The Apotheosis of My Brother

Today I saw the photo of an older man getting punched out in St. Louis. He was part of a group who had gathered around the statue of Louis IX on Art Hill to defend it against a mob who had been trying to tear it down. Many of the group were Catholics, since Louis is a Catholic saint, and they had recited the Rosary. The man depicted in the photo is being mobbed by several of the approaching activists at once. One of them is sucker punching him from behind, about to deliver a solid right hook to the man's face as he bends to protect himself.

When I saw the photo, my first thought was: if only I could have been to take the punch for you, brother.

The Breaking of the Left

Then all the Captains of the West cried aloud, for their hearts were filled with a new hope in the midst of darkness. Out from the beleaguered hills knights of Gondor, Riders of Rohan, Dunedain of the North, close-serried companies, drove against their wavering foes, piercing the press with the thrust of bitter spears. But Gandalf lifted up his arms and called once more in a clear voice:

'Stand, Men of the West! Stand and wait! This is the hour of doom.'

Tolkein tells us something very important in what Gandalf says from the hilltop here at Cormallen. It draws upon the entire long description in the novel of the forces of Sauron---a coalition in the grip of a madness of hatred against their foe, manifest in a willingness to destroy the other side completely without mercy.

Such a coalition can stay together so long as certain conditions are met. The coalition must be continually assured of victory, and also they must have their hatred pointed at a common enemy. If either of these things fails---if they are no longer assured of victory, or dissent rises in their ranks---then their forces will melt away, as they did at the climax of The Lord of the Rings.

The Left is extremely fragile at the moment. Their momentum in vandalizing property and erasing the American way of life depends on absolute conformity in repeating the slogans they want everyone to say, word for word, and also absolute conformity in whom you are to denounce and to hate.

Eventually all Leftist coalitions splinter as they attack each other and eat their own. The successful leftist revolutions that survive seem to occur only when one tiny faction can eliminate all its rivals even as they collaborate to achieve power.

As long as the Left focuses on the target in the White House and his followers, their coalition has held together. They have defied gravity with the disreality of the news spin supporting them, patching over one outrageous contradictory hypocrisy after another, ever larger and more bizarre to any rational standard. Their desperateness in pushing poll numbers shows how weak they are. It is a go-for-broke strategy to break the will and morale of our side.

It won't work, of course, but they have nothing else to try at this point, except to ramp up the intimidation.

Up until now, it seemed like nothing could break the coherency of the Left. Perhaps that's always how it seems, right before a coalition of hate crumbles. But things are going so fast that the revolution needs more targets than even the deplorable Bad Man supporters can furnish. The haters are hooked on the drug of other people submitting to their will. They've tasted it and they like it a lot. They want more of it.

The Bad Man and his supporters refuse to do this for them. There is no hope of us submitting to them, they know. But their own followers on the Left have demonstrated that they will do almost anything to appease them, and then ask for more humiliation.

This weekend I saw a glimpse of who the next wave of hatred targets of the Left will be: white women.

By this I don't mean white women who are Trump-supporting conservatives. They are already a lost cause to the Left. The rage mob knows that conservative women will just give them the proverbial middle finger again, No submission fix there.

But progressive white women, the ones who have been on their side up until now---that's a different story. White progressive women---college-educated liberals---have been the foot soldiers of the Left  for decades, including lately on social media, where they function somewhat in the same social-conformity role as the moral-enforcing female populations of frontier towns. Without them, the Left would never have gotten where it is at the moment.

The key phrase to look out for, that has been trending, is white savior. It is a derisive term used by haters all races on the Left to indicate the mentality of white women who want to play a significant allyship role in helping achieve racial justice, and who think that they have earned esteem by living lives in accordance with the values in the slogans everyone is chanting. It is exactly these women thought they were being asked to do, and they have happy to do it.

Of course it was indeed what they were being asked to do--up until now. Now it is their turn to be hated for all these same things, and to grovel in submission simply because they had the audacity to think they were doing some kind of good. In the white savior oriented dogma, they are just another form of white supremacy. They will told they are perhaps the worst kind of all.

White progressive women know how to apologize in the correct way for things done as individuals before they knew better. They have learned the right way to repent for being on the wrong side of ever-shifting rules of language and behavior. I'm sorry I wore that shirt, rooted for that team, took that college course, or saw that movie. Now they will be targets specifically because they are white women, and no other reason, because it obscures the prominence of women of other races.

It won't be a soft judgment. There is literally no escape from it. They will be asked to accept that they are the worst obstacle to racial justice, worse than even the conservatives.

The activist voices who have been criticizing white savior women have been around a while, of course, but up until now, the Left has been able to keep them from gaining prominence. Now these voices are taking center stage. They are not going to give up the microphone. They are going to drive home their points.  Trying to appease them will only make them hate their targets even more.

The worst brunt of this will be felt by the white women in Pop Culture, who have been told the future of media exposure, including getting top billing in the Hollywood blockbusters, news anchor desks, and streaming shows, belongs to them. It turns out that prominence was actually racism in disguise. They will need to cede the spotlight of first-tier Celebritydom to others more deserving. Not at all of them will be happy to do this. They will look for support and find none from anyone.

The same situation will play out in petty ways across the country inside corporations, news organizations, television networks, graduate schools, college administrations, public agencies, and above all within political parties. The forgetting, if not the downright repudiation, of white saviordom will be required to stay part of the in group.

The folks within the Democratic Party probably understand it too, and they are hard at work in their punditry labs, figuring out a way to splice the genetic code of white progressive feminism back into the race-centered movement in the War on Trump. They will need some kind of event or twist of the news to make white feminists feel righteous again for their own sake, as white feminists, one that is theirs to own as women, despite being the wrong race. The tricky part is that this must all happen without lessening the intensity of the race-hate furor, the leaders of which will refuse to cede even a smidgen of the spotlight.

It may work, but I doubt it. Things are moving way too fast. The white women who have won their place at the front of the vehicle will not want to go back several rows again so quickly. Of course any white savior women who find themselves in this situation are very welcome to join our side. There is zero initiation process. We don't browbeat you, or make you grovel and denounce anyone. Whatever you feel the need to repent for, when you come to our side, you are welcome to do so. All you have to agree with is the humanity of the people whom you used to hate (that is, us).

The stereotypes you think you'll find on our side have some grounding in truth, as all stereotypes do, but the malevolent characterizations you think are true are mostly creations of the people on your side. You'll find people of all races on our side, and even rainbow flag people too, if that's your thing. Just don't demand to make it all our thing.

Certainly don't have to become an economic conservative, or an acolyte of small government. Some on our side embrace that, but others actually want a muscular government within society. You can still be for many of the Bernie Sanders things, for example.  Almost all of us want legal rules for everyone that all can agree on. We want a government on all levels that remains in obeyance with what the Law says a government itself can do, even if that means we can't do all the things we'd like to do at the moment, that we think might be good for the nation. 

We can hash everything out later, about how things are done, the way people of good faith used to do in government. It's a lot slower than revolution, sometimes as slow as planting a tree that you know you will not live to see grow to maturity, but it is a process that actually works. We can't follow your current dystopian fantasy woven by the redefining of words into slogans-as-weapons, but want to help get to the place you really want to go to.

Some issues may be very hard for you to come to grips with, as they are things you might very much disagree with at the moment, but with which almost everyone on our side agrees. But you are welcome here nevertheless. Few of us will harangue you about those, unless you may a big deal about it, the way a leftist would. You might come to understand our point of view on these issues, even if you don't adopt it right away. You may even change your mind on them too, as many people have done when they left the Left, even as they remain economic populists, and liberals on social issues.

There are kooks and bad apples on our side, as there are in any movement, including our opponents, a fact they would deny utterly, redefining their side to disinclude anyone whose behavior might be deleterious to their self image of wholesomeness. We know about the people on our side who cause trouble. You have never cease to remind of them---the same set of examples over and over, the total of which is less than the number of such examples we could cite from your side in the last month alone, but which you deny complete responsibility for. Don't worry. After you defect to our side, you can disavow all of them immediately. You will want to disavow them.

We generally wish violence on nobody, even the leaders of your side that we cannot abide. It should be noted, however, that many people who defect to our side seem to find a sudden appreciation for the Second Amendment that they never had before.

You might even see the Bad Man in a new light. You might not mind some of the things that used to bother you about him. You might understand his humor, and his unique style of public communication in a way that is appealing. You might see his love for other people and the country.

His rallies are awesome. We're fun, a lot of us, even as we have to speak to other in cryptic gallows humor much of the time lately, knowing what faces us, and knowing what the other side would do to us, if they ever got the chance. Those ropes around the necks of statues---we know full well where many of them would prefer to place them.

We understand that if even after you come over to our side, you might need to keep it  all on the down low for the moment. Those of us who have already outed ourselves will not demand the same of you. We 're so far apart from the mandate of public slogan repetition on the other side. You can still pretend to be one of them, if you need to in public, at work, and even in church We get it. You'll see how easy it is to fool them, painfully easy, even as they could not imitate us accurately to ourselves even to save their lives. They know only the caricature, which is as easy for us to see as the color of the clothes they wear.

But you may want to stand up, even amidst your initial fear, when their intimidation fails to cower you sufficiently any longer. It feels very good, actually, to know that others may look to your example for their own courage.

We're going to win. Over here you'll be on the real winning side for change. You won't laugh at and hate the leftists that you left behind, in real life and on social media. You'll feel pity for them, even love for them, as they scream in hatred at you, and hope and pray for them come to their senses.

All These Sacred Streams, So Little Earthly Time

When I was fourteen years old, there was nothing I wanted more to do on Sunday morning than to ditch church and stay home to watch television or listen to the top 40 music countdown on the radio. Now on Sunday morning I am barely able to juggle the overlapping live streams from churches around North America that I would watch.

Among its many effects, good and bad, the shutdown has produced a golden age for the live streaming of church services. I have wanted to take advantage of this situation, as it will not last forever, and so in my curiosity and obsession, Sunday morning has blossomed into a routine of church that lasts almost six hours from early morning until almost noon. It sounds like a lot of time, but that's less time than I would have spent watching football or classic movies in the past. It goes by quickly.

For most of the Youtube live content I consume---news and entertainment commentary---I don't care if I watch it recorded after the fact. But for church, I prefer greatly to watch it live. Because so many Christian churches have been live streaming lately, Sunday morning is like a banquet laden with too many items to possibly sample. The streams overlap and conflict in time. I'm not complaining at all.

This week I woke up late, not getting out of bed until past 5:30. It gave me just enough time to grab my iPad and go out to the porch. I didn't even have time to say the Rosary.

It was already warm outside. It would be a hot day. Soon I would have to turn on the fan to stay comfortable, but for now  I could enjoy the peace..

The Youtube app on my iPad had fresh notifications, as it always does in the morning. I scrolled to select from among them one of early-morning church services from the channels in my subscriptions.

I make a priority of watching at least one traditional Latin mass during Sunday morning. In the last several months I've followed along regularly using the reprint of the Latin missal that I bought on Amazon last September before I went to.a Latin mass in downtown Phoenix (where I discovered everyone uses the same one I had bought). At the time I went looking for recorded Latin masses online, as I wanted to become familiar with the sections.  Within a few months it became much easier to do this, because of the shutdown.

Even with a missal, however, it is not easy to follow the old rite, unless you know what is going on, because many of the words are spoken almost silently by the priest while facing away from the congregation, sometimes while a hymn is being sung.

Nevertheless, in the last few months I've become familiar with most of the old rite, memorizing the opening lines of various sections. I can usually recognize where we are at any given point. My Latin professor in college in the Eighties was a former priest, and I've come to recognize many of the examples he used in our tutorials to illustrate vocabulary and grammar, pulling them off the top of his head from memory. I can still remember him saying, as a way of illustrating of the future tense,  lavabo inter innocentes (I shall wash my hands among the innocents).

Most people who aren't Catholic wouldn't know that in some ways, despite it being one organization headed by one man, the Catholic Church is like many mini-denominations under one umbrella. Hence the wide variety of types of masses, performed by different orders of priests within the Church.  Each bishop is somewhat independent, having wide autonomy as to what happens in his particular diocese. Nevertheless, a priest is a priest, and a mass is a mass.

Most Catholics my age or younger have never experienced the old rite, since it was effectively banned after 1965, only being reinstated by Benedict XVI. There are more than a few Catholics, including many bishops, who think it ought to be re-banned, even though it is probably the only segment of the Church undergoing rapid growth in the western world. Probably that's exactly why they want it banned again. It has gone from being a tiny subculture to being a threat of some kind.

Yesterday I had gotten up just in time to catch just the tail end of the Latin mass streamed by St. Mary of Pine Bluff, a parish just outside Madison, Wisconsin. Usually I don't mind if I miss this early stream from St. Mary, because for now at least, there are other Latin masses streamed later in the morning from different churches that I can watch. Still I like to experience part of as many of them as possible.

Then at a quarter to six exactly, I used my iPad to bring up the live stream that was just beginning from St. Mark Church in Boca Raton, Florida. It is a large Greek Orthodox church, no doubt serving as the focus of the Greek community there, as Orthodox churches do for various nationalities in North America.

Like the other churches of all denominations, St. Mark been empty lately except for the priests and chanters, because of restrictions from the shutdown. In the last few weeks parishioners have been allowed back, wearing masks and standing the required distance apart from each other in the pews. The priest has to direct the manner in which communion and the blessed bread loaves can be received at the end of the service while complying with health restrictions.

The live stream from St. Mark Church is well produced, and includes multiple cameras that switch from one angle to another as different people chant portions of the liturgy, taking over from each other as they perform the Divine Liturgy of John of Chrysostom, an ancient rite that goes back to the Byzantine Empire. They even have a camera behind the screen, showing action that is usually not visible to the congregation.

The liturgy lasts for several hours and is sung in a mixture English and Greek. It's a delight when I am able to recognize a particular Greek prayer I've memorized, or an entire new Greek sentence from the familiar words in it. I like how the priest in the Orthodox church, after announcing the Gospel, sings (in English) let us be attentive in an ecclesiastic rhythm you might hear in a monastery.

As you might know, the liturgical calendars of the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches have differed by a week from each other dating back to 1582, when the western church dropped 11 days from the Gregorian calendar. Thus in the eastern churches, the various feasts such Easter and Pentecost generally happen a week after the corresponding Catholic (and Protestant) celebrations. If one can straddle the schism, one can enjoy an extended celebration of various festivals in the church calendar. This is addition to the fact that traditional Catholic churches often still celebrate Pentecost and other festivals as eight-day octaves. Most of these octaves have been removed in the post-1965 Catholic Church, with only three remaining.

Shortly after St. Mark's begins, another Greek Orthodox church, Holy Transfiguration Church in Marietta, Georgia begins their own live stream of the same ritual. The streams are very similar, and I sometimes confuse them, although lately I've come to recognize the priests in the two churches.

I have to pick one to follow---yesterday it was St. Mark. One of the well-known features of Orthodox services is that because they are so long, and because attendees are supposed to stand during much of it (with much action taking place behind the screen), by tradition lay people are allowed to come and go during the long ritual, taking extended breaks and coming back in to the pews without judgment. Thus at home I don't feel bad about switching the feeds, or when I want to make coffee or have breakfast.

At seven o'clock exactly, I took a break from the long Greek Orthodox streams to catch the livestream of the mass celebrated by Father Mike Schmitz, the Catholic chaplain at the Newman Center at the University of Minnesota--Duluth. His is a Novus Ordo mass (post Vatican II in 1965), performed in English, and much less formal than the Latin mass.  It is live streamed from the small campus chapel with a simple altar. The live stream has a home-made intimate feel as he faces the camera speaking directly to the viewers. College students do the Gospel and Epistle readings. Following Church guidelines during the shutdown, while Eucharist is being passed out, they put a graphic of this prayer on screen, which one can recite along the college student saying it, in order to make a spiritual communion in place of physically receiving the body and blood of Christ.

As a priest, Father Mike is a charismatic preacher--very friendly and approachable. For years he has been producing regular recorded videos on the Ascension Presents channel on Youtube, speaking on a variety of Catholic and Christian topics. I was a big fan of him even before the shutdown. We watch these recorded videos sometimes in the evening as part of our wind-down  after the news.

This morning---the 13th Sunday of Ordinary Time, according to the Church calendar---was sad for several reasons. As Father Mike had been warning for several weeks, the live streams from the campus chapel were meant only to be temporary. They had already gone longer than they thought they would. Unless shutdown restrictions were reimposed, this week's mass is one was to be the last one to be live streamed this way from the campus chapel. For the rest of the summer he would traveling through the diocese.

No matter what type of mass they perform, all Catholic churches around the world follow the same schedule of Scripture readings day after day. It is interesting to see different priests give sermons on the same Gospel passage on the same day.

This morning the Gospel was the passage in Matthew where Christ tells the disciples that they must love him more than they love even their own father and mother.  Looking into the video camera, Father Mike said that although it is Faith that allows you to go forward confident of salvation, what truly transforms you is love of God---above your love for all other things in your life, including your possessions, your family, and even your children.

Then in the midst of talking about this, he said that this past week he had visited his own mother. He is a from a family of six children. His mother had just received a diagnosis of fatal pancreatic cancer. He described her strength and faith in accepting this situation. As he did so, he was clearly fighting back his own tears on camera.

It was heartbreaking, especially because this week's mass from UMD was the last one I'll probably see from him, unless I go to Minnesota. He mentioned his homilies from various parishes in his diocese would be available on iTunes and Youtube, as they have been. But it will not be the same as seeing them live.

At the end of Father Mike's mass, I switched back to St. Mark in Boca Ratonvto see end of the long ritual, and then watched some of the Holy Transformation stream as well. After that there was a lull in the morning's schedule from until past nine. I used this time to listen casually to part of the live stream from Sourp Kevork Armenian Orthodox church in the suburbs of Montreal, one of two Armenian streams going on at the same time.

As I learned form Google, Sourp Kevork translates in English to St. George. The ritual in the small church there is entirely in the Armenian language, even the sermons, and thus I can't understand a word, although I intend to learn the Lord's Prayer in that language. Nevertheless I find the ritual beautiful, especially the organ music, which is haunting and distinctive in a way that is evokes the ancient eastern edge of Christendom.

At nine-thirty, having usually eaten breakfast, I came back outside to wait for the start of the traditional Latin mass stream from St. Joan of Arc in Post Falls, Idaho, in the panhandle just across the border from Spokane This has been the Latin mass that I try to watch in its entirety.  Their stream is among the least sophisticated of the online operations, clearly initiated because of the exigencies of the health emergency. Sometimes the sound fails, or the feed cuts out in the middle and they have to restart it on a new stream.

I say that I try to watch it, because last week their stream never started. I was worried they had ceased streaming it altogether, but it turns out it was just technical difficulties. Nevertheless, when, in his post-sermon announcements, Father Rapoport mentioned that they would continue their live streaming for now, as the Governor of Idaho had just extended various shutdown rules, I knew the handwriting was on the wall, as they say in the Good Book.

I watched this stream until the very end, after the priest dismisses the congregation with the ancient words "Ite, missa est," from which the word mass comes from. Then after the last prayers, the celebrants file out, and altar boys in white boys return to remove the missal from the altar. The stream continues playing until only the altar is shown.

When it was finally over, I immediately closed Youtube and brought up the Grace FM app on my iPad to listen to the last part of the broadcast from Calvary Church in Aurora, Colorado. They've been doing this for years, long before the shutdown. It's a very abrupt switch from the Latin mass, to be sure.

Except for a Lutheran minister whose recorded Bible lessons I sometimes listen to during the week, Pastor Ed at Calvary Church is my last solid foot in online Protestantism. No matter how deeply I get into traditional Christian rituals, I don't think I could ever abandon Calvary Chapel, as it was in no small way because of Pastor Ed and Grace FM that about nine years ago, during a deep spiritual crisis in my life, I found my way back to Christ. Probably this means I can never be Catholic.

Of course, as Evangelicals, they don't follow any liturgical calendar in the same way Catholic, Orthodox, and even some mainline Protestant churches do, not even coordinating with other churches with which they are affiliated. Each pastor makes his own schedule.

This last part is actually the very crux of what separates Catholicism from Protestantism. More than any particular point of of Luther's theology, or criticisms he had of the Church at the time (some of which the Church has long conceded as having been legitimate), the Catholic view is that the fundamental error Luther introduced in 1517 was the concept that any man could read the Bible and interpret it in accordance with the message of Christ, instead of learning it through the guidance of tradition going person-to-person back to Jesus himself. In the United States, most non-Christians, and even many Christians, do not realize just how Protestant is the idea that one can simply open up the Bible and start reading it without getting it all wrong.

The Protestants of course have a reply to this.  I do not wish to get into the debate, only to mention that it exists.

Thus despite all the other streams I watch, I can still find joy in listening to Pastor Ed's lessons in the Word, going through Bible verse by verse, even as I find myself comparing his commentary to what the Catholic and Orthodox interpretation might be. I don't want to get too fuzzy and ecumenical, or assert too much heresy about how everything you do is cool with God, so long as you're a good person, but I'm pretty sure Pastor Ed and I agree on the important things.

I owe him much. God used him to bring me back to Christ, as he has done for others. How could I not appreciate this for the rest of my life? He is among the folks I retweet on Twitter, no doubt irking the Catholics who follow me. He and I would get along, if we talked with other, even if he wouldn't be on board with my devotion to the Rosary and other points of Mariology. I've come to understand many of the misconceptions folks have about the Catholic Church.  As I've said, at heart I'm still a still a typical Episcopalian after all these years.

Dominus vobiscum.

Fill-in-the-Blank for President

In 1988, I really, really, really wanted the Democrats to win the presidential election. The last two presidential elections before that had been bitter fruit. Three losses in a row, even a close one, would be too much to bear. The Democrats had to win.

I say Democrats here instead of Michael Dukakis, because mostly I didn't care who the Democratic nominee was.  As a political junkie, I found the horse race fascinating, of course, but at the start of the primaries that spring the only criterion I had for the Democratic nominee was that he (or she) be able to defeat the Republican (who turned out to be George Bush).

Lately very Democrat I've spoken about the upcoming presidential election, or whom I've read on social media or seen in a video clip, has embraced this attitude, even the Bernie Sanders supporters. I completely understand where they are coming from.

In the 2016 election, smart Democrats on social media realized this early, like my old friend David in Oakland, who has extended to me the most gracious hospitality over the years in the Bay Area. In the spring, when Bernie Sanders was making his surge against Hillary, David was highly active on Facebook haranguing the Bernie-or-Bust people against launching divisive attacks against Hillary.  Vote for Bernie in the primary if you want, but keep any criticism of Hillary to yourself. It was just helping the other side. Grumble if you will, but be chill and vote for her in November. You know you will anyway. No matter what centrist triangulations she has to make during the campaign to win the battleground states, you'll be more than happy with what you get once she's in power. Whatever you want beyond that can be achieved in the next round. Just get with her. It's exactly what I would have told people, and what I would tell people today, if I were still a Democrat believer.

Most Republicans have long known that unless they choose the right guy, even if he gets elected, he'll fold like a house of cards in the storm of the constant attacks on him. He'll be a slave to media approval of him, bending his knee to the legitimacy of progressive rhetoric to propitiate them even while insisting it has to be implemented in a "conservative way". The rest of the party, even when in the majority, will dive for cover and settle for meager consolations like tax cuts and being rear guard "obstructionists," even as they eventually concede to the progressive will over time.

To Democrats, you just need to get your team in power. Everything else you want can follow fall into place that, if you play your cards right. Biden could literally be in a coma, or running into walls like a zombie, and it wouldn't matter, so long as they think he will win. In fact, it would be better if he were in a coma, perhaps an ideal situation, as then his administration would be completely transparent to the will of the Party and its supporters. No one really wants or needs Biden to be president per se. Behind the scenes, the real president could be someone they actually like and trust.

Going into the 1988 election, we were sure that the conditions were right for a big Democratic year.. After eight years of Reagan, and the blowout of '84, the country would want a change. The Democrats had won back the Senate decisively in the recent midterms. Reagan was taking a pounding from Iran Contra and looked old. Nobody had much love for George Bush or the other Republicans running. The pendulum would swing our way, if we would just let it.

It hadn't helped that Gary Hart, the promised champion who looked to be a winner coming out of '84, had taken himself out of politics entirely by his pride and stupidity. But there were plenty of other fresh Democrats coming up through the ranks, untainted by humiliating defeat, who could project a robust image as a leader. By then, because of Reagan, every Democrat had accepted the axiom that victory in the presidential election required that your nominee looked vigorous on television.

Winning was just a matter of finding the strongest Democrat in the primaries, one we could all agree on, without damaging him too much by forming a circular firing squad, as Democrats were famous for doing.  Reagan We knew that Lee Atwater's Republican attack machine would swing into gear once the general election started. No need to help it in advance.

Because of this assumption that the political winds favored us in '88 no matter who the nominee was, I didn't pay much attention to the primaries, as I might normally have done. I didn't have a television at the time and there was no Internet yet. I got most of my news from newspapers, which I usually read only when I found copies of the Oregonian lying around in the campus bistro.

Moreover, the Spring of 1988 was my last full year of college. It was one of those golden times of youth for me, with so much happening at once that I wanted to experience. Despite my political obsessions, I was distracted from the play-by-play of current events, busy living my life as a 23-year-old.

To be sure, I had been meh about Dukakis, and probably would have chosen someone else if it had been up to me, but he was infinitely more attractive than Mondale had been. He projected a scrappy vibe that we thought Americans would accept in a president. He could actually speak on television without making you cringe from the first words that came out of his mouth. The party would rally around him. I told myself that I was satisfied when he emerged from the pack, fresh and ready to take on Bush.

In other words, I was completely willing to ignore the warning signs about what was about to happen.

The Magic Lantern: How I Started Writing About Movies

Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680). author of Ars Magna Lucis et umbrae.(The Great Art of Light and Shadow). When I joined Facebook in 2009, I used this image as my profile picture for the first year until people I knew complained that they wanted to see my actual face.

Besides being the year I became a commie-greenie, 1988 was the year I started writing movie reviews, an activity that decades later would come to dominate my free time for years on end.

That fall of '88 was my last semester at the little liberal arts college I attended. I'd satisfied all my physics major requirements, so I was free to take any courses in the catalog that struck my fancy, just to complete the credits necessary for graduation, Among the electives I signed up for on a whim was a film studies course in the English Department---the only film studies course they offered that term, taught by the only professor who taught film. As described in the title of the course, it was designed to examine a specific topic within movie history.

As with most young people then, I took great delight in seeing and discussing movies. In high school in the early Eighties it seemed like all we ever did was go to movies, indoors and at the drive-in. It was rare to miss one of the big ones. 

But as for old movies, my viewing history was limited, and included mostly the ones they'd shown on local television late night on weekends, always edited and chopped up for long commercial breaks. In junior high every guy had his favorite old movies they had showed this way. We looked for our favorite titles each week in the Sunday newspaper, to see if the local station managers had scheduled them.

By college, I'd also seen a few art house revivals, such as the Hitchcock re-releases I saw in Berkeley, or some random classics that been shown at the theater at the CSU student center, Beyond this, I had little consciousness of the history of movies, or film as an art form. Movies were just movies---to be consumed with popcorn. I might recognize the names of famous stars and directors of the past, but would not have been able to tell you much about any of them. Only special movie-obsessed people studied this kind of thing, like my junior high friend James, who had wanted to be a film director, and who had gone off to the University of Chicago to take sophisticated courses on the artistry of the cop movies and old westerns we had watched together, and their relation to the cinema of foreign nations.

These kind of people knew lots about movies. I wasn't one of them. But at the end of my college career, in between filling out graduate school entrance applications, I could finally take a course in film history and pretend to be knowledgable about it for a semester.

Our college is so small it didn't even have a proper movie theater, so the class was held inside a little viewing room in the theater building on campus.  The specific topic of course that semester was something that struck me as random and esoteric, but which now seems almost painfully on point in predicting the direction that the humanities would take in the years to come. It was how movies can contribute to the formation of our very concepts of gender.

The professor was one of the cool grey beards of the English Department---thin, soft-spoken and affable. He wore jackets that had patches on the sleeve. He didn't push his views as dogma but delivered his lectures in a relaxed way as if raising open questions for us to consider, as if he himself were considering all these things for the first time, which in 1988 might well have been true. Also he probably knew that first wave Gen-Xers at a small college in Oregon weren't ready for anything more advanced than that.

At the beginning of the course I went to him and almost apologized. I confessed to him I hardly knew any film history or theory, which I suspected might be an unspoken prerequisite for getting a good grade in the course. He assured me I'd do fine. I get a big laugh thinking about that now.

It so happened that I also needed a work-study job, as I always did each semester, to earn a few bucks. By then I was tired of working in the computer lab as I'd done before, so when the professor of the film class mentioned on the first day, as he handed out the syllabus and the viewing schedule, that he needed projectionists for the course viewings, and that it would be a paid work-study job, with no previous experience required, I leapt to be the first one to talk to him after class.

This work-study job is important to mention because it happens that at the same time I was doing all this, I was also working on the staff of the campus newspaper as one of the editors. As for most tiny colleges back then, the campus newspaper was a part-time activity that got busy only at sporadic intervals for a few days, since we went to press every couple weeks at most, and on no fixed schedule.

In case you didn't know, college newspapers, even big ones, are typically desperate for good writing, It might be more accurate to say that they are desperate for passable writing they can depend on students actually writing and submitting on time. At deadline time, it was not fun was to have a big blank rectangle in your page layout because a volunteer student writer hadn't delivered their copy, and was begging off the whole thing because they had a tough midterm coming up. You couldn't do anything about it. Your ad guy might be able to go out last minute and hustle more revenue from local businesses or the administration to fill the empty column inches. If all else failed you had to make up an unpaid "campus interest" announcement to fill the space.

So when it looked like we might be short of copy for the first issue, Adam, our layout and graphics guy whom I had met the previous spring, made a suggestion. He had learned, during the hours we had toiled over the macs and light tables in the basement of Doney Hall, that I was a passable raconteur. How about I write movie reviews for the paper? People liked them. They were a typical stable of campus newspapers, and no one else that semester wanted to take on that role.

I agreed at once. I'd written news and sports stories before, but movies were different. Writing about them seemed special. The idea that my opinions about them would be read and pondered by other people flattered my ego from the start. Of course I was only going to review new movies, the ones in theaters, not the ones in my film class (that would have been way too uncool)

We both agreed that I needed a persona and title for this regular feature. In my film class I had already discovered a weird phenomenon about being a projectionist. The realization was that trying to watch a movie while also being the behind-the-scenes operator of the projection apparatus, and attending to all the things that came with that responsibility, seemed to impart a curious psychological shift in the way I watched the movie itself.

I noticed that being the projectionist necessarily pulls one out of a suspension of disbelief repeatedly in the most brutal way, more so than just being in your audience seat. Much of the time, at least in the old days before modern digital equipment, one had to keep the suspension explicitly at bay, to make sure the viewing experience is seamless for the audience. Simply watching out for the little white dot in the corner of the frame, that tells you the end of the reel is coming so you can switch from one projector to another, was enough to make me feel like I was experiencing the movie in a subtly different way than everyone else in class. This is not to mention the emergency action that one has to take if the film breaks in the middle showing it, which was almost certain to happen at various times in the semester with the 16mm prints we were using, that came every week in the mail in octagonal metal boxes covered with labels from the distributor. This phenomenon of the film itself breaking in the middle of a movie is famously depicted in one of the movies we showed that semester.

At the time I thought maybe this realization was significant and interesting in a novel way. At least it was something I could write about, and when you're young, having something to write about is a big deal. So I decided to call my campus movie review column The Projectionist. In my first column, in audition to reviewing the movie itself, I wrote about the psychological shift I have just described, from seeing a movie from the booth and not from the auditorium (even though I saw the movie itself under normal conditions).

Many years later, and a few years before I started this blog, but by which time cinema had come into its own as an academic subject, I was reading one of my friend Thor's film history books about the origins of cinema. Most people think of the stage theater as the obvious cultural antecedent of movies, and certainly it is part of that, but the author asserted that the origin of movies encompasses many strands of influence beyond that, specifically the magic lantern shows.

Magic lantern shows were a popular phenomenon that went back many centuries in Europe, probably to ancient times, and were present in other cultures as well. The magic lantern shows thrilled audiences with light and shadow effects---phantoms and fantasy creatures---which the audience often accepted as real on some level. The fact that magic lantern shows no longer exist in the age of cinema---whereas stage theater still continued to thrive for decades after movies appeared---testifies to the continuity of the spectacle between magic lantern shows and movies (it was television that killed the stage).

The author of the book mentioned Athanasius Kircher, a 17th-century Jesuit priest who had written a treatise on the magic lantern show. Kircher made a systematic study magic lantern show operators to investigate how they worked. His eventual motivation for writing the treatise was a rational, scientific one. He wanted to show that the magic lantern shows were not in fact supernatural, as many people at the time asserted (including the promoters, for obvious reasons). By diagrams and descriptions, Kircher showed that the effects seen by the audience were ordinary natural phenomena produced by the operator manipulating light and shadow with various types of lantern apparatuses.

When I read this I realized at once that Kircher had somehow written about being the "projectionist" in exactly the sense I had tried to capture in my newspaper column. My realizations about movie watching, at least the spirit of them, were thus very old, having been expressed three hundred years before I was born (let alone by the auteurs of the 1960s).

As with so many things in my life, it gave me great relief when I realized that someone else had done something, or was doing something, that I thought I had to do myself, because I thought that only I could do it a certain way,

That's a recurrent theme in my life.  Almost all the time, when I think it is incumbent on me to express something about the world, it turns out other people have said the things I would say, and they are saying them better than I ever could. Movie reviews are just one example.

I find it funny. that I can't for the life of me recall any of the movies that I actually reviewed for the my column in the campus newspaper. Maybe if I think long enough, or if I looked at the list of movies released that fall in theaters, the titles would come back to me. No way would I dig out the clippings from my files to read them. That would be too much cringe to bear, as the kids say.

By contrast, I was recently able, without much effort, to recall all of the movies we watched that semester in that film class, the ones I actually showed as a projectionist. It took about ten minutes to recall all of them, from the Hollywood classics at the beginning of the semester all the way up to Rainer Fassbinder's In a Year of 13 Moons. This last film, made in 1978, seemed outrageously edgy at the time we watched it, but these days it would be standard Oscar bait in Hollywood.

How many college classes do you remember the entire syllabus for after thirty years? Whenever one of those movies comes on TCM it's like seeing an old friend again. At the very end of the semester, as part of the final paper we had to write, we had reshown the same Hollywood classic move that we had started the semester with, to highlight the spectrum of gender depiction we had studied across the term.  I would suppose that makes it the ultimate Hollywood film about gender construction (Spielberg would probably agree).

It's a classic movie I'd never even heard of it at the time, but has since become one of my all-time favorites. I'm a sucker for it when it comes on TCM, where it is shown regularly. I almost always wind up watching it again. I introduced it to J, who likes it too, for some of the same reasons I do.

In 2014 when I was in Los Angeles, I even got to meet one of the stars of that film while she was being interviewed by Robert Osbourne as part of the TCM film festival. She was well advanced in years by that time, of course, since the movie was made in 1951. I crashed the interview by booking a room at the Roosevelt Hotel and coming down through the lobby during the taping. Normally I wouldn't care to meet celebrities, or to be in the audience for something like this, but given who it was, I could not pass up the opportunity.

There was just a small crowd of people, so it was easy to slip in. Before the star came out, I threaded my way up to the edge of the little stage they had constructed in the lobby and stood beside the camera operators. I faithfully obeyed the director's instructions to us on how they wanted the audience to stand while the interview was happening. During the taping I grinned wide in a photogenic way the whole time because I knew they would want viewers of TCM to see the audience having fun when they spliced in the reactions for the broadcast. I think I wrote about this in this blog at the time, as part of my travelogue. Both Osbourne and the star have since passed away alas.

So in the end my insight about being a projectionist was not original at all, but that's true for pretty much all my thoughts and feeling from my college days, including especially the ones that created the most drama at the time, that I would never want to write about now. And my career in Hollywood wound up being just one role as a walk-on extra on television. That's the way I'd prefer to keep it. It was the perfect role for me. It's not enough to get my own imdb page, but my friend James has one!

When I Was a Commie

The old me from decades ago, the young me, would have loved seeing the degree to which leftist politics has become the universal article of faith among the media and in Pop Culture.

Back in the old days---and even until about ten years ago---I was very much a leftie. Moreover I was super politically minded, much more than most people my age, including even most of my friends who were also lefties then, and who are still lefties now.

Most of my cohort were too busy doing the practical life things, or just having fun and enjoying their youth, to get too concerned about politics in such detail. Even the ones active in party politics didn't suffer the angst I did worrying about elections, and wondering if the D-party would make ground or lose ground in the great long struggle against conservatives. It felt like a life-and-death struggle to me. My entire psychological health was at stake.

Activism was out of fashion when I was in college. It was not cool to care about anything that much. The leftie activist crowd was a tiny subculture on campus, looked on with pity by most kids who just wanted to do their own thing.

I was never a full-on communist. I knew the Soviet Union was not the model for us. But in the way American leftists are in general, I was sympathetic to communist philosophic ideals. I believed the ideals of communism were achievable within our liberal society if the American people just became aware of the problems, and embraced the correct values, the way Europeans had been doing for decades (and as many Europeans in their generosity of spirit never cease to remind us).

I would have loved the opportunity to be an activist like the kids today have on any campus across the country. I would have bought into the whole package. I would have joined in with the protests, and would have become one of those bold voices speaking out on behalf of all the important causes--anti-racism, feminism, rainbow pride, class warfare.  I would have leant my support to boycotts and pressure campaigns for corporations to adopt the proper symbolism in their marketing. I would happily have lived with the knowledge that giant tech corporations were actually on our side in the war, helping to eliminate the toxic voices in opposition to good social values. I would have pointed out that the media is still "right wing" because they tolerate a balance of voices by allowing conservatives to present their case.

Most especially I would be into all the save-the-planet causes. I'd be one of those dour folks who remind everyone how the human species is destroying the earth. I'd frown at jokes about recycling and bans on plastic straws.

When I was college in the Eighties, environmentalism was treated as a quaint legacy of the hippie era. In 1988, during my senior year, I took a class on environmental ethics from a professor in the earth sciences department and got "turned on" to things such as deep ecology. It was well-timed because for various reasons, at the end of the George H.W. Bush administration, environmentalism leapt out of obscurity to become a recognized cause again.  I was delighted with this development, and embraced being a "greenie" for much the Nineties, righteously announcing my views to anyone who would listen.

This perspective gives me a great deal of empathy and understanding with today's youth, which is being pulled into almost universal embrace of leftism through Pop Culture messaging, academic indoctrination, and above all, the desire to belong to the crowd. When one is young, it is the worth thing in the world to be ostracized or excluded. The left knows this principle very well.

There is a fragility in this, however.  My cohort was supposed to be conservative, and in many ways we are. But if I had to describe the center-of-gravity of the ideology of my high school and college classmates (at least I was last exposed to them on social media), I would say it is pretty much the one conveyed by the television show M*A*S*H, which in Colorado was shown every night after the evening news in reruns.

From this t.v. show above others we learned what it meant to be a decent person, and how this was reflected in politics. Conservatives are stupid idiots, we learned. They are almost another species from us, and thankfully they will fade away in time, being replaced by better characters with the right values. Even Major Hoolihan became a liberal by the end of show, having seen the light about feminism. There would have been no way for her to remain a sympathetic character to the audience without that migration.

I can't stand to watch returns of M*A*S*H at all now. It seems to be to be a constant drumbeat of cloying sentimental political messaging. Once you've been deprogrammed, you can never go back.

The pull of this ideology is so strong among my age group that it has pulled in many people who were conservatives back in the day---the people whom I did not understand at all. Former fundamentalist Christians who argued with me over my school newspaper editorials about evolution now are among the first to turn their Facebook profile images into multi-hued pride statements when the moment demands.

The old libertarian crowd---the Ayn Rand readers that I never felt connected to---have also found a way to embrace the suite of leftist ideologies, even as they cling nominally to their copies of Atlas Shrugged. My impression of their viewpoint is that first we need to get rid of racism/sexism/bigotry and heal the earth (because that's what science says), albeit keeping our eye on liberty as we do so. Then we can all rally around smaller government and "Go Galt." And above all we must legalize marijuana--a goal not unwelcome by the left, of course.

But who can blame them for wanting to be accepted as one of the crowd on social media? They were often nerdy outcasts back in the day. It must be feel good to be welcomed by the herd as allies in the war against the foul-mouthed Bad Man and his followers.

Thankfully when you get older, being ostracized by your former crowd doesn't hurt as much, if at all. It makes social media untenable, but one realizes that it is the price of thinking for oneself. To be honest, it would seem weird for me to be in synch with them. The most painful part was disconnecting from them one-by-one, but that is a process that is now pretty much complete.

Besides I know I'm not the only refugee from the old left. Already there are probably clandestine ones that I don't know about. Once you've been labeled the "bad guy" by the crowd, a certain freedom sets it.

Based on what I know about myself, and how my life has gone, I fully expect that in time there will be a stampede away from the current cult of crypto-communist-sympathy among my peers and even the younger generations. It seems unbreakable at the present hour, but things change. Oh, how they change.

By that time, whether this year or years from now, if I am still around, perhaps I will be in a very different place than I am now ideologically. I know I can never be a communist again. Given what I've seen so far, I'm doubtful at this point that I'll ever see scientific evidence and a coherent theory of atmospheric physics that would convince me that something dire is happening to earth because of human activity. But if anything has been constant, it is my ideological evolution over time. At that future moment, having evolved into whatever beliefs I will hold then, perhaps I will be unable to communicate with the refugees from the current left in words that would bring fellowship again, even as they will agree with the current me. But no doubt I'll be able to look back at the person I am right now and empathize with them.

One thing I know for certain from the old days, however, is how valuable it can be, when one is in the throes of ideology, to be on the losing end of a landslide electoral defeat. I look at many of today's young people and think how much they would gain from this type of experience. The worst thing that could happen to them longterm would be to win this election. Defeat---not narrow defeat, but a walloping unambiguous one---would build a lot of character for them in unexpected ways  It would be a true education. It is the kind of wisdom from my own youth that I would wish to share with them.

If I Still Did Movie Reviews

Since I very rarely see any new movies, even streaming ones, I could not go back to writing the type of posts I did when I started this blog twelve years ago.

But if I did ever write about movies, I would write only about classic ones,  since I have seen so many now, and have a good memory of them. And I would wish to write them as well as the Critical Drinker does his videos (albeit with less profanity).

"It's an acknowledgement that every life, no matter how short, or how difficult, has a uniqueness and value that can't be measured."

 (massive spoilers in link)

I confess I didn't get this movie when I saw it in high school. I liked it, but I didn't see the nuances and themes that would be so clear later.  Lived experience lets you see those things. It wasn't until years later, when I read other people's appreciations of it on the Internet, that I saw what I had missed. In 2007 they released a 25th anniversary cut of it, one of the "five hundred versions" that the reviewer mentions. I saw it at the Cinerama in Seattle. Within seven months I was going to movie theaters obsessively, and a few months later I started writing this blog.

Desert: Writing and Release

The heat this time of year means that if I want to follow my normal desert routine, I can only do so early in the morning. By this I mean my routine of taking my tripod camp stool with me in my day pack, and setting up in the Sandy Bottom between the palo verde and the ironwood, and with the metal water thermos next to me, I stare at the horizon and let my thoughts carry me where they will. It is in these moments, and the following minutes, when restless I begin pacing along the Sandy Bottom, leaving a cluster of my footprints in the sand until the birds in the trees and on the saguaro begin to complain of my activity, that I find some of my fruitful mental activity that day. Specifically this time is when the thoughts that must be written down arise---scientific, creative, personal, political, philosophical, etc.---and they begin to take shape in connected sentences and compose themselves into paragraphs.

They must be written down, as I said. I say this because until I write them down in some form, they will keep coming back to me, day and day, and also night after night sometimes I lie in bed, before sleeping, or lately more often, after I rise in the morning.

Writing these thoughts down is the only way to let them escape my mind, at which point they make room for new thoughts, which arise naturally and begin the cycle anew. In times such as thing, when I have the habit of writing everyday, some of the thoughts may barely have time to find traction in my mind and memory when I type them out. Yet I have such a backlog of them, many of them years in the making, that there is plenty of work to do there as well.

What happens if I don't write them down for too long? Eventually they will go away, unwanted, having made their presence known over and over until it is clear they were never going to be written down. Sometimes that's what you want to happen, but in a lot of cases, it seems a sad fate for one's creative activity. Better to write it down, and release it, even if it is in a private journal. Letting it out to the world is a whole different matter. Not all thoughts should be shared. In fact most probably shouldn't, one might argue. Sometimes in my archives I stumble across typewritten pages of my juvenilia from my college years---dead, unrevivable stories about half-formed characters that went nowhere because they were not meant to.

I don't know about how other people do it, but I think most physicists would know what I'm talking about it, in regard to publishing one's works. In fact I didn't really discover this until I published my book years ago. It felt such a relief to put things down in concrete fashion and to move on to other obsessions of thought.

Even the thoughts I'm typing right now are ones that demanded to be written, taking precedence before others. Wait your turn, they say to other thoughts. These thoughts I type now been inside me for a couple weeks now explicitly, but the awareness of what I'm writing now is quite old, as I said, Had I gone out on my walk before writing these down as I am now, then it would been these very words I type that would have occupied my thoughts as I dodged the sun from one shadow to another. Now if I go out on that walk, it will be other thoughts that occupy me. These ones have been freed. I don't know what these upcoming thoughts will be. They might be old ones. They might be brand new, the first time they arise in my mind, having been allowed to be revealed by the peace that is there.

Desert: The Eleven Handle

Today the high temperature here is predicted to hit 110. To people in most of the country this would seem almost unimaginably hot, and indeed it is hot, but here it is not unusual for this time of year.

By this time of year I mean June, which is the hottest month by temperature on average here. The first summer we spent here in Arizona, the temperature went above 110 for days on end, and in parts of central Phoenix it even touched 120 (the Twelve Handle, to borrow the terminology of the financial markets).

As it approached 120, it was big news locally. The airport briefly stopped operation because at that temperature, the air is not dense enough for the wings of the aircraft to provide sufficient lift. In Fountain Hills I went down to the bakery where I would buy coffee and pastries to find a sign posted saying that it closed from the heat. The world simply could not function. Air conditioning begins to fail, among other things.

When one moves to a new part of the country, as we did, one typically has little context in which to place weather events. One doesn't not know what is to be expected as normal. That's part of the fun. It turns out hitting 120 is very rare. But reaching 110, and even a few degrees higher, is not rare at all for June. It would seem a cool year if 110 was not breached on the thermometer.

Above that temperature mark, the ambient air temperature outside, even in the shade, feels much like a sauna (not a steam bath, mind you, but the dry penetrating heat that gives no quarter even as it swirls into your lung when you breath it in). I discovered that if one tries to use an electric fan outside at that temperature, it provides no relief but instead feels like standing next to a barbecue grill.

Being in the sun at all is oppressive. The popular idea of "temperature in the shade" is not really true temperature. The air temperature on both sides of a shadow is always the same. But it feels very different to us, and that is what counts. To go out hiking in this temperature, even covered as I always am with long slacks, a long-sleeve white dress shirt, and wide-brimmed hat, is to struggle against the constant discomfort of the sun. One seeks the next resting place of shade immediately upon leaving another shade, as if one is a special forces soldier creeping along while hiding from enemy aircraft. The trees and saguaros are more than your best friends. They are life.

It is in these moments when having a swimming pool in one's backyard can be tremendously attractive. The water typically feels like bath water then, but at least it keeps you somewhat comfortable---the part of you that is submerged at any given moment. The problem you might not foresee, however, is that the sun reflects off the water surface and can cook you from two directions---above and sideways. During that extremity of heat year three years ago, I went swimming in our pool only with the assistance of my ultralight hiker umbrella to shade me from the sun. I had to hold it at a particular angle to avoid the rays reflecting off the water. They were otherwise blinding.

Yet there is something purifying about it all, at least for me, when the temperature goes above 110. It is the same for me for all extreme weather events, whether hot or cold, stormy or calm. The world enters some kind of special state, when everyone's attention is focussed on natural phenomena outside their control.  Normal rules are suspended. One knows it will be temporary. I certainly would not want to live in the heat of Sonoran June year-round, or even for a short time beyond the season in which it lasts, but I perversely look forward to it each year (J does not at all share this anticipation).

I haven't been outside walking my normal route for several weeks now, as.I might do every day in the winter and spring. But today, since it is finally supposed to reach 110, I might well put on my loose white dress shirt and my big straw hat to make my normal rounds in my little patch of desert,. It's been a relatively cool year so far, so I want to take advantage of what extremeness nature has provided. I don't want to think I let a year go by without feeling its full impact at least for day. If nothing else, it will have been true summer.

My walk will not be long. I will walk at least as much as I can bear, carrying plenty of water even for a short walk.

Soon it will be monsoon season--the Second Summer. Its arrival varies from year to year, sometimes hardly coming at all, but usually by mid July. Last year it came late. The high temperatures decrease slightly from First Summer but the humidity goes up, as the air is carried off the Pacific. The sauna feeling of the air goes away, but it is actually less comfortable, as even a slight humidity at that temperature is not pleasant. At that point I shall dream of visiting cool pines at high altitude.

The End of Television Watching

Of all the developments in my personal life to come out of the recent shutdown, none is more surprising to me than the fact that, after a lifetime of doing so, I no longer watch broadcast or cable television.

Like many my age, I grew up watching television. During the 1970s the television set was turned on every evening in our home. Watching television with my grandparents at their houses, on weekend nights, forms many of my childhood memories. My paternal grandfather was a naturalist, and as a child I thought he and Marlin Perkins were essentially the same person.

At earlier phases of my life I would have thought it impossible to be connected to the outside world without television. Watching the evening news was a nightly ritual, or even more importantly, staying up to see how the late night comedians talked and joked about the news. It was important not only to know the news, but to know what other people thought about it. It seemed the only way to feel as if one were part of ongoing national conversation. I understand well those who are still in thrall to the old media this way, even as I see how narrow and manipulated that conversation always has been.

Television has become the preferred way of bonding with other people, and I was no exception. On the playground of elementary school, one talked about episodes of one's favorite shows, comparing notes about the storylines. It wasn't until I went away to college that I took any significant break from daily watching, and even then I would seek out the television lounges at my schools for anything that was important to watch.

So many hours of my life have been spent watching broadcast sporting events in the physical presence of others, overwhelmingly football.  I treasure the fun memory of watching the 1998 Super Bowl with my roommate in Austin, after many years of us both suffering together as Denver Broncos fans. I still text him about the NFL from time to time.

My late father used to take me to the Iowa State football games on campus when he was finishing his degree and when we lived in married student housing. The Cyclones were usually awful back then and lost every big game, as they still tend to do, especially when they were on television. So the memory of savoring the triumph of my own alma mater at end of the 2006 Rose Bowl as I watched it with him on their living room television in Fort Collins will always be one of my favorites to recollect. He was sitting in almost the exact spot where he would draw his last breath in hospice almost ten years to the day after that. I get tears in my eyes thinking how I almost didn't come downstairs to watch the end of that game with him.

Throughout the years, television (and to a lesser extent public radio) was a companion in times of isolation, especially when I grew into middle age and lived alone. Of course there was TCM, which I watched constantly when I lived alone for two years in Colorado, and which I sought out specifically when I lived out of hotels on the road. I have written extensively about this in this blog. Among other things, it made me feel as if I belonged to a community of movie lovers.

All that is gone, or at least it has been gone for the last four months. We still turn on the television---the old 27-inch flatscreen I bought at an electronics outlet in the Portland suburbs so we could watch the 2014 Winter Olympics. But since March our television has been turned on only briefly in the evening, and it has been configured since that time to receive its HDMI input not from the cable box, as it normally would, but from a Google Chromecast device.

Most evenings we use Chromecast to watch Youtube videos that I have queued up on my iPad (this is a far better method of watching Youtube videos than the clunky Youtube firmware interface that is built in to most televisions these days). The videos are typically ones that I might have run across during the day, which I have saved to the "Watch Later" folder in my account. I should note that I do shell out twelve ninety-five a month to Youtube for a premium account, so that we never have to watch any of the sponsored advertisements that would interrupt these videos when viewed with a free account. It is money well spent.

Almost none of these videos we watch come from mainstream media outlets, except when we watched the daily Presidential press briefings almost daily during the height of the recent health emergency, or when, more broadly, we watch one of the President's many campaign rallies, which we both greatly enjoy, including the most recent one he held in Tulsa.

In my opinion the President is, among many other things, one of the most engaging speakers in the history of media. Each one of his speeches is unique, with long extemporaneous segments in the manner of live television commentary or stand-up comedy. His intelligence shines forth in these moments, as does his manifest love for our nation and all its people, even the ones who detest him and would not vote for him. The audience is always joyous and plays along---the exact opposite of the characterizations I've heard so often from progressives, most of whom cannot stomach watching more than the tiniest clip from one of these rallies.

The President is a tremendously funny man, albeit in the style of straight comedian. To me he is worth all the late night comic pundits on other side combined, the ones who are helpless without a teleprompter of jokes written for them, and who have foundered badly in the post-shutdown world as people have seen the narrow scope of their talent. I pity the folks, even on our side, who are caught up in the President's surface-level persona of the "bad boy" that the President himself has so meticulously crafted, and continues to use so effectively within Pop Culture to so much benefit of the nation and the world. To put it in clear terms, they confuse the President with the character he has played in the Pop Culture Reality Show for the last forty years.  But he has wanted it that way.

Even for these live big-event videos, however, we often watch them not via an established media network, the ones you might think we'd use, and which Youtube pushes in its suggestions, but rather via one of upstart Internet-based channels that have become David-and-Goliath threats to the media giants. Of course if the mainstream media mentions these tiny competitors at all, it is to excoriate them as hate spewers which ought to be banished from the Internet.

Besides these speeches, however, and special one-off events like the recent launch of the SpaceX rocket, lately our primary ritual in the evening consists of my curating a selection of the various lesser-known and "nobody" Youtubers to whom I prefer to give my attention. We tend to watch many of our same favorite users from day to day, to the point of memorizing their theme music intros as one did with a Seventies sitcom. But each evening's playlist tends to have a great deal of variation in the line-up and order, depending on our mood.

Each evening after dinner I sit down and draw out my iPad to play programming director. We usually start with the hard news of the day, often provided by recorded live streams made by some of the emerging alternative commentators. These include the ones on our side, as well as the middle-ground ones who try to be fair to both sides in the war, even if they don't see eye-to-eye with our side. They typically read from news stories on their web browser and discuss it with other people in their home studio environment, or in response to live comments from people watching the video.  From this, as with my Twitter feed, I get a good overview of the opinions being expressed in the mainstream news as well, since much of the commentary is in reaction to it.

After the hard news we usually move onto entertainment news. There is a group of Youtubers I very much like, most of them well known to each other but unknown to the public at large, who make videos about the state of recent movie releases, streaming television services, and other Pop Culture phenomena.  They also report on insider news, leaks from studios, and rumors from production sets. Of course I don't watch movies or television anymore, and we don't subscribe to any streaming services (we tried them but found little we ever wanted to watch besides some food shows) so this is how I keep up with the meta-information about the "Influence Industry" that Hollywood has morphed into.

They also report on computer gaming, and I watch many of these videos as well, even though I do not play computer games at all, and have no intention of devoting even a minute of time to playing them. It happens that computer gaming is pretty much the last industry standing in Hollywood that is making money, and so one can learn a lot about the fast-moving state of our culture through the news about it.  As the Youtubers themselves would explain, this is partly because gaming is the last Hollywood-based industry that doesn't completely hate much of its audience, and (with some notable exceptions) doesn't need to hammer social messages into them at every turn.

Suffice it to say that among these Youtubers I mention, whether hard news or entertainment oriented, they universally fall into the category of folks who, although perhaps not outright enthusiastic supporters of the President the way I am, are at least the type who would not consider me to be an awful person simply because of my politics.

They all know full well what it is like to be constantly attacked by the other side as an -ist or a -phobe for any minor deviation from the progressive party line, until those words lose their meaning. This fact about them disqualifies them from consideration as legitimate sources of opinion by most of the other side, among whom it is an article of faith that anyone sympathetic to my kind of views is to be quashed.

Everyone on Youtube whom I watch in this way is well aware how precarious the situation is at the moment for non-progressive dissent. This includes the knowledge that their channels, and any meager income stream they might derive from it, could be swept away at the whim of the staff of a giant corporation, the management of which has explicitly thrown its corporate weight to the other side of the war. For the moment, the giant woke corporations grudgingly tolerate both the creators and us viewers. All smart Youtube creators on our side, and even those not outright hostile to our side, have made backup plans for the moment that their channels are eventually deleted due to complaints from the Wokenistas demanding conformity to their views. They know the worst is probably yet to come this way, but that in our persistence will be our inevitable victory. In some ways this is the Golden Age. Whatever happens, we will adapt.

After the hard news of politics and Hollywood, I often ease us into a selection of videos about interesting but lighter lifestyle topics. These are highly varied from day to day but include house construction techniques, tiny homes, gardening, homesteading, foreign apartment living, offbeat outdoors adventures, historical cooking, lockpicking, coffee making, personal travelogues, overseas vagabonding, and reviews of RVs and trailers. There is almost an infinite variety of interesting things to watch made by people out there you've never heard of, videos that they have graciously produced and then posted online for the world to see. It feels so much the opposite of the well-known "two hundred channels and nothing to watch" feeling that one gets scrolling the cable television listing.

I often end the evening's programming with a short religious lesson provided from one of the sacred-oriented channels I follow. Lately it is usually a Catholic source, often a priest, since Catholics are by far the best at getting out their message this way, and they draw on a much richer source of commentary than most Protestants will do. Then after this, in the time that we begin preparing for bed, I sometimes put on some music, most often something relaxing and Medieval.

I don't see any possibility I will ever go back to watching broadcast/cable television the way I once did. It feels liberating to let it all go forever. I still love classic movies, for example, and I go through phases of watching TCM and then giving it a break, as I have done lately. I have the TCM iPad app if I want to watch something on their schedule. Personally I think TCM cannot last much longer in its current format in this political environment, so perhaps I'm just preparing for the inevitable end of it that way. If it goes away tomorrow, I'm prepared. They can't hurt me by taking it away from me. I've seen my fill of 1930s movies to last a long time.

A month ago I was looking forward to the return of football season---both college and professional.  J enjoys those too, especially the professional game. She has her favorite players and teams, and we've watched the Sunday night game on NBC almost every week for the past few years. I had been assuming that we would start watching television again on weekends just for this alone.

But not any longer. It is evident that both college and pro football this season will be subjugated to political messaging, and harnessed by the networks to attempt to deliver the election result they desire. So I am happy to join the boycott. They can play without my attention. I sat out entire seasons  before because of the intrusion of politics into the game. This time I suspect the suspension of fandom may be permanent. If the last Super Bowl is the final football game I ever watch, that is fine by me.

Before the shutdown hit, the very last broadcast television we were watching in the evening, besides some shows on Arizona PBS that I don't particularly care about, was coverage of Pro Rodeo on a channel devoted to that. J, who grew up watching much less television than I did, recently became a fan of it after football season ended, and I followed her in cultivating an enjoyment of it.

We especially like the bull riding, because we are fans of the bovine species in general. We provide our commentary for the animals, in voices we make up for them. Of course the rodeo circuit went into hiatus with the health emergency. I haven't missed watching it. Last week J found that the rodeo channel has begun broadcasting live events again, so we may get around to watching some of them. But I feel in no hurry at all to do this.

Meanwhile, I love stumbling across some hitherto unknown and obscure Youtube channel to add my go-to list for the evening's programming selection. Last week I discovered that there are many short videos online, made mostly by zoos or animal sanctuaries, of baby beavers. The wild kingdom lives!

Fiat Lux

Lately reading my Twitter feed is like following the action of a mighty battle in progress across a wide front. From my seclusion, I get a blow-by-blow account across the theater of operations.

Often a given day is dominated by heated discussion of a handful of important news items. In our post-post-modern era, a news item can mean simply a widely-shared social media post made by someone on either our side or their side, and the reaction to it by both sides.

Many commentary threads lately focus on the destruction of public statuary that been underway around the country and the world during the last three weeks. Among my progressive friends with whom I no longer share fellowship is at least one who I know was very much in favor of the earlier wave of statue pulldowns a couple years ago in the United States, the ones associated with the American Civil War. I wonder how he feels about the latest round of demolitions, now the mob has come for one of our mutual heroes, a figure that one would have thought to have been beyond reproach even a week ago. If I had to guess, I suspect he would say it's sad but necessary to preserve the momentum of the greater movement towards justice. But I could be wrong. On an individual level, people surprise you.

I would assert that we can agree upon at least one rule about all this with absolutely certainty: the probability of certain events coming to pass which were previously ridiculed by progressives as arising from a fear-fantasy of their opponents is increasing at an accelerating rate. 

To get a clue as to what the other side will likely do in the near future, look at whatever accusations their prominent figures scoffed at only a short while ago. We just want to remove these few statues that are manifestly offensive to common decency. We'd never, ever tear down those other monuments you mentioned. Are you insane? 

Then later, when the outrageous fantasy does indeed come to pass, playing out with a breathtaking abruptness such that no one could dare oppose it as it happened, some of them will shamelessly say:  Of course we meant those other ones too!

Along these lines, this morning one of the buzzes in my feed was the commentary in reaction to a fresh tweet from an activist on the other side who is prominent on social media among the The-Slogan-We-Are-All-Supposed-to-Repeat-Right-Now Movement. In line with the scenario I.described above, one of the longstanding tactics used by his side of the war is to advocate doing something hitherto considered too outrageous even to be considered, if you had heard it before that very moment.

This is a tried-and-true ancient tactic of the progressives: propose the outrageous and catch the other side off guard. The suggestion itself is only nominally important. The real purpose is to stun their opponents with their audacious confidence. Specifically it is designed to demoralize and confuse the other side, enfeebling any resistance the other side would offer against their own advance to power. The more outrageous the suggestion is, the better.

Of course many progressives, upon hearing this description of their tactics, might well respond, in an I'm-shocked-shocked tone of voice,  that the idea that they do this kind of thing is a paranoid fantasy by our side. This is despite it being explicitly documented, advocated, and studied by famous people on their side, including presidents and presidential candidates. Some of the more innocent progressives don't realize the truth of this, however, or don't want to know it, so their ignorance can be genuine on this point. 

But for the ones who are more aware, the bald-faced denial of this tactic, even while in the midst of employing it, makes it especially delicious to wield as a weapon against us. The ones with a darker nature love the look of disorientation in our eyes when they shatter a new taboo of discussion. They thrive on it. They like to catch us unawares. They want to provoke a deeper level of fear in us, so that we blurt out, even with our expressions: What!? You can't possibly be serious! 

Of course they are serious. Your stammering reaction was exactly what they were hoping for.

The widely shared tweet this morning was in the category of just such a demoralization missile disguised as a shocking beyond-the-pale suggestion. The activist stated as a fresh demand on the heels of their ongoing success at removing public imagery that they don't like, which they suspect might be beloved, admired, or simply tolerated as historically important by our side (I don't buy at all that they are actually offended by these monuments, so I won't even use those words). 

Now that we as a nation have finally been addressing the scourge of colonialist monuments--explorers, founding fathers, army generals, saints, etc---we need to advance to the next logical level, he said. We need to address the oppressive whiteness of the historical depiction of Jesus Christ that is endemic to western art and religion. He demanded that all public images that depict Jesus with identifiably European features, including those inside churches, be removed at once. Of course we all know the manner in which his side removes public monuments these days. 

His tweet got a lot of traction across the spectrum, so one can count it a rousing success. The activist is white, for what it's worth.

The reactions of course were varied. It so happens that in my feed I follow many lay Catholic men who are on our side. From what I observed, the response among this particular Twitter subculture to his tweet was generally along the lines of a cool: We'll be waiting for you. 

I wish them well, the defenders, and will pray that however it plays out it will be peaceful. Our side has become widely aware that even the raw act of defending ourselves from physical attack from the other side is considered an act of unacceptable violence by the mainstream media. 

It should be noted, however, that it's harder to demoralize and confuse the other side, if the people you are trying to demoralize and confuse are anticipating what you are going to say. 

This is one of the huge blind spots of the progressives, and one of the reasons their movement is so weak. They think our side is stupid. Good on them for believing that. Our side should do as little as possible to disabuse them of this colossal strategic error. 

But making them aware of this, even telling them that we know what they are going to do next, doesn't matter much at this point, I think. They wouldn't believe it anyway. They would rebel against any awareness of our awareness of them. At the moment, they are drunk on their own imagined ability to alter history and reshape reality by their collective will. People in the grip of that kind of ego-delusion are generally impervious to anything that might let them become aware of its limitations, often leading to sudden downfalls. If I were to draw an analogy from classic literature to illustrate this, I might say it is like what happens when one sells one's soul to the devil.

For me personally, there were two words in the activist's tweet this morning that caught my eye more than the others.  They were his inclusion of stained glass among the categories of Christian art that are to be extracted from public view by whatever unspecified means. When I read those words in his tweet, I smiled.

Thank you, I said to him, silently. I would have been disappointed if you hadn't included those words. 

Now I shall go pray for him, and repent of my pride.

In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti. 

Sancte Michael Archangele, defende nos in proelio.