between fundamentalism/orthodoxy and the other far more liberal, even gynocentric expressions of Jewish and Christian beliefs

(7)-that in America, today’s secular, matrifascist-dominated Left is infinitely more hostile to Christianity and Judaism than the theoretical Marxist Left ever was, proof of which is the national campaign of avowedly “feminist” vandalism and defacement of (even) mainstream churches that began in Seattle in 1975;

( -that the same intensity of matrifascist hatred combines with an abysmal ignorance of world history and especially Islamic history to blind the Left to the genocide and misogynism characteristic of Islam;

(9)-that the same ignorance of history – itself a deliberate byproduct of matrifascist-dominated public education – also blinds the Left to the functional radicalism of the ideals upon which the United States was founded, including the implicit commitment to perpetual revolution contained in the “Preamble” to the U.S. Constitution;

(10)-that because of the abortion controversy, matrifascist domination of the Left has elevated the victim-identity shibboleth of “the personal is political” beyond mere moral relativity to a doctrine of self-infallibility: unlimited sanction for any expression of leftist rage, and an impenetrable barrier against persuasive discussion, critical debate or even self-critical introspection.

Together these ten consequences of matrifascist domination have produced a Left unlike any other Left in U.S. history: viciously anti-intellectual, thus utterly immune to de-programming and therefore psychologically identical to certain movements of the far Right noted for their intolerance and violence: specifically the Nazi Party and the KuKluxKlan. Hence not only the Left’s ironic hostility toward the very principles of American liberty that facilitated its birth and growth, but also a Left increasingly distracted from traditional leftist socioeconomic and political goals – distracted by its own growing obsession with its alleged victimhood, particularly in the context of abortion. Indeed the Left’s operational psycho-dynamic – or perhaps pathology – is “I am (but) a victim (of patriarchy); hence (only) the personal is political.” The ultimate result is the infinite irony of a venomously secular Left supporting a vindictively theocratic Islam: not at all akin (as some commentators have mistakenly suggested) to the Hitler-Stalin Pact, but rather more like the curious and pathetic co-dependent attachment that sometimes develops between two sociopaths, one a brazen bully, the other a coward and a weakling.

Thus too the unimpeachable accuracy of my terms “matrifascist” and “matrifascism” – female supremacy (with all of its Nazi implications) disguised as a movement for female equality.

But surely anyone with the proverbial lick of sense recognizes that, if Islam triumphs, the very first people dragged into the streets and beheaded or drawn-and-quartered or stoned to death would be the secular leftists themselves – especially the women.

The inner circle of matrifascist ideologues addresses this issue by rationalizing the triumph of Islam’s proposed global caliphate as the final, terminal stage of the despised “patriarchy.” With the seductive distractions of American liberty prohibited by Islamic law, with Western Civilization (not to mention civilization itself) reduced to blood-stains and ashes, life would indeed become unspeakably horrible, especially for women. But then – or so say the more esoteric expressions of matrifascist doctrine – humanity will magically rise up, turn against not only patriarchy but the entire male gender, and at long last enshrine “womyn” as the rightful rulers of the planet. Thus the New Order: “gynocracy,” the female-supremacist version of the Third Reich, with females as der ubermenschen and males as the Jews. (Google and browse “Mary Daly,” also “Sunera Thobani,” “Grace Shinell” and “Valerie Solanis.”)

As I have noted before, when you believe “the personal is political,” you can justify anything: the extermination of unborn or half-born children for even the most trivial or selfish reasons, the genocidal reduction of the entire male gender, giving aid and comfort to an enemy who would hack off a woman’s clitoris, enshroud her in a sweltering burka and stone her to death for so much as glancing at a man who is not her father, brother or husband.

The above combination of factors – all of them stemming from matrifascist domination and matrifascism’s pro-abortion absolutism – is why the Left cannot allow itself to acknowledge either the suicidal nature of its flirtation with Islam or the real reason for the atrocities of 9/11.

Before I say more, let me state for the record I favor legal abortion. But I also know beyond any scintilla of doubt that abortion is murder – this from the indescribably moving experience of sensing the spirit of our son-to-be hovering in the room waiting to incarnate as my second wife and I formed his body with the passion of our love. (That our son was later born dead is one of the great losses of both our lives: how we would have relished getting to know someone whose spirit was so powerful its presence was felt by each of us even before his physical being was real. May his tiny unnamed body rest in peace in whatever sadly unknown grave the hospital assigned it; may his soul fare better in all its remaining lifetimes. And may my former wife Adrienne find all the blessings she seeks in this life and afterward: as is sadly typical in such cases, our marriage did not long survive the emotional trauma of the death of our anticipated child.)

Ask a hard-core feminist to describe religion – “hard-core” defined here as a feminist who has been thoroughly brainwashed by matrifascism – and even if she claims to be a proponent of feminist spirituality, she will probably tell you that as far as “patriarchal religion” is concerned, Marx was right: that it is the opiate by which “the patriarchy” attempts to terrify (or seduce) the world’s oppressed peoples into compliance with patriarchal edicts and capitalist enslavement schemes, and that all the adherents of "patriarchal religion" should be mercilessly exterminated. The test of a religion, she might say, is “whether it recognizes that the personal is not only political but theological: in other words, whether it encourages wife-beating versus whether it encourages free abortion on demand.”

These words are not a hypothetical construct: something very close to this precise quote was the statement of a feminist whose froth-at-the-mouth hatred of Christianity I had inadvertently challenged simply by pointing out several historical facts. Call the feminist Klarissa; she had flatly stated the only “real” Christianity is Fundamentalism – viciously oppressive, infamously misogynistic and homophobic, often vehemently racist as well – and that the more liberal forms of Christianity were merely deceptions: bait-and-switch advertising designed to trap the unwary. In response I had noted it is only Judaeo-Christian culture that gave birth to liberty, only via the American Revolution, and that this selfsame liberty has since hosted not only feminism but the resurrection of the female elements of the Divine within Christianity and Judaism. I added that beyond the doctrinal boundaries of Christianity and Judaism, American liberty had encouraged the resurrection of a genuine goddess: in truth, the modern counterpart of humanity’s first and oldest vision of the Deity. Klarissa had answered that none of these facts mattered, that “even with a goddess, patriarchy would remain patriarchy,” just as Christianity “with its history of inquisition and witch-burnings” would still be “the most murderous religion on the planet.” Klarissa freely admitted she was implacably hostile to anything remotely Christian or Jewish: she said “female divinity that is part of Christianity or Judaism can only be false divinity,” no doubt ultimately “like the Virgin Mary – something to belabor women with guilt and help outlaw abortion again.”

Because my acquaintanceship with Klarissa spanned the Gulf War (which she vehemently opposed as “another oil-grab by the White Patriarchy”), the subject of Islam invariably came up in our conversations also. Much to my astonishment, Klarissa said Islam was the one organized religion she could enthusiastically support. She had belittled Buddhism and Taoism as “harmless superstition”; she had denounced Judaism as the source of “all that Old Testament violence, especially in the modern Middle East”; she had condemned Hinduism for its long-outlawed practice of suttee; she had damned American Indian spirituality as “no use against the white man’s guns”; and she had ridiculed the pagan renaissance as “an embarrassment to feminism.” But now she was telling me that Islam is a vehicle of liberation, “a true religion of the oppressed”; that Islamic violence is genuine revolutionary violence, “a politically correct response to imperialism and capitalism,” that Islam is “not really patriarchal at all, because its only enemy is the White Patriarchy,” and that Mohammed was the Third World’s equivalent of Karl Marx, V.I. Lenin, Mao Zee Dong and Che Guevara all rolled into one. I was literally speechless.

The evening of Klarissa’s astounding dissertation on Mohammed was the same night she and I had planned to go for a long moonlight walk along the undeveloped shore of Bellingham Bay, enjoying the salt wind, the sound of the breakers and the intermittent tolling of the gong-buoy at Post Point. But now Klarissa complained bitterly my dog LeeRoy was “just too wild” and demanded I take him home before we went anywhere. Never mind LeeRoy always accompanied me on walks – especially walks after dark with a woman so anti-gun she insisted I leave my sidearms in my gun cabinet. (In any case, LeeRoy was magnificent: more than compensation for the defenselessness resulting from compulsory disarmament. The quintessence of formidably protective canine, he was 100 pounds of rippling ebony-coated muscle and keen-eyed tooth-on-bone intelligence: half Rottweiler/half Golden retriever, colored and shaped like a big-headed Rottie, he strode through his world with undocked tail assertively high and nut-sack proudly swinging, handsome beyond description and normally an eager friend to all womankind. But not to Klarissa, a cat-lover who made no secret of the fact she despised him.) So I did the right thing: I took Klarissa to her home instead. And as LeeRoy grinned and climbed from the back seat of my Honda into its right passenger seat, I bade Klarissa a last good-bye.

I should have known better than to get involved with Klarissa, even superficially. In all my years as a self-defined leftist, roughly 1963 (when a viciously false arrest prompted me to give a summer to the Civil Rights Movement in East Tennessee) through 1988 (when my allegiance to the Second Amendment prompted me to vote Republican in the presidential election), I met dozens of Klarissas, perhaps even hundreds of them. Though I always found libertarian/conservative women interesting (my second wife, for example, was a Goldwater supporter), I also dated Klarissas aplenty – it is hard to avoid them when your romantic interests are mostly artists or writers. In my New York City years, I even knew several of those especially hateful Klarissas who steered feminism away from its initial “women’s liberation” libertarianism and into the matrifascist miasma it tragically became. Thus I can write with some authority about the archetype.

Ask a Klarissa to describe America today, and she will tell you “Amerika” is a “ rape culture” that is forever attempting to steal from her the right to control her own body. If she is at all conscious of other issues, she will probably say that “Amerika” loots the oil and natural resources of the less powerful, destroys indigenous cultures and supplants them with a mind-numbing “Amerikan” all-McCulture. She will likely add that “Amerika” forever exploits its own peoples and “oppressed” minorities (especially “African-Americans,” Hispanics, “Native Americans,” and of course women), and that the “gun culture” is patriarchy’s Phallus Rampant – the ultimate tool by which its oppression is intensified to the 50th power. If she is an eco-feminist, she will include a protest against “Amerika’s” wanton destruction of the environment, “the rape of Mother Nature.”

Our sweet Klarissa’s male consort (assuming she has temporarily anointed someone Resident Penis and allows him to speak) would probably attempt to demonstrate his political “correctness” by adding a few obligatory words about the new slavery of globalization. He would also probably condemn the Terror War as a “racist” or “imperialist” attempt to capture Middle Eastern petroleum, and foolishly (that is, without realizing the seditiously violent implications of his words) pledge to resist “by any means necessary” if the government were to resurrect the military draft.

Notably absent from this recitation of grievances will be any (save the most abstract) references to the human condition – or for that matter any of the genuine empathy and passion that formerly motivated leftist responses to socioeconomic issues. There will be not one word about the desperate economic struggles of the working-family underclass in the post-liberal, downsized, outsourced-job, sub-minimum-wages-for-illegal-immigrants climate of Enron Nation. This is because in Enron Nation, the Left now despises the underclass – that is, unless it is a politically “correct” underclass: an approved victim-identity group, an exotically alien culture, an allegedly conquered nation. And the American underclass is none of these things: it supports legal abortion if medically necessary, but it unequivocally regards abortion as murder. It is thus “hopelessly reactionary.”

The great (and mostly misreported) transformation on the Left, from the Old Left to the so-called (and profoundly misnamed) New Left, was an ideological reversal probably without precedent in history. It was a shift from ideologies that were expressions of humanitarianism and enlightened self-interest based on class solidarity and the notion of government as a vehicle of collective betterment, a shift to a core ideology – “the personal is political” – that despite its “progressive” vocabulary is ultimately an expression of meaningless fads and absolute selfishness. While its adherents are united by conformist fashions and the victim-identity solidarity of femaleness or vagina-envy or race and ethnicity, while they share the notion of government as authoritarian enforcer, while they are bound in the moral imbecility of (ideally unrestricted) infanticide and the institutionalized bigotry of quota-mongering and judicial presumptions of guilt, they remain ultimately forever alone in their temporal and cosmic self-centeredness: to paraphrase a present-day advertising campaign (an absurdly oxymoronic pitch to encourage Army enlistments), “ a movement of one.” Such is the New Left, which has since become the Only Left, at least in the United States: the Left of “free abortion on demand.”

Enlightened observers will recognize the ideology of today’s Left as but a perverse, carefully disguised variant of runaway “I-am-my-own-divinity” individualism and the same “I-want-it-all” avarice that characterized Enron – the latest expression of the impulses that formerly bred fascism, and with the addition of female supremacy, victim-identity politics and the notion of government as victim-identity avenger, undeniably a form of fascism itself. In other words, in a transmogrification so profound not even a medieval alchemist would have dared suggest it, the American Left has become a doppelganger of itself: the clandestinely rightist travesty of a liberation movement. All in the name of protecting its absolutism on abortion.

To expect the dunce-cap-blind proponents of such an intrinsically dishonest ideology to grasp the true nature of Islamic rage or to understand what really happened on 9/11 is to hope for intelligent conversation with a ventriloquistÂ’s dummy. (Though one can surely pray for miracles.)

And just what did happen on that dreadful day of September 11, 2001?

To respond adequately requires a brief journey through time and mythology.

While of course there is no way I can prove it – the official scribes of Islam like Mafia gangsters and corrupt politicians often claim convenient forgetfulness about past events – I have long suspected the origins of Islamic misogynism and the Muslim penchant for violence are to be found in Mohammed’s personal history. If this is indeed true, it makes woman-hating and genocide as much an integral part of Islam as individual human dignity and even the notion of the Divine as (at least partly) female are integral to Christianity. Moreover a number of East Indian sources confirm my suspicions, suggesting that the original inhabitants of Mecca – that is, the inhabitants who were later slaughtered or enslaved by Mohammed – were polytheistic but primarily worshiped a goddess who was probably akin to Ishtar, the Babylonian moon-goddess. A Vedic story of the early history of Islam and the city of Mecca is available here. If nothing else, the Vedic text expresses a Hindu view of the thousand-year Moslem-Hindu conflict that by the mid-1700s had so decimated the indescribably ancient civilization of Hindu India, the tiny mercenary army of the British East India Company was able to conquer the entire subcontinent. Undoubtedly the Vedic text is part propaganda, but in this case (largely because of its rational assertion that goddess-worship sustained the egalitarian roles and proud independence of women in pre-Islamic Mecca) I believe its is probably more factual than not. Moreover it closely parallels the pre-political- “correctness” portrait of Islam that obtained during my undergraduate years – that is, before multiculturalist censors rewrote the available histories to conceal Islam’s intrinsic murderousness. (For additional information on Islam’s origin and nature, including accounts that contradict the Vedic sources, Google “history of Mecca.”)

Another reason I evaluate the Vedic description of Islam as “probably true” is that it explains perfectly the present-day behavior of Muslims as revealed in the outrages of 9/11, the recent shoot-hack-and-stab murder of the Dutch art-film maker Theo van Gogh, and the deafening silence of the global Islamic community’s failure to condemn specific Islamic atrocities or even to repudiate Islamic terrorism in general. Moreover, I have seen Submission – the 10-minute film, based on a poignantly poetic script written by a former Muslim named Ayaan Hirsi Ali, is available here. That a brief, graceful and exquisitely poetic portrait of the true plight of Muslim womanhood would evoke such a singularly murderous reaction – the film-script’s author is herself under an Islamic death threat and is in hiding as a result – strongly suggests my hypothesis as to the real cause of 9/11 is indeed correct: that it was an attack not on oil-whore America (about which I will have much more to say in a subsequent essay) but rather on the America semiotically represented by Our Lady of the Harbor, the goddess Liberty: the America of women’s suffrage, the America of the libertarian feminist renaissance known as Women’s Liberation, the America of equal-pay-for-equal-work, the America where popular dance resurrected the proud exquisite choreography of female sexuality that was once only mirrored on Minoan murals and vases. And with that choreography came the other resurrection – of the notion God is a woman, or at least partly female – the true “revolution in consciousness,” the most important human development of the past 2600 years. Which vexed Osama bin Laden and his ilk to homicidal frenzy of a kind the modern world had never seen. Thus 9/11.

Thus too this essay’s title, drawn from one of the longer works of Taliesin, the half-legendary Celtic poet who lived just after the time of King Arthur. The source-poem is a 237-line piece called “Cad Goddeu” or “Battle of the Trees.” The battle after which the poem is named occurred approximately 600BC, a fight between devotees of the god Bran and devotees of the god Belin; the outcome is said to have determined not only the fate of the Britons but the name and gender of the principal British deity until the advent of the Christian Era. The passage from which I took “Conflicts” is as follows:

I was in Caer Fefynedd
Thither were hastening grasses and trees
Wayfarers perceive them
Warriors are astonished
At a renewal of conflicts
Such as Gwydion made.
There is a calling on heaven
And on Christ that he would effect
Their deliverance,
The all-powerful Lord.
If the Lord had answered,
Through charms and magic skill,
Assume the forms of the principal trees,
With you in array...

Gwydion was a leader in the original battle. He is the warrior-son of Don, who is Danu, as in Tuatha de Danaan, “Children of the Goddess Danu,” who were among the ancient peoples of pre-Christian Britain. Gwydion is thus, by some mythographic reckonings, a knight-errant of the goddess, her sacred champion. But the purpose of Taliesin’s epic is nevertheless unknown. It is clearly not a recounting of the original battle: note the invocation of Jesus as lord-enchanter of the trees. The late Robert Graves believed the poem was metaphorical, a contest between poets and schools of poetical thought; these lines of Taliesin’s work (the lines in italic above and below) are taken from Graves' White Goddess. Others say "Cad Goddeu" is a lay of magic, a Druidical conjuration of deities and spirits of the land, a spell that invokes the Christ merely to conceal its heretical content. Still others, of whom I am one, believe it is genuine prophecy:

There shall be a black darkness,
There shall be a shaking of the mountain,
There shall be a purifying furnace,
There shall first be a great wave,
And when the shout shall be heard –
Putting forth new leaves are the tops of the beech,
Changing form and renewed from a withered state...

In mythology, the beech is the tree of the divine as female: the Holy Spirit, Wisdom, the Muse, the Goddess – the tree of all that has come back to life in American liberty, the mere thought of which enrages the bin Ladens and their Ted-Bundy-like followers to ever more violent orgies of murder. We fight – renewal of conflicts such as Gwydion made – so that American liberty and its most profound and sacred blessings "shall not perish from the earth." Cad Goddeu is now. It does not matter if you embrace its mythology as validly metaphorical or reject it as meaningless superstition: the historical facts are undeniable. And the American Left, in thrall to an unspeakable perversion of feminism that has reduced it to hysterical blindness and moral imbecility, has declined the greatest challenge in human history – and cravenly made alliance with the enemy of everything Our Lady of the Harbor represents.

Posted by: Loren at 03:55 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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I’M OFTEN SURPRISED BY what prompts reader response, and seattleslew's scornfully accusatory retort to “Thinking Behind An Abscessed Tooth” (see below) is no exception. My toothache-rant was vaguely intended to be a parody on itself, an “I-might-live-despite-everything” expression of gallows humor and hyperbole, but obviously Seattleites are as vindictively thin-skinned as ever.

Hence, instead of the promised essay (a wholly arbitrary delay for which I sincerely apologize), here is a rejoinder that began as a few caustic lines in the “comment” matrix and then exploded into a full-fledged discussion of the Puget Sound area’s ever-worsening regional transportation crisis – nearly every bit of it the result of Seattle’s breathtakingly hypocritical policy of methodically obstructing rapid transit even as the city claims to be America’s most environmentally enlightened metropolis.

Apparently Sesl is profoundly in denial about the Seattle establishment's small but powerful clique of venomously anti-rail xenophobes and its four-decade history of frustratingly successful efforts to sabotage construction of both local rail transit and any regional commuter-rail system. The xeno-clique's tactics have even included agitating minorities enraged by welfare reform to demand – successfully – that a Seattle light-rail project be turned into a huge giveaway program, thereby betraying (and infuriating) voters who thought they were approving a public transport system – not an extension of the dole.

And then there's the spitefully self-protective opposition of Seattle's Metro Transit bureaucracy, which is so empire-builder greedy, its antagonism to the mere notion of an independent "regional transit authority" was the death of State Sen. Ted Haleys’s much larger, far more intelligently structured and far less expensive regional high-speed- rail proposal some 24 years ago – a death inflicted via typically Machiavellian maneuvers in the legislature – an outrage the Seattle media deliberately suppressed and most of the rest of the local press corps were too inept to expose.

Bottom line – and with but few exceptions – it will be mainly slow, stinky, uncomfortable (and above all slow slow slow) bus-transport-only here in Pugetopolis for many years to come, and the primary reason we are so cursed is the disproportionately powerful Seattle xeno-clique's reflexive, "we-don-wanna-be-like-Jew-York" hatred of any form of mass transit that runs on rails.

The resultant traffic congestion (not only on I-5 but on all the primary and secondary arterials in the Everett-Seattle-Tacoma-Olympia metropolitan corridor) is described – depending on the source – as the worst, the second-worst or the third-worst in the nation.

These descriptions are probably not exaggerations. Admittedly I have spent very little time in California, and none of that time in Los Angeles, but I saw nothing around San Francisco, Marin County or Oakland that compares with the gridlock I encounter here nearly every day. Ditto for Chicago, Minneapolis, Baltimore, Washington D.C. and Portland, Oregon. Speaking from the experience of my 10 adult years in New York City and its environs, the congestion in Pugetopolis is far worse – and many times more frustrating – than anything in the way of the traffic-jams I encountered anywhere in the NYC/New Jersey metropolitan area.

Fact is, New York City’s public transport is truly effective – so much so that even with its many and chronic problems, it reduces the privately owned automobile to exactly what it should be: an unnecessary luxury rather than the vital component of what – beyond Gotham – is the most painfully expensive transportation system on the planet: a system that is infinitely regressive and thus viciously discriminatory against everyone save the wealthy.

It is savagely weighted against old people too. If Sesl has never been stuck behind an elderly, defiantly stubborn Pacific Northwesterner conducting his own version of a Lesser-Seattle-Society protest by driving 40 miles-per-hour in a 65-mph Interstate-5 fast lane, I am forced to suspect Sesl has never been on the real I-5. The situation I described is so commonplace it has been a staple of local humor at least since the 1970s.

And 70 mile-per-hour traffic through Seattle at rush hour? That's not just impossible fantasy -- itÂ’s clinically delusional.

Or maybe (to give Sesl the benefit of the doubt), Sesl's speedometer is broken, and in the interminable I-5 delays, Sesl dozes off and dreams of swift passage...thereby further obstructing the traffic that has given the "I" in "I-5" a new meaning: "impassable."

As for Seattle's nasty xenophobia – more malevolent (and, yes, far more violent too) than any standoffishness toward outlanders I have encountered anywhere else – Google "Seattle Sucks" and browse accordingly. Seattle is probably the only place in the United States where out-of-state license plates are genuine hate-magnets: notes left on your car telling you, "we don't want you here; go back where you came from" -- and all too often your tires slashed as well.

Or if you want more authoritative documentation, read the section on Seattle in the seminal study entitled Cultural Regions of the United States (Raymond D. Gastil, University of Washington Press: 1975), in which Seattle's own Battelle Corporation suggests Seattle's hatred of people and ideas from elsewhere is the worst and most intense xenophobia in America.

By the way, and to set the record straight on all counts, I love the Pacific Northwest with a passion that has fetched me back every time I tried to leave: I love its forests and its waters, I love how its mountains plunge to its seacoasts, I love its climate – including its seven-month winter monsoon. Most of all, I love its light: the eerily moonlit quality of summer shade in the backwoods groves of ancient alders, the slow blue lingering twilight of summer evenings – “in just such realms” (as I say in a poem I am writing) “are Higher Powers seen.”

But every Eden must needs contain its serpent, every Camelot its villain, and for me the Modred-snake is Seattle. For the very reasons I cited above, I despise Seattle, and I admit it freely.

I lived in Seattle during the middle 1970s, was active at the city’s cultural hub, and have never in all my life known such a frigidly exclusionary domain, a place where even those who were my peers and potential colleagues remained forever remote, covertly malicious if not overtly belligerent. The very few Washingtonians who were exceptions to this dismal and loneliness-breeding rule were people who grew up outside of Seattle; the handful of others with whom I became close were all outlanders like myself – people whose experiences were in fact exactly parallel to my own.

Indeed, I have heard native-born (and otherwise seemingly intelligent) Seattle Caucasians actually boast, “you could live here 40 years and if you were born somewhere else, we’d still reject you as an interloper.”

Which is precisely why I moved to Tacoma, where I lived for five years during the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, and precisely why I choose to live in Tacoma now: it is as friendly as any city in America, it is more pleasant than many cities, it is attractive and affordable, it has the best public park system on the West Coast (in park acreage, second nationally only to New York City), and it offers virtually the same cultural advantages as Seattle with none of Seattle’s xenophobic bigotry and snooty pretentiousness.

Moreover my best friends live in Tacoma – three people with whom I have been brother-and-sister close for at least three decades.

Just to show Sesl that Tacoma knows how to get things done, I should point out that the Tacoma portion of the Sounder light rail system is already up and running – within budget and on schedule – even as Seattle remains the One Big Obstruction, a bureaucratic train-wreck, a bottomless money-pit, an outrage that threatens to turn all of Pugetopolis into grid-lock dystopia.

And by the way, Sesl – thank you so much for wishing me a speedy return to good health.

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...I COMPLETED IT UNDER the influence of dental painkillers and antibiotics, so I want to allow the text to slumber undisturbed for a day, the better for me to review it and ascertain it makes sense -- that it has not lapsed into Kerouacean stream-of-consciousness, cretinoid meaninglessness, archaic syntax residual from another lifetime, or perhaps sin tax from some penance too long undone. Patience! I promise I will post it tomorrow, or perhaps even late this evening, after I return from the dentist.

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A SUDDENLY ABSCESSED TOOTH, that all-time horror of dental emergencies, has laid me low since last night, with the result I am unable to concentrate on anything much more than living from one minute to the next until I am able to get the problem tooth extracted. I don't know when this will be: I hope today, but I doubt it. My pre-move dentist is in Olympia (a two-hour drive from where I live now), so assuming I can secure an immediate appointment, I am still facing the nightmare of having to spend four hours dealing with some of the most infuriatingly congested traffic in America while in the midst of severe dental pain -- the most debilitating agony I know. And I won't be able to take even a single pain-killer until I am safely back home, which means I am looking forward to as horrible a day as any I have ever experienced. Forget the promised essay. At this point I hardly care if I never write another word.

If the long-promised high-speed rail system were up and running, my problem would be solved: I'd phone my dentist, get a painkiller prescription, gobble a handful of blessed-relief pills and take the train. But thanks to repeated sabotage by "we-don-wanna-be-like-Jew-York" xenophobes, the rail system is six years behind schedule. So I've gotta deal with all the frustrations of local motoring, especially the archetypical Pacific Northwest morons who get in the 65-mile-per-hour fast-lane and then defiantly obstruct traffic for miles by chugging along at 40 miles per hour. Such is life here in Pugetopolis, which claims to be the most environmentally enlightened metropolitan area in America -- but which demonstrates its utter hypocrisy by the infinitely damning fact it has the worst, most abysmally useless, most outrageously nonfunctional urban public transport system in the entire United States. Sure I can ride the bus to my dentist's office -- but though it is only about 40 miles, it is nearly a five-hour trip each way.

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CONTRARY TO MY EXPECTATIONS, the essay I promised to post today remains unfinished. This is because -- as so often happens when I write -- it has taken off in a new and unforseen direction. Hence I am exploring the connection between the media's refusal to acknowledge the mytho-spiritual dimension of the Terror War and the absolute hostility to religion essential to the "free-abortion-on-demand" stance of the personal-as-political Left. My apologies for the delay; I should be finished with this (newly enlarged) work in time for posting tomorrow morning.

Meanwhile here is a must-read report by Daniel Pipes on Islamic efforts to fill the vacuum created in U.S. public schools by institutionalized hostility to Christianity and Judaism. Once again, political "correctness" is playing into the hands of those who would replace Constitution with Qur'an.

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And have a good weekend too. I'll be back early Monday.

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...to what I wrote yesterday, because I recognize it is a lot to digest (and most of all because I don't want to distract from it), I will refrain from posting today. But I am working on an essay about the underlying mythic significance of the War, which I will probably have ready to post in time for the weekend. And there are always the myriad news sites from which to lift short items, as I typically do between longer posts.

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HERE IS THE ESSAY I have been promising for the past several days. When I began it, its original conclusion was that – despite the death of liberalism – the American social-conscience liberalism had formerly represented was now being reborn in myriad new forms public and private. But then the work I am doing forced me to take (another) hard look at the implications of how taxpayer selfishness has radically shrunken governmental services – this in combination with the infuriating reality of bureaucrats who legally inflate their own paychecks by denying services to the very people they are hired to serve. And when I realized the dismal extent to which these miserly tendencies have become universally American (even here in the allegedly “leftist” realm of the Puget Sound region), it forced me to conclude our national social conscience was probably never anything more than an artificial construct: a cultural anomaly forced on us in the 1930s by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in response to the threats of fascism and Soviet Communism. But the America of the New Miserliness was not an America I was eager to acknowledge: hence the minor personal intellectual crisis – and spiritual crisis too – that is real reason this piece has taken me so long to finish.

THE PROBABILITY IS THIS era that began with the collapse of the Soviet Union will go down in history as one of our nation’s most cruel, at least as measured by its attitudes toward those who have fallen by the American economic wayside. What is said or not said by presidential candidates is always a mirror of United States values – especially now when all such presentations are so carefully shaped by focus-groups – and the speech-content of this last presidential campaign makes it undeniably clear that indifference to the poor is now one of our national characteristics. If the numbers of the impoverished were shrinking, our dwindling concern could be written off as merely an expression of good times, but in fact the opposite is true: by every statistical yardstick you can find, the underclass is getting bigger, which casts our national response – or rather the lack thereof – in an especially damning light. And as I discovered during a recent freelance assignment, whole communities – not just the archetypical poor – are feeling the pangs inflicted by America’s New Miserliness.

While the New Miserliness can be attributed to many factors – not the least of which is an uncertain economy – I believe its ultimate cause is the death of liberalism: the fact that in the wake of liberalism’s demise, we have become a nation without a domestic social conscience. Say what you like about liberalism, from the time of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt until liberalism’s destruction by forces mostly beyond its control, it was the true social conscience of America. And whether you were a Democrat or Republican, it made little difference in your acceptance of the basic notion that providing some level of social services was at least partly the responsibility of the government and thus ultimately the individual taxpayer: the ensuing debate focused on what and how much, not whether.

But before I say more, let me make it unmistakably clear what I am talking about: the liberalism I am lamenting is the old-time, John Fitzgerald Kennedy liberalism, the Dwight Eisenhower liberalism, the liberalism of Harry Truman and FDR and LBJ and Gerald Ford and yes even the begrudging liberalism of Richard Nixon, the kind of liberalism once defined by Webster: “ideals of individual esp. economic freedom, greater individual participation in government, and constitutional, political and administrative reforms designed to secure these objectives.” This was the liberalism that re-unified America after the most fiercely contested political campaigns – the liberalism that gave every man, woman and child a sense of owning stock in the United States even if they did not own a single share in one of America’s corporations.

The liberalism for which this essay has become a eulogy thus bears no resemblance whatsoever to the pathology today’s mass media labels “liberalism”: the feces-hurling, GOP-office-trashing, war-monument-vandalizing hatefulness of the self-proclaimed “progressive” Left – a Left that in its pre-election frenzies reflected its cold indifference to America’s lower-income working families by proposing an expansion of health insurance that would have been available only if you as head-of-household were willing to submit self, mate and offspring to the ultimate humiliation of enslavement by the welfare bureaucracy. Not that I was especially surprised: the Left has dismissed the poor and near-poor as “hopelessly reactionary” ever since welfare mothers rejected women’s-liberation organizing efforts in the early 1970s. The Left’s ideological hostility to the American underclass was in fact one of the earliest symptoms of the New Miserliness.

But to see the New Miserliness in all its disturbing ugliness, we have to look at Enron – the Big Business equivalent of a consortium of economic Ted Bundys run amok. Enron, the victims of which are inescapably ruined, typifies the harshly divided society of exploiters and exploited that is arising in the wake of liberalism’s demise. And the Enron ethos is apparent everywhere: in an economy ever more propped up by the scab labor of illegal immigrants, in the ranks of the homeless that increase daily, and most of all in the climate of despair that now spreads even to seniors who suddenly find themselves deprived of the hard-earned comforts of retirement. All across the land it is Enron writ large: the workplace ever more 19th-Century-sweat-shop oppressive, the workforce ever more terrified and submissive, the whole people – all save the independently wealthy – ever more cowed by fears of outsourcing, downsizing, cutbacks and closures. Indeed we have become Enron Nation.

Contrary to rightist myth, it was not excessive tolerance that brought about liberalism’s terminal crisis of confidence, but rather its loss of faith in its own principles. Feminism, victim-identity cultism in general, self-hatred portrayed as humanistic moral equivalence, craven cowardice disguised as pacifism, pathologically greedy careerism – these are the forces that subverted liberalism inside the very Democratic Party that was once its primary home, the forces that eventually discredited liberalism in the streets of America’s cities, maimed it via welfare fraud and murdered it in the classrooms of America’s schools and colleges. Apart from feminism’s original (and once legitimate) claim of being the sole vehicle by which women might achieve equality before the law, none of these doctrines – especially the female-supremacist brand of fascism that eventually suppressed all of feminism’s originally libertarian impulses – would have prevailed if liberals had not abjectly surrendered their own beliefs during their post-Vietnam penance. That the liberals were needlessly contrite – that their rightful Southeast Asian cause had been undermined by the same bureaucratic intransigence that has crippled American foreign policy since the end of the Marshall Plan – makes their fate all the more ironic.

What sprang up to challenge liberalism’s place on the Left was an utterly bogus “progressivism” of false “diversity” that demanded not the keen critical thinking that had kept the variously named American liberal impulse alive since the time of Thomas Jefferson, but rather an absolute intellectual conformity and lockstep ideological discipline that, beyond the lunatic fringes, had hitherto been utterly alien to American political thinking. Apart from a compelling label stolen from the liberal Theodore Roosevelt, today’s “progressivism” is nothing more than a new brand of victim-identity fascism, with something promised everyone (save Caucasian males) by its self-centered ideology of “the personal is political”: an affirmative-action car in every garage and a quota-mongered chicken in every pot. In fact it is merely another form of Enron-ism, the exact equivalent of the Enron plutocracy’s sneering kleptomania: arrogant greed repackaged as “progressive” demands for “reparations.” As the ancient Greeks recognized, unlimited license for self-bribery does not ever further the cause of democracy or even public well-being.

But old-time liberalism sought no such license, which is precisely why it scored its notable triumphs. One of these was the Tennessee Valley Authority, which lifted the entire South out of devastating post-Civil-War impoverishment, turned it into a new El Dorado of economic development and did so without costing American taxpayers a single penny. But other liberal remedies were sometimes worse than the diseases they sought to cure – the deliberate transmogrification of welfare recipients into a vast permanent underclass of dependents is a classic example. Though this was not the failure of liberal ideals and ideas per se, but rather the inability of the enacting (upper-middle) class to transcend its own class-bred prejudice and greed. The greed-and-prejudice syndrome – and not some hypothetical unworkability of the liberal impulse to charity – is what created the entire welfare crisis. The welfare system became nothing more than a jobs program for a whole generation of parasitic feminists who in truth despised the very people they claimed to serve. The proof of this statement is in its associated numbers: from 1970 through 1990, welfare administrative costs skyrocketed by 5,390 percent – not a typo, and a sum based on the federal government's own data. Thus were the pretend-revolutionary bureaucrats feathering their own nests even as they slashed the value of welfare stipends and services by fully two-thirds. The real welfare queens weren't mythical Black Mammies living in crack hovels; they were ideologically arrogant matrifascist social-work bureaucrats ensconced in air-conditioned offices decorated with anti-male slogans. By claiming “the personal is political,” you can rationalize anything, including the depredations of the powerful against the powerless. Once again, Enron Nation.

A less-deliberate and thus somewhat more forgivable version of the selfsame blind greed has destroyed our labor unions. Unions are not irrelevant or unnecessary – far from it, given the epicentral kleptomania of Enron Nation – but in too many industries, the workers now totally identify with their Enron oppressors and thus fail to see that, via outsourcing, salary-reductions, pension give-backs and health-insurance cuts, their standard of living is being methodically reduced to the post-industrial equivalent of serfdom. Trickle-down economics work fine for people of the upper middle class and above, but for the poor nameless stiff just thrown off a production line (the same day his wife was ousted from her receptionist's job), the future is inexorably grim. Meanwhile, as we witnessed during the recent presidential election campaign, the victors speak of poverty as if it were nothing more than a repugnant statistic (the sort of distasteful thing one refrains from discussing in polite company), while the losers passionately lament the accelerating division of the United States into “two nations” even as they demonstrate their ultimate indifference to the poor by their failure to propose any solutions whatsoever, their pseudo-passion but a Shakespearean idiot’s tale, “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Were liberalism the expression of some underlying collective American social conscience, as had I believed it to be when I began this work, it would surely have survived the double crises of Vietnam and the hostile advent of a venomously anti-intellectual New Left. In fact for a time liberalism did survive: witness the increasingly angry confrontations between the New Left’s ever-more-emotional agitators (“the personal is political”) and the meticulously intellectual Old Left leadership (“the function of government is to help people do collectively what they cannot do as individuals”). Such clashes were a major characteristic of leftist politics in the 1970s and the 1980s, and they set off conflicts that linger ephemerally even today. But what finally killed the Old Left (and thus destroyed American liberalism) was the death of the Soviet Union. Capitalism is like any other entrenched economic system: the only way to humanize it comes (just as Mao Zee Dong said) from the barrel of a gun. Liberalism's gun was the Red Army, and the secret but all-consuming paranoia of the Establishment that – unless proper concessions were made – America would someday rise up in a replay of Petrograd and Ten Days That Shook the World. Indeed it would not be unfair to say that it was the Red Army that made America what it was during most of the second half of the 20th Century. But with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the threat of the Red Army vanished, and with it died any inclination of the politicians to listen to the liberal intellectuals’ pleas for meaningful reforms, much less any imperative for the private sector to allow their enactment. Predictably, soon afterward the liberal will toward reform died also – the Old Left silencing itself in despair (“why bother; no one cares”), the New Left abandoning any pretense of commitment to classically liberal ideals and quickly thereafter deteriorating into a miasma of self-centered totalitarian cults.

In truth the death of liberalism is a tragedy the dimensions of which will probably not be fully apparent for at least another decade or two – a profound loss not only for America but for the entire world.

In this context it is instructive to examine the evidence that is be gleaned from President Bill Clinton’s program of welfare reform. Here we see the real reason Democrat Clinton was able to throw millions off welfare, condemning them to what by all indications was a certain doom of Charles-Dickens-class poverty – lifetime minimum-wage employment without any fringe benefits and not one scintilla of hope for ever advancing out of the eventually lethal cesspool of poverty. That the reality of welfare reform proved to be far less deadly than the original projections is an aside: the point is that once the USSR was beaten, there was no threat of incipient revolution to reinforce liberal demands and proposals, much less prompt a receptive attitude toward them. Thus liberalism lost its imperative as a national-defense mechanism , became useless, and was shoved (by Clinton himself) into its grave. Like it or not, it is proof of Clinton’s Enron-Nation brilliance he recognized the post-USSR circumstances and acted upon them. Clinton understood that without the Red Army, America as we knew it – the America that at least pretended to care for its have-nots even as it provided lavishly for its have-plenties – is dead.

And the have-nots (like all rank-and-file Enron employees), have ever since been intimidated to silence. Nor is there anyone left who is willing to speak for them. What we are witnessing now, in the form of the Left’s endless post-election tantrums and hissies and its burgeoning threat of radical violence, is not at all what the Left and leftist-dominated mass media would have us believe – a predictable expression of post-John-Kerry proletarian anger. It is rather the rage of a disenfranchised elite: an elite that rode to power on liberal coat-tails without ever understanding what liberalism meant, squandered its inheritance on politicizing the personal, and now faces the same obsolescence that toppled its Old Left forebears. Victim-identity cults – a throwback to Naziism – are ultimately even less American than social-welfare programs. Welcome to Enron Nation, where the ubermenschen routinely sneer at those of us who live below the salt. All that distinguishes the Left’s contempt of the electorate from Enron’s contempt toward its customers is that Enron had something to sell – something the public desperately needed.

Of course the ideals of liberalism cannot die; they are at least as old as Rome. And in places like Cleveland, where outsourcing has left 35 percent of the workforce chronically unemployed, nothing but old-fashioned FDR-type liberalism can save the day; private industry simply does not have the resources. But even with needfulness of the Cleveland caliber, I can see nothing on the horizon that is likely to force liberalism back into public policy as a counterbalance to the bitter realities of Enron Nation – realities of which Cleveland is another prime example. This is because the Islamic enemy – unlike the enemies we faced during the most of the 20th Century – does not promise the boons of economic security (fascism) or political empowerment via the workplace (Marxism) to which we as a nation had no choice but to respond with betterment-pledges of our own. Instead the Islamic enemy offers only submission and extermination – realities that are literally too awful to contemplate – plus the likelihood of untold centuries of war. Hence there is no compulsion at all for America to concern herself with domestic socioeconomic betterment. Indeed, from a purely Darwinian perspective, the only logical national response to the Islamic threat is the creation of an ever-more-stratified, ever-more-unforgiving society – to which the increasingly feudal realities of Enron Nation are probably but the historical gateway. Our golden age is ended. Next will be the decades and perhaps centuries of Fortress America, like Roman Britain in the years of Arthur or perhaps like Ireland during the Norse Invasions: a harsh realm – but nevertheless an island of civilization in a raging sea of barbarism.

Posted by: Loren at 06:37 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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I AM NOT POSTING anything other than one quick vital link today because I am in the midst of the essay about liberalism – its death and possible resurrection in new form – I promised more than a week ago. I began work on its week-old rough draft yesterday evening and discovered about midnight I had undertaken a much greater project than I realized: the work I had been doing for a local publication had spilled over into this matter and was now impelling it in new directions, with the result the one-page draft quickly became five pages of Times Roman type. It is now nearly finished, but there remain some facts to be verified, and perhaps three concluding paragraphs to be written. Then possibly because of its length I will divide it into two parts, one to run Tuesday, the next Wednesday...or perhaps – because I am my own most demanding editor – it will take until Wednesday (or even Thursday) before I am satisfied with the results.

In the meantime I would share someone else's work – a very relevant essay, given its premise: the belief (which I hold in common with the Asia Times columnist who goes by the name of Spengler) that the increasing violence of Islam heralds a global war of unprecedented dimensions, a matter that just happens to be central to the question of what will replace liberalism as the social conscience of America. Spengler is discussing why Islam cannot be reformed – why the global clash is unavoidable – a must-read available here. I hope you find this Spengler piece as thought-provoking as I did.

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THREE LINKS FOR YOUR weekend pleasure and contemplation, all seasoned by a solemn promise that on Monday IÂ’ll be back to serious blogging: the November deadline frenzy is behind me and my sore throat is diminishing to a mere tickle.

Link Number One is purely utilitarian – a huge money-saver I’ve already put to the test – something called GasBuddy that helps you find the cheapest fuel in town just about anywhere in the United States. It’s available here (with a hat-tip to the always-useful WomensWallStreet site for the original link). You just type in your zip-code, compare your alternatives and purchase accordingly: in my test run this afternoon it saved me 10 cents per gallon.

The remaining links – two and three – are vitally informative.

Number Two is to Col. Oliver North (USMC Ret.), who tells us what really happened in that Fallujah mosque – the place where a radical NBC-TV cameraman claims a Marine committed a war crime and so gave Islam another hate-America propaganda film. If you read nothing else this weekend, read this. North’s account is close to what I guessed had actually occurred, which suggests the Marine deserves not a court-martial but an “attaboy” for being on his toes, never mind the contrary testimony of a man who seems to take his hairstyle cues from Charles Manson. Once again I am compelled to ask: what suicidal dementia possesses the Bush Administration it allows enemy propagandists to accompany our troops into battle?

The third link is a tragic letter that tells us what life in politically “correct” Canada is really like, especially when you’re a law-abiding citizen desperately seeking protection from one of Canada’s protected minorities – in this instance, predatory crack addicts. I’m reminded of Manhattan in the 1960s, when most of the politicians (and too many of the cops) believed that if you lived in a bad neighborhood, you didn’t deserve any protection against the pukes and scumbags you necessarily had to share the turf with. But in the City it was merely another expression of the old adage that “money talks.” In Canada it’s something far worse: reverse bigotry enforced by men with badges and guns against a citizenry that it is totally disarmed and thus pathetically powerless – just the sort of place our gun-hating leftists would love.

Another reason to give heartfelt thanks for the United States of America – and have a fine weekend too.

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STILL SWAMPED AND SUFFERING from a sore throat as well, I think it will be at least another day and maybe two before I can get back to “normal” blogging. Meanwhile, here is a must-read from Front Page Magazine, a disturbing report from the Caliphate of Dearborn about the growing popularity among American Muslims of the late Ayatollah Khomeini’s ideology of global conquest.

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THANKS TO A LINK provided by the Lucianne.com poster who goes by the screen-name of cap MarineTet68 (and of course thanks also to Lucianne Goldberg herself), I have finally seen the film Submission, which yet another Muslim hack-and-stab murderer protested recently by killing its maker, the Dutch art-cinematographer Theo van Gogh. What follows is a slightly enlarged version of what I wrote on Lucianne.com about Mr. van GoghÂ’s work, which brought to life a script by a woman who is herself a refugee from Islamic persecution and whose own experience thus illustrates the horrors to which all women are subjected in the name of IslamÂ’s god Allah.

Named Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the script-writer grew up an upper-class Muslim in Somalia. In 1992 she fled to the Netherlands, where she became fluent in Dutch, attended college, studied political science and, after publicly abandoning Islam, became an activist in the struggle to make the plight of viciously oppressed Muslim women known throughout the West – hopeful the West will somehow end their suffering. In yet another predictable demonstration of Islamic “tolerance,” Ms. Ali of course lives under constant threats of death herself.

Here is what I said about her collaboration with Mr. Van Gogh:

This film is simple poetry, profoundly moving, transcending even my prefatory skepticism, poignant as Deirdre's Song or some other equally tragic ancient Celtic lament that is also a call to arms. It should be shown to every soldier, every Marine, every sailor, every airman and airwoman in the U.S. military establishment. It should be shown to all our allies -- especially those, like the Geordies of The Black Watch, who come from traditions that yet embody memories of chivalry and the unequaled honor that grows from the righteous defense of Womanhood. For then this war would be, in the hearts of all those who fight in the name of Westernesse, a true Crusade -- a Holy Crusade to liberate all of that vast and tragic sisterhood who suffers enslavement by Islam. Then -- just as the Union soldiers did in the Civil War, we would truly bring the Jubilee -- the plantation-owner objections of the Islamic males be damned in an apocalypse of blood and fire.

The film can be seen here.

Sometimes when I post on Lucianne.com I do so in a manner that – in retrospect – suggests the need for a cooler head. But I do not regret a word of the above, save that in my passion I misspelled Deirdre in the original, accidently transposing the e and i, an error I did not notice until later.

TODAYÂ’S OTHER LINK, RELATED to the first by more than simple synchronicity, was suggested by the blogger Anchoress, who asked me to post it for those readers we do not share. Here is what she said to me on November 11:

A pal who is connected to CBS is bemoaning that the right wing bloggers, so quick to castigate the network when they deserve it - and let's face it, they often do - are never as quick to give a little praise when it may be appropriate. He wrote, "This is something I find annoying... They cannot wait to rip us apart when we go against their grain, but they never stop to call attention to things they approve of. Last night's piece by David Martin on the wounded of Falluja healing at home, and getting thousands of dollars in financial help from Semper Fi, was a loving and respectful tribute to our men in uniform, and the people who love them. And a fitting prelude to Veterans Day. Were they all watching 'LOST'?"

He may well have a point. I don't watch much television at all (I had to ask him what "Lost" was) and did not see “60 Minutes” so I have only his word that the report was praiseworthy - but he's a good guy and his word is usually gospel.

I suspect that conservative bloggers simply didn't see the thing - I know a lot of people who "boycott" CBS, these days - and so didn't know the Fallujah soldiers were covered. It sounds like it was worth watching, and I'd appreciate feedback from any who did actually see it.

In the meantime, I wanted to pass on the information about Semper Fi, which CBS did include in its report. It seems to me an excellent way to honor our veterans might be to send them a little check!

Injured Marine Semper Fi Fund

The injured Marine Semper Fi Fund provides financial grants and other resources to injured Marines, Sailors, and their families. The Fund works closely with the Marine Corps and military hospitals nationwide to identify and assess the needs of specific families. Its goal is to provide immediate and real financial assistance to Marines, Sailors and their families during this extraordinarily stressful time. The hope is that by alleviating the financial stresses of our brave Marines and Sailors, they and their families can focus on the important job of physical and emotional healing. Donations are accepted by check payable to the fund:

Injured Marine Semper Fi Fund
825 College Blvd, Suite 102
PMB 609
Oceanside, CA 92057

For a link to The Anchoress herself, a blog that is always worth reading, see above under "Recommended Reading." And my apology for being so tardy in posting the Injured Marine information – fully a week late. This was due entirely to how busy I have been. Tomorrow things will really (I promise) be back to what passes for “normal” in this life.

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ONE OF MY MOST impassioned pro-Bush arguments evolves from the crying need to rescue our major institutions from the subversive ideologues of the victim-identity cults. Though I have never objected to the dissemination of even the most terrifying ideals – precisely what makes victim-identity cultism so dangerous is the very lack of dissemination that protects its typically hateful core doctrines from public exposure – there is a vast difference between dissemination and subversion. The former is protected by the First Amendment, which recognizes that an informed public is the primary defense of a democratic society. The latter – distinguished from legitimate criticism by its underlying destructive intent – is technically illegal, especially in time of war. It is one thing for feminists, for example, to rail against sexism, denounce American liberty and Western Civilization as “patriarchy,” and demand reforms – all of which is diligently (and properly) protected by the Constitution. It is quite another thing to conspire to overthrow “patriarchy” and replace it with female-supremacist tyranny, particularly when the conspirators employ a tactic outlined by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf: infiltration of state agencies and clandestine conversion of them into revolutionary front organizations.

But this is precisely what has happened in America. Feminists – specifically feminists of the ideological faction I persist in labeling “matrifascism” – have risen to dominance in mass media, public education, academia and the social-services bureaucracy, and from the beginning of their ascent to power they methodically set about undermining the very freedoms that had allowed their movement to flourish. Propagating their ethos of the personal as political, they spread their victim-identity analysis throughout already-restive minority communities and thus gained significant allies. Next, through their eventual control of educational and informational media, they hid away most of the true history of the United States, a three-decade act of philosophical and cultural thievery that by now is almost complete and that daily facilitates the spread of their ideologies of hate. Finally during the Clinton years they gained enough of a toehold over government in general to savagely cripple our ability to protect ourselves – witness both the enactment of draconian anti-gun laws (denying us protection against domestic criminals) and the castration of the military and intelligence establishments (facilitating the atrocities of 9/11). Worse still, the matrifascists and their victim-identity allies actively conspired to aid the enemies of the U.S. by further crippling our ability to wage war. This was accomplished chiefly through intelligence “leaks,” but quite possibly also through other measures including deliberate intra-government disinformation and perhaps even operational sabotage.

Because I am still up to my proverbial eyebrows in the last of my November assignments, I do not have the time (or even the energy) to be more specific about these matters, so I will have to trust you readers already know of what I speak – or that if you do not, you will comment accordingly, so that I can respond in detail when I am able. In the meantime, here is the most hope-kindling news story I have read since the election. The purge has at last begun – the purge (I hope) will cleanse our schools of hate-America indoctrination and restore them to places of learning, the purge (I hope) will rid the military and the intelligence services of all those victim-identity cultists who so despise America and everything for which it stands they are – like the leakers of the Abu Ghraib secrets – willing collaborators with an enemy that would subject us to the unspeakable horrors of a global caliphate. In peacetime we could have tolerated such fools, as objectionable as they are. But we are at war now – at war with a foe far older and far more dangerous than any we have yet faced. By purging the Central Intelligence Agency of its subversive elements, the President is finally demonstrating he recognizes exactly what is at stake.

Posted by: Loren at 01:57 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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DESPITE MY CRITICISM OF Andrew Sullivan a few days ago (Nov. , I probably couldn’t stop reading him even if I wanted to. Which I don’t. For Sullivan has done again what he does so often – linked us to another of those vital bits of journalistic evidence without which our understanding of the world would be sorely diminished. This time he shows us an essay that tells us all we need to know about the bigotry of blue. Indeed it is a veritable mini-Mein Kampf of big-city provincialism and intolerance, proclaiming urbanites the new ubermenschen and all the rest of us hardly fit to lick the rat-dung and roach-gooshy from the cement-scarred soles of their Birkenstocks. Here is a representative sample:

...We'll fight to keep guns off the streets of our cities, but the more guns lying around out there in the heartland, the better. Most cities have strong gun-control laws--laws that are, of course, undermined by the fact that our cities aren't walled. Yet. But why should liberals in cities fund organizations that attempt, to take one example, to get trigger locks onto the handguns of NRA members out there in red states? If red-state dads aren't concerned enough about their own children to put trigger locks on their own guns, it's not our problem. If a kid in a red state finds his daddy's handgun and blows his head off, we'll feel terrible (we're like that), but we'll try to look on the bright side: At least he won't grow up to vote like his dad.

There is such a harpy’s-brew of hate-mongering here I will not even attempt to deconstruct its separate components, much less set right its myriad misunderestimations – besides which, with my last November freelance assignment still demanding completion, I genuinely do not yet have the time. But just so you can see a true portrait of the “progressive” mindset (the better to understand its nasty penchant for vandalizing war memorials and trashing Republican office space), I will link to the entire hateful diatribe, available here. It appears in a Seattle publication appropriately called The Stranger – a sort of pierced-genitals/dirty-fingered-dominatrix derivative of the old East Village Other, but without even one of EVO’s many redeeming strengths, which included good writing, political sophistication, cutting-edge comics and the love-fantasy highlight of every edition: the un-PlayHouse, un-PetMate, never Barbie-dollish, always outrageously lovely Slum Goddess. (For more on EVO, Google “East Village Other”; for an example of a Slum Goddess, click here.) But EVO was produced when the apex of urban bohemian thinking was the Back-to-the-Land Movement. These arrogant simpletons who publish The Stranger don’t even understand the need for farmers and farmlands. In fact they seem to believe their parasitic super-ghetto (for that is precisely what they propose) can live on invective alone.

I wonder if Stalin’s “agriculture experts” held similar attitudes toward the mujikii their collectivist policies starved to death.

Once again, Mr. Sullivan, thank you for ratting out the opposition.

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FOR A NUMBER OF rock-solid reasons – the Bush Administration’s brazen obstruction of the Armed Pilots Program, the administration's support for radically reducing legal firearms ownership by criminalizing all mental problems, Bush’s endorsement of the so-called “assault weapons” ban and his intent to outlaw gun shows – I have long maintained there is not a nickle’s worth of difference between George Bush and Sen. John Kerry on Second Amendment issues.

In fact I believe it is at least arguable that Bush is actually worse – worse because of his deceptiveness, especially as expressed by former Attorney General John Ashcroft’s view the Second Amendment guarantees what is indeed an individual right. For as undeniably correct as the Ashcroft position is, it has always been clear to me it was never anything but eyewash, tolerated by the administration merely as an especially dishonest vote-getting ploy – that the administration’s real stance toward the Second Amendment is undeniably proven by its (ongoing) policy of doing everything possible to thwart the arming of our airline pilots, the will of Congress be damned.

That my estimate is correct is now proven by the PresidentÂ’s appointment of Alberto R.Gonzales as the new U.S. Attorney General. Here is what The Washington Post said yesterday morning:

Behind the scenes, Gonzales clashed frequently with Ashcroft's Justice Department. He felt blindsided when Ashcroft, early in the administration, announced that the department would embrace, for the first time ever, a view of the Second Amendment that regards gun possession as an individual right on a par with freedom of speech or religion.

Never mind that WaPo’s “first time ever” assertion is an anti-gun Big Lie. The point here is that Gonzales clearly opposes the Second Amendment – that it is entirely likely he would overturn the right of individuals to own firearms for personal protection. The remainder of the Post report, which says nothing more about Gonzales’ anti-gun ideology, is available here. (Sorry; registration required.)

The Gonzales appointment – which was applauded by one of America’s leading anti-gun zealots, Sen. Charles Schumer (D., NY) – is a disconcerting signal in at least three ways. First, it is a slap in the face to the National Rifle Association and to Second Amendment advocates in general, absolute proof the always-bogus Bush/gunowner honeymoon is forever ended. Second, the appointment is an important concession to Hispanics, 71 percent of whom are said to favor “gun control,” though the survey-findings that make this claim, available here (and scroll down), leave the precise meaning of “gun control” undefined. Third, I cannot doubt the appointment signals the ultimate triumph of the unrestricted-immigration/amnesty-for-illegals alliance of Cheap Labor Republicans and Big Bureaucracy Democrats, with long-term results I do not even want to contemplate: ruinous to the pay scales of working Americans and toxic to the cultural foundations of the nation.

Bottom line, the Liberals and perhaps even the far Left may have won this election after all: with Gonzales in the AGÂ’s office and Sen. Arlen Specter (RINO., Pa) at the judicial-appointment switch, the prospects for meaningful change (especially on the Second Amendment) are somewhere between zilch and bupkes.

Ironically this relates, albeit distantly, to what I had intended to write as this weekend’s secular homily: an analysis of how the collapse of the Soviet Union is directly responsible for the present-day American crisis – a crisis that surely includes not only the ruinous plague of illegal immigration but the frequent anti-voter treachery of both our political parties. Alas, I am still too busy with freelance work to transform the intended preachment from draft to completed essay. Though all but one of my free-lance assignments are finished, late-breaking news has dramatically altered the form and content of the last of these November reports, so I am likely to be tied up for nearly another week.

Hence my apologies.

Meanwhile, have a great weekend!

Posted by: Loren at 06:48 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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ONE MORE DAY BACK on the beat – no, I’m not doing investigations again; I’m speaking metaphorically – and then I’ll (probably) be caught-up enough to finish (and post) an essay on a topic I’ve been thinking about for several years: how the collapse of the Soviet Union contributed to the present-day political and socioeconomic impasse in the United States, and how the this conflicted reality offers several clues as to how its problems might be resolved. Meanwhile here are two more vital links to keep you entertained while I am off chasing the Greenback Dollar.

The first link, to a cogently disturbing report in The New Republic, warns in very specific terms of the growing Chinese influence in Africa, even linking it to the genocide in the Sudan:

...China's march could scuttle Washington's efforts. In a searing 581-page report, Human Rights Watch recently argued that Chinese companies are complicit in Khartoum's efforts to displace populations in southern Sudan to clear the way for oil rigs. It also charges that China's oil purchases have enabled the Sudanese government to buy arms--sometimes from Beijing itself--fueling the violence in Darfur that Washington says it is now trying to stem. And who knows how much of the $1 billion in arms that Beijing sold to Ethiopia and Eritrea during their 1998-2000 war has migrated over the border into Sudan?

The rest of this well-researched, frightening (and surprisingly pro-Bush) analysis, which should be read by every spook on the Central Intelligence AgencyÂ’s Chinese and African desks, is available here.

Next and last comes a link to an equally spooky speculation that grave mischief is again a-brewing in Central America, complete with an ominous threat to Miami. I canÂ’t help you evaluate it because IÂ’m not familiar with the writer (though the on-line publication itself seems to have a reasonably good reputation). HereÂ’s the link. I provide, you decide.

Posted by: Loren at 07:10 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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STILL TOO BUSY WITH bill-paying freelance work to spend adequate time with this blog – six articles to finish and the deadline now only nine days away – so I am once again going to take the busy man’s out. Here’s a link to another blog, The Anchoress, who is one of the very best (unrecognized) writers on the ‘Net. Her work is always insightful, but yesterday she set out some especially cogent observations about liberals and liberalism – conclusions with which I mostly agree but which are so well written they would be worth reading even if I disagreed vehemently. (Scroll down to “God Bless Christopher Hitchens”; I recommend “Master Bullies” too.) Then I am going to direct your attention to a truly astonishing piece in Editor & Publisher – astonishing because of its suggestion E&P is finally beginning to practice genuine diversity. Click here; you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

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