Opinions, art, debate
It’s deeply bizarre that people would demonstrate against being returned to Mexico by waving Mexican flags.
There are few movements as devoid of reason and logic as the open border movement. One would think that people would try to argue that America is their home, they should stay because they love this country. But no, the exact opposite message is sent.
For people who are wondering why Trump is punishing Canada with tariffs, I want to post this short video where the current Canadian Prime Minister is debating the future Prime Minister. It’s all in there, in their own words. The future Canadian leader is explaining “why now, why is Canada punished more than China,” all of it.
This is the money voted by the Congress, signed by POTUS, so where is it? We all really want to know where it went.
We’ve been talking about this for a very long time but is it finally going to be investigated?
The terrible crash at the DC airport has still not been adequately explained. The Black Hawk pilots were tragically incompetent, and so were the air traffic controllers. I’m shocked that there are people who are trying to justify the pilots by rolling out their experience and how well they performed in school. My students often claim that trying hard should matter more than the results of said trying but we all know they are kids who will grow up and learn how life really works.
Instead of being quiet and apologetic, families of the Black Hawk pilots are pouting publicly how extremely professional and successful their relatives were. It’s possible and commendable to love relatives who committed great evil but it needs to be done quietly. Bragging that your relative who murdered 60+ people was in the top 20% of cadets is unconscionable.
Another thing that is impossible to understand is why there was a Black Hawk flying among passenger aircrafts at all. If its visibility is truly as bad as everybody says, then whose brilliant idea was to fly them there at all? This all needs to be investigated in depth.
This the actual Handmaid’s Tale of our times but cosplaying ladies have zero interest in this. Just like the #MeToo crowd was deathly indifferent to real sexual abuse.
And this is the only corner of Europe that still has the will to live. The rest of Europe is destroying itself.
Tara is still silent. She’s staring down at the spot on the floor were Kalima began her labor. She’s thinking about something Denver told her, that one time when he was giving a woman a prenatal exam, a few weeks before her due date, and he put his fingers through her cervix to feel if the head was engaged, he felt a tiny hand curl around his finger, through the sac. She’s remembering the day, just around this time last year, when she first felt that fluttering in her stomach. She was three months pregnant then.
I have read Joyce Maynard’s books all the way back to her very first novel Baby Love, and I finally know why I felt compelled to read everything she’s ever written. Maynard was supposed to be a conservative writer. Everything she was and felt was conservative. But how does a writer remain conservative if living a life of complete isolation in the woods like JD Salinger is not an option? First, you have to make a living, and that often means writing for the periodicals. Today, Maynard could have become a conservative mommy blogger but in the 1980s and 1990s she had to write for the left-leaning press. You also end up becoming part of the literary scene, and again, there’s no place for conservatives there. You can hold your own as a mature, authoritative writer but as a very young woman, you are doomed to having to parrot lefty lines if you want people not to shun you.
Before all this happened, though, Maynard wrote her first, most sincere novel that is a hymn to motherhood.
“A man never really knows what it is to love a woman until she’s had his child.”
I can’t remember reading anywhere else such an exalted literary description of breastfeeding as I did in this novel. This doesn’t mean that Baby Love shies away from the heavy physical toll of motherhood. The novel describes everything honestly but does it from the point of view that motherhood is the pinnacle of existence.
Right now, for instance, Sandy may be upset about Mark coming home drunk. The artist and his wife (his friend? Why did he call her his friend?) may be having some kind of troubles… Tara may be living in a house full of bad vibrations, with a mother who, at this moment, is banging on the bathroom door saying, “Nothing but grief, do you hear me?” But the main thing is, all of these people have their baby, or they’re going to have their baby. That makes everything else seem small.
Baby Love is not a happy-clappy novel. Maynard’s characters live in a world where sex has been cheapened, women are degraded, and babies are cast off at will. The only people who manage to revel in the joys of bringing life to the world are members of a hippy birth cult from Georgia and a couple who thoughtlessly aborted and now pine for a child.
She has begun to understand—though she’s still nine months away from being a parent—why it is that people with children are often so conservative.
The novel was published in 1981, and Maynard shows that a terrible rift had occurred between women who pine for babies and men who no longer know what their role in the arrangement is supposed to be.
There are characters in Baby Love who don’t want children but they are monstrous, perverse. The worst one of them preformed an abortion on a woman, killing her in the process.
There are technical flaws in the book, and you can see that Maynard was inexperienced when she wrote it. Some of the chapters are very short, and the narrative feels choppy. Other than this, however, Baby Love is Maynard’s most talented work because she wrote it before her brain was marinated in treacly wokeness.
There’s been a fascinating debate going on between JD Vance and a former British MP Rory Stewart about the Christian concept of love. Vance says that one should first take care of one’s family, then one’s friends, then the community, and so on. Whoever is closest to you comes first in the hierarchy of caring.
Stewart disagreed that there should be such a hierarchy. Christian love, he said, should be borderless and flat. You should love a sufferer on the other side of the world exactly as you love your own child.
I’m not a theologian, and my perspective is based not on profound readings of Church authorities but on what I observe. During service, fellowship meals, prayer circle, and confession, the priest always returns you from the far-flung to the immediate and reminds you to be humble. Discussions of world problems are very discouraged. The message is, “work on making yourself a little better, strengthen your family, do something for your parish family. Do what’s real instead of flattering your hubris.” I’ve seen our extremely gentle priest cut people down pretty abruptly when they started going on about intractable problems outside the immediate.
Loving faraway strangers is extremely easy because they aren’t annoying. If you never meet a person, they can’t get on your nerves. Loving the actual relatives, neighbors and coworkers is very hard because they get daily opportunities to drive you nuts and use those opportunities eagerly. I donate to charitable faraway causes very gladly and often. But that’s extremely easy in comparison to the effort it takes not to retaliate against a really annoying person at work.
Seraphim of Sarov, one of our greatest saints, said, “save yourself, and thousands will be saved around you”. He also said, “establish yourself in God, and then you’ll be helpful to others.” People don’t work on improving themselves because hubris blinds them. Every tiny victory over our ingrained tendency to act shitty is precious but it’s hard. It’s so much easier to buy an indulgence and consider oneself a good person.
An understanding of how this works can only come from actual religious practice. Everything in church is about the practice of humility. And that’s wonderful because we suffer from overinflated egos that know no boundaries and expand in a boundary-deprived fashion. The rise in mental illness we keep hearing about is exactly this, the ego that tries to subsume the world because it doesn’t know there’s a place it should actually stop. People who are not religious meditate, do gratitude journals and pursue grounding practices precisely for this purpose. Grounding yourself in the immediate is such an instantaneous relief to an overblown, overheated ego.
So yes, we could all do with a bit more humility and a bit less grandiosity.
I want to reiterate that in academia I never saw anybody with any intellectual weight use email pronouns. Ever. Not once. Pronouns are the purview of either secretaries or academics who can’t get published to save their lives. It takes an effort not to offer productivity advice to colleagues who use pronouns in signatures. Pronouns are a surefire stand-in for “published nothing since 2007”. Everybody knows this and everybody acts sensitively towards the pronoun crowd.
Academics got everybody else to do it but won’t do it themselves because it’s pathetic.
There’s also no Santa. And – brace yourself – no Tooth Fairy.
I know, this hurts but we need to stay strong and bear life in the cruel, cruel world without Santa.
Christmas elves are totally real, though.
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