Day: March 4, 2005

So the Imperium has released Martha Stewart. Now what?

I know no one who states the case better:

“Lest we forget: She was jailed for making false statements, not under oath, to Federal Officers. One of those statements was to protest her innocence of a crime she had not been indicted for, much less convicted of. Even more interestingly, it turns out that what she denied doing was not a crime whether she did it or not. So: for denying, not under oath, doing something that was not a crime to begin with, she is sent to prison at great expense to her and considerable expense to the Republic. Are we all safer?”
–J.E.P.

Just so you know. Defying, even politely, the minions of our rulers is grounds for imprisonment. Protest your inocence of a crime the feebs don’t even intend to pursue and cannot prove? Fine. Go to jail.

We are no longer a nation of laws and rule of law, if people can be jailed for simply not being humble and bowing to petty bullies. And let me be clear: I don’t particularly care for Martha Stewart. Her manner and the obsessions of her life just give me a 9figurative) rash. But that’s not the point. Being an irritating, arrogant broad isn’t a legitimate reason to imprison someone, anyone. Unless you’re a feeb functionary and have the power to make it so.

What i do not understand is the jury that was stupid enough to let the feebs pull the wool over their eyes. Well, yes, I do understand it. The sheep are stupid enough to be ruled by dogs.

Arggghhh! I hate injustice, even when practiced against an irritating broad like Martha Stewart.

But now, she’s out. Sorta. Wearing electronic chains, as it were. Quite some few bucks leaner, and after many, many of YOUR tax dollars spent harrying her.

Makes me wanna hold a tea party in Boston. But make the “tea” by dunking feebs. Won’t do it, of course. I have more scruples and a higher morality than that. Just think of the polution. *shudder* Feebs contaminating the water. Not good. *sigh* Have to give that idea a reluctant pass.

See? Once again the feebs get away with another crime against humanity… (Yeh, Martha’s—barely—human.)

Sometimes childhood memories ought to be refreshed…

The post I made earlier wherein I did a riff on C.S. Lewis’ “Men Without Chests” (which means both more and less than the meme Hanson cited), spurred me to take my lunch time and reread the essay.

*whew!* Lewis really lays the barbarism of our age bare! This brief clip illustrates but one (perhaps close on to central) problem with so-called “public education” in these ever more and more homogenized States:

“St Augustine defines virtue as ordo amoris, the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded that kind of degree of love which is appropriate to it. Aristotle says that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought. When the age for reflective thought comes, the pupil who has been thus trained in ‘ordinate affections’ or ‘just sentiments’ will easily find the first principles in Ethics; but to the corrupt man they will never be visible at all and he can make no progress in that science. Plato before him had said the same. The little human animal will not at first have the right responses. It must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likeable, disgusting and hateful In the Republic, the well-nurtured youth is one ‘who would see most clearly whatever was amiss in ill-made works of man or ill-grown works of nature, and with a just distaste would blame and hate the ugly even from his earliest years and would give delighted praise to beauty, receiving it into his soul and being nourished by it, so that he becomes a man of gentle heart.”

Indeed. The cultural and moral and ethical wasteland that is our popular culture owes much of itself to the destruction of a sense (and appreciation) of beauty and finding pleasure in good things that “prison for kids” (AKA “public schools”) seems bent on doing at every turn. It seems as though those who design, fund and run our “prisons for kids” do indeed intend that the end product be the “trousered ape[s]” and “urban blockhead[s]” Lewis decries. It must be so, because despite more and more money, despite ever louder railing against the methods and procedures that continually turn out more and more of this debased product, the so-called education establishment is determined to continue to do more of the same.

For more money, of course.

Thus is one foundation stone laid in the war to destroy Western Civilization: coarsen the youth, bend them to depravity so that they cannot even see things of real value as having value. Enslave them to the accretion of stuff as the only “true” value?regardless of that stuff’s worth: junk CDs filled with non-music; clothing that is “old” and “worthless” as soon as some trousered ape on MTV wears something less attractive and more worthless, but “new”; bigger house (to put more stuff in?); better car (more “bling”?another worthless criterion), etc. The new materialism: valued junk.

And where is Beauty, Honor, Justice, Love (no, not those animal slaverings pop culture misrepresents as “love”)?

Ahhh! That’s all relative…

I found The Abolition of Man, which includes “Men Without Chests”* essay and others, online here. I strongly recommend reading (or re-reading) it. Much of his writing therein is eerily prophetic.

(BTW, “Men Without Chests” includes as essential the idea: men without hearts… For a heart that has only the shallow draft of modern dulled sensibilities is no heart at all and provides nothing for the chest to hold or protect… What use a chest in that case, anyway, eh?)

Or perhaps not

(Wherein your humble—ha!—author emulates J.E.P. “It’s a daybook.” It’s not well organized or well-edited. It’s just stuff that occurs to me to jot down. Notes, to myself as much as anything else.)

One of the best reads of my teenage years was C.S. Lewis’ Abolition of Man. I was lucky it was included in an addendum to The Great Books, or I might not have read it, even though I was already familiar with some of Lewis’ other books (The Narnia Chronicles and the space trilogy).

At any rate, recently as I was reading an interview Arthur Chrenkoff did with Victor Davis Hanson, I was reminded of the first essay in the Lewis book (Hanson made eliptical reference to the meme birthed by Lewis’ “Men Without Chests”). Of course, my mind, being what it is, came up with a vision entirely at odds with the meme, though strangely complementary to Lewis’ thesis…

“Men without chests”—sure, that describes well the majority of men in our society who lack manly virtue (while embracing every manly and/or every effeminate vice), but is also brought to mind women who attempt to be the “men with chests” they seek to supplant or need to supply.

Two different things, those, but both equally destructive. On the one hand we find femi-nazis who thump their ill-constructed-for-thumping chests in ape of manly agression and on the other women who—very necessarily—take up the slack for the wusses who ought to be men in their relationship (marriage, family, whatever).

“Women with chests” really ought to comjure up some other image than that of either twin-turreted spouts of vitriol or strapped-in-the-harness workhorses. But with men mostly abdicating manhood, women will fill in the void of both manly vice and manly virtue while those who ought to be men slink off into a corner and form their various boys’ clubs.