On wankery

Dear Son*,

I'm convinced that a major reason Americans are dumber than our ancestors is because so many of us are wankers.  Almost nobody talks about this, but a man's ability to be excellent is directly connected to whether he's spent himself sexually.

Are women as good as men?

Dear Hannah,

At this point it can very safely be said that feminism from its inception was practically a bait-and-switch.   We know this because from the beginning feminists were telling us they were as good as men, and now the arguments from feminists center around the fact that they aren't.

Mothers and other villains

Dear Hannah,

It seems we have a conflict of interest.  Somewhere within the last couple of years you've decided life is intolerable without music; which is unfortunate because I think life is intolerable with it.  In this regard you came about a decade too late.  Sometime around 2008 someone stole all my cd's and I came to the realization that silence and I were better off than I thought; and my theory, to the best of my ability, has to do with the fact that the things coming out of my brain were more interesting than any music I could put into it.

A Room of One's Own: a review

Dear Hannah,

Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own has the honor of being the first time I've heard the patriarchy mentioned as a pejorative and haven't been interested in throwing anything at anyone.  Most other times it's said with imbalance; not as though there were moderate and radical ways of saying patriarchy as an insult, but as though the woman who was saying it was imbalanced in general.  None of that is visible here.  None of the blaming of "rape culture" for a man making a pass or a woman making a mistake; none of the irrational and ignorant calls for an equal wage that isn't equal; none of the blaming society when a woman is fat and she knows it; and none of the crusades against slut-shaming when a woman is dirty and flaunts it*.  Virginia Woolf is sensible; but not in a manly way.  She writes like a woman who's writing for the spiritual greatness of womankind, and by it does honor to her sex.  She's a hundred years old and a breath of fresh air.  If feminists knew where they came from, they would know how terrible the place was where they had arrived.

In partial defense of Cat Stevens

Dear Hannah,

My original response to hearing that Cat Stevens had become a Muslim and changed his name to Yusuf Islam was that he was a traitor.  My opinion, as with anyone else who trades an English heritage for Sharia Law, is that he's still a traitor; but as there are many different brands of traitors out there, what kind of a traitor is the question we ought to be asking ourselves today.

Goodbye to the 68'ers

Dear Hannah,

Anyone who was a child in America during the 90's will tell you how he was repeatedly molested by stories about the 60's.  It was everywhere, back then; the 68'ers having all grown up and many of them gone into cinema to tell about how things were in the good old days of radicalism and free-spirits and new ideas and easy lays with pretty women.  The recollections were more sad than anything else, and every picture you saw had the miserable tint of nostalgia; not as though you were experiencing the 60's themselves, but as though you had missed it and it had been lost forever, along with somebody's youth.

Between the World and Me: a review

Dear Hannah,

Fear is the basis of this book.  Fear of the streets, fear of the schools, fear of the police -- of losing control of one's body, of one's life, of one's family.  Many men have lived and died under such a fear, but few of them so inquisitive and eloquent as Ta-Nehisi Coates.  Many men living in the Baltimore ghetto have oftentimes asked the question why their lives are full of fear; and seeing the white world going on safely beyond them have asked themselves why others' lives aren't.  Between the World and Me is a painful search through race and history and humanity to understand the suffering of the black American.  Like most of us Americans, Coates quickly finds the reason for the suffering.  Like most of our Democrats, his cure is worse than the cancer.

The Fire Next Time: a review

Dear Hannah,

Distrusting both the literacy and the judgment of modern activists, I had originally intended to read Frederick Douglass or W.E.B. Dubois as my introduction to black literature.  But skimming through an informal list of the Greatest Essayists of All Time and seeing James Baldwin rather high on the chart, and also seeing him frequently and reverently quoted by Black Lives Matter activists, I decided to pick up The Fire Next Time and give him a go. 

Some sympathy for the historical American jingo

Dear Hannah,

It's become very fashionable to ask us to walk a mile in a man's moccasins without wondering what it's like to be chased by someone with a tomahawk.  Nearly everyone feels comfortable condemning Andrew Jackson for how he treated the Indians -- and condemning him at least partially rightly.  What they have not felt comfortable doing is asking themselves how it would feel to be born in a country you didn't found, and have a strange-looking group of illiterate, jobless, pagan wild-men show up at your neighbor's house and scalp all your best friends.  Whether or not this is Jackson's experience is irrelevant if this was the experience of many American settlers.  To have a savage at your doorstep, ready to strike at night and oftentimes beyond the reach of the law, would eventually affect your psychology in ways a modern man would consider unfavorable.  The only good Indian is a dead Indian is a cruel thing to say.  But we wonder how many cruelties a man had to witness or hear about (I'm speaking of the unmentionable tortures practiced by many of the Indian tribes on their enemies) before he was capable of saying it*.

Random thoughts on the alleged unpopularity of populism

Dear Hannah,

The fact that a party named specifically after democracy can be especially opposed to populism is a phenomenon too appropriate for the times we live in.  Perhaps no other era in the history of mankind has ever been so interested in butchering the idea of representation; and we know this because the worst governments possibly in the history of the world have almost all recently claimed to be republics*.  History's nastiest theocracies, in fact, soiled with the blood of honest questioners and accidental heretics, are easily less offensive than our leftist "republics;" and if there's anything to be learned in the matter, it's that allowing anyone to label himself is just as much a human right as our ability to judge him by it -- the latter of which, in light of the transgender issue, our leftists are also apparently against.

A bigger problem than plagiarism

Dear Hannah,

When a presidential candidate's wife, known for stumbling though broken English, gets on a stage and plagiarizes a speech, the most important thing to say about her plagiarism is that it probably isn't her plagiarism.  In fact, we may safely say that in an overwhelming majority of cases like these, the speaker was probably not aware that the speech she had given had already been given.  Her job, if she really was more than slightly involved in it, was to simply approve what was written, and then read it to the public.

The Age of Bad Reasons

Dear Hannah,

When a magazine like The Atlantic asks its readers whether they think reason or emotions are currently dominating the public discourse, I'm worried to see what the response is.  Not only because I have very little faith in the people who are giving the answer, but because I have very little faith in the quality of the question.

How to love yourself like a man

Dear Hannah,

Richard Baxter, whom I consider to be the greatest of the Puritan ministers, once wrote in The Reformed Pastor that the likelihood of a deathbed conversion was extremely rare.  The reason that he knew this was simple.  A lot of people on their deathbeds simply refused to die.

So you say you hate the Dark Ages

Dear Hannah,

I wouldn't go as far as the Huffington Post and say that Jesus was transgender, but I feel very comfortable saying that Christians have been arguing that things are what they aren't for a very long time, and until recently were putting people to death over it.  This can be explained with two very casual observations.  The argument over the trinity (at best) is an argument about whether one is one or three; and the difference between transubstantiation and consubstantiation is an argument over whether bread and wine are body and blood*.

Winston Churchill's easy mother

Dear Hannah,

Whether or not Winston Churchill's mother had more than 200 lovers as reputed by George Moore, she had enough lovers to find him favor wherever he went and whatever he wanted to do.  It appears almost as if he owed his career to it.  To those of us familiar with the English from shows like Downton Abbey or the Hornblower series, a sex life as promiscuous as hers seems almost anathema to the stiffness of their manners and the rigidity of their morals. And yet that is the sex life she had.  And if it had only been her we could leave the matter and go on to other issues; but as any act of sex takes at least two, it is only safe to say she wasn't alone.  She was with the king -- and many other prominent men in England, Germany, France, America, and apparently the English colonies.

Never trust a "non-judgmental" person

Dear Hannah,

When atheists first began to undermine the power of religion, I think they meant to keep us from arguing about all kinds of silly things.  As it turns out, we're still arguing about silly things; the difference being that now we are responsible for being silly.  Before the advent of modernism, you could blame your arguing about any number of ridiculous things on the fact that you were convinced that God had said it.  Now if we're caught in the clutches of any trendy and backward philosophy, we say it's because a man had said it.  We've gone from being idiots on accident to being idiots on purpose; and with everything bad we've lost by dethroning the Pope, we have added a hundred more by enthroning our professors.

Why we still go to church

Dear Hannah,

An honest inquirer asked me this week why I plan to raise you in church when I have very publicly left the Christian religion.  And since it might seem insincere for me to leave a religion while being a part of it, even telling the pastor and others that I'm an apostate, I suppose somebody deserves some kind of an explanation.

A defense of my almost indefensible language

Dear Hannah,

A very kind gentleman has written me this week and asked me why I used the term "blow-job" in a letter to a three-year-old girl.  One of the reasons I can think of is that these letters aren't actually written to a three-year-old girl.  They're written to you, of course; but which version of you is a matter of utmost importance.

A waste of Cicero

Dear Hannah,

One time, when Cicero was in the middle of an argument with Metellus Nepos, Nepos attempted to bring Cicero's nobility into question by repeatedly asking who Cicero's father was.  Cicero, knowing that Nepos's mother was easy, replied that I would ask you the same question, but your mother has made it very difficult to answer.

An objection to my latest essay on Spike Lee

Dear Hannah,

My editor (God bless him) has rejected the last essay on the grounds that I was unfair to Spike Lee.  The fact that Spike Lee is unfair to everyone else is absolutely beside the point if my editor was right; and since I believe a sense of fairness is what separates men like me from Mr. Lee, I'm going to give him something of an apology.

Concerning the first 30 minutes of Spike Lee's Chiraq

Dear Hannah,

I just finished the first 30 minutes of Spike Lee's Chiraq, which I had expected to be a very good movie with a very bad message, and was surprised to find that it was a very bad movie with a partially good message.  For years we've been hearing Spike Lee's name in association with cinema, and had every reason to believe it was because he was a good filmmaker.  Now that I've seen part of his film, I realize that I had only heard about him because he's a loud filmmaker.  Like the Black Lives Matter movement, he's someone to be watched not because you want to watch him, but because he wants you to watch him.  It's notorious in the world of entertainment that any publicity is good publicity.  Spike Lee is well aware of this truth, and as he lacks the talent to make us love him, has had the prudence to have us hate him.

Some obscure sayings of Solomon and Franklin

Dear Hannah,

Many of the wisest sayings may be unclear to any but the wise. Reading Ecclesiastes, you might be tempted to take in much wisdom is much grief, and assume that wise people grieve because they know the way things might have been.  Knowing the way things ought to be done, of course, leaves plenty of room for grieving about things going unnecessarily wrong; but no more room than the average fool has when he considers the way he thinks things could have gone right. The nature of ignorance is not to know little or nothing, but to believe we know rightly when we actually know wrongly.  The idiot faces exactly the same emotional problem as the genius.  He says the world is a mess because nobody listens to him, and feels powerless to fix it.

Jesus texting

Dear Hannah,

I'm finally working on my first book, the unofficial sequel to Sarah Young's Jesus Calling.  It's going to be called Jesus Texting, and instead of pretending to speak for Him in the voice of a warm (but ultimately weak) white woman, I'm going text for Him in the style of a sarcastic teenager.

Paul the Apostle

Dear Hannah,

HG Wells once wrote in his Outline of History that Paul was responsible for refashioning the Christian religion.  From what I can tell this seems to be unfair.  Not only because there were twelve actual Apostles to keep him from doing it, but because Paul had a very different mission from Jesus Himself.  The whole purpose of Jesus was to start the Christian religion.  The job of Paul and the Apostles was to figure out how to organize it.

A note on the generosity of Myanmar

Dear Hannah,

I refuse to accept that Americans can be second-place in anything -- even in obesity.  It just means we haven't given it our best.  We've all seen our southerners, and if the Mexicans can beat us in gluttony they can beat us in anything.  There is however one trophy I'll accept in silver, and it happens to be the one we got for philanthropy.  The Charities Aid Foundation reports that we've been beaten by Myanmar, and nothing makes me happier than concession.  The only reason Myanmar ranked higher is because the people of Myanmar are dumber.  The only way we could be better at philanthropy is if the CAF ranked us worse.

Against an excess of positivity

Dear Hannah,

There's nothing more obvious than that Westerners are obsessed with serial killers, but there are many things more disturbing.  We all know why people watch deranged people doing deranged things, and it has something to do with our being a little deranged ourselves.  It also has lots to do with our being very safe.  Few of us can be terrified by aliens and ghosts after childhood, and wars and riots are beyond the general experience; but serial killers are real, and they strike unsuspecting people in unsuspected places.  An obsession with serial killers flows from public innocence; not our licentiousness.  The stories about the kidnapped middle-class bombshell reflect our fear of everything going wrong in the middle of its rightness.  The stories may pollute our souls, but only because the most of us are busy doing every thing but raping people and killing serially.

Thoughts on the Academy Awards

Dear Hannah,

Anyone tolerant enough to have seen the first 20 minutes of Birdman knows that the Academy Awards are a matter of opinion -- and that the opinion is oftentimes a bad one.  And this is because (whatever the people at the Academy Awards would have us believe) there is no other way to judge a film than by the way it makes you personally feel.  There is no science of film criticism, and (whatever Jeremy Bentham said) there will never be an accurate mathematical formula for measuring happiness.  The question on America's mind should never be whether the Academy gave an award to the right movie or people.  It should be whether they gave the award to the right feeling.

A timely rediscovery of Aaron Burr

Dear Hannah,

Nearly everyone knows that Aaron Burr shot Alexander Hamilton, but almost nobody knows that Burr was wanted for murder while he was the vice president.  Few people are aware that Aaron Burr was even the vice president at all; and fewer would expect, given the historically serene nature of contemporary politics, that an American vice president has ever been wanted for murder while in office.  Nixon nearly went to prison for eavesdropping.  Bill Clinton was impeached over a series of consensual blow-jobs.  Because of the Hamilton affair, Burr was wanted by two states on charges of homicide.  He essentially spent part of his vice-presidency in hiding.

Joe Rogan vs the Book of Genesis

Dear Hannah,

People love to talk about Mother Nature, but they rarely capitalize on our being Her children.  They never consider that maybe like everything else in the universe we're doing what She intended -- even in doing the things She never would have done without us; even in destroying what we perceive to be natural.  They call it the state of nature when we haven't done anything to change nature itself; they say that things are natural before we touch them, and unnatural after we do.  The birds can make their nests out of twigs, and the twigs are considered natural whenever they're made into nests -- and only because the birds never think of doing anything else.  A government, unlike an anthill, is considered an alien intrusion; almost as if it was made out of spirits and miracles -- or mutants and toxins.  A condo is considered a blemish, and a hornet's nest a necessity.  We recognize everything as natural except everything we do.  We recognize everything as necessary except what we need.  We secretly believe in the divinity of man because we consider him the only foreigner in the universe.

Well-behaved women

Dear Hannah,

Of all the feminist slogans I've ever heard, one of my favorites has got to be well-behaved women seldom make history, and mostly because they've forgotten to mention that almost nobody makes history.  Amongst women, the number of people who make history is even fewer; and amongst their poorly-behaved, the number is significantly less.

Concerning "Dear White America" in the New York Times

Dear Hannah,

The great irony of a hunger strike is that it does nothing to prove the morality of the hunger striker.  It does everything to prove the morality of the man he's striking against.  Millions of horrible people have been willing to die for horrible causes, and we have only been the worse for it.  Far fewer have been willing to save the life of a suicidal enemy.  And if you do happen to go on a hunger strike and win, the only thing you've done is proved your enemy cares more about you than his cause.  You can only win a hunger strike against a person who cares about people.  You can only defeat your enemy if your enemy is actually a saint.  Gandhi may have saved the Indians from the English.  We can only wonder how successful he would have been against Al Qaeda.

The skeptic's prayer

Dear Hannah,

I don't remember whether it was Chesterton or Macaulay, but somebody is responsible for telling me about the hilarious English skeptic who was about to go into battle and was overheard praying

Dear God, if there is a God, save my soul, if I have a soul.

Nothing more accurately sums up skepticism than this -- not even our modern skeptics.  Our modern skeptics are actually fundamentalists in disguise.  They have very real beliefs about controversial things, and they call themselves skeptics because it gives everyone the impression that they're still thinking hard about them.  In reality they've mostly made their minds up, and so have joined the ranks of the conservatives who want to change everything, the liberals who don't like liberty, the socialists who who prefer a mixed economy, and the Christians who ignore everything Jesus commanded.  The skeptic's name means something, exactly like everyone else's.  It means something it isn't supposed to mean.  It most usually is code for atheist.

Never bring a Christian leftist to the zoo

Dear Hannah,

It's the uncontested opinion of a very small circle of my friends that we will never take a Christian leftist to the zoo.  Aside from the fact that Christians have had a historical tendency to be thrown to the lions, there have been a few cases in which Christians have thrown themselves into the lion's den.  But this grisly reason aside, the reason we never take a Christian leftist to the zoo is purely selfish.  It's because he's more likely to throw you to the lions, and then praise the Lord for making him better than everyone else.

Why we love our guns

Dear Hannah,

Black people are almost the only people in the United States with any history of being enslaved, and almost all of them belong to the party working desperately hard to rush us back into slavery.  It's a masterstroke of irony fit only for fiction  The one thing every free man's got to have is the one thing they openly wish they hadn't got.

Concerning nude photos of Amy Schumer

Dear Hannah,


The important fact to begin with is that I'd never heard of the Pirelli calendar until it became too terrible to ignore.  Now all of a sudden Pirelli is the only calendar -- because until now I've never known anybody who was interested in talking about calendars.  Yesterday calendars were for little kids and the elderly; today they're the talk of the town, like every other thing we took for granted that's suddenly gone horribly wrong (I refer especially to our bathrooms). What Pirelli is -- who Pirelli is -- why Pirelli is, is not the question.  What's wrong with Pirelli is the question.  Feminism is the answer.

Mad Men: musings on character and capitalism

Dear Hannah,

I've heard many people say that with great power comes great responsibility; but I've never heard anyone say that with great responsibility comes great power.  If you want the most obvious example of the former, I recommend watching Spider Man and paying attention to Peter Parker.  If you want an example of the latter, I recommend watching Mad Men and paying attention to Donald Draper.

How to horrify your children

Dear Hannah,

When Time Magazine asked Americans which of our practices would horrify our children, I don't think Cindy Crawford (and possibly even Time Magazine) understood the question.  Her answer was that our children would be horrified by our "otherness" -- or our inability to recognize that we're all exactly the same.  Our children's answer will much more likely be that we failed to recognize which portions of humanity are incompatibly different.

"All life is precious" and other idiotic ideas

Dear Hannah,

There are only a couple of people I know who have taken a stand against the slogan all life is precious, and one of them is me.  The good news for me is that the other one appears to be God.

On the greatness of Rome: a review of a review

Dear Hannah,

Anyone with any brains knows that in order for you to be successful in any endeavor, you have to have two things.  The first are circumstances favorable enough to make your endeavor possible; and the second is a personal ability to take advantage of the circumstances.

In defense of nativism

Dear Hannah,

In the world of demographics, there are very few kinds of people who can fairly be excused of nativism, and one of them is a person who is about to move somewhere else.

Sounders 'til I die

Dear Hannah,

Political bumperstickers may be more annoying than bumperstickers about sports, but in terms of insanity they lag very far behind them.  I've never understood what it is that could lead anyone to place a bumpersticker for or against gay marriage on the back of his car, because it implies it was the only opinion he thought worth me knowing.  You would think that maybe it might be better to shout religious slogans if anything at all.  You'd think that if you had only a single chance to deliver a message to the person behind you, it might be preferable to choose something aimed at the realization of mortality -- or maybe about the possibility of entering into eternal damnation (which many people claim to believe, but are too polite to consider warning us about).

Concerning the use of human shields

Dear Hannah,

Nearly every conflict in the world is morally complex -- nearly every conflict except the one between the Israelis and the PLO.  With many conflicts you're forced to dig through decades (and if you're unwise, centuries) of sins and blunders, trying to see who's responsible for starting it.  The PLO makes our decision easy, because they almost remove history from the equation entirely.  They provoke Israelis with violence, and then shield themselves from damage with little children.

Jesus is Lord -- but only of the rich

Dear Hannah,

If I could change one thing about Christianity today, I would make Jesus the God of the poor.  If this sounds like I've forgotten all the passages about the meek inheriting the earth and camels going through the eye of a needle, some explanation may be necessary.  Whatever the Bible says about the poor being blessed, their blessing may rest entirely on the fact that Christians today aren't placing them under any obligations.  They're blessed because they do inherit the earth; but only in the sense that they don't have any rules to follow, and only because they don't have a God to give them any rules.  The earth is theirs because it's theirs to squander: the Western middle classes are only here to build it.

Two terrible parents

 Dear Hannah,

Marcus Aurelius is known for being one of the wisest and justest emperors of imperial Rome.  The other thing he's known for is being one of the worst parents.

Why women love fall

Dear Hannah,

I apologize that I keep talking about Solomon: it's completely unintentional.  I'm starting to feel like he's the only person I talk about.  And since I've mentioned several times that Benjamin Franklin is my personal hero and several others that Solomon is a screwup, it must seem like I don't understand myself very well at all.

Obama the Christian radical

Dear Hannah,

One of the most frustrating characters in all of Christian history is Jesus, and mostly because you're never really sure whether to take His statements practically.  It might be fairly argued that He was never meant to be taken practically, and that an uncomfortable portion of His sermons were meant to make us humble.  It could be that after all the talk about poking your own eyes out, what He was really trying to prove is that perfection (for you and I) is impossible, and that Christian living is entirely beyond us -- that it might even be suicidal, if we were to take it seriously.  Taken in this sense, the Sermon on the Mount may not be a sermon about behavior.  It may be an attempt to get us to cry "uncle" and ask for forgiveness.

How to change with the times like Sarah Silverman

Dear Hannah,

I wouldn't call myself a fan of Sarah Silverman's, but I'm definitely a fan of some of the things she says.  And when she said a short while ago that comedians have to change with the times and accept political correctness, I don't think it's possible for me to agree with her more.  In fact, when I woke up this morning to check my Facebook I asked myself what day it was, and when I figured it out, I told myself I would have what everyone else was having.

Why Republicans deserve Obamacare

Dear Hannah,

I was delighted to find in the New York Times this week that our hospital capitalists are beginning to wonder what their expenses are.  It's nice to finally have some company.  I've been wondering what my expenses are ever since I moved out of my parents' house; and I've been keeping records of it in red and black ink because I don't want to live in the streets.

You cannot be a Christian and be a Christian

Dear Hannah,

Spend any significant time reading the Bible, and you're sure to have encountered a certain saying that not many wise were called to be Christians.

We have reason to believe that Paul was being serious when he said it.  Not only because the majority of the Christian epistles were written to people who apparently misunderstood everything about Christianity (I refer the reader to the Book of 1 Corinthians); but because even after two-thousand years of reading the epistles, many Christians have difficulty understanding that Christianity and killing children are mutually incompatible.

Miley Cyrus and the post-gender generation

Dear Hannah,

Solomon was never meant to be taken literally, but generally.  And when he says there is nothing new under the sun, we are almost led to believe him entirely -- if it hadn't been for automobiles and the internet and America.  About the rest of it he was right.  You can always expect the best and worst out of humanity, because the loves and hates of human nature have always remained the same, which leads us to do the same kinds of things we've always been doing.  And if he was right about anything in particular, it was about the recurring existence of Miley Cyrus.