Calibrating a Western Standard

FYI: there's a new magazine starting up in Canada called Western Standard. As it’s being published by Ezra Levant, and being modeled on the recently defunct Alberta Report, it’s going to be the sole conservative, Christian, anti-abortion, pro-American magazine in the country. All the big right-wing Canuck loonies are going to be contributing articles, including my three fave's: Mark Steyn, David Warren and Michael Coren.

My subscription is already in the mail….


Helen Keller And The New Church

I was just reading the latest issue of ISI News (the newsletter of Information Swedenborg Inc.), and in it, there's a short review of Light In My Darkness, the revised edition of Helen Keller's book My Religion. The following paragraph from the conclusion of Chapter 11 (pg145) appears in the review:

"Were I but capable of interpreting to others one-half of the stimulation thoughts and noble sentiments that are buried in Swedenborg's writings, I should help them more than I am ever likely to in any other way. It would be such a joy to me if I might be the instrument of bringing Swedenborg to a world that is spiritually deaf and blind. His volumes are an inexhaustible wellspring of satisfaction to those who lead the life of the mind. If people would only begin to read Swedenborg's books with at first a little patience, they would soon be reading them for pure joy."


And Now For Fun...


What follows are excerpts from Windswept and Waylaid: Dispatches from the Edge of Sorrows, the latest memoirs of traveling duo J.S. Kern and Sandy Papillon, now available in paperback from Kia Ora Press:

Chapter II: Traitor's Talon and the Bandits of the Kahli Irkit

We left the relative sanity of Telawhopa in the gaudiest patchwork taxi this side of Islamabad. Part Mercedes, part Trabant, this vehicular mutt chugged along the twisting goat paths of the Kahli Irkit held together with swaths of orange cotton and a plastic brocade that appeared to be made from shaped sections of discarded Tupperware lids. But, ever grateful for small mercies, I appreciated the diesel fumes from the poorly maintained exhaust system wafting up through the torn Papier-mâché carpeting. The nausea and headache I was developing easily distracted me from the smell of goat spoor and offal emanating from the driver’s mouth, which, unfortunately, turned to spray us with entreaties and narration more often than it remained forward-facing to direct unrecognizable curses at the dust-powdered windshield.

As we bounded along the corrugated hard-pack at a pelvis-cracking pace, I looked over at Sandy to try and gauge her impression of the taxi trip’s “local colour”--as she likes to call anything unsafe, unsound or insane, so long as it has charming cultural antecedents. As usual, she just beamed that excited 12-year old girl smile of hers at me, and went back to holding on to one of the enormous silk tassels swinging wildly from the cabin ceiling. To look at her you’d think we were riding to Ascot in a 30 foot, calf's leather upholstered Roller as the honored guests of Lady Aspertame-in-Sprite and her charming paramour for the day, Tank. Instead we're swinging like khaki gibbons in an Afghani wardrobe being rolled down the jagged side of the Khyber Pass.

The Traitor's Talon is the 100m extension of a kilometer-long finger of rock pointing across the border of Pakistan into Afghanistan. When I first saw it I immediately thought of a petrified ICBM complete with a contrail frozen in stone….

Chapter V: Zeus on the Loose

Like the desk clerk in the Hotel Scoliosis, Athens in July is hot, dusty and old. Even the air in this city seems ancient as it idles familiarly around the historical landmarks of Western civilization. However, unlike the crone at the desk with the poor English and even poorer manners, Athens is noisy. Very noisy. From the minute we stepped out of the airplane the discordant cacophony of shouts, car horns and the bustling hum of humanity took our breath away like steam in a sauna. Only in the limo ride to the hotel was there any respite from the hammering thrum of this teeming, cross-sectioned beehive swirling beneath the blue Aegean sky.

Sandy's not a hotel person. To her, there is something subtly inhospitable in the bland uniformity and sterile fastidiousness inherent in rented rooms. She is particularly unimpressed when staying in any place where the windows don't open. Anything more than two days in the same hermetically sealed cardboard room and she's ready to run through the lobby naked waving a near-empty bottle of Chivas and screaming for oxygen. On those nights I usually find her sleeping at the nearest beach with some newfound friends and a gray, tattered Salvation Army blanket.

Okay, probably not. But I have to write things like that. You see, I usually do the first drafts of these memoirs then hand them to Sandy. Naturally, along with making factual amendments, she edits out everything that is too vulgar, too fanciful or legally actionable. It's a boring bloody job. So, prince amongst men that I am, I like to add the odd line of whimsy for her, just to keep her interest up. That way she'll gladly keep beavering away on the manuscript while I can enjoy the sleep of champions.

Of course, now she'll have to leave that bit about the bottle of Chivas in; or else that last paragraph won't make sense. Which, yes, was my plan all along.

As for the surly clerk and the Hotel Scoliosis, even Sandy just wanted to deal with the registration and get upstairs for a hot shower and at least 5 or 6 hours of straight, uninterrupted sleep. We were supposed to be in Malta by Thursday, which left just two days to experience enough of Greece to keep the publisher happy, so, after the trouble in Israel, we'd need all the rest we could get. But the tight-lipped grin on the unhelpful gnome in charge of the room keys told me that things were about to go terribly awry….

Chapter VIII: A Train of Bastard Children and the Curse of Quisling's Ghost

It's not that Oslo is uglier than Hamburg, or even that it's colder than January in Montreal, that makes it one of the worst cities in Scandinavia. It's things like the disgusting and outrageously over-priced beer; the lack of decent fast-food; or, the unending train of unwed mother's and their bastard children clogging the pavements outside the maddeningly hard to find Post Offices with ski-rigged baby-strollers enveloped in blue clouds of Marlboro smoke.

Everyone in Norway learns to ski from the moment they learn to put on shoes. They ski everywhere. As a Canadian, when I see deep snow outside the front door of a house, I instinctively look for a shovel. But here, the first reaction to the sight of fresh snow is to slap on a pair of skis and glide on over to the corner shop for a newspaper, or 300 grams of finely ground reindeer meat.

On the other hand, whenever Sandy, my intrepid Maori princess, sees snow, she instinctively clutches for a flight schedule and looks frantically for the next plane heading south….

Chapter XI: Constable Di Jones and the Poet of LLandwhaffglae

There is something unbelievably sad about the Welsh. Sure, they're happy enough singing their little hearts out while getting absolutely rat-arsed on strong ale at the local. And, true, they're damned glad to see the total numbers of those afflicted with Black Lung decline to statistical insignificance….

Mea Gulpa and The Grim Gospel of St. Paul

No posts for nearly 20 days…irregular posting since the new year started…humiliating…the blogger bund will be repossessing my membership card if this keeps up…but, honest, I haven’t let all my responsibilities slide…(gulp)

I just sent in another article for The Right Page…on Politics Canada…called The Grim Gospel of St. Paul…uhm…I think it’s funny…oh, and I wrote a couple of poems…uhm…one of them is actually quite good…no, really

…and I got my car fixed…I did, honest…fuel-pressure valve was sticking…cost me over 200 bucks...I drive a Mazda…(gulp)…it’s red….

Right.

Okay, okay, okay, look, I’m sorry…mea culpa…several things have happened since January that have helped dampen the fire in my belly, and govern my once-driving sense of outrage. Naturally, this has affected my give-a-damn gland vis-à-vis daily posting. It’s not that I don’t care about current affairs anymore, it’s just that I don’t feel the same sense of urgency to point out all the lies, prevarications and inanities of the western Left. I don’t have to, really. These whistle-heads, wild with anti-Bush hysteria, have been blowing gaskets every day since the war in Iraq. And, by showering everyone with their shallow platitudes and hostile invective (Al Sharpton uses the phrase “Jewing down the numbers” and he’s STILL considered a viable candidate for the Democrats? C’mon!), they’ve been turning more people conservative in one day, than I could help to do in a month of regular posting. They are their own worst enemy.

Hee, hee….

Besides, there are plenty of excellent conservative websites, commentators and bloggers out there (all the ones listed on the right-side of this page and many, many more.) lending invaluable assistance to The Cause.

Anyway, the only point I’m trying to make is that I’m going to continue posting, but I’m going to change the manner and style of my posts. I’ll still be commenting, but, just as I have with my Right Page articles, I want to move away from the dull and dusty tone of the serious, academic pundit, and sidle more towards a more enjoyable (for me, at least), iconoclastic, Gonzo-style of writing.

The greatest change, however, will be in the focus of many of my future posts. I’ve never hid the fact that I am a Christian, but I have purposely been non-sectarian in my religious expression. When I began this blog, I was satisfied with this generic Christianity—after all, in most cases, doctrinal differences are insignificant in relation to the secular world so sorely in need of any form of Christianity; but, recently I’ve begun to feel less content about this; I now want to use my blog as a way to proclaim my belief in the Christology and doctrine of The New Church (Church of the New Jerusalem). Not in an overt evangelizing way, but certainly much more directly.

Anyway, this’ll all become more obvious as I post later. So, let’s leave it for now. Here’s an excerpt from The Grim Gospel of St. John:

Edged-weapons and the lust for blood are everywhere these days. Last weekend in Toronto an as yet unknown psychopath repeatedly stabbed travel agency owner Paulson Chellakudam and visiting St. Lucian student Suzette Augustin to death during what police describe as an “apparent robbery”. In Oshawa a fight between two men resulted in a 24-year-old’s death by multiple stab wounds. And, in theatres around the country, the tortured visions of Mel Gibson’s Mediaeval Christology are assaulting the senses of moviegoers in the brutal, blood-soaked celluloid form of The Passion of the Christ.

Currently, in Ottawa, there is yet another macabre spectacle of running blood and sorrow. It is an on-going, slow motion political passion play detailing the last, albeit lengthy, days of a man once hailed as the Messiah of the Liberal Party of Canada: Mean Jean Chretien. The humble little millionaire, the crooked life-long civil servant, is stumbling to the hard and dusty top of a high and dirty hill. He will be haughty and arrogant to the end: the disgraced master of a disgraceful mission in the throes of hubris and denial. He will not be missed; he will not be mourned. Tears are only shed for victims, and although they both have the same initials, in Chretien’s Passion, the main character isn’t sinless. As well, the only persecuted innocents in it are the ignorant rabble of taxpayers, and those too-few souls, like Francois Beaudoin, who refused to follow along with the corkscrew plans of the would-be Savior of Canada.

Prime Minister Paul Martin, in what seems to be a state of righteous indignation, has traveled the country assuring everyone of his willingness to root out the rot in Canadian politics, and offer up the wrongdoers in his own party for sacrifice—to toss the money-changer’s from what should have been his father’s House, as it were—all to appease the hellish anger of the electorate. In the Gospel of St. Mathew, John the Baptist talks of swinging an axe through the roots of the evil trees, but in the autobiographical Gospel of St. Paul the Unknowing, the writer himself is going to do all the chopping, with, I suspect, a relish rivaling that of even the most insane Pharisee, or bloodthirsty Roman, conjured up by the febrile imagination of Mad Mel, The Road to Galilee Warrior....


The Lord bless you all...!

The Right Page

The latest edition of The Right Page has been posted on the Politics Canada website. Click here to read Of Frozen Rage and Poison Dogs. Here's a quick slice to whet the appetite:


“Anyone who has transgressed in this matter is going to pay the consequences” --Prime Minister Paul Martin.


Sleep will not come easy for Paul Martin over the next few weeks. He is already suffering. He has the look of a French nobleman hearing the dark, greasy swish of the guillotine blade just outside the tiny window of his cell. He’s going to have to do some fast talking to get out of this one. And, if he wants to save his hide, he better come up with phrases a damn sight less measured than “transgressed” and “consequences”. I suggest he start chucking out a couple of “criminal fraud’s” and “jailed for life’s”, because, unlike his predecessor, Martin can’t count on the decency of Canadians to look away and not call attention to the tortured monstrosities he passes off as sentences. We hear everything Martin says as clear as crystal, and we’re going to demand logic, precision and truth from now on. I have a feeling he’s going to regret those words above as surely as he regrets ever crossing the little palsied Napoleon from Shawinigan.

Mean Jean Chretien has just returned from pretending to be a lawyer and playing golf in the Far East. He is preparing a statement on this matter, say his handlers. Another screed of demented lies and gnarled prevarications, no doubt. The same Sgt Schultz tack that Martin defaulted to: Knew nothing; saw nothing. It’ll take a while before we see it, of course, because a team of real lawyers will have to dig through it like fat kids through a box of Timbits. But, when it’s finally released to the public, you can bet your last cup of double-double that Chretien won’t follow Martin’s lead and refuse to implicate his erstwhile friend.

Oh, and by the way, has anyone checked Sheila Copps’ head recently? Someone might want to call St. Joseph’s in Hamilton and have them dispatch the paramedics to see if they can unhook her grin from her ears….

O Tempora, O Mores!

With breathtaking regularity David Warren opines on an issue in such an incontrovertibly well-reasoned way, and articulates it so precisely, that I am compelled to call everyone’s attention to it.

The article entitled More Revolution is Warren’s take on the “Gay Revolution’s” victories to date. The situation, for those of us who abhor the willful hypocrisy and moral disingenuousness shown by the proponents of so-called “gay rights”, is grim.

For Canadians, from the shocking support by supposedly sensible parliamentarians of the dispiriting free-speech restricting Bill C-250, to the dizzying vacuity of Conservative Party leadership candidate, Belinda Stronach, Warren tabulates the dire state of political thought on this matter.

For Americans, Warren turns his attention to the latest learned pronouncement of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court on same-sex marriage; and how they used, of all things, the Ontario Superior Court’s decision legalizing it to butress their own argument…and, with seasoned prescience, Warren prophesizes parenthetically that “our Supreme Court will cite the Massachusetts decision in return”.

Speaking of which, Warren makes a much more important parenthetical remark in his next paragraph, the thought behind which should be expanded into a full article itself, and then the article should be published on the front pages of every newspaper and website in the English speaking world:

"Civil unions" confer…privileges…including…full adoption "rights". (The quotes are necessary, for the idea that the adoption of a living child can be a human right is a moral obscenity, on a level with slavery.)

Think about that for a minute: that making the adoption of a living human child a right, an entitlement, is on a par with slavery! He’s absolutely correct. Once said, once pointed out in this way, it is astoundingly obvious, isn’t it?

This revelation alone should be enough to have this man canonized.

Of course, the wisdom keeps right on coming. Warren exposes the frightening level of megalomaniacal disregard for the public displayed in the thinking of Chief Justice Margaret Marshall:

[I]n a condescending dismissal of [the public's] right to an opinion, Chief Justice Margaret Marshall wrote, "That there may remain personal residual prejudice against same-sex couples is a proposition all too familiar to other disadvantaged groups. That such prejudice exists in not a reason to insist on less than the constitution requires."

When the opinion of what is likely the majority of the electorate is described as a "personal residual prejudice", we are dealing with something more than mere personal arrogance. And when a moral disorder is intentionally confused with a cultural or racial identity, we are dealing with a view of reality that is deeply twisted.

The degree of the condescension may be gauged by the fact that the constitutional right to same-sex marriage on which Madame Chief Justice based her decision, does not exist. Her invocation of it was a bare-faced lie. The idea that any such "right" existed, or anything resembling such a right, in the founding documents of Massachusetts or any other polity in North America, is a howling absurdity.

Well, I guess, to any Chief Justice who can so cavalierly disregard the Constitution upon which she is meant to base her rulings, dismissing the opinion of the majority of the herd she has solemnly sworn to faithfully serve must come easy. When one is so convinced one is right, it must be a simple matter to justify the illicit means for the self-evidently correct ends. Clearly, the possibility that those tens of millions, who disagree profoundly with homosexual conduct, and its judicial promotion, might be right has never entered Maggie’s concrete skull.

Incidentally, via positive synchronicity, I noticed Mark Steyn has re-posted an Aug 2003 article dealing with the same intolerance of dissent afflicting our tolerance-demanding elites:

Thirty years ago, in the early days of gay liberation, most of us assumed we were being asked to live and let live. But, throughout the Western world, “tolerance” has become remarkably intolerant, and “diversity” demands ruthless conformity. In New Zealand, an appeals court upheld a nationwide ban on importing a Christian video Gay Rights/Special Rights: Inside The Homosexual Agenda. In Saskatchewan, The Saskatoon Star-Phoenix was fined by the Human Rights Commission for publishing an advertisement quoting Biblical passages on homosexuality. Fining publishers of the Bible surely can’t be far off.

The coerciveness of the most “liberal” cultures in the western world is not a pretty sight.

Whatever happened to “live and let live”? If I can live with the occasional rustle from the undergrowth as I’m strolling through a condom-strewn park or a come-hither look from George Michael in the men’s room, why can’t gays live with the occasional expression of disapproval? Christian opponents of gay marriage oppose gay marriage, they don’t oppose the right of gays to advocate it. But increasingly gays oppose the right of Christians to advocate their beliefs. Gay activists have figured that, instead of trying to persuade people to change their opinions, it’s easier just to get them banned.

As Rodney King, celebrated black victim of the LAPD, once plaintively said, “Why can’t we all just get along?” But, if that’s not possible, why can’t we all just not get along? What’s so bad about disagreement that it needs to be turned into a crime?


What indeed?

I implore you to read both articles and e-mail them to everyone you know. To me, it seems that far too many people, who would be natural allies against these political/judicial machinations in favor of a cause few seriously support, are hopelessly misinformed. We who see what’s going on are duty-bound to at least try and alert those who don’t.

I leave you with Warren’s summation:

We are living in a dark time, in which we see the laws that bind our civilization together arbitrarily overthrown by judicial fiat, with no comprehension and verily, no interest in what the destructive consequences will be for our families and society at large. I am more and more convinced that we must drop the pretence that these judges are fulfilling a legitimate mandate. They are the deadly enemies of all we hold dear.