The Adventures of Reaction Man: Episode III

Reaction Man Defeats the Diabolical Designs of Diaper-Face

In their dens at home, Justice Bob Baddecision of the Ontario Inferior Court and Don Alfredo Fettucine of the Fettucine Crime Syndicate turned on their computers and opened a popular teleconferencing app. They had been told to be ready at 6:66 pm for a very important online meeting. They had been given special clocks for the purpose, as regular clocks don’t register a 6:66.

 At that precise moment a burst of flame appeared on their screens which began to emit a smell of sulfur into the air. The flame coalesced into the image of a man with a goatee and ponytail, and the stumps of horns on his forehead. 

“Hi Lucy” they exclaimed. 

 “Greetings my closest friends” said Lucifer, or Lucy, as the gender-confused devil preferred to be called. “I have called this very important meeting tonight to introduce you to my latest scheme.” (1)

 Lucy rubbed his hands together and began to cackle. 

 “As you are aware, some of my recent plans have suffered unfortunate setbacks. Four years ago, my favourite daughter from the Sisters of the Night coven was set to take control of the most powerful army on the face of the earth, and launch the Battle of Armageddon. My plan was foiled, however, by the rise of Donald the Orange, who has been doing the exact opposite of what I wanted, reducing his country’s military presence around the globe, putting out the fires of ethnic conflict that I have been stoking for over a century in both the Balkans and the Middle East, and even going to North Korea to negotiate peace with Kim. I have since unleashed my mutant-demon squad on Donald the Orange in the hopes of getting revenge.” (2) 

“More recently, working through my faithful minions, the Woke Millennial and his Aunty Fa, I unleashed an army of Marxist zombies on the campus of Aberhart Manning University in Brown Moose, Alberta. My scheme went awry, however, due to the interloping of that annoying superhero, Reaction Man.” (3) 

“This time, however, my plot is foolproof. Allow me to introduce you to my new minion Diaper-Face.”

Lucy stepped aside and a new face filled the screen. Or rather, what would have been a face, if a large diaper were not permanently obscuring most of it, leaving only the eyes visible. Diaper-Face said something, but neither Justice Baddecision nor Don Fettuccine could make out what it was due to the combination of his accent and his voice being muffled by the diaper. 

“Ummmm” they both said. 

 “My apologies”, Lucy said, stepping back into the screen. “What Diaper-Face was trying to say was ‘hello’”. 

The judge and the mafia boss both greeted Diaper-Face in return. 

“Diaper-Face used to be a research scientist in a virology lab in China”, Lucy said. “He was performing an experiment one day when an accident occurred and every virus in the lab escaped and infected him simultaneously. He instantly came down with the biggest attack of the sneezes the world has ever seen. You could even call it a sneeze seizure. He left the lab, intending to go to the nearest hospital, but the sneezing attack disoriented him. He ended up going into the glue factory next door instead and let out a particularly violent sneeze that knocked over a vial of the stickiest, most permanent, adhesive ever invented by man, which spilled onto his face. Not knowing what it was, he grabbed a diaper that was for some reason sitting there, and tried to wipe his face off. Instead, the diaper became permanently attached. The experience has driven him mad. He now has no desire except to see the entire world in the same predicament, with diapers permanently attached to everyone else’s face. He called upon me, and I granted him powers in exchange for his soul. With the combination of the powers I have given him, and his own in-depth understanding of virology, it should be a cinch for him to frighten the world into forcing everyone to wear diapers on their faces. The diapers will be specially consecrated in a Black Mass ceremony so that everyone who wears them will be pledging their loyalty to me.” 

“Bwah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha” 

“Diaper-Face is my greatest creation yet! He truly is my left hand.” 

“Don’t you mean right hand?” Don Alfredo asked. 

“No, Steve Earle’s mama was right when she told him back in the General Store that that is the pistol.”

“Left hand sounds funny” said Justice Baddecision. 

“Just think of what people used to use their left hand for”, Lucy said. “Through Diaper-Face, that is what I intend to do to the world.” 

Unbeknownst to Lucy and his colleagues, their conversation had been intercepted and recorded, and the recording transmitted to an obscure monastery in the Carpathian Mountains. 

A short time thereafter, Lucy unleashed Diaper-Face. Through the combination of his expertise in virology and the powers the devil had given him in exchange for his soul, he had created two viruses. One of these he called the Viral Bogeyman, although the world was soon to know it by a different name. It produced a respiratory disease that was severe-to-fatal among a small minority, although most infected experienced only mild symptoms. It was the other virus that was the more deadly of the two, for it infected the mind rather than the body, causing people to perceive the first virus as being something other than it was, something on the same level as the Black Death or worse. This virus spread around the globe much more quickly than the first, and infected a lot more people. The symptoms of the infected were that they curled up in the fetal position, sucking their thumbs, and calling upon their government to take away all of their neighbours’ rights and freedoms while they waited for Big Pharma to produce a magic needle that would save them from the Viral Bogeyman. While they waited for the magic needle, they put their trust in a magic diaper, wearing it all times and in all places, even when sitting alone in their own cars, to ward off the Viral Bogeyman. 

Those who were fortunate enough not to be infected by Diaper-Face’s mind virus, looked around in dismay and astonishment, at the foolishness of all those around them who were. Among these were the Right Reverend John Keble Waterland, Bishop of Paleo-Middlesex and his good friend “Eddy” Johnson. Bishop Waterland and Eddy would have tea about once a week, and these days much of the conversation revolved around the craziness of everyone around him. Bishop Waterland would shake his head as he recounted the latest silliness of the Right Reverend Barty Battyblabber, Bishop of the neighbouring diocese of Neo-Soho. Most recently, Bishop Barty had taken to wearing no less than ten magic diapers on his face at any given time. (4) 

“He looks absolutely ridiculous”, Bishop Waterland told Eddy, “but he says that he would rather be safe than sorry. At least I think that is what he was saying. It is almost impossible to make out a word he says under all those layers.” 

The phone rang, and Bishop Waterland answered it. 

“Hello? Oh, alve-say Brother Whippet. I think this is the first time we have spoken since you returned to Romania. How are things over there? Why yes, as a matter of fact he is here.” 

Bishop Waterland handed the phone over to Eddy. 

Eddy took the phone and was soon in intense conversation with the member of the ancient and sacred Order of St. Michael of Marshmallow who had come to Canada and knighted him after he had received the power to turn back the clock on the anniversary of the Reaction of Thermidor, turning him into Reaction Man. It had been Brother Whippet’s superior, Brother Moonpie, who had received the transmission of the recording of Lucy’s conversation. (5) The Marshmallow Monks, having put together what had happened, urged Eddy to find Diaper-Face and defeat him. 

Eddy, after he had finished talking with Brother Whippet, handed the phone back to Bishop Waterland, explained the situation, for the Bishop knew his secret, then changed into his Reaction Man costume and set out to track down Diaper-Face. 

Reaction Man found Diaper-Face standing on a high balcony, surveying the streets below where every visible person was wearing a diaper on his face. Diaper Face was laughing and gloating over his success. 

“I’ve found you at last, Diaper-Face” said Reaction Man. “It is time to set all these people free from the bondage they are under due to the spell of your evil mind virus.” 

 In response Diaper-Face said “Good luck with that, Reaction Man. You can never defeat Lucy and me. All the people of the world will be living in slavery to the irrational fear that my mind virus has planted in their rotting brains for the rest of their lives.” 

Of course, since he said all of this in Chinese and from behind his glued-on diaper, Eddy couldn’t make out a word of that. 

“What did you say?” 

 Diaper-Face repeated himself, but was still indecipherable. 

“Pardon me, could you say that one more time?” 

 Diaper-Face gave his super-villain boast in heavily muffled Chinese again, but, of course, to no avail.

“Well, I still don’t know what you’re talking about, but I guess it doesn’t matter. It is my duty to defeat you and that is exactly what I am going to do.” 

 Reaction Man pointed at Diaper-Face and used his power to turn the clock back. The super-adhesive holding the diaper onto Diaper-Face’s face dissolved and the diaper fell to the ground. 

“My diaper! My beautiful diaper!” Diaper-Face screamed, this time in English. 

“Finally you said something that makes sense”, Reaction Man said, “although I beg to differ. That diaper was as ugly as sin.” 

“You don’t understand. All the power that Lucy gave me was contained in that diaper. Without it, the spell will be broken.” 

 Diaper-Face lunged for the diaper, but Reaction Man was faster. He grabbed the horrid thing and threw it into an incinerator that for some odd but convenient reason was located there on the balcony. As the diaper hit the flame, it burst into a cloud of brimstone. 

 All around the world, people woke up from the paranoia that the mind virus had induced, realized how foolish they all looked wearing diapers on their faces, threw them in the garbage in disgust, and resumed living their lives, no longer bound by fear of the Viral Bogeyman.

(1) Lucy the gender-confused devil and Justice Bob Baddecision first appear in Lucy’s Day in Court. Don Alfredo Fettucine first appears in Justice for Minnie? 

(2) See The Witches’ Sabbat and Brother Moonpie and the Devil’s Apocalypse. 

(3) See The Adventures of Reaction Man: Episode II – Reaction Man Versus the Marxist Zombie Army (4) Bishops John Keble Waterland and Barty Battyblabber first appear in Bishop Bartholomew B. Battyblabber and His Big Bad Bash. 

(5) As told in The Adventures of Reaction Man: Episode I – The Origin.

Who Is Their Intended Demographic?

 

Have you ever seen an advertisement for a product that left you wondering who on earth the company had in mind as its prospective market base?

At some point over the last year, I think, perhaps, as far back as last Christmas, I was amused to see a television commercial that raised this very question. It was for Maple Leaf Foods, and was promoting a product line labelled 50/50. The products so labelled are hamburgers and sausages that are half meat, and half a plant-based substitute. 

This is not intended as a commentary on the products themselves. I have not tried them and, for all I know, they could be the best tasting, greatest and most nutritious items on the market today. 

I could not watch that commercial, however, without trying to picture what the brainstorming session that gave birth to these might have looked like. I imagined a meeting of marketing executives, fresh out of college and with no experience of real life and real people. They were sitting around a table and one of them made the following pitch: 

“As you all know, a number of products have appeared in recent years, that resemble meat products but which are derived entirely from plants. There are people out there, who are known as vegetarians and vegans, who buy and eat these products. There are other people, who are proud and loud meat-eaters, who buy regular beef hamburgers and pork sausages. Now here is my proposal. Let’s develop a product that we can sell to both groups at the same time and capture both markets.” 

At the risk of ruining a good joke by explaining it, the reason the above imagined scenario is so hilarious is that a half-and-half meat and vegetable product, rather than appeal to both vegetarians/vegans and proud carnivores simultaneously, would appeal to neither and probably be offensive to both. 

Vegetarians, for varying reasons – a health condition that requires it, the mistaken notion that it is healthier in general, or some sort of perverse moral hang-up against the eating of animal flesh – do not eat meat. A burger or sausage that is half meat would be as much against their diet as one that is fully meat. Needless to say this goes double for the vegans, those vegetarians with extra large carrots stuck up their butts who think they are morally superior, not only to normal people, but to other vegetarians, because they won’t even eat dairy products or eggs. 

As for the proud carnivores – the kind of people who like their meat, who make sure that you know they like their meat, and who generally hold the people discussed in the preceding paragraph in contempt – can you really see them embracing a meat product that is half plant-substitute? They wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. 

There are, of course, plenty of people – the majority, I am sure – who base their food choices on personal taste, rather than some food ideology. While such people would not have the kind of natural aversion to a meat product that is half plant-based substitute that the previous groups would have, it is difficult to see why they would be particularly attracted to these products either. People who like both meat and vegetables, tend to prefer meat as meat, and vegetables as vegetables, or some combination of both that is its own thing, over vegetables disguised to look like meat or meat diluted by vegetables. 

Of course, the fact that these products continue to be available indicates that somebody is buying them and in large enough quantities to make them profitable to produce and sell. That is all that really matters as far as the company is concerned, but the question of who exactly that somebody is remains a very interesting one. 

This was not the first time the question of who they expect to buy this has popped into my head during a commercial. Usually, however, it is has something to do with the product being extremely redundant or a poorly conceived sales pitch that seems more likely to have the opposite of its intended effect. This one stood out because it had the appearance of having been thought up in an amusing scenario like the one imagined above. Since we all need a good laugh after the bad joke which was Captain Airhead’s proposals in the Throne Speech earlier this week for burdening us all with more socialism, censorship, rules, and government debt, I figured I would share that with you rather than dissecting said proposals.

The White Inferiority Complex

 

For decades, hurling the epithet “racist” was the liberal’s go-to method of acknowledging anyone who disagreed with him from a standpoint somewhere to his right. In this same period this method served its purpose of discouraging disagreement with progressive liberalism well. Those who belonged to the mainstream of whatever was considered to be conservatism at the time, which was generally what had been considered liberalism a decade or so earlier, were, for some reason that has never really been explained, particularly sensitive to this accusation, and every time the liberal used this dreaded word they would rush to be the first to throw whoever was on the receiving end of the accusation under the bus. 

Eventually, however, this word lost most of its bite. It had simply been used too often and against too many people. When everyone is a racist, nobody is a racist, and people stop caring when you call somebody a racist. While it made something of a comeback this year, when used with the modifier “systemic”, for a few years now it has been largely replaced in liberal usage with “white supremacist.”

By trading the worn out “racist” for the fresh “white supremacist”, liberals exchanged an insult that had lost most of its meaning through overuse for one that was more powerful than the original had ever been, but in doing so they made themselves look absurd. For one thing white supremacist has a much narrower range of meaning than racist, with connotations of ideology, zeal, commitment, and activism that the word racist does not. There are very few actual white supremacists left and when liberals try to use this expression in the way they used to use racist they invite ridicule upon themselves. 

There is another aspect to the absurdity of the charge of white supremacism being flung around like so much monkey excrement. It is quite evident to anybody with open eyes that if any sort of bad racial thought presently infests the minds of the white people of Western Civilization it is not a sense of superiority over others, much less a feeling of supremacy over others, but rather a sort of inferiority complex. 

What other explanation can there be for the fact that even though the United States, after its Supreme Court abolished all de jure discrimination against blacks, established de jure discrimination against whites in 1964, and Canada, the United Kingdom, and all other Western countries decided to follow this foolish American precedent, and for over a generation anti-white discrimination has been the only established racism in Western Civilization, nevertheless white people have been willing to affirm the proposition that Western countries are “white supremacist” and that they therefore enjoy “privilege” on the basis of their skin colour? 

How else do we explain all the white people who are enthusiastic supporters of Black Lives Matter? BLM, despite the organization’s innocuous if also truistic and banal name, is not about a positive agenda of promoting the security and well-being of black people. Abortion rates have been disproportionately high among black people for decades, but BLM couldn’t care less about all the black lives lost to abortion. They are, in fact, allied to the pro-abortion, feminist cause. Nor does BLM care about all the black lives taken by black perpetrators of violent crime. Blacks are overrepresented among both the perpetrators and the victims of violent crime in general, which has been the case for as long as statistics have been kept about this sort of thing and shows no sign of ceasing to be the case any time soon, and this overrepresentation is even larger for homicide. The inevitable and natural corollary of this is that blacks are also overrepresented among crime suspects, arrests, convictions, and incarcerations. The black lives lost to black crime are not black lives that matter to BLM. BLM cares only about blaming the overrepresentation of blacks among suspects, arrests, etc., on the racism of white police. For this is what BLM is truly about – spreading hatred of police officers, Western Civilization in general but with a focus on the United States, and especially of white people. 

It makes about as much sense, therefore, for white people to support BLM as it would for black people to go around wearing white robes with pointy hoods. Yet this year, in which BLM has, ahem, removed its mask and revealed its true colours like never before, it would have been difficult not to notice the prominent participation of whites in the record-breaking wave of race riots and the “Year Zero” Cultural Maoist assault on historical monuments and statues. That is even without taking into account the lionizers of BLM and its cause among white newspaper and television commentators, white university professors, white clergymen, white corporate executives, white celebrities, and white politicians. 

There is a name for this sort of inferiority complex. It is called liberalism. While there are many different liberalisms with many different meanings, the one that I have in mind here is that of the liberal whom Robert Frost defined as “a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.” Although I must say that when the poet penned that worthy diagnosis it probably never occurred to him that the disease would progress to the point where those infected actively take up arms against their own side. 

This, however, is the stage of the condition in which we find ourselves today and it may very well prove to be the terminal stage. 

Today, whether they seriously believe it to be true or not, a sizeable portion of whites are willing to affirm that racism is a moral offence for which light-skinned people of European ancestry bear a unique guilt, that they are guilty of it even if they are not conscious of having thought a racist thought, said a racist word, or committed a racist act, that this unconscious racism supposedly built into the very fabric of society is worse than the overt racial hatred that is often directed against whites by blacks and others with an anti-white axe to grind, and that it is their moral duty, therefore, to express contrition or shame whenever any non-white person chooses to take offence at something they have said or done or merely the fact that they are living and breathing, and to ignore or excuse explicit expressions of racial animus directed against them, even when these are violent in tone. 

Western liberalism has clearly undergone a mutation from when its humanitarian and universalist ideals merely generated a blindness to the legitimate particular interests of Western nations and peoples. It now actively opposes those interests. 

Think about the implications of the ubiquitous calls to end “systemic racism.” Many, perhaps most, white people have been jumping on board this bandwagon. Perhaps they do not understand that “systemic racism” is a technical term, from neo-Marxist Critical Race Theory, and that it designates this idea of an embedded racism which all white people and only white people are guilty of whether they are conscious of racist thought and actions or not. Perhaps they think it means institutional policies and practices that explicitly discriminate on racial grounds. If the latter is what they think, however, then they are mistaken if they think that racism of this sort, other than the kind that is directed against them, exists in Western countries today. This crusade against “systemic racism” in the Critical Race Theory sense of the term can only have the result, if successful, of making the explicit discrimination against white people that has been institutionalized in all Western countries since the ‘60’s and ‘70s of the last century, worse. 

There is a far worse manifestation of this mutant strain of the liberalism virus. Taken together, a number of liberal policies that have been in place in most if not all Western countries for over four decades, constitute an existential threat to white people. One of these policies is the use of large scale immigration from non-Western countries to offset the declining fertility that has been produced by, among other factors, the anti-natalism of social liberalism’s pro-contraception, pro-abortion, views. The result of this policy having been in place for decades has been the massive demographic transformation of Western societies to the point where in several countries that in living memory were almost entirely white, whites are on the verge of dropping to minority status. When you add to this the introduction in the same time frame of the aforementioned anti-white institutional discrimination, and the vilification of whites in the news media, popular education, and the revisionist educational curriculum, what you end up with is a recipe for a sort of self-inflicted genocide. Indeed, for decades now, Critical Race Theorists such as the late Noel Ignatiev have couched their anti-white ideas in explicitly genocidal language such as “the abolition of the white race”. When called out over this they have defended their rhetoric by saying that the “white race” they are talking about is a social construct, but their arguments have a rather hollow ring to them when we consider that these people would be the first to cry genocide if the same language were used about any other race and that the activist movement that has been built upon the foundation of their theory has translated such rhetoric into even cruder terms and actions that are not so easily explained away. These same people insist that “it is okay to be white” is a dangerous and offensive racist slogan. 

Yet despite all of this, liberalism has been largely successful at convincing a large segment of the white population to regard anyone who dares to speak out against this suicidal combination of policies as being a bigger and more real threat than that combination itself. Indeed, there are several liberal organizations in North America that do nothing else except identify those who speak out against white liberalism’s racial suicide pact and wage a campaign of character assassination against them. 

Liberalism is usually wrong about everything and it is certainly wrong about this. The West does not have a “white supremacist” problem in this day and age. What it is suffering from is rather that many, perhaps most, white people have become infected with a sick-minded racial inferiority complex in which they regard their skin colour as a badge of racial guilt which can only be atoned for through racial suicide. You will be waiting a long time, however, for liberals to acknowledge this. That would mean admitting that liberalism is the problem. Liberals would sooner demonize all those who share their own skin colour than admit that liberalism could be wrong.

The Bread of Life

 

The institution of the Eucharist is recorded in all three of the Synoptic Gospels. It took place towards the end of the Last Supper, the final Passover meal that Jesus ate with His Apostles before His betrayal, arrest, trial, and Crucifixion. The account of the institution is brief in each of these Gospels. Here is how St. Matthew tells it: 

And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and blessed it, and brake it, and gave it to the disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is my body. And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, Drink ye all of it; For this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins. But I say unto you, I will not drink henceforth of this fruit of the vine, until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father's kingdom. (Matt. 26:26-29) 

Interestingly, the fourth Evangelist, who provides the longest account by far of the Last Supper – all of chapters thirteen and fourteen take place at the table, and a conversation which began there and continued as they went on their way to the Garden of Gethsemane occupies the next three chapters - omits any mention of the institution. Paradoxically, however, it is St. John who provides the fullest doctrine of the Eucharist earlier in his Gospel when He provides us with the Lord’s discourse on the bread of life in the aftermath of the feeding of the five thousand in the sixth chapter. There are those, of course, who would deny any connection between what the Lord has to say about eating His flesh and drinking His blood in that chapter and the Eucharist, but these merely illustrate the old saying that there is none so blind as he who refuses to see. To agree with them requires believing that on two separate occasions Jesus made reference to His flesh and blood as food and drink but meant something completely different by it each time. This is possible, perhaps, but hardly likely. While words can have different meanings in different contexts, this whole elaborate image of eating flesh and drinking blood, does not lend itself well to multiple uses. 

At the beginning of the sixth chapter of his Gospel, in introducing the account of the feeding of the five thousand, St. John notes that the Passover was approaching. While one wants to be wary of reading too much into details such as this, the fact of the matter is that an understanding of the Passover and how it relates to the significance of Jesus’s death is absolutely essential to making any sense out of the Eucharist. The orthodox Fathers were right and the Gnostic heretics very wrong indeed about the ongoing importance of the Old Testament for the Church under the New Covenant. 

The original Passover comes from the book of Exodus and from the central event that gave that book its title. The children of Israel, who had moved to Egypt in Joseph’s time, had grown to nationhood there but had been subjected to slavery. God, hearing the cries of the Israelites, had raised up Moses and sent him to speak to Pharaoh on His behalf to demand the release of His people. God sent a series of judgements of increasing intensity upon Egypt but each time Pharaoh hardened his heart and refused to let Israel go. Then, in one final judgement, He slew the firstborn of every household in Egypt, from Pharaoh’s down, prompting Pharaoh to not just let Israel go but to actively drive them out. The Israelites were instructed, on the night in which this was to take place, to take a lamb per every one or two households, depending upon their size, kill the lamb before the assembly of Israel, mark the sides and lintel of the door of their homes with the blood, and eat the flesh of the lamb. Those whose houses were so marked by the blood would be spared from the judgement on Egypt. The Israelites were commanded to repeat this on the anniversary of the event, the Ides of Nisan, perpetually. 

The Israelites, celebrating the Passover every year, looked back to how God had delivered them from bondage in Egypt. The Passover, however, and the deliverance it commemorates, also looked forward to the greater act of deliverance that would inaugurate the New Covenant promised in the Old. Just as the physical bondage of the Israelites in Egypt depicts the spiritual bondage to sin which has held the human race captive since the Fall, so the killing of the lamb depicts the death of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, Who offered Himself up as the one, true, and final sacrifice that would effectively remove man’s sin as a barrier between man and God. St. Paul, who in his epistle to the Hebrews explains how all Old Testament sacrifices are types of Christ and how Christ is the final sacrifice that once and for all accomplished what all previous sacrifices could only illustrate, spells this out in his first epistle to the Church in Corinth when he writes “For even Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us” (1 Cor. 5:7). 

This context is essential to understanding what the Lord was saying when He instituted the Eucharist, and in that context His words make perfect sense. After the lamb of the Old Passover was slain, and the protection of its blood was applied to the door of the home, the flesh of the lamb became the meal which the family ate. The Passover was not complete without the eating of the lamb. In the Eucharist, God offers the flesh and the blood of the “Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world” as food and drink, in a way that unites all the different sacrifices and offerings of the book of Leviticus. Read through the book of Leviticus and you will see what I mean. Apart from the various sacrifices and burnt offerings in which an animal was killed, there were grain offerings or oblations – called “meat offerings” in the Authorized Bible – of flour and oil, or of unleavened cakes made of the same, and drink offerings or libations of wine. Through the bread and wine of the Eucharist, corresponding to the oblations and libations of Leviticus, the flesh – and even the blood, which, of course, was never consumed in the Old Testament – of the one true Sacrifice become the food and drink which nourishes the souls and spirits of the faithful in perpetuity. 

When considering how the temporal shadows of the Old Testament depict the eternal verities revealed in the New – how anybody can read the eighth through the tenth chapters of Hebrews without recognizing that St. Paul was a Christian Platonist is beyond me – the differences are often as striking and significant as the correlations. We have noted one such difference already – that there was no drinking of the blood along with the eating of the flesh in the Old Testament, and, indeed, there was a strict prohibition of the consumption of blood which was the only dietary restriction to be carried over into the Church by the decree of the Apostolic Council at Jerusalem after the conversion of the Gentiles. The offering of the blood of Christ as drink through the wine of the Eucharist stands out, therefore, as the sole Scriptural exception to this rule. This, of course, corresponds to the most obvious way in which Christ’s one final and true sacrifice is the sole exception to the Scriptural prohibition on human sacrifice. 

There is only one example in the Old Testament of God commanding a human sacrifice. (1) That can be found in the twenty-second chapter of Genesis and is the familiar story in which Abraham is commanded to take his promised heir, Isaac, to Mount Moriah and sacrifice him. Abraham obeys the command, but is stopped from killing his son at the last minute by a voice speaking from heaven. This had been a test of Abraham’s faith, a test which he passed and was rewarded with a magnification of the promises of blessing which he had previously received in earlier chapters. Multiple allusions to Christ are evident in this chapter. Abraham, in answer to an inquiry from Isaac, expresses his faith and speaks prophetically when he says “God will provide Himself a lamb.” It is a ram, not a lamb, that is sacrificed later in the chapter, for the ultimate fulfilment of the prophecy awaited the coming of Christ, the Agnus Dei. In the repeated praise of Abraham because “thou hast done this thing, and not withheld thy son, thine only son” there is a hint of exactly how God would ultimately “provide Himself a lamb.” It is, of course, in the coming of Christ, that the promise that all the nations of the world would be blessed through Abraham is finally fulfilled. 

Elsewhere in the Old Testament human sacrifice is strictly prohibited. The Israelites are forbidden from practicing it in the Mosaic Law and are told that this is one of the abominations that is bringing divine judgement upon the nations that preceded them in Canaan. The apostasy that later brings the judgements of the Assyrian destruction of the Northern Kingdom and the Babylonian Captivity upon Israel involves their lapsing into pagan idolatry including human sacrifice. 

To understand why Christ’s sacrifice was acceptable and, indeed, the only truly efficacious sacrifice, when all other human sacrifice was condemned as abominable, it is helpful to observe the reversal of direction that occurs in the New Testament. Sacrifices in the Old Testament were called offerings. Whether the offering consisted of animals – lambs, rams, doves, etc. – flour and oil, or wine – it was something that the faithful brought to God. This was the ancient concept of a sacrifice. It was dutifully brought to the altar by the faithful as a tribute owed and dutifully offered up to the deity by the priest. The direction was always upward.  

While the sacrifice of Christ does fit this pattern when the participants are correctly identified, as we shall see momentarily, the New Testament sets it in the context of the Gospel where the overall direction runs the other way. Repeatedly in the New Testament Jesus Christ is depicted as God’s gift to mankind. The most beloved words in all of Scripture are “For God so loved the world that He gave His Only-Begotten Son that whosoever believeth on Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” While the Incarnation as a whole is what is meant by the giving of God’s Son, that there is a focus on His death as the atoning sacrifice is evident from the verse that immediately precedes the one just quoted. 

In the old sense of the word sacrifice, a tribute which man offers to God, human sacrifice was an abomination. God repeatedly rejected even the sacrifices He Himself had ordained if they were offered in a wrong spirit, and He regarded the ritual slaying of other human beings as a crime crying out for His wrath and judgement. Christ’s death, insofar as it was an act for which other human beings were responsible, whether it be the disciple that betrayed Him, the religious leaders that conspired against Him, the Sanhedrin that unjustly condemned Him, the mob that howled for His Crucifixion, the Roman magistrate who knowing Him to be innocent signed His death warrant to appease said mob, or the soldiers who cruelly beat and crucified Him, was most certainly a crime. When God accepted it as the sacrifice to end all sacrifices, it was not as an offering from the hand of other men. The Victim Himself was the High Priest Who offered Himself on behalf of the sinful world, by knowingly and meekly submitting to this injustice. Indeed, since Jesus Christ was God as well as Man, He was simultaneously the Priest, Victim and the Recipient of the offering. 

This is why Christ’s sacrifice accomplished what no other sacrifice could do. Sinful man, bringing his tributes to God, had nothing to offer Him which could atone for his trespasses and rebellion. Only God Himself, Incarnate in the Person of Jesus Christ, could make such an offering and that offering was Himself. While Christ in His Crucifixion offered Himself up to God as the true sacrifice which took away the sins of the world, His having come into the world to do so was itself a gift in the other direction, from God, in His infinite goodness, mercy, and grace, to sinful man. 

This same reversal of direction can be seen in the Eucharist. In the Old Testament the grain offering was brought to the altar, a portion was burned, and the rest became bread reserved for the priests. The drink offering was poured out in its entirety upon the altar. Under the New Covenant, the bread and wine are consecrated at the altar, and then distributed among clergy and laity alike, as the means whereby the whole Church partakes of the Body and Blood of the true Paschal sacrifice, Jesus Christ. 

It seems incredible that anybody at all familiar with the Old Testament and the book of Hebrews could make the mistake of disconnecting Jesus’ discussion of Himself as the Bread of Life with its vivid imagery of eating His flesh and drinking His blood in the sixth chapter of St. John’s Gospel from the Eucharist and interpreting these references as meaning nothing more than the reception of the verbal communication of the Gospel message. It is not surprising, however, that those who do make this mistake are the same people who think that going to Church is an academic exercise in which the important and essential part is hearing a lecture, and everything else is just cosmetic trimmings, the less of which there are the better. Such people belong to the class of Protestant that we have had cause to consider in the context of other issues recently, who see their Protestantism as a rejection of the Catholic and not just the Roman. This kind of Protestantism always swings the pendulum too far in the opposite direction of Rome. Whereas the early Reformers, who merely rejected the Roman and not the Catholic, rightly took exception to the papacy’s claim that Christ’s sacrifice, clearly stated by St. Paul to have been offered up once and for all, is re-offered on the Eucharistic altar, this other kind of Protestant goes to the extreme of rejecting the Scriptural and Catholic doctrine that the faithful are fed in perpetuity by that Sacrifice through the Sacrament. Whereas Dr. Luther and the other Reformers rejected the papacy’s explanation, derived from Aristotelian philosophy, of the Sacramental Presence of Christ because it went too far and asserted the post-consecration absence of the bread and wine, this other kind of Protestant tends to reject the Sacramental Presence altogether, or to explain in in some way that is just as nonsensical as transubstantiation. 

What is truly puzzling is that in this present crisis in which Satan, through his demon-possessed minions among bureaucratic practitioners of the modern-day witchcraft of medical science, successfully shut down the Churches around the world back at the beginning of Lent and has kept them closed for months, allowing them to re-open only if they met insane and anti-Christian requirements such as restricting their numbers, which translates into the thoroughly unchristian practice of turning people away from Church, or admitting people only if they agree to wear the devil’s diaper on their face, the strongest opposition to all of this nonsense has come mostly from the kind of Protestant who believes the Bread of Life is communicated only verbally, and who thus logically ought to have the least objection to being forced to do everything online. 

Surely it is time for those with the Apostolic ministry who recognize that it is through the Eucharist that the Bread of Life is communicated to the faithful to speak out against this Satanic oppression. 

(1) However we understand Jephthah to have fulfilled his rash vow in the book of Judges, there is certainly no command from God that he sacrifice his daughter in the text.

The Meaning of the Mask

 

Last fall, a virus that was common enough among Chinese bats managed in some way to jump to humans in Wuhan, the capital and largest city of the province of Hubei in China. The question of exactly how, whether it involved mad scientists working in a lab, a plot by the Communist dictatorship in Beijing, or merely the barbaric cultural practices of the notorious “wet markets”, became a topic of hot debate. The virus, which usually produces either no symptoms at all or a disease indistinguishable from the ordinary flu, can, like all other colds and flus, turn into a potentially fatal pneumonia under certain circumstances.  In this case, the pneumonia is the particularly nasty form known as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, first identified almost twenty years ago. Those who are above retirement age and who have two or more other serious health conditions are, as with other colds and flus, the ones most at risk from this virus. By the end of January, the virus had spread beyond China, in this case definitely due to malfeasance on the part of the Chinese authorities who had sealed the inflected province off from the rest of their country while deliberately allowing international travel in and out of Hubei. In March, the hopelessly corrupt and Communist-dominated World Health Organization declared the spread of the virus to be a “pandemic”, a truism, since the word “pandemic” simply means that an infectious disease is being experienced around the globe, like every seasonal cold and flu. The mob, however, never noted for its ability to think clearly – or at all – influenced by the malice of the media, took the word to mean something along the lines of “the next Black Death” or “the super-flu from Stephen King’s The Stand” and dropped the dem from pandemic turning it into a panic. 

Governments around the world, seized on the opportunity to give dictatorial powers to their public health officials, who of all bureaucrats are the least worthy of enhanced powers of any sort since they are medical doctors, who have long had the reputation of having the highest percentage of tyrannical, full-of-themselves, jerks of any of the professions. Those public health officials, proceeded to live down to this highly negative assessment of their character, and imposed an experimental and thoroughly draconian new form of quarantine on most countries. Whereas traditional quarantines are imposed upon the symptomatic and those known to have been in contact with the symptomatic, for a set and limited time, this new quarantine was imposed upon everybody, healthy and sick alike, for an indefinite period of time. 

In imposing this new form of quarantine, the public health officials issued “stay at home” or “shelter in place” orders, closed all public facilities, and shut down all businesses except those which sold groceries and medicine or were otherwise arbitrarily declared to be “essential” by these autocratic “experts.” These measures were generally called “lock-downs”, although many of us who had more sense than to be in favour of them referred to them as “house arrests”. Both terms evoke the image of a police state. They caused immeasurable damage – economic, psychological, spiritual, and, yes, physical, for the medical health profession used the pandemic as a pathetic excuse to fail in the treatment of non-COVID-related conditions – as many of us, right from the onset, could and did say would happen. 

After a couple of months of this nonsense, the public health tyrants began to slowly ease up on these restrictions. Businesses were allowed to re-open, provided they followed a long list of new regulations aimed at promoting “social distancing” within their buildings. The number of people allowed to gather for social functions was gradually increased. Restaurants were given permission to re-open their dining rooms at a reduced capacity.

In a famous scene from Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 film version of Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, the character of Johnny Fontane, widely believed to have been based on Frank Sinatra and portrayed in the movie by Al Martino, goes to his godfather – in this case, in the literal sense, as well as the more obvious one given the nature of the story – the title character of Don Vito Corleone, portrayed by Marlon Brando. The crooner whines and complains that the head of a motion picture studio won’t give him the film role he needs to salvage his career. Don Vito, after slapping him and telling him to act like a man, advises him to go home, eat and rest, and in a month he would have the role. When Fontane says that this is impossible because they start shooting in a week, Don Vito utters in response one of the most familiar lines in all of cinematic history “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse.” The audience had been tipped off in advance to the double meaning of this phrase when, only a short time prior to this, the Don’s youngest and favourite son, Michael, played by Al Pacino, had used it in explaining how his father conducted his business to his girlfriend Kay, played by Diane Keaton. Later in the film, it is made quite clear when the studio executive, after telling Don Vito’s consigliere Tom Hagen, played by Robert Duvall, that Johnny Fontane would never get that role, wakes up one morning to find the head of his very expensive race horse lying beside him. 

In the midst of the far-too-slow re-opening of our countries, those who took all of our rights and freedoms away from us back in March made us an “offer we can’t refuse”. We can have our lives back, they said, and everything else they took from us, we can see our friends and families again, we can have access to public facilities again, we can go to Church, the library, the movies, etc., and basically resume our normal lives, provided we wear a mask. 

It is truly appalling to see the extent to which the public have taken them up on this offer. I am not referring merely to the number of people who have started wearing masks, even out of doors, but to the enthusiasm with which they have embraced the making masks mandatory. It makes one wonder whether anyone reads George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four anymore. Those of you who have read that classic dystopian warning against totalitarianism will perhaps recognize the part of the novel to which I am alluding. In Orwell’s novel, the totalitarian state in which the protagonist, Winston Smith, lives, is entitled Oceania, a vast super-state and one of three between whom the world is divided, an allusion on Orwell’s part to James Burnham’s theory that the world was headed towards a geopolitical realignment around three regional loci of power. The extent to which the state of Oceania, represented by the figure of Big Brother, controls the thinking of its citizens is illustrated by the fact that at any given time, Oceania is allied with one of the other two super-states, Eurasia and Eastasia, and at war with the other. When the identity of the ally and the enemy switches, the Ministry rewrites history, and the controlled populace accept against the evidence of their own memories that “we were always at war with Eastasia.” The relationship between the totalitarian regimes of Orwell’s own day, the Soviet Union and the Third Reich, which went from being enemies to being allies to being enemies again all within a short space of years, was, of course, the inspiration for this. 

Interestingly, a similar sort of mind-control in which someone is made to affirm contradictory propositions can be found in William Shakespeare’s play The Taming of the Shrew, where it was put to comic rather than political effect. In that comedy, the Paduan nobleman Baptista Minola has vowed that he will not allow his younger, more pleasant, daughter Bianca to marry, until her older sister Katherina does. This is not an easy hurdle to overcome because Katherina, the shrew of the play’s title, has driven away all prospective suitors with her acerbic tongue. Hortensio, however, one of Bianca’s suitors although not the one that ends up with her, talks Petruchio, who is looking to marry a rich wife and live off of her fortune, to court Katherina. Petruchio is successful both in his courtship and subsequently in his efforts to tame his sharp-tongued bride. At the beginning of the fifth scene of Act IV, Petruchio and Katherina are travelling to her father’s house, and Petruchio comments about how bright the moon is shining. While Katherina initially points out that it is the sun, Petruchio insists that it is the moon, and that he won’t go any further with her unless she agrees. She declares “Forward, I pray, since we have come so far,/and be it moon, or sun, or what you please:/An if you please to call it a rush-candle,/Henceforth I vow it shall be so for me.” “I say it is the moon” he replies, to which she says “I know it is the moon” only to hear “Nay, then you lie: it is the blessed sun”, to which she says:

Then, God be bless'd, it is the blessed sun: 

But sun it is not, when you say it is not; 

And the moon changes even as your mind. 

What you will have it named, even that it is; 

And so it shall be so for Katharina. 

The mask-wearing populace of today resembles both the citizens of Oceania and Katharina in their willingness to accept the necessity of masks today, even though it is coming from the same experts and authorities who told us not to wear masks back in February, March and April. 

This is not a matter about which the body of knowledge could have grown sufficiently within a short period of months to justify a complete turn-around on evidentiary grounds. This particular virus may be new to humans, but the effects of masks on the transmission of viruses has been studied for years. Either the experts were lying to us then or they are lying to us now. Either way, it completely undermines any notion that they deserve to be trusted with the sort of absolute control over our lives that they have exercised since March. 

As far as the efficacy of masks as preventatives of viral transmission goes in itself, the data largely confirms what common sense tells us. There are masks designed to prevent viral transmission and there are masks which are not. The latter, which are the kind that are being made mandatory almost everywhere, are ineffective at preventing the spread of viruses. If air can get through the mask, a virus can. Since the corollary of this is that an effective anti-viral mask will prevent airflow, such masks are not safe to be worn by anybody long term – unless, of course, we are talking about some kind of Darth Vader type apparatus that provides you with a non-external source of oxygen, which obviously we are not. Non-anti-viral masks are effective at preventing the spread of larger particles, which may contain viruses and transmit them through other-than-airborne means and this is what most of the memes and videos and articles in support of masks concentrate on, but the slight benefit in slowing transmission gained in this way, hardly constitutes grounds for justifying forcing everybody, including the asymptomatic, to wear these things. 

The efficacy of masks is not really the issue, however. If it were, and masks were incontrovertibly effective, what we would be hearing is advice to consider wearing one if we are experiencing either a) anxiety about contracting the virus or b) symptoms. This is not what we are hearing. The argument we are hearing from the pro-maskers is that although the masks probably won’t keep you from getting the virus they may prevent you from spreading it so they provide a protection against the virus but only if everybody wears them. This, however, is an argument that is clearly not derived from fact and logic, but crafted to support its end, which is the shoving of masks down everybody’s throat. 

The real issue, therefore, is what the masks represent. Earlier this year, the public health officials, and the politicians who gave them their power and seat and great authority, took away from us our lives and livelihoods, our friends and families, our basic rights and freedoms, showing thereby that in their opinion these were not ours but theirs to give and take away from us as they so choose. Now they are offering all that they took away from us back on the condition that we wear the very masks they told us not to wear half a year ago. We are threatened, if we do not comply, to have everything that had been left to us at the beginning of the lockdown – such as being able to buy or sell groceries - taken away from us. The masks are not, therefore, tickets out of the oppression of the lockdown. They are symbols of the very tyranny and totalitarianism behind the lockdown. The insistence that we wear them is a demand that we acknowledge the claims of that tyranny and totalitarianism and wear a sign of our submission and obedience on our faces. 

In the masks, therefore, the oppression of the lockdown, has been taken to a whole new level. It has increased rather than decreased, grown greater rather than less.   The masks are not there to give us our lives back, as some internet propaganda would suggest, but to force us to grant our approval to their having been taken from us int he first place.

The Stopped Clock

The proverbial stopped clock is right twice a day. I am using the expression metaphorically to refer to the person who through the ignorance which decades of academic decline and progressive media brainwashing have induced in our electorate now occupies the office of Prime Minister of Her Majesty’s government in the Dominion of Canada. I don’t think his actual track record is quite as good as a stopped clock. Indeed, twice a year might be pushing the boundaries of what is credible. Nevertheless, he was right on Monday. Or as close to being right as I have seen from him in a long time. 

He was in Montreal for some purpose or another related to the bat flu and the upcoming rape – thank you Dr. Paul Craig Roberts for pointing out the analogy – of the populace with injections of some noxious and satanic witch’s brew, when somebody asked him about the violent, Canada-hating, thuggish mob that tore down the statue of Sir John A. Macdonald on Saturday. His response was to say:

Those kind of acts of vandalism are not advancing the path towards greater justice and equality in this country. 

Now, this was a poor way of saying “it was wrong.” Justice and equality should never be linked because equality is often the exact opposite of justice. Justice is doing right by everybody. Equality is treating everybody the same. The image of equality is that of treating a stranger as well as you would treat your own brother. This is how it sells itself. The reality of equality, however, is that of treating your own brother as if he were a stranger. This is the opposite of justice, which demands not that we treat everybody as if they were the same, but that we treat everybody right, which is much more difficult. Equality is the easy, lazy, substitute for justice.

Furthermore, even if he had not added equality to justice in this way and had simply said “greater justice”, this wording suggests that the vandals were striving towards a worthy and admirable cause, they just went about it the wrong way. In reality, however, those who tore down Sir John’s statue were, like past zealots who have sought to erase history – and for those who think otherwise, while the past cannot be erased, it is entirely possible to erase history, for history is not just the past but, in the words of John Lukacs, “the remembered past” – are not admirable but misguided seekers after justice. They are the mob, the easily enflamed masses, stirred up by those who have incited hatred against our country, its history, its institutions, and its traditions.

I will return to that momentarily. Allow me to first conclude my reflection upon the Prime Minister’s words by saying that while it was a poor way of saying that the vandals were wrong, it was indeed a way of saying it, a condemnation of their actions. Erin O’Toole the new Conservative leader, Maxime Bernier the leader of the People’s Party of Canada, François Legault the Premier of Quebec, and Jason Kenney the Premier of Alberta each and all said it much better, but he did say it. It is right to give credit where credit is due, even if I am thinking of Sawyer Brown’s linking that proverb with thanking “the devil for the trouble that I get into” as I write this, and so kudos to the Captain, Canada’s stopped clock, for finally getting something right, in a way. 

Now, having gotten that out of the way, let us turn our attention back to the mob and the diabolical minds that have stirred up their passions and misdirected their energy. 

There are those who have tried to justify the actions of the mob by slinging mud at our first Prime Minister. Rather than re-invent the wheel, for those seeking answers to such people I refer you to Stephen K. Roney’s rebuttal of Bruce Katz, which can hardly be improved upon. To those looking for a fuller defence of Sir John I refer to my essay from two years ago entitled “Speaking Out For Old Tomorrow.” For those wanting a comprehensive rebuttal of the anti-Canada, Critical Race Theory, narrative as found in the Truth and Reconciliation Committee Report and the more recent report of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Committee, I refer you to the aforementioned Stephen Roney’s excellent book Playing the Indian Card: Everything You Know About Canada’s “First Nations” is Wrong.

The toppling of the statue, however, was an act of violence, directed not against Sir John A. Macdonald as an individual, but the country of which he is a symbol. Sir John A. Macdonald was the leading figure in Confederation, the discussion in which the provinces of British North America agreed to join into a federal union with our own Parliament under the Crown. He was the first Prime Minister of the Dominion of Canada and the man who saw her through the period in which she was most vulnerable to the various powerful commercial and political interests from the republic south of the border who wished the Confederation Project to fail that they might swallow up the pieces. He was the one who spearheaded the construction of the railroad which effectively thwarted the designs of Manifest Destiny and saw it through to its completion. It is no coincidence, that the Critical Race Theorists’ attempts to blacken his reputation take the form of a spurious and anachronistic deliberate misreading of everything he did in order to meet the obligations of the Dominion government under the treaties signed with the Indian tribes, and that those treaties just happened to have been negotiated as part of the process of building the railroad, settling the prairies and uniting the east with the west. The Critical Race Theorists know what they are doing and it is the Dominion of Canada the country, not Sir John A. Macdonald the man that is really under attack here. 

On a larger scale, of course, the attacks of this nature that we have seen occurring across Western Civilization are attacks upon that very civilization as well as the countries within it.

Neither the Dominion of Canada nor Western Civilization is beyond scrutiny and criticism, of course. Both are made up of fallible and deeply flawed human beings since other than the Son of God these are the only kind that can be found on this earth this side of Eden and prior to the Second Coming. The universal failings of human nature are a perpetual and unanswerable argument against those who would point to the inevitable shortcomings of human leaders, institutions, countries, and civilizations as grounds for razing them to the ground. Revolutionaries, no matter how lofty the ideals they preach, are fundamentally incapable of replacing an old order with a perfect and pristine new one, for they cannot escape participating in the same flawed nature as those who built the old one. In the end, all that revolutionaries can ever accomplish is to destroy all those things which meliorate the human condition and allow for the possibility of a good life for fallen human beings. We ought never to forget the words of the late Sir Roger Scruton that “good things are more easily destroyed than created.” 

The Dominion of Canada, established on a foundation of loyalty, honour, and continuity, has been blessed with an abundance of those good things. To list our constitution of parliamentary monarchy, and the civil rights, prescriptive liberties and judicial principles of the Common Law tradition, is to speak only of the most obvious civil or political examples of these. The way our political leaders and mass media commentators, from all sides of the political spectrum, feel constantly compelled to reduce all of these to “our democracy” has trivialized them, but that is a topic for another time. It is these good things that are under attack, when mobs stirred up by demon-inspired Critical Theory intellectuals, wage war on our country and civilization, by attacking its symbols and historic figures. 

If only the Prime Minister had included all of that in his answer.