Thank your hysterical neighbor

Dear M,

Idaho has moved back into "Stage 2" of a coronavirus lockdown.  Modified, they say.  It could be worse.  Other states have mask mandates, stay-at-home orders, holidays are canceled, limitations on informal gatherings, church bans, gym bans, bar bans, closures of all kinds of small businesses -- the population divided into "essential" and "nonessential" workers.  Large corporations and pot dispensaries and liquor stores, the big spreaders of diseases both temporal and spiritual, are left open.  

The Exodus (or: Giuliani vs The Machine)

Dear H,

Rudy Giuliani says that Dominion, the software company that ran the elections in our swing states, is actually a front company for Smartmatic.  The reason this is important is because Smartmatic is a company based in Venezuela; and beyond this, a company known globally for throwing elections.  The Washington Post and other outlets are calling him a liar.  But the outlets also called Joe Biden the President, despite the fact that massive lawsuits, in Pennsylvania and Michigan, over unconstitutional measures and voter fraud, could easily throw the election for Donald.  They know it and won't say it.

Random thoughts on being good

Dear H,

David Hume once wrote that in order for something to be really felt on a moral level, it had to have three aspects.  The first is that it had to be beautiful.  This aspect has entirely to do with our instincts.  A God-thing you're born with.  As in, you see a beautiful action and you like it and that seals it, like watching a curvy woman walk, or smelling an apple pie.  Thus you see a man push a stroller out of a car's way, at great personal danger, and you just like him for it.  

Life advice from the left-wing

Open up your border
And get rid of the police
And get morbidly obese.
Disarm yourself and
Make sure all the felons can vote.

The reactionary Hispanic

 Dear T-,

I was raised to think of myself as Hispanic, but in retrospect, I was trained to worship like a white man.  My mother was from Honduras but she might as well have come from Mayberry.  Back "home," our family history had been difficult.  Lots of great people but even more hard times.  People had been beaten up, tortured, gunned down, and kidnapped.  One of my relatives had been shot in the streets.  Another had been forcefully conscripted into the Honduran army.  At the time fighting the guerillas was desperate, and the government was stealing random teens right off the streets, like kidnappers.  He made it out, but lots of people didn't.   To go to the theater or the billiard hall was to risk your whole life, and parents in the know advised their kids to stay away from them.  

Our problem with the presidency

Dear M,

Paul Johnson says, in his biography of Washington, that in 1789, the only monarch with powers as wide as the President's was the czar.  All the other ones were hemmed in by regulations.  Johnson doesn't go too far into detail about it; but why take his word when we can see it right in front of us?  In the last eight years we found the President can put grown men into little girls' locker rooms; that he can pay enemy states hundreds of billions in ransom cash; that he can flood our states with millions of Africans and Middle-Easterners; that he can make or unmake the border at whim; that he can grant citizenship to illegal aliens; that he can pardon scores of drug dealers; that he can veto almost every bill; that he can station troops in any town; that he can put off the payment of payroll taxes; that he can effectively bribe the unemployed with hundreds of dollars a week; that he can bomb people in countries we're not at war with; that he can spy on the next presidential candidate and walk away scot-free; and that, according to Democrats, he can lock the country down and not allow anyone "inessential" to run a business.

To save America, defund the schools

Dear H,

I've just been informed by a friend that school's closed this year, but you can send your kid to daycare -- in the closed school.  For money.

There are online classes, of course; but why?  They're terrible for children; and we know, now, that the disease itself isn't the issue.  Matt Walsh reports that kids are three times more likely to die of the flu than COVID-19.  So we know schools aren't being closed for their safety.  We heard that childcare costs hundreds a month, per kid, which we know parents can't pay, since many of them are too poor.  We heard that teachers are essential, and then were told, by the teachers, that they're inessential.  LA County told us they'd take the children back -- if we could stop all "police brutality," and adopt universal healthcare, and mail-in voting.  I would personally rather not send them.    

In these troubled times

Dear H,

I don't think we're built for the news.  At least not the way it's run nowadays.  Just think that, maybe not even six-hundred years ago, we'd hear only snippets of the world.  Not a constant barrage of injustices and outrages every second of the day, but hearsay, only here and there.  The weight of the world was for rich men and kings -- heavy is the head that wears the crown.  Today we have the weight of the crown but not the substance.  We have the knowledge and lack the wisdom, the will, the ability to do things.  When men knew all they wore crowns made of gold.  The Age of Information?  From this view, more like a crown made of thorns.      

We were engineered by God for ignorance.  There is too much to know and too much to fit together and too much to emotionally process.  So we brought ourselves out of the grime and found out that "omniscience" was a bitch*.  We ate the fruit of knowledge and were surprised God evicted us from the Garden of Eden.  

For the love of God, stand up for yourselves!

Dear readers,

How do you feel in the third week of black lives mattering?  That is, now that your white friends and fellow churchgoers, parents and coworkers, siblings and grandparents, lovers and spouses, your friendly neighborhood policemen, your founding fathers and saints, your ancestors and your children have all been mercilessly kicked, slandered, threatened, in many cases surrounded and violently beaten -- now that the police who protect you in major cities have been defunded; now that your businesses have been looted; now that Merriam-Webster says it's impossible to be racist to white people; now that you've been called names, made fun of all over Facebook and Twitter, told you're a problem because of your skin color; that you don't deserve what you have; that you're a robber and an oppressor; that you have it easier than millionaire celebrities like Don Lemon and Lebron James; that the future doesn't belong to you; that no matter how many black squares you posted and how much sympathy you showed and how much you marched, you are still never enough -- how do you feel?  Do you feel like you're on top of the system?  Do you feel like Black Lives Matter is about all races living with equal dignity and freedom?  Do you feel like these leftists can ever love or respect you -- really?  Do you think that at some point you'll ever be clean in their sight?  Not guilty -- for the sins of others?  That you and your children won't be sacrificed at the first chance?  That every step they tread on your rights, your dignity, your very body, isn't a prelude to another? 

What do they really want?

Dear H,

Imani Bashir, writing for the New York Times, says that Living abroad is my way of prolonging my black son's life.   It's actually the title of the article.  She says she's been living abroad for years now, in places like Cairo and Poland and Malaysia and Wuhan (yes, that Wuhan), and that the bills are piling up and they're eating at her soul.  Still she won't move back to America.  She sees her son's face in every black person the police kill*.  She's stuck in Florida for the moment, and waiting for the borders to ease up so she can go anywhere else.

Apologies to President Obama

Dear H,

Trump Derangement Syndrome is real, but we on the Republican side have yet to develop an immunity to Obama.  Nothing the man said, in office, would please us.  And how could it?  We could sniff his hijinks out for miles.  He was throwing us under the bus on the first day.  Going on apology tours and bowing to enemies.  Talking about how he was going to personally roll back the oceans, about Americans clinging to our guns and our religion, about how the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.  He said Obamacare would be debated publicly and then rammed it through behind closed doors. 

Portrait of a people-pleaser

Dear H-,

I believe in nothing less than in "self-esteem."  Everything I am, I am through others.  So I think I'm a good lover.  But what do the ladies say?  So I think I'm a good builder.  Do people like living in my houses?  I live not as myself but as myself in a series of relations.  When I come in contact with others I become a new organism -- not me, but me plus; a new hybrid.  We mix and mesh and out of this new recipe comes a new flavor.  We judge these relationships as an art critic judges a painting.  The more tasteful the gist of it, the more frequent the tastefulness, the higher my rating is.  I see others not as objects to be gotten over, but almost as expressions of myself -- each and every one of them draws parts of me out into the open.  They make my definition possible.  The object becomes me as I interact with the object.  I like or dislike others as others make me like myself.  If they draw nothing good out of me, I want nothing to do with them.    

The Great Shame

Dear M,

When I was a small boy I was told about a coming judgment.  Mom said that God was the judge, but what stuck with me more forcefully was the idea of how He would do it.  There would be a great TV in the sky with all our deeds on view -- all of them, large and small -- and everyone would see what kind of life we lived.

Can a leftist write great history?

Dear Hannah,

Richard White says he wrote The Republic for Which it Stands for the money, and because he said it he deserves our praise.  He could have written anything else in the preface and saved face*; anything like he did it for minorities (which is likely), or for his children (which is unlikely), or for the plain fact that what he wrote about was interesting.  For his own sake he could have even just kept his mouth shut and avoided a preface.  But Richard White didn't; and what we got is a history book, concerning Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, that not only fails to appear politically impartial, but which in its partiality is also extremely interesting.

Notes on the pandemic

Dear H,

At some point last week, in the middle of this pandemic, I realized the inevitable.  The chance that my personal favorite barber would remain open into the foreseeable future was nil.  This led me into one of two options.  I could resolve to just get on with life, and when worst came to worst, to shave my head.  But the angel with golden flowing locks on my shoulder said hell no.  He kicked into high gear and gave a suggestion.  "Why not call her up and work out a deal?"  So I did.  She was in the barbershop but not working, according to the receptionist, so I asked if I could speak to her.  When she answered, I got to the point.  "Look, Kim, I'm a vain man.  I can shave my hair any time and do fine, but why should I when I've got you?  So just in case the shop closes down, how about I get your number and we arrange something ourselves?"

Black Elk Speaks: a review

Dear M,

Black Elk Speaks is supposed to be a spiritual classic for American Indians.  Not just for his tribe, but for all of them.  It's so far advanced in this direction that now, almost a hundred years after its first publication, it's beginning to get its own schools of theology, and a horde of uninspiring idiots argue about its more obscure passages.  But this is how it goes.  Inspiration leads to confusion leads to policy.  The Spirit gives life, and the letter kills it. 

Black Republicans

Dear H,

Candace Owens, Queen of Blexit

In America, a black intellectual only joins the human race by joining the right wing*.  I had almost said when he votes Republican.  Nearly all the other black "thinkers," their writers and other disseminators of ideas, excluding maybe Oprah Winfrey and Barack Obama, are too caught up in the black question to join the rest of us.  Thus the majority of their works, if not all of them, are focused on black people and the police, or black people in history, or black people in business, or black people in politics.  There's no Thomas Sowell, who's known primarily for his works on economics, or Voddie Baucham, known primarily for his lectures on Jesus and Homeschooling, or Ben Carson, known primarily for his work on brain surgery.  Instead we get a slew of one-trick-ponies and racial narcissists, the likes of Ta-Nehisi Coates, Brittney Cooper, Shaun King, Al Sharpton, James Baldwin, Jesse Jackson, and Michael Eric Dyson.  The only way a black man gets ahead in the Democratic Party is by cutting himself off from the rest of humanity; by whittling himself down to something so small, so specific, so niche, that it can only appeal to black men such as himself, or to white people looking to glorify themselves for loving black people.  A huge market, really, but the biggest one only to spiritual and intellectual midgets.

Some Athenian euphemisms

Dear T--

My position on r------d people* is exactly the same position on everyone else: the good ones I keep, and the worst ones I hate.  I've had more than one r------d enemy, in fact, and some of them are so brutal, so treacherous, and so incapable that I find no use for them; and I think the best use for them is the exercise we'd get running them out of town.  There are autistic people I've enjoyed, day after day, and been happy to see, and others who threatened my friends.  Some of them are sweet and others are rapists.  Some of them are silly and other ones are spoil-sports.  But J, some say, they can't help it!  Can the rest of us?  Are we really so different from them?  Are any of these categories I mentioned things we don't experience ourselves?  So what if we can think things through -- many of us still make bad decisions, rotten statements, and horrible messes, especially when acting in groups**.  We give the handicapped a pass because most of us could do better.  But I doubt in many cases we could.  A personality is something set in stone.  A sourpuss, a loser, a cheater and an idiot will be what he'll be, and many times was born that way.  God has given us our trajectory -- in most cases, our job is to act it out, not to change it***.

A commie worth reading

Dear H,

I have great respect for Peter Kropotkin, not so much for what he preached as for when he preached it.  He was born an aristocrat in 1842 but ended up an activist by 1872.  He went from a gilded cradle to a filthy prison.  His landmark treatise on anarcho-communism, The Conquest of Bread, is well-written and innovative.  It's worth a read, but not before you've read Rand or Mises or Bastiat or Hayek.  It would have made a commie of me, but it's too late -- I've seen how the trial runs went, and I prefer to not die in a gulag. 

Midsommar: an analysis

Dear T,

Before getting along with this essay I want to give my recommendation.  If you're a devout Christian, or a grandma, or a respectable person in general you need to see the Horatio Hornblower series.  It's full of great morals, top-notch acting, lovable characters, and lessons about life.  For the rest of you, the Christians-in-name-only, the teenagers with no direction, the jaded hipsters, the people who saw The Rocky Horror Picture Show without wincing, and other people who don't like their souls spotless, I recommend Midsommar*.  The rest of you can stay away, and if you dare to disregard my warning, you deserve what you get.  This thing is filthy and disturbing, and if you watch it you can lay the blame anywhere other than my feet.  Blame Satan.

So you want to be a manly man?

Dear M,

Smiling on the front lines

I don't consider watching sports a necessary prerequisite to manhood. Depending on the sport, playing them is more like it. I consider knowing sports stats and knowing Pokemon stats to be exactly the same man-stat.  So for those of you who keep calling my Man Card into question every time not watching football comes up, here are a list of things I think make a man really manly, and sometimes even godly.  I fit a good chunk of these, but I want to fit them all.

The rise and fall of Mark Driscoll

Dear H,

Up until Mark Driscoll I had never considered getting a full-time job.  I was a playboy and a loser at heart, had never read a serious book, and had lived in a kind of perpetual childhood.  Then I heard him speak.  A stocky, round-faced working-class type, he caught me off guard because he was funny.  A pastor who was actually funny.  Unheard of, in those days, and in fact most days, as Christianity and humor are in an eternal fight to the death (neither sex nor laughter are mentioned in Heaven).

On the death of Cato

Dear T,

This week we've been waiting for World War 3 to start.  At least that's what everyone's been telling us.  It started about a year ago, actually.  A little event nobody even noticed that turned into more events and got us to here.  And if you want, you could say it started a lifetime ago.  Donald Trump put the squeeze on Iran last year because they put the squeeze on President Obama.  They put the squeeze on President Obama because the Ayatollah took over in 1979.  He took over because Mohammed's followers couldn't agree about who takes over for Mohammed.  And Mohammed only took over because nobody could decide who really spoke best for Moses.  So you could say this was four-thousand years or so in the making.

In defense of Hollywood

Dear H,

Ricky Gervais, hero

I hate the poem First They Came, but I have to admit it has kind of a point.  Once you go down some roads you have to ask who's next?  Thus once Ricky Gervais told the actors to shut up (hats off to him), why not the professors?  Once the professors, why not the musicians?  Why not the cashiers, the mechanics, and the nurses? Why not the street-sweepers and garbagemen, the bus-boys and Uber drivers, the mail-men and the waitresses?  None of whom, by the way, have anything to do directly with politics, or are specialists in any field related to government or social policy, and few of whom, in the end, have ever read a serious book on economics, or law, or civics, or foreign policy. 

In defense of Pope Slappy

Dear M,

I'll confess up-front, for the sake of dramatic effect, that I think Pope Francis is a slimeball.  Nearly everything he does in the news makes me sick.  We caught him washing Syrians' feet.  He told us to let them all in -- an act which even the Dalai Lama, out of respect for Western Civilization, is against.  The next he says we can't judge perverts, while likening Donald Trump to the baby-killer King Herod.  He hates the death penalty, and even life imprisonment for murderers.

I could go on here, but unnecessarily.  He's for life if you're a lowlife.  If you're doing well, or a patriot, or innocently wealthy, or you just won a war against the Hun, you'll be last in line for a foot washing.  Like nearly all leftist Christians, he says to love your enemy and care for the outsider.  Like nearly all leftist Christians, he forgets that this is subjective, and that the "outsider," the "sinner," the "woman at the well," the person you're "not supposed to judge," is the person you are personally offended by.  He ought to eat his words and wash Trump's feet.

The gay mafia comes to Idaho

Dear T-,

A truce has been called between religious folks and gays.  Or at least that's what we're being told.  The Fairness for All Act, legislation intended to give rights to both Christian conservatives and transgenders, has been put before the House.  For the latter, it proposes that "sexual orientation" be added to the Civil Rights Act, making it hard to discriminate against anyone on a basis of their sexual identity.  It gives sweeping protections in housing, business, banking, and "pubic accommodations."  On the other hand it grants protections to anyone in a business with less than 15 employees, and exemptions to anyone in a so-called "faith-based" organization.  Deseret News says it resulted from a dialogue between LGBTQ+ groups and representatives from the Seventh Day Adventists, the Mormons, the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, and other such suit-and-tie respectables. 

The first Protestant

Dear H,

Huston Smith's Buddhism: A Concise Introduction is a suspicious book.  Or at least it is to me.  I've known for a long time now that if you want to learn from a great man, and especially a spiritual man, you've got to go to the man himself.   None of this What Plato Taught nonsense -- you skip the interpreters and go right to the Republic.  A failure to do this means you never get to the man.  It means you have him filtered through the soul of a most-likely lesser man.  Probably some second or third-rate regurgitator, with his own opinions on the maestro's opinions, some handy insights that will probably mislead you, and a host of things he'll want to sweep under the rug.  Hence the fact that Jesus is beloved by feminists, capitalists, anarchists, communists, Muslims, libertines, puritans, social justice warriors, the Christian Identity movement, slave owners, and abolitionists.  Each of them claims Him as their own, and each of them has some idiotic book explaining why.  This is probably why Jesus hasn't come back yet*.

OK Boomer

Dear T,

So far as I'm aware, none of the big leaders of the Greatest Generation were members of the Greatest Generation.  Sure, the Greatest did the grunt work -- but was Patton one of them?  Was Churchill, or Eisenhower, or MacArthur, or Roosevelt?  The Greatest Generation's chief work during the Great Depression was the suffering required, many times as dependents, to harden them for World War 2.  No great accomplishments were made by them until then, and almost no notable philosophy.  The great films we know from their period today, such as It's a Wonderful Life, The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, and such, were made (mostly) by men significantly older than them -- men who did the grunt work in the 20's and the 30's, and many of whom, in the case at least of Frank Capra and Michael Curtiz, were born in Europe in the 1800's.  The Greatest read Hemingway and Faulkner, but were neither Hemingway nor Faulkner.  Walt Disney, born in 1901, barely made "the cut*."

On being friends with Democrats

Dear H,

I complain a lot about Seattle, but the truth is I've enjoyed my time here immensely, and now that it's time to go I'll confess I'm going to miss it.  Not all of it, but lots of it.  Some of even the worst parts of it.  It's a terrible place to raise kids, but if you've got the spark of life in you it's a great place to turn into a man.  I was an effeminate self-proclaimed socialist when I arrived here, and I'm a die-hard right-winger now that I'm leaving.

In all truth the place is a train wreck; and it was the policy towards bums that made me rethink the concept of empathy; the insanity about gays that made me fall in love with gender roles; the disrespect for whites that made me celebrate my whiteness; and the praise of outright defects which made me rethink the limits of kindness.  There were so many shitty ideas I was forced to rediscover great ideas; and maybe I could have learned these things in a red state, but I doubt I'd have learned to value them so dearly.  It was the sheer insanity of this place that made me wake up.

A birthday gift

Dear T,

I spent a few teenage years pretending I didn't believe in God, but the first time I actually didn't was at church.  I was around 30 years old.  I remember because we were in the middle of a song and it felt like the air had been sucked out of the room.  Not like someone had left, but as though everything had left -- as though a building crammed full of singing people could be empty.  I have no way to explain it other than saying the vaulted ceiling felt higher than usual.  It was like the cold darkness of space had intruded into the room, and up meant up forever and ever; that there was nobody there to hear us, or to welcome us at the end, or to care for us at all.  I was next to my wife and my parents and it was the most alone I ever felt in my life.  I was singing but I wished I was dead.

Old codgers and young dreamers (Rambler #196)

Dear M,

Regarding the human condition, Samuel Johnson is the best philosopher I've ever read.  I make no exceptions.  A thousand times better than me.  I've been telling my fans this for years and nobody believes me, not only because nobody has ever heard of Samuel Johnson, but because Samuel Johnson wrote in Johnsonese.  They think somebody who's been forgotten isn't worth remembering, and beyond this if they do get to him, they can't get past a few old-fashioned sentences.  So what I've decided to do is take this incomparable man and "translate" him into modern English -- my English.  A well-read working-man's English.  That way my fans aren't only forced to meet him, but I can be sure, if they can't understand him, that it's their fault and not mine.  I have done all I can to help you payasos -- God bless you, good luck, here is a real genius.

In defense of Greta Thunberg's awful parents

Dear H,

I read in one of Orwell's As I Please articles that Fynes Morrison, an Englishman back in 1601, said melons grew everywhere in Britain -- a statement repeated fifty years later by the poet Andrew Marvell.  Melons, as Orwell noted, didn't grow in England in 1944.  It was just too cold there, and if Morrison hadn't also mentioned grapes being everywhere too, Orwell was disposed to think that by melons he meant pumpkins.  But climate change is real now and has always been real; and the earth, from sometime around the Industrial Revolution, had been cooling.  On the issue of climate, we think we're the centerpiece but we're probably more like the fleas.  I have my doubts, but probably.

The book that liberated nobody

Dear H,

I hate to use the word fascist, not just because it's unfair, but because it's uncool.  Like literally, diversity, equality, and bigot, it's a word that used to have a meaning, and even a useful meaning; but eighty years of use by tricksters, slanderers, and dimwits has run it into banality, and now when I hear it it signifies much less about the thing being spoken about and much more about the person who's speaking it.  Winston Churchill was called a fascist for wanting to fight the fascists.  George Orwell, in another one of his passages which ought to have been famous, said he'd heard Gandhi, Catholics, Boy Scouts, and pet dogs called fascists; and that the term meant anything you didn't like, and beyond this most usually a bully.  This was at the beginning of the word fascism, and it will probably be this way to the end.

On not being famous

Dear M-,

Anyone who's been writing for ten years and isn't famous has got to ask himself why.  There are lots of answers and most of them, excepting the most likely one, are easy.  You can say, for instance, that most people have no taste, or brains, or attention spans, or that they're too rigidly "moral" to appreciate fresh thinking, or too young and inexperienced to understand you, or that you're just not that good a writer.  Tons of easy excuses and one tough possibility.  Truth is there are too many writers and most of them are bad; and even if someone likes you there are too many other things they like, and unless you slap them upside the head three times a day, brilliantly or not, they're going to forget you.  The secret to a strong internet following isn't brilliance, but consistency.  And my writing is anything but consistent.  It has also at times, I admit, been horrible.

Nerds with guns

Dear T-.

My position on breeding is as follows: I'm for it.  Not for everyone, but definitely for me, and ultimately in excess.  I think this is the position most honest and healthy men have at heart; and the idea that everyone should have one wife is a nice idea and a safe idea -- but certainly not a fun idea.  The problem with polygamy lies in what you'd do with the other men.  You get one Solomon and 999 guys are left horny and angry and jealous -- and what do you do with the majority of your women?  Sure they're all yours; but are they really?  Do you really have the time to sweet-talk and caress all of them enough to make them really love you?  And can you keep enough of an eye on them to bar them from the other 999 horn-dogs?  Too much work if you ask me.

Making small talk

Dear T-,

One great irony of being human is that small talk is hard work and talking heavy is great fun.  Small talk is either foreplay or outright avoidance.  A no-man's land of the soul, or maybe a demilitarized zone -- barbed wire up and land mines galore; a tip-toeing around the true-self and a putting on of costume.  People are very bad at it because (thank God) they're very bad at lying.  It takes too much imagination to be a small talker -- to talk about things you don't want to think about and in truth aren't interested in.  You have to think first of all about something that's neutral for at least two of you.  This means on some level you're afraid, and that you don't trust the other person; but you can't show it.  So the longer it goes the more nervous you get.  The more chance you have of slipping up and looking bored; or that the tip-toeing goes wrong and you run into a land-mine; or that you run so far and so long into banality that you wonder if the other party wants to ditch you.

On being half white

Dear H,

What does it mean to be white? Being half Hispanic has led me to think lots on this subject, and I've found that to answer in the positive is impossible.  Almost, anyway.  Like all the racial categories, it only comes into focus when you compare it with the other races.  The Native Americans were culturally as different as the Chinese and the Italians until we showed up and made them feel similar; and France and England hated each other until Islam arrived and made the Catholics shake hands -- occasionally.  To be a race isn't so much to be a race as to not be the other races.  It's an act of identity that only happens when someone else is even stranger.

Who are the brain police?

Dear M,

We talk a lot about public censorship, but even if you live without the public you'll end up with the private.  Simply put, there is no time and place where a man is free to violate the terms of the society he lives in.  Each of us are thoroughly and subtly policed by our family, friends, neighbors, customers, lovers and coworkers; and the invisible pressure they apply can be braved momentarily, but not entirely, and certainly not for eternity.  You buck too many of their norms and you pay for it.  They retract their goodwill from you and as a social animal you're finished.  A free-thinker has thus got to be a charmer, or wealthy, or useful.  If he bites more than he licks he'll be left out like a stray dog. 

Scout's Honor

Dear H,

Not today, thank you

I like to sidestep Christ's commandment let your yes be yes and your no be no by being a Man of Maybe.  M.O.M. is the acronym and it fits because it's unmanly.  I freely admit this; but I don't have the ego or the willpower to go around making promises and keeping them, and I won't just break them, so instead I don't make them.

When a man says yes or no to something, or even worse -- gives a promise, what he says in effect is that he guarantees something will happen against the scheming of the whole universe.  A bold move for a tiny man.  So I like to throw in a caveat: weather permitting; if I don't have anything else planned already; barring flood, or sickness, or famine, etc.  A whole slew of things I don't and can't see coming and know I don't see coming; a realization of my finite nature -- a non-Muslim's en-shallah.  James the Apostle's Lord willing*.

Arguing on the internet

Dear T,

I read somewhere in Orwell that Sir Walter Raleigh tried to write a history of the world -- while he was locked up in the Tower of London.  As he was penning away in a fury, two workers outside his cell window got into an argument, the argument turned into a scuffle, and the scuffle ended in a killing.  Raleigh began asking why they were fighting but couldn't get a solid answer; and when he realized he couldn't find out what happened right outside his own window he took his manuscript and threw it into the fire.