Monday, December 28, 2015

The Survival of Our Faith


With thanks to Biltrix.com


Mr James Larson has provided us with a penetrating study on, to put it simply, where we are right now and how we are to cope with it.  It can be found at his blog, The War Against Being.

It is easy in our too-hurried lives to be put off by long, meticulously argued tomes.  But Mr Larson's piece contains so much that is essential to one's understanding of where things sit at the moment (and the remedies for extricating ourselves from it) that it reads quickly even in the midst of such fascinating detail.

Please grab your favorite coffee or tea or other favored libation, and/or your favorite tobacco and allow yourself to be edified and filled with hope by the following piece by Mr Larson, The Immaculate Heart of Mary, the Rosary and the Survival of Our Faith, which begins as follows:


"Let us be honest.
We now experience a situation in the Church (and obviously also the world) in which fear and trembling almost inevitably penetrate to the very marrow of our faith and charity. Virtually no one living only half a century ago could have conceived of a Catholic Church so weakened, stained with moral filth, outwardly compromised in the teaching of Christ’s Truth, and prostituted to the world as we now see before us. And, possibly most debilitating, no one could have imagined that this charge into a seeming hell of philosophical, theological, and pastoral disorientation would be led by a Pope (or Popes).
Christ promised a Church built upon a rock against which the gates of hell would not prevail. Much of what we now receive through our mind and senses testifies against such perpetuity – just as a scourged, spat upon, bloody, and crucified Christ appeared to testify against His Divinity, and His promises, on that day almost 2,000 years ago when He was put to death. It therefore creates a deep uneasiness within our souls which challenges us to the depths of our faith.
In this time of severe crisis, it behooves us therefore to passionately seek the answers to two questions: What is faith – what is the deepest nature of the act by which man possesses that theological virtue absolutely necessary for salvation? And secondly, what is the surest means by which that faith is protected and retained?
The definitive teaching on the nature of the act of faith is to be found in Vatican Council I’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic Faith:
“Man being wholly dependent upon God, as upon his Creator and Lord, and created reason being absolutely subject to uncreated truth, we are bound to yield to God, by faith in His revelation, the full obedience of our intelligence and will. And the Catholic Church teaches that this faith, which is the beginning of man’s salvation, is a supernatural virtue, whereby, inspired and assisted by the grace of God, we believe that the things which He has revealed are true; not because the intrinsic truth of the things is plainly perceived by the natural light of reason, but because of the authority of God Himself, Who reveals them, and Who can neither be deceived nor deceive. For faith, as the Apostle testifies, is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things that appear not. (Heb 11: 1).”
It is quite easy to quickly read over this passage, to render assent to what it says, and yet never penetrate to the depths of the words contained herein, or to their implications.
However, this dogma was given to us by the Holy Spirit at the beginning of this Modern Age which has seen virtually every conceivable deception being thrown at the intellect of man in order to make the Christian faith appear impossible, irrelevant, and simply false. If we are not to be drawn into the vortex of this almost universal deception, it therefore behooves us to look very closely at this definition of our own act of faith."


Read the whole piece here: http://www.waragainstbeing.com/

Saturday, December 26, 2015

Even amidst the rubble, Christmas in Damascus is celebrated



I don't know how they do it but the local people there can still manage to celebrate Christ's birth in Syria.



A lesson for us all, as our media, our government and the zeitgeist spit on us this holy season.

RT covers the story:  https://www.rt.com/news/327064-christmas-celebrate-syria-damascus/



[Yes, I too would prefer not to see Thomas Nast's "Santa Claus", America's replacement of the Christ Child, on display, but at this stage of the game it has become so ubiquitous that I fear only a thunderbolt from Heaven would remedy the situation - a situation immensely worsened by the Inclusionistas of Vatican 2]

Thursday, December 24, 2015

Christmas Eve

"Blessed be the hour and moment in which the Son of God was born of the most pure Virgin Mary at midnight, in Bethlehem, in piercing cold...."

Adoration of the Christ Child by Carl Marr

An English Carol, So Blest a Sight, sung by soloist Donna Carter, with the Robert Shaw Chorale:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-oC_TleKYW0

May the Blessings of the Christ Child be upon all our readers and their families.

Wednesday, December 23, 2015

Cardinal Koch, may we expect a new Joint Declaration?



It is comforting to know that some still honor their ancient traditions, as we can see from the following linked story out of England.  Since this is an important movement of spiritually-motivated people we are confident that Cardinal Koch will soon be composing a Joint Declaration between the Church of Rome and the Church of Stonehenge.  It would be consistent with the oft-stated goals of the Vatican to have encounter and dialogue,

Who can be against that?

https://www.rt.com/uk/326806-stonehenge-winter-solstice-celebrate/

Cardinal Koch, we await your conciliatory prose.  And think of how natty you would look in a deer antler chapeau.



[For a more honest and more entertaining look at the mysteries of Stonehenge we could do no better than to recommend a superior horror film from 1957, The Night of the Demon, (which was released in the US in a cut version and re-titled Curse of the Demon...see the original British version only) which was brilliantly written by Charles Bennett based on a short story by M.R. James, and a film that contains a superb performance by Niall MacGinnins as the evil Carswell.]


                    

A sample of this film's mastery of atmosphere:


        

Tuesday, December 22, 2015

Respighi: The Adoration of the Magi

From his Trittico Botticelliano, with the Philharmonia Orchestra under Geoffrey Simon:



                    

Saturday, December 19, 2015

Yesterday, at Our Lady of Damascus Church in Syria



Just an FYI for our readers. And a reminder that all is not as the worldwide media would have us believe.

President Assad attends a choir rehearsal and wishes his Christians a Happy Christmas



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And this:  https://www.facebook.com/United.Syrian.Republic/videos/1738551319712361/

More info here fromGloria TV via RT: https://www.gloria.tv/media/D7ENLAj8Ybb


Please pray to Our Lady of Damascus, for peace in Syria.

Aquinas reminds Pope Francis






“Mercy without justice is the mother of dissolution; justice without mercy is cruelty.”



Friday, December 18, 2015

A Layman in a Monk's costume

From Gloria TV:

"When Pope Francis was elected, I was entirely positive about the new pontificate, focusing in my commentary on the new Pope’s apparentdevotion to the Blessed Virgin and his respect for the Fatima event, as shown by his request to the Patriarch of Portugal to consecrate his entire pontificate to Our Lady of Fatima. But I confess that at the time I knew next to nothing about the former Cardinal Mario Bergoglio. I did not know, for example, that he was “famous for his inconsistency.”

After two-and-a-half years of experience with this pontificate, however, I was not the least surprised to learn that Francis had named the fulminating, anti-Fatima, anti-Marian heretic Enzo Bianchi as a consultor to the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of Christian Unity. This phony “monk,” a layman who calls himself “Prior” of the phony interdenominational “monastery” of the “Bose Community,” was rightlydenounced by Monsignor Antonio Livi, former dean of the faculty of philosophy at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome, as “substantially atheist” and a “prophet of the end of Catholicism” whose speeches are “a rhetorical device for his propaganda in favour of a humanism that is nominally Christian but substantially atheist.”



Read the rest here: https://www.gloria.tv/media/pMU3RG7HG81

As I keep wondering, where do these nuts and idiots come from?

Tuesday, December 15, 2015

We didn't listen

We didn't listen.  We weren't fruitful.  We did not multiply.  And now the inexorable results.

Our refusal to accept the children that God wished us to have has now brought us to the brink. A quick glance at the current migration crisis in Europe is a revealing look at what our one-or-two kids mentality has brought to us.  We have contracepted, NFPd and aborted ourselves to something bordering on oblivion.

Where is everybody?

The answer is, they were never born.  And so the empty spaces that we have created will be filled by others, sometimes by good people, other times by criminal layabouts.  We had much help in bringing this situation to pass.  For example, in order for Ford Motor Company to have enough workers for their factories in the 1940s, and so that do-gooding, anti-Catholic meddlers like the Quakers could feel good about themselves, a massive migration of southern blacks were brought to the North, and in so doing the Catholic ethnic neighborhoods like those in Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Milwaukee, etc. were destroyed, never to return or revitalize.  But Big Business, anti-Catholic interests and the Quakers had to be appeased even if it meant turning charming and safe neighborhoods into hell holes.  Where once there were charming neighborhoods of Irish, Italians, Germans, Jews, Polish and Russians there are now war zones and destruction.

And now Europe.  Catholicism is dying in Europe, helped by a moribund Church that has all but ceased teaching the Faith, and the results are the same: fewer children.  Now we see who it is who will be filling that vacuum.  The same interests that destroyed the ethnic neighborhoods in America in the 1940s to the 1970s, or their descendants,  are trying to destroy the remnants of European Catholic culture by facilitating an influx of refugees their own wars and policies created.

Our dislike of having children had enormous help from the weird idea called Feminism, a swindle perpetrated by some pretty smart people in order to wreck our homes, drive our women into the workforce, put our one or two children into the hands of uncaring daycare workers or over-taxed grandparents, and suppress the natural longings of the fair sex, transforming some of them into neurotic harridans or worse.  Feminism was also providing fertile ground for the rise and tolerance of the homosexual perversion.

The Money Power knew its target well and acted accordingly.  Anything that discouraged the begetting and nurturing of children was grist for their mill.  They loved the idea of women in the workplace; their cynicism and manipulations over the issue were observed by not a few.  To them it meant a whole new set of consumers, a rise in prices and profits and a reinforcement of a slave mentality.  They wanted unthinking, overworked robots who would not question.  And that is precisely what they got.

It is very late in the day, almost too late.  But this situation can be reversed.

Don't reject the children God wants to send to you.

Friday, December 11, 2015

To Tea Drinkers

(With thanks to the Hilaire Belloc blog)


"Is there no Latin word for Tea? Upon my soul, if I had known that I would have let the vulgar stuff alone."

Hilaire Belloc


(Full disclosure:  I enjoy tea and digestive biscuits usually around 4 p.m.  So there!)

Thursday, December 10, 2015

The Church and the World are afraid to say anything...maybe the environmentalists will?


Nostra Aetate Dept.


From the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem:

http://en.lpj.org/2015/12/10/beir-onah-continuation-of-land-confiscations-and-trees-uprooting/

On land stolen from the Palestinians, ancient olive trees are destroyed



These Master Race tactics of the occupying regime in the Holy Land are all too common.

[For anyone interested, on the sidebar is a photo of olive oil.  By clicking the photo you will be taken to a site that sells the precious olive oil produced by these millennium-old trees, the remaining ones that is.  We use this in our home and can highly recommend it.  It makes a lovely Christmas gift, too.]

Wednesday, December 9, 2015

President Duda, what is more important to you, NATO or your own Polish people?

Already the new president of Poland, Andrzej Duda, who had given us such hope that he would be a tireless fighter for the rights of Poland and her people, is showing the world that being in the good graces of NATO is more important than peace in the region.  It is even more important presumably than the Polish people who elected him.

Duda has apparently joined the US/NATO bandwagon and the sinister cabal of oligarchs behind them.  He is ready and willing to help the US and NATO (or do I repeat myself?) wage their wars of choice and to increase the tensions in the area.  Incredibly, in an act of national stupidity if not national suicide, he will allow nuclear weapons from NATO to rest on Polish soil, and to be fired from Polish soil presumably at Russia, if the US wants, ensuring that the retaliatory strikes that will inevitably come will destroy great swaths of Polish land and people.

What is the hold that the US and NATO have over the leaders of Europe that would make them sacrifice the very lives of their own people against imaginary threats cooked up by Washington? What makes these leaders abandon their people so completely and so quickly?  Money?  Blackmail? What is it?

I believe that Mr Duda is a serious Catholic, though, of course, one that has been undernourished in the Faith like most of the rest of the world's Catholics for the past century.  Yet even so he does seem to take his faith seriously.  If that surmise is the correct one is there no sensible clergyman around that can school him in the realities of the world?  Here is a man clearly willing to see a nuclear weapon strike his land in retaliation for one shot from his country under NATO/US orders.

Satan never sleeps, we know, and so the centuries-old hatreds between Poland and Russia are being whipped up by the Lords of Chaos who cleverly use these ancient hatreds to manipulate people and nations.  The Evil One works through men and he has found fertile ground in certain peoples and countries. But to continue this hatred in the face of today's reality is pure stupidity.  The US/NATO and the other players in this game are happily doing the work of their overlords by stirring up a hatred between Poland and Russia.  It is mind boggling that so many Poles go along with this.

The Russians for their part are not being as helpful as they could by their constant Victory Parades marking the defeat of the Nazis.  Though Vladimir Putin has been notably trying to warm relations between his country and others, there are still those patriotic marches and celebrations that, frankly, could be toned down.  We can somewhat understand why these marches are suddenly popular again: half the world wants Russia's head on a platter.  Be that as it may it would do well if Russia would re-think this strategy of super patriotism.

[A fascinating article appeared here at The Unz Review.  Even more fascinating were the comments that followed, especially several that pointed out the same things about Russia's over-indulgence in Victory parades.  Says commenter "Rurik":
What I would hope for is for Putin to relax his anti-fascist rhetoric that gets all the former satellite states like Ukraine and Poland and the Baltic states riled up and trembling at the Russian bear. Thereby priming them to want to run to big daddy NATO for succor. Militaristic Russian nationalism on steroids may assuage the urge for nationalistic chest beating of the working class Russian male, but at what price?
Russia, IMHO needs more and better reconciliation between Russia and those people who suffered under the Soviet Union. This seems to have happened in places like Hungary, but is a big problem in the Baltic states because of the large number of ethnic Russians who are still there and are having a hard time assimilating. Putin just needs to be an even more impressive statesman than he’s already being. Relax the rhetoric. Tone down the Victory Day Parades. Allow the people to tear down the hated statues of Lenin and the hated Red Soldier (rapist) Stop denigrating the Baltic grandfathers who heroically fought against Bolshevism. It only pushes your neighbors into the fetid hands of Zio-NATO-Rothschild/Fed.

I highly recommend both the article and many of the comments.]

But with all that at least Russia is making an effort at friendship and cooperation.  Poland on the other hand does not appear to be making much effort on its part to bury the hatchet.

What Andrzej Duda might do is to emulate Viktor Orban of Hungary.  Hungary suffered terribly under the Communist Russian boot but has come to realize that Russia is not the Soviet Union anymore and is willing to work together with all nations for the good of his Hungarian people.  Not surprisingly, he is hated for this by the US establishment.

Orban could show Poland the way if she would but take note.  If Mr Duda wishes to continue his fatal friendship with NATO his nation will be just another pawn in the hands of billionaires and may end up a smoking ruin.  Literally.  If Russia detects a nuclear weapon coming at it from any NATO country it is unlikely that Russia will merely sit there and take it.  This is the imminent danger that America has put Poland in (and Germany and Italy and dozens of others), and it is astonishing that the leaders of Poland are willing to accept this danger. [Here is a good article on what NATO and the US are up to in the Balkans: http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/2015/11/30/bfp-exclusive-stoltenberg-in-belgrade-biden-in-zagreb/]

We can only hope that Mr Duda's Catholicism "kicks in" soon and that he rejects the siren song of the Money Power and its agents, who care nothing how many innocent people get burnt to cinders in their quest for imperial dominance.

Pray for dear Poland.

Tuesday, December 8, 2015

Some of us might have this response to Fisichella's veiled excommunication threats

           



Seriously though, the good Archbishop would help himself if he would delve more deeply into Church history.  Legitimate and respectful criticism of the Pope when necessary has been going on in the Church since Christ Himself walked the earth, and has continued on since then.

One doesn't need to bore readers with the obvious historical examples that abound.  Catholics know that when their leaders go astray they have the right and the duty to express their thoughts, even if those thoughts are not the kind that high-ranking Churchmen wish to hear.

Would the good Archbishop be shocked to learn that Jesus Christ Himself said to the first pope, "Get thee behind me, Satan." ?

If nothing else Fisichella's ludicrous remarks indicate that the current Pope's hangers-on (and maybe Francis himself) are in desperation mode.





Monday, December 7, 2015

Confessions of a Potential Excommunicate

The theological lightweight, Archbishop Rino Fisichella, president of the Pontifical Council for New Evangelization (sic), has intimated that those who might be more than a little troubled by some of the odd remarks emanating from the Vatican in recent years might be flirting with excommunication.

Words fail me.

A classic example of the ignorance of the doctrine of papal infallibility is here on full display from this high Churchman.  The Archbishop is saying, in effect, what the defined dogma of papal infallibility firmly rejected: that every utterance from the mouth of the Pope carries magisterial if not infallible dignity.  He is saying that the Popes are now impeccable - that anything and everything that drops from their lips belongs in the Deposit of Faith.  Fiscihella may not realize this, but that is what he is saying.

This confusion over papal infallibility did not originate with men like Fisichella.  Echos of it can be found pretty much everywhere in the Church.  Many are those who confuse infallibility with impeccability.  Sedevacantists and papolaters, who would not wish to be in the same room with each other, also misunderstand this dogma. Both of these opposing groups believe a pope must be impeccable, unable to say anything which is false or erroneous.  Both have a poor understanding of the issue.  If a papolater hears something from a pope that is 180 degrees different from previous teaching he will simply go along with it, secure in the knowledge that whatever the pope says must be gospel since he is impeccable.  When the sedevacantist hears the same 180 degree different teaching from the pope he will say to himself, well since the pope is impeccable and that is clearly wrong, then, ergo, he must not be a real pope.

But Fisichella is carrying this ignorance of dogma to an entirely new level: suggesting in a subtle way that those who disagree with Francis' Modernist fancies may face ecclesiastical penalties.

As I said, words fail me.  But they don't fail the writers over at Voice of the Family:

Archbishop Fisichella, President of the Pontifical Council for New Evangelization, has stirred controversy by suggesting that some criticisms of Pope Francis might result in automatic excommunication.
Archbishop Fisichella made his remarks while explaining how Pope Francis’s new “Missionaries of Mercy” will operate. The 800 “missionaries” will have the power to absolve from penalties previously reserved to the Holy See.
In reference to Canon 1370, which imposes automatic excommunication for “physical violence” against the Roman Pontiff, Archbishop Fisichella said:
“I would say that we need to understand well ‘physical violence,’ because sometimes words, too, are rocks and stones, and therefore I believe some of these sins, too, are far more widespread than we might think.”
Archbishop Fisichella’s comments will be interpreted by many as an attempt to silence faithful Catholics who are deeply concerned by the direction currently being taken by those who hold offices at the highest levels of the Church. Serious concerns have been raised over the last two and half years concerning:
Read the rest here.

The erstwhile editors of The Eponymous Flower call this "insane".  We heartily agree.

The days of silencing the laity with this kind of nonsense are over.  There will be more courageous Churchmen, magazines, blogs, courageous layfolk and websites who will keep talking about these confusing times.  Childish threats such as Fisichella's will not stop a deluge.

Sunday, December 6, 2015

The Teachings of James Martin, SJ and Thomas Roscia






The Mutt and Jeff of Media Catholicism are at it again.


A screen shot of Jesuit Father James Martin's Facebook post on anti-gay reaction to the Supreme Court decision.



"....especially when I think of all the wonderful LGBT friends I have."

Oh dear.

"Love means: getting to know LGBT men and women [aka sex deviates]..."

He's getting warmer.

"spending time with them..."

Uh-oh.

"..and wanting them to be a part of your lives..."

Still warmer.  I believe Martin is trying to tell us something.

I know what he is telling this writer: if it looks like a duck (see above photo), walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck.  "Even after 25 years as a Jesuit [Note to young men with a vocation: you might want to cross the Jesuits off your list.] the level of hatred around homosexuality is nearly unbelievable to me". Someone must have hurt this man's poor, little feelings.  It is instructive that he seems inordinately interested in this particular mortal sin. In addition to his personal "predilections", shall we say, Father Martin is instructing us on what he apparently believes is correct theology.

And then there is the Rosica Guy, master of theology and cravenness:

Rosica(l) and kindred spirit, Mr Cupich of Chicago

"In contrast to the modern-day Pharisees and their followers, true Christians are those who boast in Christ crucified and no other, meaning that they believe that Christ’s work ensured the salvation of all whom He represented and is the only thing that makes the difference between salvation and condemnation. They know that their own efforts form absolutely no part of their acceptance before God. They rest in Christ alone as their only hope, knowing that it is the work of Christ by the grace of God that guarantees salvation."

"....their own efforts form absolutely no part of their acceptance before God"?  Mr Rosica will need to clarify that point a little.  Is "acceptance" salvation?  If not, what does the man mean by acceptance?  Acceptance of what? Their sinful selves?  And who are the modern day Pharisees? Please advise, Father Rosica.  If you are not just spouting gibberish have the courage and the decency to tell us plainly what you are talking about.

In view of these pseudo-doctrinal musings one wonders what vending machine these two clowns got their theology degrees from.

[with thanks to Kitchener Waterloo Traditional Catholic for the Rosica quote.]

Friday, December 4, 2015

Eric Margolis has some advice for Obama the Mad

Concentration of forces is the most basic  law of military science. Victory on the battlefield is won by amassing as many troops as possible at the key point of attack, or ‘schwehrpunkt,’ as it’s known in German.
Unfortunately, the amateur strategists in the White House seem to have been studying social anthropology and women’s issues instead of basic military science.  What they want is, to use the term coined by Russian poet Yevtuschenko, a half war.
This week, Pentagon chief Ash Carter, announced the US  would send about 200 more special forces troops to Iraq and Syrian to fight the Islamic State.  After vowing not to send troops to the Mideast, President Obama has by now deployed 3,500 new US soldiers to Iraq for “training.” 
The best way to lose or at least prolong a war is by committing penny packets of troops.  The US did precisely this in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan – and lost all these wars.   Now, we’re on to more half-measures in the Levant.
President Barack Obama’s first instincts to avoid any more wars were absolutely correct.  But the course of political events and the Paris massacre have dragged him into more rather than less military misadventures in the Mideast and Afghanistan.   Obama’s senior strategic advisors, Susan Rice and Samantha Power, have been steadily providing wrong-headed, even calamitous advice.
America’s mighty – perhaps almighty- military industrial complex, the Republican war party, neoconservatives and imperialists – keep impelling the US towards new wars in Ukraine, Iraq and Syria in spite of Obama’s desire to end America’s addiction to foreign conflicts.  Some of these cranks want a full-blown war with nuclear-armed Russia.

While Mr Margolis is far too kind to our illustrious Emperor his article is well worth a look.  Read the rest of the article here.

Prepared in advance: the Apostolic Exhortation

The internet is abuzz about a story from somewhere that the Synod Apostolic Exhortation was written prior to the Synod.

Did anyone think otherwise?

Those who did are not versed in the ways of propaganda, and the blog that is exploding this supposed "bombshell", as if it were a shocking revelation, might do better to study the mechanics of revolutions.  Revolutions are not spontaneous uprisings; they are generally well-planned and orchestrated with brilliance.  The actors are hand-picked, well-connected and amply financed.

That is not to say that things can't go wrong.  They can.  But as a rule when a PR campaign is prepared by skilled people - and the Synod was nothing but a pre-planned PR campaign - things generally flow along pretty smoothly.  The examples of pre-planning on this farce were well in evidence from the get go: the questionnaires, the press releases, the conveniently leaked information, etc. A thoroughly professional job.

Playing people like violins is the special talent of propaganda artists.

We don't wish to burst any blog's bubble (they are colleagues after all) but this "revelation" or "bombshell" should really surprise no one who has been paying attention.

Monday, November 30, 2015

Pope Francis Demands a Scripture Rewrite


Let's hope not.



From Christopher Manion:

In Nairobi, the pope calls for “eliminating carbon use” on a continent where tens of millions of  poor families burn wood to heat their homes and cook their food.
(He somehow failed to note that Jesus cooked fish for his apostles over burning coals).
Meanwhile, U.S. bishops join their colleagues to demand a binding global agreement on global warming, while  the pope’s feckless Peronist sidekick insists that opponents of such an agreement are evil Tea Party members who make their living selling oil.
Not to be outdone, New York’s Cardinal Dolan, faced with the most antiCatholic administration in living memory, pleads with Obama: “Mr. President, we want to be with you, we want to be strong” – in fact, he insists, America’s bishops long to be Obama’s “cheerleaders!”
Is it any wonder that thirty million Catholics have left the church?
And why would the successors of the apostles want to be “Cheerleaders for Caesar”?

Read the rest here.

Sunday, November 29, 2015

Thursday, November 26, 2015

Jewish blasphemy against Our Lord, again

As one has come to expect, Easter and Christmas bring about the usual Jewish blasphemies against Jesus Christ, and Catholicism, and anything smacking of the sacred.  They occur everywhere, magazines, television, movies PBS "specials", the lot.  I believe it is time we call out these people for what they are: the Jews and those who serve them are mockers of God.

We have been trained, so to speak, to avoid these issues or else to speak in hushed, careful tones about them out of fear of being called names or worse.  The bombardment of propaganda intended to silence Christians while Our Lord is being ridiculed has been enormously successful: only very few will bring up the subject at all.  Regular visitors to this blog know that I occasionally point out Jewish complicity in many of the ills in the world, from the wars and terrorism they are promoting, to the promotion of sodomy, to the attacks on the person of Our Lord and Blessed Mary.  I try to do it gently, with a huge dose of irony, and always with the intention that these blind people will come to their senses and accept their birth right, the Catholic faith.  But perhaps it is now time to speak more frankly to these people, who are never going to see God in the face due to their rejection and hatred of His Son and whose eternal destiny is too horrible to contemplate.

Now in release out of the Jewish-owned entertainment industry comes a little gem called, "The Night Before".  I avoid modern films like I avoid head lice so I wouldn't have even heard about it unless someone mentioned it.  But a comment over at The Unz Review reads thus:


You left Hollywood off that list. We used to have to suffer through such sentimental, second-rate movies like It’s a Wonderful Life. Fortunately we can now enjoy first-rate Christmas movies like The Night Before (Directed by Jonathan Levine; produced by Seth Rogan, Evan Goldberg; written by Ariel Shaffir, Evan Goldberg, Jonathan Levine; starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Seth Rogan, Lizzy Caplan, et al.), which has a touching scene of Rogan mocking Jesus on the cross and throwing up in the aisle during consecration of the Eucharist during midnight Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

Note well the names of the people involved in it.  Aside from being a group of non-talents they are all Jews.  What, I wonder, is the opinion of those innocent Jews out there who don't necessarily have any overt animosity towards Christians yet must realize that at some point there is going to be a backlash against all this?  Biblical historians might well ask, Don't they ever learn?

So where does this leave us at this point in time?

At an absolute minimum we should be expecting to hear something, anything, from Church leaders despite the fact that the Church made peace with "the world" officially in 1962-1965.  Will Los Angeles prelate Gomez speak out bravely and publicly, naming names, about such cheap little blasphemies? How about Cardinal Dolan, in whose diocese many scenes of this movie were shot?

Was an actual Catholic church used in the scene referred to above, or was it a studio mock-up? If it was an actual church, which one was it, and who gave these cretins permission to film there?

Personally, I grow weary of Jewish mocking of Christ and His Church and am using my little space on the internet to say so.  Christian charity demands that I tell them that unless they are baptized, and unless they enter the one, true Church, their final end is damnation.  It is frankly that simple.

For two thousand years they have been battling the Church in a futile effort to destroy her.  They have used many artifices to accomplish this and, unfortunately, have had some success.  Pray for them.  And pray for the leaders of the Church who once had the courage and charity to say what had to be said, as did holy priests, like Padre Pio:

"Jews are enemies of God and foes of our holy Religion."

And pray, too, for the audiences who attend this movie, and laugh and enjoy themselves.  Mr Belloc, of course, has a word to say to those people.  The following quote has been ignored or misunderstood for decades.  Even today's war-mongers misuse it to defend their annihilations of nations.  But it was not intended for that; it was intended for the mockers and those who enjoy their mockings.

We sit by and watch the Barbarian, we tolerate him; in the long stretches of peace we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond: and on these faces there is no smile.

Tuesday, November 24, 2015

A Lesson for the Pope, from Russia

Pope Francis if he would stop, think, look around him and ponder what is happening to the Church and the world, might take notice of something that is slowly but surely gaining ground in post-Communist Russia.  Russia is a nation still suffering from problems, and a recent century-long occupation by an alien thing known as Communism, but the signs of its healing are unmistakable to anyone who will look at the situation with brutal honesty.

The West, the post-Catholic West, is crumbling morally, religiously and civilizationally while post-Communist Russia is rediscovering its Christian past.  The leaders of the West, the anti-Christian Western powers exemplified by the United States, Britain, France, Germany, and its hangers-on, have declared "spiritual war" on Russia, and as the days and months continue so does the animus towards this resurging Christian nation intensify.

The Russian Orthodox has its problems, to be sure.  The Caesaro-papism of their outlook is preventing to a large extent its reunion with Peter's Chair.  We Catholics know that reunion will happen in God's good time, but sensible people cannot see any hope for a reunion until first the Catholic Church finally does what Russia and its Orthodox Church has done, namely: return to its roots. Writer Frank Gashumba notes:

For the modern outsider, Orthodoxy may appear a confronting relic of the past: a highly ritualistic liturgy suggesting an imprisonment to empty tradition; a disturbing refusal to embrace such modern imperatives as gender-neutrality, the men obstreperously growing their beards long with the women underfoot meekly covering their heads; no guitars, rock ‘n’ roll or a general concern to become relevant and get with the program. In a word, an insouciant disregard for the importunate demands of the world.

There is the stone wall presented to us in all its clarity.  The leaders in the Vatican are doing precisely what the Russian Orthodox are not,  Rome wants to get warm with the world, Orthodoxy in Russia does not.  Rome has embraced the world which is why Pope Francis is so admired by the world; it is also why the world hates Russia and its re-emerging Christianity and wants to destroy her by any means possible, including using Syria as a catalyst to start a world war to destroy the Russian nation.  All wars are religious, and so is this one.

Unlike Orthodoxy Rome does not want to be seen as "a relic of the past", and so has since the swinging sixties destroyed the beauty and holiness of the Mass, ignored centuries-old expressions of piety, abandoned beauty in music, art, literature and architecture and has, well, totally embraced the world.  And we have a Pope who is seemingly just fine with all this chaos.

If Pope Francis would study seriously what is slowly growing in Russia and act on it as the Vicar of Christ he is supposed to be he might yet save Europe and the Faith.  If he wont, may God grant us mercy by removing him and replacing him with a man who will be hated the world.

Monday, November 23, 2015

Creepy priests and non-creepy priests

In the interests of helping Pope Francis warn the faithful against priests who give him the creeps, and those who give him warm feelings, we offer this gallery of photos to help readers in identifying the types referred to by the Holy Father.

CREEPY PRIESTS:

Some weird old guy in Italy


Herbert Vaughan - they made him a Cardinal yet!
Creepy seminarian who justly wound up in a concentration camp



NON-CREEPY PRIESTS:
Who is he looking at?  Or shouldn't I ask?



The distinguished Bishop ackerman

The ultra-manly and masculine James Martin
The noble Bernardin, while being devoured internally by AIDS
We trust this will be helpful to our readers in spotting the type of seminarian or priest our current Pope wishes us to avoid, and the type he likes very much.

Just to prove that Francis puts his money where his mouth is, here are two examples of fine, non-creepy men he has put into high positions:

What, me worry?
A kindly homosexual caresses his pontiff

Saturday, November 21, 2015

I'm sorry to hear that The Force is Awakening

Lucas, left, with that other permanent adolescent, Spielberg 

The mind of movie guru George Lucas, a mind permanently fixed in a state of adolescence, will give birth in a few weeks to yet another rehash of his "Star Wars" obsession.  Though he is not as "hands-on" in this latest production his rapidly greying eminence hangs over it like a pall.  

Amused, we glance over the cast list, the likes of which I shall not dwell upon. The worst of it is to see so fine an actor as Max von Sydow wasting himself in such trivialities.

To say that we are being bombarded and bamboozled by the hype over this never-ending saga is to put it mildly. The hoopla to date would give one the impression that what we are witnessing is more important than the Second Coming. Such is the power of PR.

And such is the state of mind of the average person that the release of more junk like this is greeted as something almost holy.  A glance at the average news outlet tells the story plainly: another helping of Lucas-bloated pabulum with mayonnaise is what the world is waiting to have poured over them.

And it is impossible to escape this.  The upcoming release is drummed into our heads like a voodoo mantra, complete with drums and gyrating adherents, displayed everywhere we walk, work or (try to) relax. Am I the only person, film aficionado that I am, that finds this disturbing? Young people, our precious young people, are allowed by their parents to feed on this over-cooked and tasteless stew on a regular basis.  "It's only a movie.  Relax", they say.  My answer to that would be, garbage in, garbage out.

Young people are having their own precious brains - not to mention, souls - addled by the addled brains in Hollywood. That is really what is going on here.  Their young lives are being filled with eye-catching nonsense daily.  Hourly.  They are not allowed to develop either intellectually, emotionally or spiritually.  They become obsessed with mere entertainments, so obsessed that the practical living of their lives is being adversely affected.  Will they ever get serious about life? Plan for the future? Begin to realize that they will have to make it though life on their own without a light sabre or the help of The Force...or their parents?

To say they are being dumbed down would be a compliment.  I vividly recall several occasions when I attended the screenings of some classic films of the past at a theatre that once specialized in these types of movies.  The film(s) being shown were intelligently written and made, quite witty and in many cases edifying.  During several particularly amusing moments which would draw laughs from those of us seasoned in the world of great films the baseball cap-wearing young people who normally feasted on modern movies, and who thought it might be nice to sample an "old film" for a change, would sit there in a dazed stupor, obviously too dull to appreciate examples of real humor.  Tragic, really. When even a simple sense of humor is no longer being developed in our young folk we are edging closer to disaster.

A similar experience occurred when after recommending P.G. Wodehouse to an acquaintance who still enjoyed reading I was amazed at his reaction.  He found the books boring and unfunny. I would suggest that anyone who finds Wodehouse unfunny is already deceased.  Yet this fellow could not find a single story about Jeeves or Ukridge that amused him. In my own case this I can attest: that Mr Wodehouse is perhaps the only author I have ever read who makes me laugh literally out loud. Not my friend, though. But we must be tolerant and patient of such souls; I suppose anyone who finds the Junior High-level humor of The Simpsons funny, as he does, has already had his comic sensibilities bludgeoned out of him and would find reading Wodehouse similar in enjoyment to a  journey to the Arctic without taking along a winter coat.

But to return to the infantilism that now characterizes the entertainment industry, and the forced-fed phenomena that is the release of the newest Lucas effort, it tells this writer how difficult a job it would be to help these dazed movie-goers get control of their lives and their futures.  Too many times have I seen potential in young people being left to rot in the rain as their attention is drawn to these special effect baubles that dance on movie screens and televisions.

Would they tolerate a warning from someone who knows what he's talking about?

The late, great Sir Alec Guiness, who appeared (somewhat reluctantly) in the original "Star Wars" has some advice for young people who look upon these movies as idols:

                       

I believe that Sir Alec has pronounced the final word on this obsession.  Once and for all.

This coming Advent and Christmas Seasons will be better spent ignoring Hollywood.  An antidote to the general hysteria over the release of the latest big screen rubbish?  Wodehouse?Chesterton? Dickens?  Maybe a Christmas concert?  Whatever you choose, keep them out of the movie theatres.

And may The Force go away.


                       

Thursday, November 19, 2015

Barbarians IN the gates

Two black teenagers murder a white woman and then take the corpse on a joy ride.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/teens-allegedly-kill-woman-car-wash-body-joyride-article-1.2433766

The victim


To try to comment on this will be impossible. How can one comment on it?  Let it serve, then, only as a warning.

To those who believe things like this can be turned around, I offer this letter from a school teacher who teaches at a predominantly black school.  It is a comment (slightly edited to remove some of the more disgusting comments by the students) from an article in the UNZ review.  The author is not vindictive nor does he mince any words.  He uses the dialect of the persons involved not to mock but to give an idea of what a teacher has to face when trying to educate them.

A Teacher From a Black High School:
The truth is usually a tough thing to accept, so I understand if this is flagged. It would be a cowardly thing to do, but I understand it. Some people just ignore unpleasant truths. However, if you think ignoring the problem, or trying to censor the truth, will help our black children improve, you’re dreaming. This is important, so I’m happy to repost – indefinitely if necessary. I find it interesting that NO ONE has had the intellect to refute anything in the essay. They can only attempt to censor it, as if doing so somehow makes it invalid. Weak minds, weak minds.
Until recently I taught at a predominantly black high school in a southeastern state.
The mainstream press gives a hint of what conditions are like in black schools, but only a hint. Expressions journalists use like “chaotic” or “poor learning environment” or “lack of discipline” do not capture what really happens. There is nothing like the day-to-day experience of teaching black children and that is what I will try to convey.
Most whites simply do not know what black people are like in large numbers, and the first encounter can be a shock.
One of the most immediately striking things about my students was that they were loud. They had little conception of ordinary decorum. It was not unusual for five blacks to be screaming at me at once. Instead of calming down and waiting for a lull in the din to make their point — something that occurs to even the dimmest white students — blacks just tried to yell over each other.
It did no good to try to quiet them, and white women were particularly inept at trying. I sat in on one woman’s class as she begged the children to pipe down. They just yelled louder so their voices would carry over hers.
Many of my black students would repeat themselves over and over again — just louder. It was as if they suffered from Tourette syndrome. They seemed to have no conception of waiting for an appropriate time to say something. They would get ideas in their heads and simply had to shout them out. I might be leading a discussion on government and suddenly be interrupted: “We gotta get more Democrats! Clinton, she good!” The student may seem content with that outburst but two minutes later, he would suddenly start yelling again: “Clinton good!”
Anyone who is around young blacks will probably get a constant diet of rap music. Blacks often make up their own jingles, and it was not uncommon for 15 black boys to swagger into a classroom, bouncing their shoulders and jiving back.
They were yelling back and forth, rapping 15 different sets of words in the same harsh, rasping dialect. The words were almost invariably a childish form of boasting: “Who got dem shine rim, who got dem shine shoe, who got dem shine grill (gold and silver dental caps)?” The amateur rapper usually ends with a claim–in the crudest terms imaginable — that all womankind is sexually devoted to him. 
Black women love to dance — in a way white people might call gyrating. So many black girls dance in the hall, in the classroom, on the chairs, next to the chairs, under the chairs, everywhere. Once I took a call on my cell phone and had to step outside of class. I was away about two minutes but when I got back the black girls had lined up at the front of the classroom and were convulsing to the delight of the boys.
Many black people, especially black women, are enormously fat. Some are so fat I had to arrange special seating to accommodate their bulk. I am not saying there are no fat white students — there are — but it is a matter of numbers and attitudes. Many black girls simply do not care that they are fat. There are plenty of white anorexics, but I have never met or heard of a black anorexic.
“Black women be big Mr. Jackson,” my students would explain.
Blacks, on average, are the most directly critical people I have ever met: “Dat shirt stupid. Yo’ kid a bastard. Yo’ lips big.” Unlike whites, who tread gingerly around the subject of race, they can be brutally to the point. Once I needed to send a student to the office to deliver a message. I asked for volunteers, and suddenly you would think my classroom was a bastion of civic engagement. Thirty dark hands shot into the air. My students loved to leave the classroom and slack off, even if just for a few minutes, away from the eye of white authority. I picked a light-skinned boy to deliver the message. One very black student was indignant: “You pick da half-breed.” And immediately other blacks take up the cry, and half a dozen mouths are screaming, “He half-breed.”
For decades, the country has been lamenting the poor academic performance of blacks and there is much to lament. There is no question, however, that many blacks come to school with a serious handicap that is not their fault. At home they have learned a dialect that is almost a different language. Blacks not only mispronounce words; their grammar is often wrong. When a black wants to ask, “Where is the bathroom?” he may actually say “Whar da badroom be?” Grammatically, this is the equivalent of “Where the bathroom is?” And this is the way they speak in high school. Students write the way they speak, so this is the language that shows up in written assignments.
It is true that some whites face a similar handicap. They speak with what I would call a “country” accent that is hard to reproduce but results in sentences such as “I’m gonna gemme a Coke.” Some of these country whites had to learn correct pronunciation and usage. The difference is that most whites overcome this handicap and learn to speak correctly; many blacks do not.
Most of the blacks I taught simply had no interest in academic subjects. I taught history, and students would often say they didn’t want to do an assignment or they didn’t like history because it was all about white people. Of course, this was “diversity” history, in which every cowboy’s black cook got a special page on how he contributed to winning the West, but black children still found it inadequate. So I would throw up my hands and assign them a project on a real, historical black person. My favorite was Marcus Garvey. They had never heard of him, and I would tell them to research him, but they never did. They didn’t care and they didn’t want to do any work.
Anyone who teaches blacks soon learns that they have a completely different view of government from whites. Once I decided to fill 25 minutes by having students write about one thing the government should do to improve America. I gave this question to three classes totaling about 100 students, approximately 80 of whom were black. My few white students came back with generally “conservative” ideas. “We need to cut off people who don’t work,” was the most common suggestion. Nearly every black gave a variation on the theme of “We need more government services.”
My students had only the vaguest notion of who pays for government services. For them, it was like a magical piggy bank that never goes empty. One black girl was exhorting the class on the need for more social services and I kept trying to explain that people, real live people, are taxed for the money to pay for those services. “Yeah, it come from whites,” she finally said. “They stingy anyway.”
“Many black people make over $50,000 dollars a year and you would also be taking away from your own people,” I said.
She had an answer to that: “Dey half breed.” The class agreed. I let the subject drop.
Many black girls are perfectly happy to be welfare queens. On career day, one girl explained to the class that she was going to have lots of children and get fat checks from the government. No one in the class seemed to have any objection to this career choice.
Surprising attitudes can come out in class discussion. We were talking about the crimes committed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and I brought up the rape of a young girl in the bathroom of the Superdome. A majority of my students believed this was a horrible crime but a few took it lightly. One black boy spoke up without raising his hand: “Dat no big deal. They thought they is gonna die so they figured they have some fun. Dey jus’ wanna have a fun time; you know what I’m sayin’?” A few black heads nodded in agreement.
My department head once asked all the teachers to get a response from all students to the following question: “Do you think it is okay to break the law if it will benefit you greatly?” By then, I had been teaching for a while and was not surprised by answers that left a young, liberal, white woman colleague aghast. “Yeah” was the favorite answer. As one student explained, “Get dat green.”
There is a level of conformity among blacks that whites would find hard to believe. They like one kind of music: rap. They will vote for one political party: Democrat. They dance one way, speak one way, are loud the same way, and fail their exams in the same way. Of course, there are exceptions but they are rare.
Whites are different. Some like country music, others heavy metal, some prefer pop, and still others, God forbid, enjoy rap music. They have different associations, groups, almost ideologies. There are jocks, nerds, preppies, and hunters. Blacks are all — well — black, and they are quick to let other blacks know when they deviate from the norm.
One might object that there are important group differences among blacks that a white man simply cannot detect. I have done my best to find them, but so far as I can tell, they dress the same, talk the same, think the same. Certainly, they form rival groups, but the groups are not different in any discernible way. There simply are no groups of blacks that are as distinctly different from each other as white “nerds,” “hunters,” or “Goths,” for example.
How the world looks to blacks: One point on which all blacks agree is that everything is “racis’.” This is one message of liberalism they have absorbed completely. Did you do your homework? “Na, homework racis’.” Why did you get an F on the test? “Test racis’.”
I was trying to teach a unit on British philosophers and the first thing the students noticed about Bentham, Hobbes, and Locke was “Dey all white! Where da black philosopher a’?” I tried to explain there were no blacks in eighteenth century Britain. You can probably guess what they said to that: “Dat racis’!” One student accused me of deliberately failing him on a test because I didn’t like black people.
“Do you think I really hate black people?”
“Yeah.”
“Have I done anything to make you feel this way? How do you know?”
“You just do.”
“Why do you say that?”
He just smirked, looked out the window, and sucked air through his teeth. Perhaps this was a regional thing, but the blacks often sucked air through their teeth as a wordless expression of disdain or hostility.
My students were sometimes unable to see the world except through the lens of their own blackness. I had a class that was host to a German exchange student. One day he put on a Power Point presentation with famous German landmarks as well as his school and family.
From time to time during the presentation, blacks would scream, “Where da black folk?!” The exasperated German tried several times to explain that there were no black people where he lived in Germany. The students did not believe him. I told them Germany is in Europe, where white people are from, and Africa is where black people are from. They insisted that the German student was racist, and deliberately refused to associate with blacks.
Blacks are keenly interested in their own racial characteristics. I have learned, for example, that some blacks have “good hair.” Good hair is black parlance for black-white hybrid hair. Apparently, it is less kinky, easier to style, and considered more attractive. Blacks are also proud of light skin. Imagine two black students shouting insults across the room. One is dark but slim; the other light and obese. The dark one begins the exchange: “You fat, Ridario!” Ridario smiles, doesn’t deign to look at his detractor, shakes his head like a wobbling top, and says, “You wish you light skinned.”
They could go on like this, repeating the same insults over and over.
My black students had nothing but contempt for Hispanic immigrants. They would vent their feelings so crudely that our department strongly advised us never to talk about immigration in class in case the principal or some outsider might overhear.
Whites were “racis’,” of course, but they thought of us at least as Americans. Not the Mexicans. Blacks have a certain, not necessarily hostile understanding of white people. They know how whites act, and it is clear they believe whites are smart and are good at organizing things. At the same time, they probably suspect whites are just putting on an act when they talk about equality, as if it is all a sham that makes it easier for whites to control blacks. Blacks want a bigger piece of the American pie. I’m convinced that if it were up to them they would give whites a considerably smaller piece than whites get now, but they would give us something. They wouldn’t give Mexicans anything.
What about black boys and white girls? No one is supposed to notice this or talk about it but it is glaringly obvious: Black boys are obsessed with white girls. I’ve witnessed the following drama countless times. A black boy saunters up to a white girl. The cocky black dances around her, not really in a menacing way. It’s more a shuffle than a threat. As he bobs and shuffles he asks, “When you gonna go wit’ me?”
There are two kinds of reply. The more confident white girl gets annoyed, looks away from the black and shouts, “I don’t wanna go out with you!” The more demure girl will look at her feet and mumble a polite excuse but ultimately say no.
There is only one response from the black boy: “You racis’.” Many girls — all too many — actually feel guilty because they do not want to date blacks. Most white girls at my school stayed away from blacks, but a few, particularly the ones who were addicted to drugs, fell in with them.
There is something else that is striking about blacks. They seem to have no sense of romance, of falling in love. What brings men and women together is sex, pure and simple, and there is a crude openness about this. There are many degenerate whites, of course, but some of my white students were capable of real devotion and tenderness, emotions that seemed absent from blacks — especially the boys.
Black schools are violent and the few whites who are too poor to escape are caught in the storm. The violence is astonishing, not so much that it happens, but the atmosphere in which it happens. Blacks can be smiling, seemingly perfectly content with what they are doing, having a good time, and then, suddenly start fighting. It’s uncanny. Not long ago, I was walking through the halls and a group of black boys were walking in front of me. All of a sudden they started fighting with another group in the hallway.
Blacks are extraordinarily quick to take offense. Once I accidentally scuffed a black boy’s white sneaker with my shoe. He immediately rubbed his body up against mine and threatened to attack me. I stepped outside the class and had a security guard escort the student to the office. It was unusual for students to threaten teachers physically this way, but among themselves, they were quick to fight for similar reasons.
The real victims are the unfortunate whites caught in this. They are always in danger and their educations suffer. White weaklings are particularly susceptible, but mostly to petty violence. They may be slapped or get a couple of kicks when they are trying to open a bottom locker. Typically, blacks save the hard, serious violence for each other.
There was a lot of promiscuous sex among my students and this led to violence. Black girls were constantly fighting over black boys. It was not uncommon to see two girls literally ripping each other’s hair out with a police officer in the middle trying to break up the fight. The black boy they were fighting over would be standing by with a smile, enjoying the show he had created. For reasons I cannot explain, boys seldom fought over girls.
Pregnancy was common among the blacks, though many black girls were so fat I could not tell the difference. I don’t know how many girls got abortions, but when they had the baby they usually stayed in school and had their own parents look after the child. The school did not offer daycare.
Aside from the police officers constantly on patrol, a sure sign that you are in a black school is the coke cage: the chain-link fence that many majority-black schools use to protect vending machines. The cage surrounds the machine and even covers its top. Delivery employees have to unlock a gate on the front of the cage to service the machines. Companies would prefer not to build cages around vending machines. They are expensive, ugly, and a bother, but black students smashed the machines so many times it was cheaper to build a cage than repair the damage. Rumor had it that before the cages went up blacks would turn the machines upside down in the hope that the money would fall out.
Security guards are everywhere in black schools — we had one on every hall. They also sat in on unruly classes and escorted students to the office. They were unarmed, but worked closely with the three city police officers who were constantly on duty.
There was a lot of drug-dealing at my school. This was a good way to make a fair amount of money but it also gave boys power over girls who wanted drugs. An addicted girl — black or white — became the plaything of anyone who could get her drugs.
One of my students was a notorious drug dealer. Everyone knew it. He was 19 years old and in eleventh grade. Once he got a score of three out of 100 on a test. He had been locked up four times since he was 13.
One day, I asked him, “Why do you come to school?”
He wouldn’t answer. He just looked out the window, smiled, and sucked air through his teeth. His friend Yidarius ventured an explanation: “He get dat green and get dem females.”
“What is the green?” I asked. “Money or dope?” “Both,” said Yidarius with a smile.
A very fat black interrupted from across the room: “We get dat lunch,” Mr. Jackson. “We gotta get dat lunch and brickfuss.” He means the free breakfast and lunch poor students get every day. “Nigga, we know’d you be lovin’ brickfuss!” shouts another student.
Some readers may believe that I have drawn a cruel caricature of black students. After all, according to official figures some 85 percent of them graduate. It would be instructive to know how many of those scraped by with barely a C- record. They go from grade to grade and they finally get their diplomas because there is so much pressure on teachers to push them through. It saves money to move them along, the school looks good, and the teachers look good.
Many of these children should have been failed, but the system would crack under their weight if they were all held back.
How did my experiences make me feel about blacks? Ultimately, I lost sympathy for them. In so many ways they seem to make their own beds. There they were in an integrationist’s fantasy–in the same classroom with white students, eating the same lunch, using the same bathrooms, listening to the same teachers–and yet the blacks fail while the whites pass.
One tragic outcome among whites who have been teaching for too long is that it can engender something close to hatred. One teacher I knew gave up fast food–not for health reasons but because where he lived most fast-food workers were black. He had enough of blacks on the job. This was an extreme example but years of frustration can take their toll. Many of my white colleagues with any experience were well on their way to that state of mind.
There is an unutterable secret among teachers: Almost all realize that blacks do not respond to traditional white instruction. Does that put the lie to environmentalism? Not at all. It is what brings about endless, pointless innovation that is supposed to bring blacks up to the white level. The solution is more diversity–or put more generally, the solution is change. Change is an almost holy word in education, and you can fail a million times as long as you keep changing. That is why liberals keep revamping the curriculum and the way it is taught. For example, teachers are told that blacks need hands-on instruction and more group work.
Teachers are told that blacks are more vocal and do not learn through reading and lectures. The implication is that they have certain traits that lend themselves to a different kind of teaching.
Whites have learned a certain way for centuries but it just doesn’t work with blacks. Of course, this implies racial differences but if pressed, most liberal teachers would say different racial learning styles come from some indefinable cultural characteristic unique to blacks. Therefore, schools must change, America must change. But into what? How do you turn quantum physics into hands-on instruction or group work? No one knows, but we must keep changing until we find something that works.
Public school has certainly changed since anyone reading this was a student. I have a friend who teaches elementary school, and she tells me that every week the students get a new diversity lesson, shipped in fresh from some bureaucrat’s office in Washington or the state capital. She showed me the materials for one week: a large poster, about the size of a forty-two inch flat-screen television. It shows an utterly diverse group — I mean diverse: handicapped, Muslim, Jewish, effeminate, poor, rich, brown, slightly brown, yellow, etc.–sitting at a table, smiling gaily, accomplishing some undefined task. The poster comes with a sheet of questions the teacher is supposed to ask. One might be: “These kids sure look different, but they look happy. Can you tell me which one in the picture is an American?”
Some eight-year-old, mired in ignorance, will point to a white child like himself. “That one.”
The teacher reads from the answer, conveniently printed along with the question. “No, Billy, all these children are Americans. They are just as American as you.”
The children get a snack, and the poster goes up on the wall until another one comes a week later. This is what happens at predominately white, middle-class, elementary schools everywhere. Elementary school teachers love All of the Colors of the Race, by award-winning children’s poet Arnold Adoff.
These are some of the lines they read to the children: “Mama is chocolate . . . Daddy is vanilla . . . Me (sic) is better . . . It is a new color. It is a new flavor. For love. Sometimes blackness seems too black for me, and whiteness is too sickly pale; and I wish every one were golden. Remember: long ago before people moved and migrated, and mixed and matched . . . there was one people: one color, one race. The colors are flowing from what was before me to what will be after. All the colors.”
Teaching as a career: It may come as a surprise after what I have written, but my experiences have given me a deep appreciation for teaching as a career. It offers a stable, middle-class life but comes with the capacity to make real differences in the lives of children. In our modern, atomized world children often have very little communication with adults — especially, or even, with their parents — so there is potential for a real transaction between pupil and teacher, disciple and master.
A rewarding relationship can grow up between an exceptional, interested student and his teacher. I have stayed in my classroom with a group of students discussing ideas and playing chess until the janitor kicked us out. I was the old gentleman, imparting my history, culture, personal loves and triumphs, defeats and failures to young kinsman. Sometimes I fancied myself Tyrtaeus, the Spartan poet, who counseled the youth to honor and loyalty. I never had this kind intimacy with a black student, and I know of no other white teacher who did.
Teaching can be fun. For a certain kind of person it is exhilarating to map out battles on chalkboards, and teach heroism. It is rewarding to challenge liberal prejudices, to leave my mark on these children, but what I aimed for with my white students I could never achieve with the blacks.
There is a kind of child whose look can melt your heart: some working-class castaway, in and out of foster homes, often abused, who is nevertheless almost an angel. Your heart melts for these children, this refuse of the modern world.
Many white students possess a certain innocence; their cheeks still blush. Try as I might, I could not get the blacks to care one bit about Beethoven or Sherman’s march to the sea, or Tyrtaeus, or Oswald Spengler, or even liberals like John Rawls, or their own history. They cared about nothing I tried to teach them. When this goes on year after year it chokes the soul out of a teacher, destroys his pathos, and sends him guiltily searching for The Bell Curve on the Internet.
Blacks break down the intimacy that can be achieved in the classroom, and leave you convinced that that intimacy is really a form of kinship. Without intending to, they destroy what is most beautiful–whether it be your belief in human equality, your daughter’s innocence, or even the state of the hallway.
Just last year I read on the bathroom stall the words “F**k Whitey.” Not two feet away, on the same stall, was a small swastika.
The National Council for the Social Studies, the leading authority on social science education in the United States, urges teachers to inculcate such values as equality of opportunity, individual property rights, and a democratic form of government. Even if teachers could inculcate this milquetoast ideology into whites, liberalism is doomed because so many non-whites are not receptive to education of any kind beyond the merest basics.
It is impossible to get them to care about such abstractions as property rights or democratic citizenship. They do not see much further than the fact that you live in a big house and “we in da pro-jek.” Of course, there are a few loutish whites who will never think past their next meal and a few sensitive blacks for whom anything is possible, but no society takes on the characteristics of its exceptions.
Once I asked my students, “What do you think of the Constitution?” “It white,” one slouching black rang out. The class began to laugh. And I caught myself laughing along with them, laughing while Pompeii’s volcano simmers, while the barbarians swell around the Palatine, while the country I love, and the job I love, and the community I love become dimmer by the day.
I read a book by an expatriate Rhodesian who visited Zimbabwe not too many years ago. Traveling with a companion, she stopped at a store along the highway. A black man materialized next to her car window. “Job, boss, (I) work good, boss,” he pleaded. “You give job.”
“What happened to your old job?” the expatriate white asked. The black man replied in the straightforward manner of his race: “We drove out the whites. No more jobs. You give job.”
At some level, my students understand the same thing. One day I asked the bored, black faces staring back at me. “What would happen if all the white people in America disappeared tomorrow?”
“We screwed,” a young, pitch-black boy screamed back. The rest of the blacks laughed.
I have had children tell me to my face as they struggled with an assignment. “I cain’t do dis,” Mr. Jackson. “I black.”
The point is that human beings are not always rational. It is in the black man’s interest to have whites in Zimbabwe but he drives them out and starves. Most whites do not think black Americans could ever do anything so irrational. They see blacks on television smiling, fighting evil whites, embodying white values. But the real black is not on television, and you pull your purse closer when you see him, and you lock the car doors when he swaggers by with his pants hanging down almost to his knees.
For those of you with children, better a smaller house in a white district than a fancy one near a black school.
I have been in parent-teacher conferences that broke my heart: the child pleading with his parents to take him out of school; the parents convinced their child’s fears are groundless. If you love your child, show her you care — not by giving her fancy vacations or a car, but making her innocent years safe and happy. Give her the gift of a not-heavily black school.
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