The Devil’s Deadly Trick

 

Last week David Warren wrote “I have long supposed the Devil’s ‘fan base’ is to be found overwhelmingly on the political Left. The cause is obvious: they are the godless parties.”  I agree with this.  I usually find myself in agreement with what the former editor of The Idler and Ottawa Citizen columnist writes.  Usually, not always.  I don’t agree with him that St. Peter was given a universal jurisdiction over the other Apostles and the entire Church which has descended to the Patriarch of Rome to this day although I rather admire the way he has handled that office being currently held by someone who is clearly not what the Presbyterian Anne Blythe nee Shirley would have called a “kindred spirit.”  Of course this is a relatively new belief of his.  He entered the Roman Communion in 2003.  Back when I was reading him in print in the 1990s he was still a member of the Anglican Communion to which I currently belong, although at the time alluded to I was attending Non-Conformist meetings of a very Low Church sort.  Looking back, it must have been somewhere around the time that he crossed the Tiber that my theology started to develop along the High Church lines that put me on the Canterbury trail by the end of the decade.  I also no longer share his current admiration for Donald the Orange, although in the interest of being fair I do admire the dismantling of America’s “deep state” that Warren was praising in the piece quoted above.  While Trump initially lost my admiration the moment he first threatened Anschluss against Canada I have since come to see that he is someone who no Christian of any Communion who is familiar with Scripture and Tradition should be supporting because he has formed a cult of followers around himself that make blasphemous claims about him that he has never repudiated, at one point retweeted, and has both made himself and encouraged among his followers.  In the most recent example, Paula White, the heretical televangelist whom Trump has appointed the head of his newly created “White House Faith Office” formed ostensibly for the purposes of combatting anti-Christian discrimination, blasphemously said “To say no to President Trump would be saying no to God.”  In the early centuries of Christianity, when persecution came from officials of the Roman Empire, it was because Christians refused to accept the claims of divinity that the state cult made for the emperor.

 

That having been said, I reiterate that I do agree with Warren’s statement about the Devil’s fan base being “overwhelming on the political Left.”   In this essay, however, I intend to demonstrate that the Devil’s can sometimes more effectively work through those who are not his fans, those who are not openly on his side.   The first step in the demonstration is to ask a question.  

 

If the Devil’s fans are on the Left what are we to make of a “Right” that has largely aligned itself with a cult that worships a false christ?

 

This is an important question to ask because historically the home of political messianism has been on the Left.  The idea that political action is the path of salvation is arguably the defining characteristic of the historical Left.   The Right’s historical attitude has been to reject this idea and to regard the various schemes that have been hatched out of it with the appropriate response ranging from skepticism to horror.  If it be countered that the “far Right” twentieth century movements Fascism and Nazism both preached a form of political national salvation, the response is that these movements were not related to the historical and traditional Right, did not consider themselves to be on the Right – Nazism stands for “National Socialism” and regarded itself as a revolutionary rather than a reactionary party – rejected all the principles of the historical and traditional Right, formed regimes that resembled those of Communism, and are only considered on the “Right” because the Left has so categorized them.

 

This “Right” that so blasphemously looks upon Donald the Orange as a “Saviour” is obviously primarily an American phenomenon based in the United States of America.   This itself is sufficient to explain its turn to political messianism.  The American Right has no more of a relationship with the historical and traditional Right than Fascism or National Socialism did because the United States was founded on the repudiation of the principles of the historical and traditional Right.

 

The historical and traditional Right was essentially the resistance of Christendom – Christian civilization – to its being replaced with Western Civilization – Modern, liberal, secular civilization.  As such, it held the worldview of Christendom, a worldview incompatible with theories of political salvation such as were to become all too numerous in the politics of Modern, liberal, secular, Western Civilization.  The struggles and woes of man in this world are a condition from which he cannot extract himself because they are the consequences of Original Sin – he is in exile from Paradise Lost.  The State has been given to man, therefore, not to save him from his condition, but to administer earthly justice and enforce the laws made necessary by Original Sin.  Although salvation was accomplished by God in this present world in history through the events of the Gospel, and can be partially enjoyed in this present world in Christ’s spiritual kingdom the Church in her “militant” mode, the full enjoyment of salvation, Paradise Regained is to be looked for outside of history, after the event that will bring history to a close, the Second Coming of Jesus Christ to “judge both the quick and the dead.”

 

The historical and traditional principles of the Right are basically three – one political, one religious, and one that combines the political and the religious.  The political principle is royal monarchy.  Not just monarchy, the governance of the one. Dictatorship or tyranny, the absolute rule of someone propelled into power by the mob, is a perverse example of that.  Royal monarchy or kingship, the reign of someone selected not by popular election but by an established line of secession that places his office above democratic politics, who accedes immediately on the death of the previous Sovereign, but is confirmed in the office by swearing oaths before and to God in the Church.  The religious principle is orthodox Christian Churchmanship which is the confession and practice of the orthodox Christian faith of the ancient Creeds, in a Church in organic descent from the Church in Jerusalem, with valid Sacraments administered by the ministerial priesthood governed by bishops in Apostolic succession.  The third principle is the union of Church and State, not in the sense of a theocracy in which the Church rules the State or Erastianism in which the State rules the Church, but in the sense of the co-operative relationship between the Christian kings of the first principle, and the orthodox Church of the second principle, in which each exercises their authority in their own sphere to uphold the other in its sphere.

 

The most legitimate Right is the Right that continues to hold to these principles.   The second most legitimate Right is that which defends the other good things that the Left turned to attacking after its war on kings, the Church, and Christendom’s union of Church and State. Any list of such good things would have to be representative as the Left is constantly adding to it.  The American Right at its best – and it is far from its best at the moment – can only ever be a version of the second most legitimate Right, because the United States was founded on an explicit repudiation of the first and third principles, by Puritans, freemasons, and deists who had personally repudiated the second.

 

Does this mean that the United States was founded as a country of the Left?

 

Yes and no.  The United States was built on the foundation of liberalism.  While “liberalism” and “the Left” have often been used interchangeably they are not identical.  Think of a river, flowing from a spring, from which, near the source, a tributary breaks off.  Now, if you think of the spring as the turning away of Modern philosophy from Christianity and the traditions of Christendom, liberalism as the river flowing from it, and the Left as the tributary, you will have the basic idea of the relationship between these things.  It should be added that throughout their history the streams of liberalism and the Left have sometimes moved closer to each other and sometimes further apart. 

 

Now, while liberalism’s repudiation of the principles of Christendom and the Right was bad and places it on the Devil’s side along with the Left, the ideas of liberalism were not all bad, and those that were bad were not all bad to the same degree.  It was necessary that this be the case for the Devil’s trick to work.  For that trick is simply this, to present people with two options, one on the Left that is more or less explicitly evil, the other, a more palatable liberal option that can be marketed as “conservative” and to tell people they have to choose one or the other.  I am not thinking primarily of party politics although the American two-party system does provide an illustration of how the trick works.  The most recent Democratic presidential candidates have been people who think women have the right to murder their babies, that white people should be made into racial scapegoats for the problems of everyone else, that men who claim to be women are what they claim to be and have a right to be treated as such and that violent criminals should be turned out onto the streets as soon as possible.  That is only a sampling of their crazy and evil ideas.  They are the Devil’s fan base indeed.  So the Republican candidate gets elected. 

 

The Devil has played this trick very effectively in economics.  The Left has offered us an option called socialism.  Socialism is a scheme of political salvation.  It tells us that our woes are all due to economic inequality, that the cause of economic inequality is private ownership, and that salvation is to be attained by eliminating private ownership and replacing it with some form of common or public ownership.  Don’t be deceived by its surface appearance for if you look beneath the surface it is clear that this is not some benevolent if sappy “lets care and share” sort of thing but something far more sinister.  Where its true face can be seen is in its egalitarianism.  A movement that was genuinely about alleviating economic suffering and misery would do so rather than obsessing about the unfairness, real or imagined, of their being “haves” when there are also “have nots.”  Eliminating private ownership is a way to harm the “haves” not to help the “have nots.”  “Private property”, Simone Weil wrote in The Need for Roots, “is a vital need of the soul.”  Socialism therefore reduces to Envy, the hatred of others for their possession of something you desire that is the second worst after Pride of the Seven Deadly Sins.  That so many have been fooled into looking no further than the surface and seeing something that looks to them like Christian Love for the poor and disadvantaged should not surprise us.  This is another of the Devil’s tricks, the one identified by St. Paul in 2 Corinthians 11:14-15.  Today, after about a century of socialism having been given chance after chance to alleviate misery, only to produce more than it alleviated, that trick is less effective.

 

This brings us to the other economic option that in the Devil’s trick is presented as the alternative to the Left’s bad option of socialism.  This is capitalism, the economic system for which liberalism has always advocated although the capitalism of reality and the capitalism of liberal economic theory have never been the same thing.  For our purposes here the differences are irrelevant.  The key elements common to reality “capitalism” and liberal theory “capitalism” are the private ownership of capital (wealth that can be used to create more wealth), contractual labour, and voluntary economic transactions.  Since these are each preferable to their alternatives, capitalism as a whole has been easy to sell to those who see socialism for what it is and capitalism has often been thought of as the economics of the Right despite its association with liberalism.  When it comes, however, to all those good things that the Left has declared war on, capitalism, the economy of Big Business, has been very destructive, arguably far more so than socialism.  Richard M. Weaver, writing in 1948 identified a few of these goods: “The moral solution is the distributive ownership of small properties.  These take the form of independent farms, of local businesses, of homes owned by the occupants, where individual responsibility gives significance to prerogative over property.” (Ideas Have Consequences, 121)  He then added “Such ownership provides a range of volition through which one can be a complete person, and it is the abridgment of this volition for which monopoly capitalism must be condemned along with communism.”  

 

Much was made, and rightly so, in the Batflu scare of 2020 to 2022, of the harm the lockdowns and other repressive measures were doing to small businesses that did not have the resources to weather that storm of stupidity the way large conglomerates did.  While lockdowns, vaccine passports, and the like, are hardly “capitalist” measures, I wonder which was responsible for eliminating more small businesses, Batflu tyranny or the online global business empire of Donald the Orange’s newfound billionaire bestie Jeff Bezos?

 

Numerous other examples of this trick of the Devil’s can be produced.  One that is particularly germane at the moment is the nationalist opposition to the Left’s dream of world federalism with global citizenship and a battery of international bureaucracies to impose sex reassignment surgery on those few children they have allowed to escape subsidized, near-mandatory, abortion the second they experience a moment of gender confusion anywhere in the world whatever the local laws happen to say about it.  The alignment of the Left with the Devil’s values is particularly obvious in this case.  As tempting, however, as that makes the nationalist option, it ought to be resisted by the Right.

 

For one thing, nationalism’s home, like that of political messianism is properly on the Left.  Nationalism, historically, was a product of the French Revolution.  The Jacobins equated nation with state, and demanded, at the risk of your head if you didn’t comply, that loyalty to king and Church be replaced with loyalty to the nation-state.  For another, nationalism like socialism is a vice masquerading as a virtue.  The virtue it pretends to be, obviously enough, is patriotism, the love of one’s country.  Nationalism, however, is a poor imitation of patriotism.  It’s exaggerated and loud boasting about its country, its belligerence towards and bullying of other countries, none of which is characteristic of quiet, irenic, patriotism, betrays a lack of love for one’s country.  In a recent and excellent column Charles Coloumbe said much that is true, but when he wrote of Donald the Orange “That the newly restored president deeply loves the United States is, no doubt, true” he was very mistaken.  If Donald the Orange deeply loved the United States, he would accept her for what she is warts and all, quietly try to remove the warts without drawing attention to them, and leave the rest of the world alone, rather than loudly proclaim his intention to make her “Great Again” a proclamation that shows that he does not consider her to be great now and that greatness, a measure of strength and size, is the quality he wishes for her, rather than goodness, which is what someone who truly loved her would look for and manage see in her, even underneath her flaws.

 

In the last example there is a clear third alternative that the Right should chose over both nationalism and the Left’s world federalism/global citizenship/international bureaucracy and that is simple patriotism.  Such an alternative is more difficult to identify for the false choice of socialism and capitalism, in part because there are a multitude of acceptable alternatives. The distributism proposed by G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, its close American cousin the agrarian economy that the Vanderbilt Twelve associated with the antebellum South which Wendell Berry both promoted and lived, Austrian economist Wilhelm Roepke’s synthesis of these with the liberal free market are just three such.  I shall defer further discussion of this point to an essay of its own at a later date.  I raise it here to make the point that these choices are false choices.  There are other options than socialism and capitalism.  There is a better alternative to one-worldism than nationalism.  There is a better alternative to democracy than republicanism.  We do not have to fall for the Devil’s trick and choose capitalism because socialism is so repugnant or choose nationalism because of all the evil that has been done by one-worldism.  Capitalism and nationalism have historically been very destructive of the good things in this world that we on the Right wish to conserve or restore.   

 

Finally, just because the Devil’s “fan base” on the Left, reviles and hates Donald the Orange for the things he gets right such as his refusal to allow his country to overrun by invaders, his banning the mutilation of children, his recognition of only two sexes, and the like, this does not mean that we on the Right should join what has so obviously become a deluded and dangerous cult, that worships the American president, and blasphemously looks upon him as some kind of saviour figure.   Out of all these false choices, this is by far the worst.

 

In the Olivet Discourse Jesus warned that “many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many.” (Matt. 24:5)   Later He told His disciples how to respond to these “Then if any man shall say unto you, Lo, here is Christ, or there; believe it not.” (v. 23).   It is incumbent upon us to obey our Lord’s words now.  False christs, as Gamaliel pointed out to the Sanhredrin in Acts 5, don’t end well, and they bring their followers down with them.  Jesus of Nazareth, was shown to be the true Christ, the Son of God, by the fact that the Crucifixion was not His end, He rose again from the dead and ascended into Heaven and is present in His Church to this day.   The Trump movement, by contrast, will end like that of any other false christ.  The fact that he is president of the United States will only make his fall that much harder.

 

Don’t fall for the Devil’s trick.

Christ is Still Victorious

J. Brandon Magoo, the decrepit old geezer who a few years ago under suspicious circumstances highly indicative of chicanery and perhaps a deal with Lucy the gender-confused devil, became the occupant of the building at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington DC that has surprisingly not been renamed in one of the fits of anti-white hysteria that have marked the acceleration of Western Civilization’s descent into the final stages of Spenglerian winter, declared 31 March to be “Transgender Day of Visibility.”  Exactly why he thought this segment of the alphabet soup gang the visibility of which proportionate to its representation in the public has become comically excessive in recent years, needed such a day, escapes me.   Perhaps it is indicative of his eyesight having become so bad with age that he cannot see what is right before his nose.   Lest anyone think I am unfairly picking upon our neighbours to the south who are twice unfortunate, first in being saddled with an ungodly republican form of government, and second in having Magoo as their president, I will point out that the twit who has led His Majesty’s government as prime minister for the last nine years is just as bad and doesn’t have the excuse of extreme old age.  At any rate, Magoo’s choice of date looks very much like it was intended as a kick at his country’s Christians.   For this year, the most important festival of celebration in the Christian Kalendar fell on 31 March.   That is the annual celebration of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ that is the Christian Passover.   In most countries it is called Pascha or some similar word derived from the Greek and Latin words for Passover.  In some countries, not all, with Germanic based languages – English developed out of Anglo-Saxon a dialect of German – it called Easter, Ostern, or some other such cognate, for which reason countries with Germanic languages are infested with the type of Hyper-Protestant who likes to spread the ridiculous conspiracy theory that the Church is not really celebrating the Resurrection on this day but rather worshipping some pagan goddess.   Twits like this would have a harder go at selling such tripe in countries that speak Greek or a Romance language.

 

It is rather amusing that these Hyper-Protestants are able to spin an elaborate conspiracy theory from what they think they know about the name of the festival.   In the lands where a variation of Eastern/Ostern became the popular name of the festival the Church had been celebrating as Pascha for centuries prior the name was taken from the month in which it often fell.   This is the month that we call April.   The Anglo-Saxons called it Eosturmonaþ. (1)   The Venerable Bede may or may not be right about that name having come originally from a Germanic goddess.  He is the sole source attesting to there having been such a goddess.  Whether or not the pagan Anglo-Saxons worshipped such a deity is immaterial.  She was supposedly the goddess of spring and the rising sun – the term east for the direction in which the sun rises has the same derivation – and this is the basis of her association with the month of April.  Eosturmonaþ was the Anglo-Saxon “month of spring.”   This is the association that was undoubtedly foremost in the minds of the Anglo-Saxons after they converted to Christianity and began calling the Christian festival that often falls in that month by its name.  

 

Far from being a paganization of Christianity the borrowing of this name for the Christian Passover was very apt.   While the Son Whose rising we celebrate on Easter is the Son, spelled with an o, of God, He is also according to the Messianic prophecy of Malachi “the Sun of righteousness”.  That is the prophecy that reads “But unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings; and ye shall go forth, and grow up as calves of the stall.” (Mal. 4:2)   As for spring, into this season in which after months of winter, trees put forth leaves, grass begins to grow, flowers start to appear, animals come out of hibernation and the birds return, God has placed within nature a depiction of resurrection.   Perhaps this is also the reason why the Jewish Passover which prefigures the events that culminated in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ celebrated in the Christian Passover occurred when it did.   The Jewish Passover falls on the 14^th, the Ides, of the month in the Hebrew calendar that since the Babylonian Captivity has been called Nisan.  The original name of this month, the one used in the Pentateuch where the account of the Exodus out of Egypt and the instructions for celebrating Passover are laid out, is Aviv or Abib. (2)   This word means spring.  The name of the city of Tel Aviv in modern Israel means “Hill of Spring.”

 

This is why the Christian Passover is celebrated when it is.   In the early centuries of the Church different regions had different practices with regards to the celebration of Christ’s Resurrection.  Some thought it should be celebrated on the date on which it occurred in the secular calendar regardless of what day of the week it fell upon.  Others thought it should always be celebrated on the day of the week in which it occurred, Sunday.   Some thought it should fall on the same day as the Jewish Passover.   Others thought that the dispensational change needed to be signified by a different date.  In the first ecumenical Council of the Church – a council, to which all the bishops from every region are invited and the rulings of which are subsequently received as binding by the universal Church – which was convened at Nicaea in 325 AD to address the heresy of Arius of Alexandria, who denied that the Son was co-eternal, co-substantial, and co-equal with the Father, it was ruled that the Church would celebrate the Christian Passover on the first Sunday – the day of the week on which the Resurrection took place – after the first full moon – a month in a lunar calendar begins with the new moon and the Ides fall on the full moon so Jesus was crucified on the full moon – on or after the spring equinox, an approximation of the anniversary of the Resurrection.

 

For those for whom all this talk of spring, the moon, etc. smacks of paganism, I strongly recommend, a) reading your Bible more thoroughly – that God gave the lights in the heavens for “signs, and for seasons, and for days and for years” is stated in the Creation account (Gen. 1:14), and the calendar the Israelites used was a lunar calendar in which each month was the length of a moon cycle, and b) reading C. S. Lewis’ God In the Dock.   This is a collection of essays compiled by William Hooper and published after Lewis’ death.  It is largely apologetic in theme and the essays that deal with Christianity and paganism are particularly relevant.  Lewis, in rebuttal of the school of skeptical anthropology that drew inspiration from Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough and wrote off Christianity as presenting simply another version of themes that appear throughout pagan mythology, pointed out that by contrast with the figures in these myths, Jesus lived, died, and rose again in history, not in some otherworld and othertime, but in a known place and time in this our world.   He also pointed out that by contrast with mythology, in which a dying and rising again god may be understood as symbolizing such things as nature and fertility and the life cycle, with the events of the Gospel, it is the things in nature that the myths signify that themselves signify Jesus’ Death and Resurrection.    If you are averse to this sort of argument that Jesus is the reality to which myths imperfectly and indirectly point, understand it in terms of the New Testament’s theology of revelation.  God has revealed Himself to all in His Creation, St. Paul explains in the first chapter of Romans.  This is called natural revelation.   It is insufficient to bring anybody to a saving faith but it provides enough light that the ideas that natural man derives from this revelation, whether philosophical or mythological, while they will be marked by numerous errors, will not be entirely devoid of truth.   The ancient Israelites were given a different type of revelation on top of this.  It is called special revelation.  The true God in establishing His Covenant with the Patriarchs and later the nation of Israel gave them a revelation of Himself and His will that no man could come to from natural revelation alone.   That revelation too, however, paled in comparison to God’s ultimate revelation of Himself in the Incarnation.   When St. Paul brings up natural revelation in the first chapter of Romans it is at the beginning of an argument in which he shows that the nations of the world, despite this revelation, fell into the apostasy of idolatry and gross sin, and then shows that the Jews who had been given God’s Law fared no better, but that the whole world, Jew and Gentile alike, are sinful, lacking the righteousness that God requires of them, which righteousness God gives to Jew and Gentile alike freely by His grace in Jesus Christ, through His Death and Resurrection.   This is something to which those who stick up their nose at Easter, the Christian Passover, and insist that we should stick to the Old Testament feast, really ought to give consideration.

 

As important as the delivery of the ancient Israelites from Egyptian bondage, to which the Jewish Passover looks back, was, unless it is regarded as a type, foreshadowing the greater deliverance that Jesus Christ would accomplish it is merely the story of one nation, one people.   The Hebrew people, enslaved in an Egypt that had forgotten Joseph, was delivered by the God Who had made a Covenant with their distant ancestors, by sending a series of plagues upon Egypt culminating in the death of the firstborn from which only the Hebrews were spared on that first Passover, prompting Pharaoh to finally give in to God’s message through Moses, and let the people go, or rather drive them out.   Thus a nation was born and to that nation these events will always be specially sacred.   The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, however, was not some tribal deity, but the True and Living God, the Maker of Heaven and Earth, and God had promised the Patriarchs that through them He would bless all the nations of the world.   The Hebrews in the Exodus account represent all the people of the world, their physical bondage in Egypt represents the spiritual bondage to sin that has been the plight of the world since Adam, their deliverance from that slavery on that first Passover represents the redemption from slavery to sin, death, and devil that Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God, the Promised Christ or Messiah, would purchase not just for Israel but for the entire world by dying and rising again from the dead.   There were many facets to this redemption.   The Church Fathers in the first millennium stressed that because the Incarnate Son of God was sinless, death had no claim on Him, and so by dying He entered death’s kingdom not as captive but Conqueror, and liberated those over whom death had lost his claim by taking Jesus.   In the West in the second millennium the vicarious aspect of Christ’s death, that He bore our sins so as to settle our account and make us righteous before God, came to be stressed.   These are two aspects of the same truth which cannot be comprehended in any one single theory.   However we understand the mechanics of His Death for us the story is not complete without His Resurrection.   In His Resurrection the enemy that comes for us all in the end is himself overthrown and destroyed.   This is a victory that ultimately we are to share in.  As John Donne put it: One short sleep past/We wake eternally/And death shall be no more/Death thou shalt die.   In another very real sense our sharing in the victory of Christ’s Resurrection does not await that final day.  St. Paul explains in the sixth chapter of Romans that in out baptism into Christ’s Church we are baptized into Christ’s Death.   Being so joined to Him in His Death, we remain united with Him in His Resurrection and our sharing in His Resurrection life is the new spiritual life into which we are regenerated and in which the Apostle enjoins us to live to God in righteousness.   This is the substance of which the first Passover was the shadow.

 

In discussing Christ’s victory we often speak of the enemy that He defeated, death, as a person.   This is not just a device like the Grim Reaper of folklore that helps us to make tangible the concept of death.   The Apostle in the Epistle to the Hebrews tells us exactly who death personified is: “Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also himself likewise took part of the same; that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil”. (Heb. 2:14)   It should not surprise us therefore, when agents of the devil act out his impotent rage against all that Easter represents by doing things like declaring a day for something stupid, silly, and nonsensical and making it fall on the same day as Easter.   Nor should we allow it to disturb our peace of mind.   These are the last desperate measures of an already defeated foe and should be regarded as such and as nothing more.

 

Happy Easter!

Christ is Risen!  He is Risen indeed! 

Alleluia!

(1) The letter þ is called a thorn and is pronounced like th.  It is a runic letter.  When printing was invented, rather than make a distinct type form for it, printers often made y do double duty, for itself and for thorn.  In the 1611 edition of the Authorized Bible you will often find "the" and "then" printed as ys for thorns with the other letters in small superscript above them.   For the most part obsolete, this runic addition to the Latin characters that otherwise make up our alphabet, survives in the signs of businesses that have deliberately archaic names like "ye olde shoppe".   The "ye" is not the second person plural pronoun, which would not make sense as the first word in the name of a store, but the definite article spelled with the y version of thorn.

(2) The second letter of the Hebrew alphabet can be pronounced either like a b or a v.  In modern print Hebrew, the pronunciation is indicated by the presence of a dagesh, a dot in the middle of the letter.  If the dagesh is present bet is pronounced like b, if it is absent it is pronounced like v.  The dagesh like all Hebrew diacritical marks including the vowel indicators, is a relatively modern invention absent from ancient Hebrew writings.   This is why some words are transliterated into English both ways.

Devil Departments

Of all the evils that Satan or Lucy as the gender-confused devil prefers to be called unleashed upon the world in the twentieth century, human resources management or HR and public relations or PR are among the most insidious.   A couple of socio-economic transformations – first from a rural society with an agricultural economy to an urban society with an industrial-manufacturing economy, then from an owner-managed industrial-manufacturing economy to a corporate economy managed largely by professionals trained in management – the private sector equivalent of bureaucrats –with both steps thought up in hell and overseen on earth by the devil himself, brought about the establishment of HR and PR departments.   See James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution (1941) for an account of the second of these transformations.  HR and PR are specialized fields within the more general field of professional management and the departments which bear these names are filled by people who have been trained in these specialized fields.   The theory on which professional management training, including HR and PR training, is based is the theory that the knowledge of how to properly run a company is technical knowledge, that is to say, knowledge that can be reduced to a technique – a set of instructions which followed will invariably produce the desired result – that can be written down in a manual, preferably in terminology distinct to the particular technique – technical language – so as to keep the secrets of the technique among the trained.   For an outstanding critique of technical knowledge in general, see the title essay in Michael Oakeshott’s Rationalism in Politics (1962).   On top of the problems that are common to every kind of training in technical knowledge, however, there are a lot of things that are distinctly wrong with training in HR and PR.   Foremost among them is that it resembles the viruses, radiation, and other contagions that turn people into the walking, brain-devouring, dead in the ever-growing plethora of films, graphic novels and video games about a zombie apocalypse.

 

While that comparison may seem a little over-the-top, HR and PR types are notorious for wearing phony smiles plastered over their faces all the time and constantly projecting cheerful and friendly demeanours beneath which lie cold, calculating, minds that would not hesitate either to stab you or their own mothers in the back if they thought it would advance the company’s interests or their own careers (HR) or to throw anyone under the bus or tell any lie no matter how big if it will create the image they are looking for (PR).   HR and PR positions basically require the person who fills them to be soulless and training in these fields is a good way to kill the soul.

 

With HR the soulless nature of it is advertised in its very name.   Think about what the words “human resources” mean.   They mean regarding and treating human beings as if they belonged to the same category as land, money, trees, petroleum, or any other sort of material asset that businesses own and utilize.   The alternative expression “human capital” that is sometimes used makes this even more explicit.   While “human resources” was actually coined in the nineteenth century (by John R. Commons in The Distribution of Wealth in 1893), and the thing which we now use the expression to denote became recognizable in its present form around the time of the first World War, it was around the second World War that the thing was joined to its name and the name entered general circulation and usage.   It is interesting, is it not, that this was a little over a century after the British Empire outlawed the Atlantic slave trade, committed its navy to eradicating the trade, and abolished slavery within its borders, and a little under a century after the United States abolished slavery as an ex-post facto justification for the bloody internecine war she fought with herself in the first half of the 1860s.   Today, progressives rail against slavery more loudly and more often than the abolitionists ever did, in the hopes of convincing weak and foolish governments to tax people who have never owned slaves in order to pay people who never were slaves, on the absurd and utterly false grounds that slavery was the cause of all the problems facing people who have the same skin colour as the slaves most people think of when slavery comes up regardless of whether their ancestors were slaves or not.   At the same time corporations, by naming the department that is the intermediary between upper level management and labour “human resources management”, have demonstrated that in their way of thinking their workers are their property and that it is labour-contracted-for-between-free-agents that was abolished in reality, slavery in name only.   San Jose State University Professor of Economics Jeffrey Rogers Hummel appears to have been on to something when he entitled his history of the war between the American states Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men (1999).

 

In 1922, the philosopher Martin Buber published his Ich und Du, the translation of which was published in 1937 as I and Thou.   His thesis was that to each of us as a subject, “I”, everything else is either an object, an “it” which we experience and/or use, or a “thou” with which we relate as another subject.  Impersonal objects cannot properly be thous, but primitive people often treat them as such.   Modern people make the opposite mistake.   Other people can be either its or thous but to modern people they are far more often than not its rather than thous.   It is perceiving and relating to others as thous, however, that makes our lives meaningful and makes each of us fully “I”.   The ultimate and eternal “Thou” is God Himself.   HR zombies are trained to address people as thous in their endless, empty, and meaningless jargon, while in reality treating them as its.  

 

It has been observed over the last decade or so that the sort of left-wing lunacy that we once thought was safely confined to the asylums that are the campuses of academe is now being aggressively promoted in the corporate world.    Many corporations now require their employees to undergo diversity, inclusion, and equity training which is a form of brainwashing with progressive propaganda.   Companies in which the portion of their workforce that regularly interacts with the public faces an increased threat of bodily harm due to criminal violence now sometimes add insult to the risk of injury by requiring their workers to take “de-escalation training” as if it were their employees’ fault that some punk, just released on bail and high on meth, assaults and robs them and as if the garbage techniques taught in such training would work in such a situation.   It is through HR that this sort of madness has infected the management of so many companies.

 

PR is no better than HR.   Public relations, as we know it today, goes back to just before the First World War when Ivy Lee was hired by J. D. Rockefeller Jr. to be the spin doctor for his family and their oil company.   What Lee was to PR in practice, Edward Bernays, Lee’s friend and the nephew of Sigmund Freud on both sides of his family, was in theory.   In 1945 his Public Relations was published.   According to Bernays, PR was not just old-fashioned advertising, but a scientific method of analyzing public opinion and, utilizing insights drawn from psychology and sociology as well as the means of the new mass communications technology, reshaping public opinion.   It is no coincidence that this closely resembles the subject of his earlier, influential, work Propaganda (1928).   Indeed, the most significant difference between PR and propaganda is that listening to public opinion as well as shaping it is essential to PR.   This does not make it less mendacious and manipulative than its close relative.   On the contrary it makes it a more effective tool of mass manipulation.   It is also the reason why in today’s “cancel culture” PR departments insist that that someone be thrown under the bus every time the “woke” mob demands that person’s head as a sacrifice.   It is why todays PR firms are less interested in helping their clients present themselves in terms of the excellence of the goods and services they offer than they are in presenting them as the most devoted adherents of the cult of feminism, anti-white race hatred, and alphabet soupism on the block.  

 

It makes one positively nostalgic for the good old days when they pursued more worthy and benign efforts like promoting the oil and tobacco businesses.  

 

Let HR and PR return to Lucy in the hell whence they came.   They have already done enough to make earth resemble that place.

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.

Bishop Bartholomew B. Battybabbler and his Big Bad Bash

The Right Reverend Bartholomew B. Battybabbler had been very self-satisfied on the day he was consecrated bishop of the Diocese of Neo-Soho. Ever since he graduated seminary with his Doctor of Untraditional Ministry Backed by Advancements in Sacred Science degree, he had been looking forward to the day when he would finally be in a position to enact all the exciting new ideas that had been implanted in his brain. As, upon his enthronement, he took his episcopal vows with fingers firmly crossed behind his back, Barty, as he insisted that everyone, whether friend, family or foe, call him, thought back upon his seminary career and remembered his professors with fondness and gratitude.

Barty recalled how naïve he had been during his undergraduate days before he entered the Wellhausen-Schleiermacher Seminary of Theology. At the time he still held to a literal understanding of the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds that he had been taught as a child and to an outmoded view of morality based on the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule. When, towards the completion of his BA, he had settled upon the ministry as his vocation, he at first considered enrolling in the traditionalist Seminary of Hooker-Andrewes-Laud. Then he met Lucy. (1)

He was sitting in the university library, filling out his application to HAL, when a man who had been sitting at the next table came up to him. He had a pony tail and a goatee and was fashionably and immaculately dressed and groomed, although he wore his hat tilted very low so as to cover up his entire forehead. He introduced himself as Lucy. Barty wondered at the name, but out of politeness neither laughed nor asked questions.

“I see you are filling out a seminary application” Lucy observed. “Is it your wish to become a clergyman?”

Again, politeness prevented Barty from saying “no, I am entering seminary in order to become a travelling vacuum cleaner salesman” so he simply said “yes”.

“I commend you. It is a career that will enable you to do a lot of good – as long as you don’t become one of those reactionary, fascist, type priests who do nothing but perpetuate those old superstitions and myths that are holding the world back from achieving progress.”

Barty was not sure what exactly Lucy was talking about but it didn’t sound good so he said “No, I don’t want to be anything like that.”

“I didn’t think so. In which case, have you considered Wellhausen-Schleiermacher? They are a very progressive theological institution. All of the best sort of right-thinking priests come from there.”

Lucy pulled a brochure out of his jacket and gave it to Barty.

Barty took and read the brochure, threw away his application to HAL, and entered Wellhausen-Schleiermacher instead. He would be forever grateful to Lucy for his guidance. His professors had taught him that it was rank superstition to believe the Creeds literally, that the Bible should be valued as a literary work rather than an authoritative text, that the stories it contains of supernatural intervention by God in the affairs of people must be regarded as belonging to the same genre in which Hans Christian Anderson and the Brothers Grimm wrote, that enlightened and advanced ethics had moved far beyond the Ten Commandments or even the Sermon on the Mount, and that the real essence of the Christian message was the revolutionary social change that would bring about the radically egalitarian society that Jesus meant by the “Kingdom of God.” To promote that change, Barty had been taught, was the Church’s true mission, from which it had long been sidetracked by all this talk about the Trinity, Original Sin, Redemption, the Final Judgment, Heaven, and Hell, and it was the job of progressive young clergymen like himself to finally get the Church back on track.

Enthroned as Bishop of Neo-Soho, Barty proceeded to do just that. In his visitations to the parishes of his diocese he preached sermons that promoted social justice, wealth redistribution, and environmental awareness and condemned the sins of racism, sexism, and homophobia. Above all else he condemned fundamentalism, by which he meant all traditional, orthodox, theology, mentioning it negatively in every sermon, even if it had no apparent bearing on his main topic.

He encouraged his clergy, who had quickly gotten the picture that liberals would receive the full support of their new bishop whereas traditionalists would be ostracized and shunned, to discontinue traditional catechism and Sunday School and to hold sensitivity training workshops instead.

Barty knew, however, that to make his mark for the cause of progress, he would have do much more than this for any other liberal bishop would have done the same in his place. So he began a series of his own innovations, determined that the Diocese of Neo-Soho would be the most forward-thinking, progressive, denomination in the entire Church.

First, he set out to eliminate agism in the ordination of clergy. Taking Isaiah 11:6, “and a little child shall lead them”, as his motto, he declared that he would accept candidates for ordination without any artificial and discriminatory limitations based on age. So it came about that when the rectorship of the parish Church of SS. Peter, Paul, and Mary opened up he ordained and installed Tommy the Toddler as the new incumbent.

“This is the wave of the future”, an extremely proud Barty told reporters at the press conference after the ordination. The following Sunday, the new rector preached his first sermon with the title “You’re a Doody Head.” When his parish broke out laughing shortly after the title was announced, he sat down in his pulpit and began to wail, after which he took his toys and went home to his mommy. One of the reporters who had been at the press conference was in attendance and tried to contact Barty but was told that no further comment was available at this time.

Barty’s next ordination was of Melinda Meangirl, the queen bee of the most exclusive high school in the city. Barty was particularly pleased with this ordination because he felt it was a blow that struck against both agism and sexism. He held off on holding a press conference after appointing her to her first parish, however, and this proved to be a prudent move for, although Melinda’s social organizing skills were a boon for the first few months, rumors began to filter back to Barty that she had established a clique in the parish, with rather strict appearance based criteria for inclusion, and that those who didn’t make the cut were being branded as losers. Then, when the time came to renew the parish directory, she had the bright idea of creating a slam book and while Barty praised this as innovative, it proved extremely divisive.

Having eliminated agism, Barty next set out to combat discrimination in the administration of Holy Matrimony. “It is unacceptable”, he told his clergy, “that in this advanced day and age, the Church is still violating the principles of fairness, equality, and social justice by reserving Holy Matrimony to human beings. If we continue to practice this sin of speciesism we are no better than Donald the Orange.”

Donald the Orange, since his rise to power, had become as much the focus of Barty’s rage as fundamentalism.

To set an example for his clergy, Barty held a wedding ceremony at his Cathedral in which he married a bull terrier to a shih tzu. Throughout the ritual the sound of barely suppressed laughter could be heard arising from the congregation as the inevitable joke about the progeny of such a match made the rounds. As a precedent-setter, however, it appeared to be successful, for Barty started receiving calls from people asking him to marry their own pets. Then the zoo summoned him and asked him to marry their lions and tigers and bears. “Oh my” was Barty’s response. Soon, people stopped calling in advance and just showed up at the Cathedral with their pets. There were cats and rats and elephants and, sure as you are born, well, okay, there were no real unicorns, although someone did try to make a couple by gluing horns to the heads of his ponies.

As elated as Barty was to see his exciting vision become reality it could not escape his notice for long that church attendance and revenues were dwindling. It was apparent that unless there was a turnaround soon the diocese would be in severe financial difficulties. Barty couldn’t understand it. With all of his fresh new ideas every pew in every parish in the diocese ought to be packed and overflowing every Sunday. Instead they seemed to be leaving in droves. Even when he introduced his third major innovation, “hash hosts”, that is to say, communion wafers containing a strong dosage of tetrahydrocannabinol which was now legal thanks to Captain Airhead, for whom Barty thanked his higher power every day, this only slowed the exodus rather than halting it altogether.

“The Diocese of Paleo-Middlesex does not seem to have this problem”, Barty noted with some bitterness, for the bishop of Paleo-Middlesex, the Right Reverend John Keble Waterland, was a traditionalist, the kind whom Barty always called a “fundamentalist”, and whom he suspected of having a less than completely negative opinion of Donald the Orange.

“Their church attendance and donations are both way up and they will be ending the year in the black. This year I had to advise all of my clergy to cut three quarters of the funding to their music programs. Waterland had enough funds at his disposal to commission Danny Elfman, the Chuck Norris of composers, to write a brand new Mass setting which will be premiering at their Cathedral this fall. How do those reactionaries do it? What is their secret?”

Barty was turning green with envy.

Nevertheless, he still had an ace up his sleeve to play, when it came to balancing the diocesan books. Every summer he hosted a fundraiser party on board his yacht on Lake Wootiewappy. This year he would crank it up a notch and throw the biggest, most fabulous, party of all time. His friend Saucy Sam of Saucy Sam’s Salad Bar and All You Can Eat Barbeque Buffet had agreed to donate the catering and all of his friends in the local arts, music, and theatre community had agreed to contribute their talent to what promised to be a very entertaining program. Everybody who was wealthy and important in his diocese had received an invitation and they had all RSVP’d. Bishop Waterland had also been sent an invitation and lo and behold he was the first to show up.

“Thanks for the invite, Barty. It looks like you have a great evening planned for us.”

“Thanks, John.”

“Do you think you will raise enough to get your diocese out of the red?”

“I hope so. We had to make some pretty painful cuts this year.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. It is always difficult to know what to let go, when you are in strap, financially. What did you decide upon, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Well, we had to cut our music programs down to a quarter of what they were.”

“Oh, oh!”

“Why are you giving me that look?”

“Are you sure that was a wise thing to do?”

“We had to cut something. Why not music?”

“I take it you haven’t been following the latest research in behavioural genetics.”

“No, and I am rather surprised that you have.”
“Then you haven’t heard about the Kappa Rho Alpha Zeta Upsilon chromosome?”

“Um, no. I’ve heard of the X and Y chromosomes.”

“Those are the chromosomes that determine sex.”

“What is this crazy chromosome that you are talking about and what on earth does it have to do with my music program.”

“There is a genetic component to our talents, abilities, and behavioural dispositions. Not that these are entirely genetically, determined, mind you, but genes play a role. Scientists have isolated the genes that predispose someone to become a church musician, especially an organist and choir director. These are located on the Kappa Rho Alpha Zeta Upsilon chromosome.”

“Fascinating, but I still don’t see what the problem is.”

“Well, the genes that predispose someone towards piracy are located on the same chromosome.”

“What?”

“It would appear that the church musician genes are the stronger of the two sets on the chrosome. What this means is that an individual with the Kappa Rho Alpha Zeta Upsilon chromosome will be most strongly inclined to become a church musician, but if that opportunity is taken away from him, he will be inclined to fall back upon piracy as his second choice.”

“That has got to be the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard.”

“I’ll send you a copy of the scientific journal in which the research was published. It is quite fascinating. At any rate, you can see why I bring it up. Drastic cuts to your music program will mean a lot of church organists will either be let go or forced to moonlight in order to survive. Piracy will be the first thing that pops into their head.”

At this point, other guests started to arrive and Barty turned to greet them. He thought it over and chuckled over it a little latter.

“I hadn’t realized how much stress Waterland must be under. He must be on the verge of snapping, buying in to silly theories like that.”

Much later that evening, after everyone was well fed, the first half of the entertainment program was over and they had entered into an intermission. During the break everyone came up to Barty to congratulate him on the success of his event. While this was going on a loud boom was heard.

“What was that?” several people asked.

“Do you have fireworks planned for us, Barty?” asked the dean of his Cathedral.

“No”, answered Barty. “At least I don’t think so.”

All of a sudden a second boom could be heard. This time something came flying towards the yacht and smashed into the deck making a big hole.

“That was a cannon ball!”

Everybody on board the yacht turned in the direction from which the ball had come. There they could see another boat approaching. It was armed with cannons and was flying a flag, a black flag with a grinning skull and crossbones.

“That’s the Jolly Roger! We’re under attack by pirates!”

The pirate ship pulled up next to Barty’s yacht, and every organist and choir director in his diocese began to board the yacht. Some swung over on ropes. Others came across on planks they placed down from deck to deck. On the yacht, some of them went from guest to guest, demanding that they hand over their wallets and jewelry at cutlass-point, others cornered Saucy Sam and absconded with all of his delicious food. Needless to say, the yacht’s ample supply of liquor was taken, the rum going first.

“Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you, Barty!” the Right Reverend Waterland said to his host as the cathedral’s own organist put a pistol to his head and ordered him to hand over his episcopal ring and all other valuables.

“Oh shut up” said Barty.

Once they had stripped the yacht of everything worth taking, the organist pirates ordered everybody to the far side of the deck, and made them walk the plank. Barty was the last to go.

As he walked the plank and plunged into the water, Barty was extremely thankful that Lake Wootiewappy is no more than five feet deep at its deepest.

(1) Lucy first appears in Lucy's Day In Court.

The Adventures of Reaction Man: Episode II

Reaction Man versus the Marxist Zombie Army

Three times every year Aberhart Manning University in Brown Moose, Alberta hosts a series of debates on important and timely issues. The student body is expected to attend these debates but they are open to the public as well. Unlike most universities, AMU loves the most controversial topics and has a firm, long-standing, policy of making sure that both sides are fairly represented in the debate. The more controversial the topic, the more important this policy is.

Admirable as the university’s stand is, it has made them enemies. Foremost among these is the supervillain known as the Woke Millennial. Lurking in his secret lair, otherwise known as his parents’ basement, one day, he plotted and schemed about how he would make the university grovel before him.

“In exchange for my soul”, the Woke Millennial said, “Lucy has given me the power to generate a force bubble around me within which no intelligent thought can take place and so no ideas to which I object can be expressed. I call this my safe space.”

At this point a classical supervillain would have given off a deep, maniacal, laugh. The Woke Millennial instead gave a high-pitched, shrill, something that was half-way between a giggle and a cackle. As with everything else, they just don’t make supervillains the way they used to.

“The problem is that my power is limited. On my own I can only generate a safe space of a few meters in diameter around me. That is not near large enough, certainly not large enough to encompass the university, let alone the world. Lucy told me, however, that there was a way to make my safe space larger. I need to create an army of mindless zombies. The vacuums between their ears form echo chambers which augment my safe space generating rays. Fortunately for me, it is the nature of zombies to feed off the brains of those around them, creating even more zombies. It is also working in my favour, that university students are the easiest people in the world to turn into zombies, and that the perfect tool for doing so already exists and is in my possession.”

The Woke Millennial looked at his collection of The Complete Works of Karl Marx Annotated and Interpreted by the Frankfurt School.

“The average university student cannot read more than a sentence of this without turning into a mindless zombie. AMU is no ordinary university, however. There is a strong reactionary element there. I will need some protection while my zombie army is being created and while my safe space is still vulnerable. I know, I will call my Aunty Fa!”

The following day was scheduled to be the opening of the first of that year’s series of debates at AMU. The topic for the first debate was Donald the Orange: Good, Bad, or Ugly? The Good position was to be represented by right-wing author, columnist, and media personality, Angela Coltrane. Invited to speak for the Bad position was retired CBC commentator Paul Ladysditch. The Ugly side of things was to be taken up by the anti-racist activist and general left-wing loudmouth, “Borin’” Tinsel.

As the debate was about to begin the dean of AMU began to make his way to the podium to introduce the controversialists. He found his way barred by the Woke Millennial.

“What is your problem, young man?” the dean asked.

“First of all, I object to the terms “young” and “man.” You have imposed these age and gender labels on me. Secondly, I cannot allow this debate to take place. It is unacceptable.”

“It is a three-way debate, and two of the three are on your side! How can you find that objectionable?”

“Because Angela Coltrane is the other debater. Her views have no place in an academic setting. The vulnerable students of this university must not be exposed to any positive depiction of Donald the Orange.”

“This university thinks it best to allow its students to hear all sides and to trust them to evaluate them intelligently and come to their own conclusions.”

A lock of shock came over the Woke Millennial’s face.

“But the students are vulnerable. That is so irresponsible of you. Where is your compassion?”

The Woke Millennial began to cry and as his crocodile tears hit the floor they turned into a cloud of toxic gas from which the dean backed away in fear.

“Now Aunty Fa!”

The Woke Millennial’s Aunty Fa entered the auditorium dressed in a dark paramilitary uniform with her face hidden beneath a hood. Among the powers for which she had traded her soul to Lucy the gender confused devil was the ability to duplicate herself, which she promptly did. Her duplicates formed a barrier between the three invited to participate in the debate and the audience and then began to surround the auditorium. As they did so the Woke Millennial opened up his copy of the Frankfurt School annotated edition of Das Kapital and began to read aloud. As such inane lines as “In reality, the labourer belongs to capital before he has sold himself to capital” and “the value of a commodity represents human labour” fell on the ears of the students in the audience their brains began to evaporate and they became mindless zombies. The first zombies started repeating Marx’s banal tripe to the nearest non-turned students they could find, sucking their brains out and transforming them into zombies as well.

Before Aunty Fa had completely cut off the auditorium, however, preventing anyone from getting in or out, one student managed to slip out and get away. He was a member of the small traditionalist student group Christians United for Royalism and Monarchy Under God and against Egalitarianism and Other Nonsense. Members of this group wear its acronym as a badge of honour, observing that in an age that has gone mad through its obsession with progress the only sane response is to complain loudly about all the new-fangled ways and pine for the good old days. Their response to those who point out that the acronym is misspelled is to say, accurately enough, that their spelling is a centuries old alternative spelling which they deliberately chose because it was archaic. If pressed further, they will say “fine, the d is the d in the middle of Under.” This particular member’s name was Ritz Cracker. He was the youngest son of the youngest brother of Brother Moonpie the head monk of the holy and ancient Order of St. Michael of Marshmallow. (1)

“I need to contact my uncle Graham”, Ritz said as he fled the auditorium. “He will want to know about this and may know what to do about it.”

A short time later, after a very long distance call to a remote monastery in the Carpathian Mountains, followed by another very long distance call from that monastery back to Canada, Brother Whippet, who had decided to remain in Canada for a few weeks after administering the oath of knighthood to Evelyn Disraeli Dryden Bonald Burke Carey Filmer Eliot Hyde Maistre Salisbury Johnson and bestowing upon him the superhero name of Reaction Man, (2) contacted Eddy and let him know what was going down in Brown Moose.

“This is a job for Reaction Man! It will be your first battle, Eddy. Are you ready for this?”

“I don’t know. First I will have to defeat Aunty Fa before I can tackle the Woke Millennial and his zombie army. How am I going to do that?”

“I sent you a parcel. Surely you have received it by now?”

“Yes, it arrived yesterday. But all it contains is a mirror. How is that going to help?”

“It is the Mirror of Truth. Unmask Aunty Fa – the real Aunty Fa, not one of her duplicates – and make her gaze into it. She will see her true spirit reflected in it. Her spirit that is, not her soul, for she has none, having sold hers to Lucy. This will destroy her.”

“Then I guess I am ready.”

Eddy pointed at his cellphone and activated his superhero ability to turn back the clock. The phone transformed into an old-fashioned phone booth. Eddy then entered the booth to change into his Reaction Man costume. Emerging from the booth, he took off into the air, and faster than any airplane, flew to Brown Moose.

Reaction Man landed in front of the AMU auditorium which was now completely surrounded by Aunty Fa and her duplicates. They immediately began to throw epithets at him.

“Racist!”

“Bigot!”

“Fascist!”

“Neo-Nazi!”

“Holocaust Denier!”

“Anti-Semite!”

Reaction Man looked around at them all and wondered how he would ever be able to tell the real Aunty Fa apart from her duplicates. Then he noticed that one of them was talking to herself and that she was saying something that was more than just the one or two word examples of tiresome progressive billingsgate that otherwise seemed to be the limit to the Aunty Fa vocabulary.

“History is on our side! Reaction Man will never be able to defeat us. We will crush him and leave him on the trash heap of history”

“Aunty Fa! You have given yourself away!”

As quick as lightning, Reaction Man moved to Aunty Fa and, separating her from her duplicates, ripped off her mask to reveal the face of a notorious lobbyist and activist.

“Fernie Barber! I should have known that you were the one hiding behind that mask. So you are the Woke Millennial’s Aunty Fa!”

“Yes, Nazi, you have learned my identity, but you shall never tell anyone else. Woke’s zombies shall swallow your brains before you ever get the opportunity.”

“You sure like to throw that N word around Fernie! One would almost think you were projecting. Shall we find out?”

Reaction Man pulled out the Mirror of Truth and made Aunty Fa look into it. Reflected back at her was the infamous face of a man with a postage-stamp moustache, untidily parted hair, and a gaze that could either hypnotize or send you running away screaming in terror. Aunty Fa shrieked in agony!

“I’m literally Hitler!”

Confronted with the truth about herself, that in spirit it was she, not her enemies, who was the fascist, she melted away like the Wicked Witch of the West and all of her duplicates disappeared with her.

Reaction Man stepped in to the university auditorium. The Woke Millennial, seeing him, said:

“I don’t know how you defeated my Aunty, Reaction Man, but you will never defeat my Marxist zombies.”

The zombified students, with arms stretched out before them, began slowly moving towards Reaction Man, and uttering brain-dissolving phrases like:

“Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument” and “The essential difference between the various economic forms of society, between, for instance, a society based on slave-labour, and one based on wage-labour, lies only in the mode in which this surplus-labour is in each case extracted from the actual producer, the labourer.”

Reaction Man laughed.

“You will need to come up with something better than that mindless drivel if you want to steal my brain.”

Ritz Cracker, who had just arrived back on the scene, witnessed this.

“Is there any way of turning them back Reaction Man?”

“Fortunately, Ritz, I happen to know the cure for Marxism.”

“What is it, Reaction Man?”

“More Marxism!”

“What?”

“Only from a better Marx!”

Reaction Man pointed at the projection screen at the end of the auditorium and once again activated his ability to turn back the clock. A man appeared on the screen. He had very bushy eyebrows and a moustache, and was smoking a huge cigar. He had eyeglasses perched on a very large nose and his entire face looked like it was the inspiration for those fake nose/moustache/glasses combos that novelty shops used to sell – as, in fact, it was. He started to talk.

“One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I’ll never know.”

The zombies had turned to watch the screen. Signs of returning life began to flicker across their eyes. On the screen, Groucho continued to speak

“I’m not feeling very well. I need a doctor immediately. Ring the nearest golf course.”

A snicker or two could be heard arising from the zombie army.

“The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”

Several more chuckles broke out among the zombies.

“I sent that club a wire stating, ‘Please accept my resignation. I don’t want to belong to any club that will have me as a member.’”

A wave of laughter swept across the room, as Groucho’s humourous nonsense drove out Karl’s serious nonsense and restored the former zombies to life.

“Nooooooo” screamed the Woke Millennial! “Those jokes are offensive. They hurt my feelings. They must be silenc….”

The Woke Millennial never completed that word or that sentence for his safe space, which had grown to gargantuan proportions when it was augmented through the echo chambers of the zombies' empty heads, had contracted once the students’ brains had returned and the force of the shrinking safe space had knocked him into a coma.

“What happened to him, Reaction Man?” asked Ritz Cracker.

“The Woke Millennial has been put to sleep.”

“How did you think to use Groucho Marx to counter Karl Marx. A lot of people would have tried to answer those quotes with other quotes from Smith, Ricardo, Bastiat, Friedman, or Mises.”

“True, but that would not have served the purpose. I needed to cure the zombies, not turn them into a different kind of zombie.”

As the auditorium broke out in applause, Reaction Man announced “My work here is done” and turned to the dean and said “Now, you should probably get started on that debate which everyone is here for.” Then, he stepped out the door, took off, and flew home.

Stay tuned for the next exciting episode in The Adventures of Reaction Man

(1) Brother Moonpie and the Order of St. Michael of Marshmallow first appear in Brother Moonpie and the Devil’s Apocalypse.
(2) See The Adventures of Reaction Man: Episode I – The Origin.