#THE INTEMPERATE SONS

[metalshockfinland]

THE INTEMPERATE SONS Release Re-Imagined Version of Alice In Chains' 'Brother'

Photo Credit: Nate Schiefelbein The Intemperate Sons have unveiled their re-imagined version of Alice in Chains “Brother” via FRAME|WORK. “Brother” is a heartfelt rendition of the Alice in Chains classic, recorded as a tribute to a family member who has faced personal struggles. The Intemperate Sons bring their unique blend of rock and emotion to this cover, creating a powerful and moving…

[rockyoushow]

THE INTERMPERATE SONS Release New Single "Lake of Poison" + Official Music Video via FRAME|WORK

Ardent Owl Media Indie rock band The Intemperate Sons released their latest single “Lake of Poison” from their highly anticipated new album Game of Keep Away that will be released to all major platforms via FRAME|WORK/INgrooves in the fall of 2023. The band also released the official music video for the single and are in the early stages of planning a fall run of shows on the west coast. “Lake of…

[arabian-bloodstream]

The Object of Your Ire, Take 2

OK, so I've been reading posts on HOTD this season but been quiet, but after this last episode, I had to come out of hiding, because, yeah, I just can't. I called this after season 1, and I think I'm pretty sure where we're headed now. I genuinely do not believe that Daemon is being written out of character, or that this is coming out of nowhere, or that this makes no sense, or that Daemyra are being destroyed. Truly, just be patient. I think we're gonna be good.

I wrote this on October 21, 2022: The Object of Your Ire

And, yeah, I was almost 99% right there, so I've got a pretty good read on the thought process they got going. So, here's my take.

First, let's assess the situation.

Viserys dies. The throne is usurped. Daemon wants to go to war. He has no problem crowning her because they are both fire and blood. However, like Viserys, Rhaenyra cautions temperance. Because of this, Daemon fears she is weak like his brother. Luke is killed and Rhaenyra is enraged, and Daemon thinks now she will be on the same page as him. They will go to war and wipe out the traitors. They will indeed burn together. Instead, due to the Jaehaerys "mistake," Rhaenyra is once more urging caution, and Daemon's not here for that. Rhaenyra finally calls him out on the fact that Viserys didn't trust him, and now she knows that she can't either, not in this very volatile climate.

Daemon is proud and stubborn, and just as he didn't believe that Viserys didn't trust him but it was rather a case of jealousy and his own ego at play cannot see that it truly was the fact that his own intemperate actions pushed Viserys, and now Rhaenyra to this point. So he storms off. Now, in Harrenhal, these visions he is having are bringing home his guilt, parallels to moments in his life with Rhaenyra that pertain to her as heir and him not.

1) The camera work when he "killed" young!Rhaenyra was identical to when Viserys had him on the floor in S1EP4 and Viserys told him he didn't want Rhaenyra he wanted the crown 2) Rhaenyra on the Iron Throne as he walked towards her paralleled when we first saw him and Rhaenyra in the first episode but it was Daemon on the throne 3) Young!Rhaenyra was wearing the same dress that Rhaenyra was wearing when she mentioned Aegon's prophecy to her, the same when he choked her

(Also, someone pointed out that in the actual scene in the 1st episode, Daemon and Rhaenyra spoke Valyrian to each other. In this haunting vision, only young!Rhaenyra is doing so. Daemon is speaking the Common Tongue. He does not want to engage in their "secret language" in this version of young!Rhaenyra because she is not the real Rhaenyra and he knows that.)

So, why? Why is he having these visions? And why did he have the vision of having sex with his mother? Because Daemon has deep-seated issues of guilt and ego, and mommy and daddy-issues. Because Daemon feels like he should have been the one on the throne. That HE was better than Viserys. That HE would have been a better king than Viserys. That he would have been the favored son. But remember… these aren't JUST Daemon's visions, he's also almost assuredly being slipped something from Alys Rivers to hallucinate things. So, there is that. Basically, we're having a deep character dive into Daemon to deal with his guilt over some of the fucked-up things he's done, his issues that are even too much for him, and Alys's woowooaaahh! is pushing that along its way.

Oh, and BTW, that woman in Daemon's hallucination wasn't ACTUALLY Alyssa Targaryen. So, people saying, oh noes, they've ruined Alyssa Targaryen, no, no, they have not. We haven't met the real Alyssa Targaryen. That was some fucked-up concoction of Daemon's deranged psyche, not the real woman. Not by a long shot. Daemon desperately misses his wife, but he messed that up, and can't admit that he messed up. He's not there yet. He can't admit that. He also can't admit that he would make a lousy king. Last we heard him say, he's still saying that he should be king, and Rhaenyra his queen, by his side. Ah, ah, ah, ah, but I think the reason for this arc is to deal with that once and for all….

And there's good news on that front.

I know I'm kinda all over the place here, and I apologize, but there's a crap-ton to unravel. Look, Daemon is a fucking mess. But the first two episodes set this up perfectly to get us where we are and lead us, I believe, to where I think we're going. I could be wrong, absolutely, but I really did nail the whole Daemon/Viserys/Rhaenyra lack of trust/heir messed up in the head thing. I really did. So, I'm kinda trusting my gut here.

So, first couple of episodes, Daemon is itching to do things his way. He can't as he's waiting for the queen's go-ahead, but she's off looking for proof of Luke's death. She finally comes back and gives him that go-ahead. YAY! He thinks, but then he makes a "mistake," and she tears into him, telling him some very hard truths that he is just not willing to hear. So he storms off on his dragon. That's our set-up.

Then the next three episodes have been at first, he's working on getting the army for her, but then it starts to become about well, she's not doing this how I would, and I would be better so I should be the king and she can be my queen, so it should be my army, yeah, yeah, that's the ticket. Except it hasn't been as black and white as that because:

He's having all of these visions that are wrecking him, reminding him of how he was not the chosen heir at one point, it was Rhaenyra. (Natch, just like in the real world, Aegon/Alicent were getting that same dose of reality.)

He's stomping all over the Riverlands trying to force people to do his bidding as he would if he were king. First he tells the young Tully heir to kill his grandfather (nope, won't do, the kid loves his grandsire), then he threatens to kill the Brackens (or Blackwoods, I forget which, LOL) with dragonfire (nope, they'd rather die), then he's all do war crimes, but not in my name (they do the war crimes, under the Targ flag). In other words, Daemon does everything wrong. He kinda shows that Viserys was right.

We have that lovely final shot of him, head bent as he leans against the fireplace that flows directly into from the opposite side --> Rhaenyra leaning against the fireplace, head bent. SOULMATES!

Then she has her little talk with Lord Alfred, sending him to Harrenhal to find out what are Daemon's intentions. And there are three very interesting things of note in this scene. 1) That she knows Daemon well enough to know that he might be considering raising a host in his name. Yeah, it's awful of Daemon to even be considering that, but the fact that Rhaenyra knows him THAT WELL, yeah, you go, Rhae-rhae!, 2) Lord Alfred immediately was all like: "His intentions? But, but, but… Prince Daemon would never!" Loved that. Because you know it did not come from a place of Daemon Targaryen is just known for being SUCH a loyal guy, but rather because they know he loves his wife. Uh huh! And 3) Rhaenyra's message: That she wants to finish their conversation. Love, love, love that. Girl is like, babe, we gonna hash this out!

Furthermore, we also had Jace (sweet, beautiful, perfect Jace, Iluvusomuch!) having Daemon's back when talking to the Freys, but straight up just expecting Daemon to be there for Rhaenyra because that's just what's been up for so long, and then he cut himself off because of their, erm, "marital spat, but still, yeah, he just, that's his expectation about Daemon when it comes to Rhaenyra, and that just made my heart go SQUEE!

On another Jace note with regards to Daemon and the Riverlands, so ya got Daemon there failing spectacularly in his attempt to gain a host, while Jace--using tactics learned from his mother's school of politicking--got a big swath of Riverlands mileage they can use. So, Daemon's whole 'your way sucks, my way is better' isn't quite working which brings me back to eps 1-2 set-up, and what eps 3-5 have been doing for us.

Rhaenyra asked Daemon "Do you accept me as your queen and ruler?" We didn't get an answer. I believe--and I totes, totes could be wrong, but I believe that we are heading toward the moment when Daemon can answer Rhaenyra because he has exorcised enough of his demons that he can finally say yes. He can say yes because he realizes that his way isn't the way. That Viserys didn't trust him because of Daemon's actions, not because of jealousy on his brother's part. And that Rhaenyra following suit wasn't her lack of faith, but Daemon's lack of control. And that is his arc, gaining that realization, and that control, restoring her faith in him.

I think.

[lyledebeast]

Colonel Martin's Closet

A common sentiment I've found across many reviews of The Patriot is that Benjamin Martin could be an interesting character if the filmmakers were not so concerned with presenting him as "good." The contrast between what Martin claims to believe and value, and what others believe about him, and his behavior is certainly stark. However, I find the insistence of Martin, his community, and the narrative as a whole that his violence does not define him, despite being the most consistent thing about him, to be precisely what makes this character interesting.

It becomes clear early on that Martin has been keeping a secret from his family concerning his service in the French and Indian War more than a decade prior to the start of the film. The first allusion to this secret comes when a fellow Patriot expresses surprise that opposition to the impending American Revolutionary War arises from "the same Captain Benjamin Martin whose fury was so famous during the Wilderness Campaign." Martin's only reply is "I was intemperate in my youth." Yet less than twenty minutes of run time later we find him sitting on a British regular's back while hacking into his shoulders and neck with a tomahawk and screaming. Both of these scenes are witnessed by Martin's eldest son Gabriel, on whom the camera lingers in the aftermaths. Later, that son makes the observation, "Wherever you go, men buy you drinks because of Fort Wilderness. Strangers know more about you than I do." Up to this point, Martin has constructed a wall to separate his life as a soldier and his life as a father. Or, rather, several walls. And a door.

In Epistemology of the Closet, a foundational text in queer theory, Eve Sedgwick writes of the closet that "a whole cluster of the most crucial sites for the contestation of meaning in twentieth-century Western culture are consequentially and quite indelibly marked with the historical specificity of homosocial/homosexual definition, notably but not exclusively male, from around the turn of the century. Among these sites are, as I have indicated, the pairings secrecy/disclosure and public/private" (72). The Patriot's subject matter predates the historical specificity Sedgwick delineates, but the film's writing does not. Indeed, given its rampant historical inaccuracies, The Patriot may be said to tell us more about the early 21st century than the 18th one. It is no secret that Martin is a soldier, but the particular kind of violence he engaged in previously breaks containment over the course of the film even as most others' recognition of it does not. I want to propose that the closet is a particularly apt metaphor for the ways Martin's crimes are separated from his identity.

Just as the closet can manifest in different ways, so there are different ways to occupy it. Particularly striking examples of two of them can be found in Tony Kushner's two-part play from the early 90s, Angels in America. Joe Pitt rejects his desire for other men, not giving into it until halfway through the play, because he believes it is sinful. When his wife asks what he prays for, he replies, "I pray for God to crush me, break me up into pieces and start all over again" (Millennium Approaches, II, ii). An earlier attempt at disavowal finds him asking "Does it make any difference? That I may be one thing deep within, no matter how wrong or ugly that thing is as long, as I have fought with everything I have to kill it?" (Millennium Approaches, I, viii). Joe hopes to find salvation in inaction, but ultimately cannot maintain this resolve. Still, the conviction that action will damn him remains sincere. Before going home with his soon to be lover Louis, Joe tells him, "I'm going to Hell for doing this" (Millennium Approaches, III, vii). Joe uses the closet to conceal a part of himself of which he is deeply ashamed, that he has fought, unsuccessfully, to rid himself of. Joe's mentor Roy Cohn, though, insists that his actions do not define him because of his political standing, his "clout." When his doctor diagnoses him with AIDS, he says, "Your problem, Henry, is that you are caught up on words, on labels, that you believe they mean what they seem to mean." Later in this scene, he clarifies:

"I have sex with men. But unlike nearly every other man of which this is true, I bring the guy I'm screwing to the White House and President Reagan smiles at us and shakes his hand. Because what I am is entirely defined by who I am. Roy Cohn is not a homosexual. Roy Cohn is a heterosexual man, Henry. Who fucks around with guys" (Millennium Approaches, I, vi).

There is no shame in Roy's closet. There is instead contempt for other gay men: "Homosexuals are men who in fifteen years of trying cannot get one pissant antidiscrimination bill through City Council." While Joe fears action for the impact it will have on his identity as a married Mormon Republican man, Roy insists that no such connection exists. He believes he can do as he pleases with impunity and his community will keep the secret, as he coerces his doctor to do.

Early on in The Patriot, Martin's way of inhabiting the closet appears to have more in common with Joe's. When he discovers that his son Thomas has gone into his room and opened his trunk full of French and Indian War memorabilia to put on his red British Colonial Army coat, not only does he immediately insist on taking it off of him, but he does not look at it until the end of the scene. When Thomas asks, "What happened at Fort Wilderness?" Martin cannot make eye contact with him and says, "Put it away." What is a trunk but a horizontal closet? And yet this closet serves two purposes for Martin. It conceals these souvenirs from his past, yes, but it also assures that he knows exactly where they are and can access them quickly when he needs them. This is also true of Martin's relationships with the men who fought with him in the previous war, as we see when he is recruiting men in the tavern later. One acquaintance asks Martin if he is paying any bounties, and Martin responds: "No scalp money this time Rollins, but you can keep or sell back to me the muskets and gear of any redcoat you kill." Not only does Martin easily, even flippantly, confirm what is arguably the most shocking of his past actions, but he is offering to do it again with one important modification. He is no longer trafficking in human remains, but he has no qualms about incentivizing murder. Where did his shame go? Like Roy Cohn, Martin has no problem discussing his "secret" with men who already know it. And Rollins is certainly not going to judge Martin; they are allies, and the relationship is mutually beneficial.

Martin's allies support him in more ways than one. In addition to giving him space to operate outside the closet, they also aid in its maintenance. As Sedgwick writes, "'Closetedness' itself is a performance initiated as such by the speech act of a silence--not a particular silence, but a silence that accrues particularity by fits and starts, in relation to the discourse that surrounds and differentially constitutes it" (3). Coming out is not an autonomous, individual action. Much depends on the response of those who witness the silences and confessions, whose response shapes the speech act as much as those whose secret it reveals or conceals. When Gabriel follows his younger brother in asking about Fort Wilderness, Martin answers by telling the whole story. If he may be said to truly "come out" anywhere, it is here: "And not a day goes by that I don't ask God's forgiveness for what I did." As much as Martin centers his current feelings at the expense of his past actions, as much as he'uses collective pronouns when describing those actions--as though he was part of a committee rather than a commanding officer--he does, at the very least, own that he did something wrong. But Gabriel's response is quite telling: "Thomas was my brother as well as your son. You may not believe this, but I want satisfaction as much as you do." This has nothing to do with Martin's confession. It is not even in the same stratosphere as Martin's confession. Like so many loved ones of LGBTQ people in response to their acts of coming out, Gabriel does not accept or condemn what his father has revealed about himself. He simply changes the subject. This scene is comparable to the one in Angels in America when Joe makes a drunken call to his mother in Salt Lake City to tell her "I'm a homosexual," and she responds with "Drinking is a sin! It's a sin! I raised you better than that." (Millennium Approaches, II, viii).

For all these similarities in characters' interactions, The Patriot and Angels in America's uses of the closet could not be more different. When Joe's relationship with Louis comes to an abrupt end, he tries to return to the safety and familiarity of his marriage only to find that his wife is leaving him. Roy, whose body is already marked by Kaposi sarcoma lesions when he meets with his doctor in the first play, is dead from the disease he himself connects with the group he refuses to acknowledge his inclusion in at the end. Ultimately, they are unable to detach identity from action. Martin can, not only owing to his loved ones' cooperation but to the narrative's.

Of course, the main point of contrast to Martin's closetedness is the open-ness of his antagonist Colonel Tavington, who kills both Thomas and Gabriel by the end of the film. Tavington's words, actions, and identity exist in seamless unity with one another. Most of the war crimes shown onscreen are carried out on his orders; he speaks violence into existence. Moreover, those in his community do nothing to conceal his crimes: quite the opposite. In a deleted scene, Cornwallis tells Tavington in a tent full of British officers, "General O'Hara informs me that you've earned the nickname 'The Butcher' among the populace." Not only does Cornwallis uncritically accept that Tavington's behavior warrants such a name, but he assures that all of his officers know of Tavington's actions. Yet neither here nor elsewhere does Tavington deny or diminish his application of violence. And he is aware of the consequences. When he argues to Cornwallis that "brutal" tactics are necessary to capture Martin, he also acknowledges, "If I do this, you and I both know I can never return to England with honor" before asking for land on the frontier, beyond the reach of British law. The closet has not been built that could contain Tavington.

Martin's nickname evokes his closetedness as much as Tavington's does his outness. His actions at Fort Wilderness included both cutting Cherokee and French men's bodies into pieces and distributing those pieces, butchery in the most literal sense of the word. Yet his nickname, first coined by Tavington himself, is "The Ghost," an allusion to his way of appearing out of nowhere to surprise the British forces far more than what he does to them afterwards. Not only are Martin's past victims erased from the narrative, but his present ones are wholly silent on the subject of his violence except, ironically, Tavington, who has to remind his superior that Martin "has killed [eighteen] officers in the past two months" when General O'Hara stops him from drawing his sword on Martin. Perhaps it is not surprising that he sees the truth about him so much more easily than others. The wider Martin's closet door creaks open, the more what we glimpse within resembles Tavington, red coat and all.

Tavington does play some role in the opening of that door, and it is the same role Louis Ironson plays in coaxing Joe Pitt out of the closet and into his bed. Joe knows he is gay long before he meets Louis, just as Martin's taste for violence is well established more than a decade before he encounters Tavington, but these meetings with men who are already "out" create ideal opportunities for Joe and Martin to give in to the desires they have repressed. Ironically, it is during his fight with Tavington at the end of the film, the consummation of the bloody courtship carried out between them since Tavington recognized Martin at the prisoner exchange, that Martin chooses to shut the closet door from the inside. After stabbing Tavington through the torso, the same way he killed Gabriel, Martin tells him, "My sons were better men," and puts a bayonet through his throat. This is not about gratifying his own desire for violence; it is just about avenging his sons. The sons his closet protected him from, whose refusal of knowledge reinforces that very closet, have the final word on defining who their father is. Benjamin Martin is not a war criminal. Benjamin Martin is a war hero. Who likes to kill men in rapey ways.

The final few scene of the film only serves to reinforce how little Martin has changed. He returns home to his children to marry their aunt and produce more "good stock." The final scene reveals his men building him a new house in the exact spot where the one Tavington burned once stood. This house will no doubt contain a new trunk that itself will contain the weapons he used in the American Revolutionary War, waiting for an opportunity when violence, once again, proves the only option. Martin is able to inhabit the closet in a way Roy Cohn can only dream of. Roy believes other Republican lawyers will help keep his secret; instead, they rejoice at his demise. And when he dies, his mourners consist of two out gay men who detest him and the ghost of a woman he helped the state murder. The historical Roy Cohn is remembered as much for dying from AIDS as for anything he did in his lifetime; his panel on the AIDS Memorial Quilt is inscribed with the words "Bully, Coward, Victim." Kushner chose to include a characterization of Roy Cohn because his failure to remain closeted in death so well illustrates the play's themes surrounding the difficulty of change, the importance of community, and the inevitability of progress.

The men on whom Benjamin Martin is based have fared better than Roy Cohn thus far, though that is changing. They are honored in history books and by statues and plaques and the names of universities. It is only in recent decades that the racist acts accompanying their fight for freedom from tyranny have been brought to light as worthy of public as well as academic attention. The Patriot represents an argument against this type of outing. What does it matter that these men who fought for American freedom may have done unsavory things to win it? Is it not better to keep that part secret to better appreciate what they were able to accomplish? It does matter, and it is not better to hide it, because to do so erases the histories and silences the voices of those whose lives were destroyed by the victors' hunger for power, namely Native and Black Americans, and how is that not tyranny in itself?

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Gail Godwin is one of our finest writers. Godwin's latest book "Getting to Know Death," will be published this month by Bloomsbury U.S..

This excerpt appears in Harper's Magazine.

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DARK KNIGHTS OF THE SOUL

I have been close to people who one day found themselves in the desperate place and didn’t make it out.

I remember struggling to write a letter to a young man whose father had just hanged himself. The father had been the builder of our house. He was charming and talented and proud of his son. I wrote these things to the son and then came the point in the letter where I was supposed to write something hopeful for the future. All I could think of to convey was No, you’ll never get over it, but the time will come when you will be glad you can’t get over it because the loved one remains alive in your heart as you continue to engage with the who and the why of him.

Two people in my family didn’t make it out of their desperate place: my father and my brother.

Though I had seen my father only twice when I was a child, I sent him an invitation to my high school graduation. Mother said not to expect him to show up, but he did. He, his new wife, and his brother drove from Smithfield, North Carolina, to Portsmouth, Virginia, for the ceremony. In the early-summer weeks that followed, we wrote letters to each other. He had elegant handwriting and prose to match. He wrote that he would like more than anything to get to know me better. Could I—would it be possible for me to spend a few weeks with them at the beach this summer? I was in my first desperate place at that time and decided to tell him about it—though not all of it. I ended up going to the beach and returning with them to Smithfield and entering Peace College in the fall, paid for by my father.

My father had been doing some personal bookkeeping of his own. At the age of fifty, he had at last achieved a measure of stability. Finally, after thirty years of intemperate living, he had managed to stop drinking, had married a new widow in town with a prosperous brother-in-law, and was manager of sales at the brother-in-law’s car dealership. My father confided to me during the weeks we spent at his brother-in-law’s beach cottage that he regretted not having made more of himself. “You mustn’t let it happen to you,” he said. “Nobody is prepared for how quickly time passes, and you don’t want to be one of those people who wakes up in the late afternoon with nothing to show for it.” But later, in a radiant moment while we were lying on the beach working on our tans, he told me that I had come along at just the right time, and if he continued to win his battle against depression and alcohol, and if automobile sales continued like this, well, the future didn’t look so hopeless after all.

As we lay side by side, congratulating ourselves for finding each other, I had no idea that old disappointments were biding their time, stealthily building like waves, which in less than three years would drown him.

One winter afternoon when I was a junior at Chapel Hill, he phoned his brother at his office. “Just felt like saying hello, old son,” he said. “Son” was what the brothers called each other. After he hung up, he lay down on the floor of his bedroom in Smithfield and shot himself in the head.

Losing ground. Was that the thing that ultimately killed him? In his twenties, he began losing jobs, losing status, but always got back on his feet. A charming, handsome man, he did not need to keep a steady job as long as his mother was alive. And after her death, there would be other admirers waiting in line for whom his looks and charm were enough. By the time he met my mother, he was an alcoholic. After that came the mental disorders, given different psychiatric names as the years went by.

When they were driving back to Smithfield after my high school graduation, he came with a raging toothache. They found a dentist along the road who pulled the tooth. But the pain continued, and when they got home, the dentist told him it had been the wrong tooth. “I should have known,” he would finish this story, laughing. “I should have known when we drove into the parking lot and his shingle read: doctor payne.” He still had the charm but the looks were going.

This is from a June 16, 2018, New York Times op-ed, “What Kept Me from Killing Myself,” by the Iraq War veteran Kevin Powers. “Throughout that summer and into the fall . . . just below the surface of my semiconsciousness, was the constant thought: Maybe I won’t wake up this time.” Powers continues:

I doubt much needs to be said about the kind of despair that would make such an idea a source of comfort, despair that came not from accepting that things were as bad as they were going to get but, worse, that they might go on like that forever. The next step felt both logical and inevitable.

This sounds along the lines of what my twenty-eight-year-old brother might have been thinking in the hours that led up to his death.

In the last week of his life, Tommy was working on a long poem. He left behind two drafts. He titled one “Why Not Just Leave It Alone?” and the other “Why Change the World?” One line is the same in both drafts: “My pride is broken since my lover’s gone.” Both drafts end with the same image of the poet being laid to rest in his wooden home, “With my trooper hat on my chest bone.”

It was October 2, 1983. What happened, what we know happened, as opposed to all that we can never know, was that on the Sunday afternoon after Mother’s birthday, Tommy ironed a shirt at his parents’ house, where he had been living with his three-year-old son. He told Mother he was going over to see J., the woman he loved, a nurse who also had a three-year-old son. They had planned to marry; they had even made out a budget. Then J. suddenly broke it off. Tommy told Mother he was going over to ask J. to reconsider. “I’m going to settle it one way or another before the afternoon is out,” he said, and drove off alone.

COUPLE FOUND SHOT was the headline in the newspaper the next morning.

The day before, on Mother’s birthday, I knew Tommy was unhappy. But Tommy was always unhappy. He “felt things more than most” was the family euphemism for his troubled nature. He most took to heart the family’s fractures as well as the world’s. Drawing you in with his shy, closemouthed smile, he would offer his latest tale of woe. But always, always in his stories, there had been a quality of suspense, of entertainment. He starred in them as the knight-errant, complete with pratfalls and setbacks, but a knight-errant who picked himself up, dusted himself off, and set out on his next mission. Tommy was a modern Samaritan who carried a first-aid kit and a blue emergency beacon in his car in case he came across an accident.

We were in the kitchen and he told me the story of J. suddenly breaking up with him. But this time something was different. I was not, as usual, deriving the usual listener’s satisfaction from his story. Many years later, when remembering that kitchen scene, I realized what had spooked me about it: Not only was there not a trace of the shy, closemouthed smile, there was no knight-errant starring in my brother’s story. The tone was new: one of bafflement and resignation. There was no sense of any future missions. There was no tug of suspense. It was like a story that had already ended.

Tommy would be sixty-three now. He was born the same summer that my father drove from Smithfield to Glen Burnie, Maryland, and rescued me from my desperate place. If on that October afternoon twenty-eight years later there had not been a pistol handy in the glove compartment of J.’s car, would Tommy have remarried somebody else and raised his son and reconciled himself to a fallen world, as long as he had a firstaid kit and a job that gave him the satisfaction that he was rescuing people from injustice?

But now I do hear his voice, the old Tommy voice, just as it was in life, chiding me as he defends the position of his beloved National Rifle Association with its singsong refrain: “Gail, guns don’t kill people. People do.” I continue to engage with the who and why of my father and my brother.

During my life, I have found myself in the desperate place four times. But that first time, at age eighteen, was by far the worst.

Summer 1955 in Glen Burnie, Maryland. Everybody seemed to have a future but me. I had received a letter from Mother Winters, my mentor from ninth grade. She congratulated me on being salutatorian, asked about my plans for college, and brought me news of some of my classmates. “Pat has won the four-year Angier Duke scholarship to Duke, Carolyn will be going to Radcliffe, Stuart and Lee to St. Mary’s in Raleigh . . . ” Here I stopped reading and felt . . . what? A dry mouth, a pang in the chest, a sense of going down, of losing myself. All I knew to do was mark my position.

My position. At the time, I couldn’t hold all of it in my mind. If I had tried, I might have despaired, or lashed out and hurt myself or somebody else. I had so little experience to draw from and there was no escape.

Since my early teens, I had been building my life on false premises. I was creating a persona that was more extroverted than I really was. She pretended to more confidence and security than I felt. I became a pro at embellishing and editing my history. When I entered a new school, I “went out” for things I was good at that would bring me attention. The school paper, the drama club, painting posters and scenery, entering competitions—and, of course, getting high grades. I dated lots of boys, made it a point to be cagey and hard to get until each got fed up and moved on, usually just as I had begun to appreciate him.

That was the outside of things. At home, other dramas were playing out. We were not free people. Our embattled breadwinner, who was angry much of the time, sometimes knocked one of us to the floor for challenging him. There was no money for us except what he doled out and no going anywhere he didn’t drive us. As I entered my teens, the bread winner, who was only twelve years older than me, often spoke of how he “loved” me. His voice trembled. At night I would wake to find him kneeling in the dark beside my bed, his hand taking liberties.

My mother had shed her former confident self. As a child, I knew a mother who arrived home on the 10:00 pm bus after her wartime job on the newspaper, a woman who taught college and on weekends typed up love stories that earned one hundred dollars apiece. This powerless woman seemed more like someone I was visiting in prison. Only I was in prison with her. She suffered because there was no money to send me to college. She made phone calls to a private college in Baltimore to see if I could go as a day student. The registrar said a partial scholarship might be arranged, given my academic record, but where was the rest of the money to come from? There was no “rest of the money,” my stepfather reminded us, as though we were dim-witted. He suggested I take a year off and find a job, “maybe in sales work,” and save up for college next year. He added magnanimously that I could continue to live under his roof for the time being without paying rent.

That’s the way the ground lay that June 1955 morning in Glen Burnie, when the girl sat cross-legged on her bed, the letter from her old teacher clutched in her fist. “Pat to Duke, Carolyn to Radcliffe, Stuart and Lee to St. Mary’s.”

This is my life, but I may not get to do what I want in it.

I can’t see a way out of this.

Things will not necessarily get better.

In my novel Unfinished Desires, about life at a girls’ school, two old nuns are being driven back to their retirement home from a doctor’s visit, and one says to the other, “There was a sentence this morning in that Prayer for Holy Women: ‘In our weakness Your power reaches perfection.’ What do you think it means, Sister Paula?” Sister Paula thinks for a minute and then replies, “I think it means you have to admit you can’t save yourself before you’re fully available to God.”

That morning in Glen Burnie, God was undergoing some very slippery changes in my psyche. He had ceased being the attentive Heavenly Father who was always aware of me. All I could be certain of that long-ago summer morning was that I could not save myself.

But something else did, something already embedded in the tissue of my particular circumstances: the earthly father who had been the absent father. In a mood of defiant resignation, I decided to send him an invitation to my graduation. Of course he wouldn’t come.

But he did come. And when we were lying beside each other on the beach, he said, “When I opened your invitation, after I got over being pleasantly surprised, I thought to myself, Well, this is one thing I did that came to fruition. And then, after we began to write letters to each other, it struck me that I might be the rescuer you needed.”

Art Work: "When Day Touches Night," a painting by Michael Ho, whose work was on view last month with Gallery Vacancy at the art fair Independent New York.

(Follies of God)

[dieletztepanzerhexe]

In his influential book Desert Frontier, James Webb argues that the Western usage of the terms ‘white’ and ‘black’ as racial markers ‘seem to be a distant and refracted borrowing from the Arabo-African past’.

[...]

Hall retraces the history of Arabic racial discourse in the Sahara and Sahel since the 17th century, and their final intermixture with European racial discourses in the colonial period. With Webb, Hall argues that ecological changes in the region since the 16th century worked in favour of nomad pastoral groups to the disadvantage of sedentary communities, leading to the political and military dominance of the former over the latter. This dominance was partly legitimated in a racialist discourse on cultural and religious differences borrowed in part from the thinking of Ibn Khaldûn on the origins of phenotypical difference. Ibn Khaldûn refuted the ‘Ham thesis’, linking the origins of race to the story of Noah’s curse of his son Ham, but his thinking was racial in that he linked phenotypical difference to cultural, religious and mental inferiority, positioning the inhabitants of the most extreme zones, the Africans and the Slav populations of Europe close to animals. He explained this inferiority through the classic Greek theory of seven climatic zones, and the detrimental effects of living in the most northern and southern climates. Of course, this theory presented a major hermeneutical flaw in failing to explain the rise of Islam in such an intemperate climate as the Arabian Peninsula, which is refuted by insisting on the moderate influence of the sea winds, which temper the Arabian climate. But furthermore Ibn Khaldûn believed that the deficiencies caused by life in the harsh climatic zones could be mitigated by adherence to Islam*. This concept was, as Bruce Hall demonstrates, reworked in the Saharan context to become linked to descent from Arabic Muslim lineages.

First, ideas about ‘white’ Arab Islamic culture that originated in the IslamicMiddle East and North Africa were made part of Southern Saharan cultural identity by a reconfiguration of local genealogies connecting local Arabic- and Berber-speaking groups with important Arab Islamic historical figures in North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. Second, local Arabo-Berber intellectuals rewrote the history of relations between their ancestors and ‘black’ Africans in a way that made them the bearers of Islamic orthodoxy and the holders of religious authority in the Sahelian region.

The political dominance of these Arabo-Berber groups, partly originating in ecological advantages, was thus legitimated by a claim on Islamic cultural and religious heritage, handed down in particular lineages of Arabo-Berber origins. Thus, religion, behaviour and descent were primal traits of ‘race’. Bruce Hall summons this reasoning up as: ‘To be “Black” is to be a son of Ham; to be “White” is to be a bearer of “true” Islam’.

*The story of the curse of Ham is known in the Muslim world. It is even very likely that it was through Arabic texts that the link between this qur"anic and biblical story, and the origin of races came into European discourse. The link between “curse” and “black” is explicit in Arabic as both are derived from the same Arabic root: SWD

Lecocq, B. 2010. Disputed Desert. Decolonisation, Competing Nationalisms and Tuareg Rebellions in Northern Mali.

[frmartinshomiliesandreflections]

27th August >> Fr. Martin's Reflections/Homilies on Today's Mass Readings for:

Tuesday, Twenty First Week in Ordinary Time (Inc. Matthew 23:23-26)

And

Saint Monica (Luke 7:11-17).

Tuesday, Twenty First Week in Ordinary Time

Gospel (Except USA) Matthew 23:23-26 Clean the inside of the cup first, so that the outside may become clean.

Jesus said: ‘Alas for you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You who pay your tithe of mint and dill and cumin and have neglected the weightier matters of the Law – justice, mercy, good faith! These you should have practised, without neglecting the others. You blind guides! Straining out gnats and swallowing camels! ‘Alas for you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You who clean the outside of cup and dish and leave the inside full of extortion and intemperance. Blind Pharisee! Clean the inside of cup and dish first so that the outside may become clean as well.’

Gospel (USA) Matthew 23:23-26 But these you should have done, without neglecting the others.

Jesus said: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites. You pay tithes of mint and dill and cummin, and have neglected the weightier things of the law: judgment and mercy and fidelity. But these you should have done, without neglecting the others. Blind guides, who strain out the gnat and swallow the camel! “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites. You cleanse the outside of cup and dish, but inside they are full of plunder and self-indulgence. Blind Pharisee, cleanse first the inside of the cup, so that the outside also may be clean.”

Reflections (6)

(i) Tuesday, Twenty First Week in Ordinary Time

There are many prayers in the letters of Saint Paul. As well as encouraging and directing his churches, Paul also prayed for them. There was a real pastoral dimension to his prayer. The needs and struggles of the churches he established were central to his prayer. There is a good example of Saint Paul’s prayer for his churches in today’s first reading. Writing to the church in the Greek city of Thessalonica, Paul prays, ‘May our Lord Jesus Christ himself, and God our Father… comfort you and strengthen you in everything good you do or say’. It is a striking prayer and one worth reflecting upon. Paul acknowledges God the Father and the risen Lord as the ultimate source of all that is good in our words and actions. God alone is completely good, but, with the Lord’s help, God’s goodness can be reflected to some degree in everything we say and do. It is through the Lord’s strengthening presence to us that something of his goodness can take flesh in our own lives. In the gospel reading, Jesus spells out this goodness in terms of three basic qualities, ‘justice, mercy, faith’. He was criticizing the religious leaders for becoming obsessed with what is not so important in our relationship with God, the tithing of herbs, and neglecting what is really important, justice, mercy and faith. To act justly is to give to others what is their due as human beings, as sons and daughters of God. To show mercy often means going beyond justice, attending to people’s basic needs irrespective of who they are or what they have done. Faith or faithfulness refers to a loving, faithful relationship with God, finding expression in loving, faithful, relationships with others. Jesus is saying that when it comes to our relationship with God, these are the qualities that really matter. This is the goodness that the Lord desires to find in our lives and that he can bring about in our lives, if we are truly open to his working, the working of his grace, within us and among us.

And/Or

(ii) Tuesday, Twenty-first Week in Ordinary Time

Perhaps we don’t always think of Jesus as having a sense of humour. Yet, the image he uses in today’s gospel reading displays a sense of humour. He accuses the Pharisees of straining our gnats and swallowing camels. A gnat or flee is almost invisible; a camel is big and imposing. The picture of someone straining out a gnat so as not to swallow it while happily swallowing a whole camel is humorous in a zany kind of way. Jesus uses that image to poke fun at those who make a big deal about what is not important while happily ignoring what is important – being scrupulous about paying tithes on herbs while ignoring justice, mercy and faith. Jesus is talking about getting our priorities right, keeping things in proportion. We can all be prone to getting overly excited about minor matters while not attending sufficiently to what really important. On this occasion, Jesus lists what is important as justice, mercy and faith. Justice and mercy concern our relationship with our neighbour; faith concerns our relationship with God. Jesus is saying, what really matters is getting those two relationships right; everything else is secondary. St Paul says something very similar in one of his letter, ‘the only thing that matters is faith expressing itself in love’. We pray that this would always be our priority.

And/Or

(iii) Tuesday, Twenty-first Week in Ordinary Time

In the gospel reading this morning Jesus criticizes the Pharisees for being so preoccupied with unimportant details relating to the tithing of herbs while neglecting the core values that the Jewish Law sought to uphold, such as justice, mercy and faith. The background to what Jesus says here may be the prophet Micah’s understanding of what God desires of us, ‘to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God’. The context of Micah’s statement was the people’s concern about what kind of animal sacrifice should be offered to God. Micah was saying to the people that their preoccupation is wide of the mark; it does not correspond to what God really wants. Jesus stands in the line of the prophets who sought to bring people back to what was really important, what really mattered to God. As disciples of Jesus, we have to keep on returning to the essentials, to what is at the heart of the message of Jesus, what is at the heart of God. It would be hard to find a better statement of hose essentials than that trinity of values given to us by Micah and by Jesus, the exercise of justice and mercy towards others and a humble, trusting faith in God. These were the values which Jesus embodied in his life and in his death. To live by them is, in the language of Paul, to put on Christ, which is the core of our baptismal calling.

And/Or

(iv) Tuesday, Twenty First Week in Ordinary Time

There were many religious laws and regulations in Jesus’ time. In the gospel reading Jesus criticizes those who give too much attention to the less important laws and regulations and too little attention to what was really important, what Jesus calls the weightier matter of the Law. He names the less important aspects of the Law as the regulations relating to the tithing of various herbs and the more important aspects of the Law as justice, mercy and faith. When it comes to our relationship with God, Jesus wants us to put our energy into getting the basics right. It would be difficult to come up anything more basic than the ‘justice, mercy and faith’ that Jesus refers to in the gospel reading. Justice and mercy have to do with how we relate to others. We are to be just and merciful in our dealings with each other. Faith has to do with how we relate to God. We are to be faithful to God, which means being faithful to Jesus and to all he stands for, even though that may cost us a great deal at times. There is clearly a close link between faith, on the one hand, and justice and mercy, on the other. Faithfulness to Jesus entails showing justice and mercy to others, as he did. When we find ourselves getting very worked up about something in the religious sphere, it can be good to step back and ask ourselves just how basic, how fundamental, the issue in question really is.

And/Or

(v) Tuesday, Twenty First Week in Ordinary Time

There is a verse in one of the prophets of the Old Testament, the prophet Micah, which many people feel drawn to. ‘What is it that the Lord requires of you but to do justice, to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God?’ To do justice is to give people what is their due as human beings and as images of God. To love mercy is to show mercy to others in the sense of forgiving others and serving them in their need. To walk humbly with your God is to be open in faith to God’s purpose and desire for our lives. These three basic attitudes are a summary of God’s will for our lives. It is possible that this text from the prophet Micah lies behind what Jesus calls in today’s gospel reading, the weightier matters of the law, ‘justice, mercy and good faith’. Jesus was accusing the religious experts of his day of being too preoccupied with the less important requirements of the Jesus law, such as what produce should be tithed, and neglecting these weightier matters of the law. That triad of justice, mercy and faith remains a very succinct statement of what the Lord desires from us in our own day. In a sense, those three elements correspond to the two great commandments that Jesus proclaimed. The first commandment, to love God with all our heart, mind, soul and strength corresponds to faith and the second commandment, to love our neighbour as ourselves corresponds to justice and mercy. These remain the weightier matters of our own Christian tradition. All the other elements of our tradition need to be at the service of these two commandments and these three fundamental values of justice, mercy and faith.

And/Or

(vi) Tuesday, Twenty First Week in Ordinary Time

Jesus often uses humorous images to illustrate his teaching. You may recall his reference to those who try to take a splinter out of someone’s eye while not noticing the plank in their own eye. We have another such humorous image in today’s gospel reading. He addresses the scribes and Pharisees as blind guides, ‘straining out gnats and swallowing camels’. They pay excessive attention to what Jesus considers to be minor matters of the Jewish Law, such as tithes to be paid on various herbs, while, at the same time, neglecting the weightier matters of the law, ‘justice, mercy and faith’ or ‘faithfulness. Justice consists in rendering to others what is their due, as human beings made in God’s image. Mercy goes beyond justice in graciously bestowing on others even more than their due. The father in the parable of the prodigal son was merciful in that sense. Faith could refer to either dealing faithfully with others or entrusting oneself in faith to God. Faith in that second sense, a faithful relationship with God, is the source and inspiration of the more social virtues of justice and mercy. In that way, the three qualities of justice, mercy and faith would be closely aligned to the inseparable twin commands to love God with all our being and our neighbour as ourselves. In the gospel reading, Jesus was calling on his critics to keep going back to the essential core of their religious tradition. It is a call we all need to keep hearing. We can get so preoccupied with what is relatively peripheral to our faith that we undermine what is essential there. We need to always keep in view the essential trinity that Jesus refers in the gospel reading, justice, mercy and faithfulness.

-------------------------------------

Saint Monica

Gospel (Except USA) Luke 7:11-17 The only son of his mother, and she a widow.

Jesus went to a town called Nain, accompanied by his disciples and a great number of people. When he was near the gate of the town it happened that a dead man was being carried out for burial, the only son of his mother, and she was a widow. And a considerable number of the townspeople were with her. When the Lord saw her he felt sorry for her. ‘Do not cry’ he said. Then he went up and put his hand on the bier and the bearers stood still, and he said, ‘Young man, I tell you to get up.’ And the dead man sat up and began to talk, and Jesus gave him to his mother. Everyone was filled with awe and praised God saying, ‘A great prophet has appeared among us; God has visited his people.’ And this opinion of him spread throughout Judaea and all over the countryside.

Gospel (USA) Luke 7:11-17 She bore me in the arms of her prayer, that you might say to the son of the widow: Young man, I say to you, arise (Saint Augustine, Confessions, book 6, no. 2).

Jesus journeyed to a city called Nain, and his disciples and a large crowd accompanied him. As he drew near to the gate of the city, a man who had died was being carried out, the only son of his mother, and she was a widow. A large crowd from the city was with her. When the Lord saw her, he was moved with pity for her and said to her, “Do not weep.” He stepped forward and touched the coffin; at this the bearers halted, and he said, “Young man, I tell you, arise!” The dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother. Fear seized them all, and they glorified God, exclaiming, “A great prophet has arisen in our midst,” and “God has visited his people.” This report about him spread through the whole of Judea and in all the surrounding region.

Reflections (2)

(i) Feast of Saint Monica

Today we celebrate the feast of St Monica, the mother of St Augustine. She was born in North Africa in the year 332. She was married to a man called Patricius, who was either a pagan or a very nominal Christian. He lived a very immoral life. However, Monica’s persistent witness to her faith eventually won him over and he was baptized a year before he died. In the words of this morning’s first reading, she made herself an example for him to follow. Her son, Augustine, was an even bigger challenge than her husband. Her son’s irregular life caused her much suffering. Eventually, she gave up arguing with him and turned instead to prayer and fasting on his behalf, hoping that they might succeed where arguments had failed. At a certain point in his life, Augustine went to Rome then on to Milan. Monica followed her son, and it was in Milan that he announced to her that he wanted to become a Christian. After Augustine’s baptism Monica set out with him and some of his friends on the journey back to North Africa, but she died on the way, at Ostia, just outside Rome. Monica’s role in the conversion of her husband and her son reminds us that we are all called to lead each other to the Lord, to support each other on our journey towards the kingdom of heaven. This morning, we pray, through the intercession of Saint Monica, that we would be faithful to that calling.

(ii) Feast of Saint Monica

Today we celebrate the feast of St Monica, the mother of St Augustine. She was born in North Africa in the year 332. She was married to a man called Patricius, who was either a pagan or a very nominal Christian. He lived a very dissolute life and was known to have a bad temper. However, Monica’s persistent witness to her faith eventually won him over and Patricius was baptized a year before he died. Her son, Augustine, was an even bigger challenge than her husband. Her son’s irregular life caused her much suffering. Eventually, she gave up arguing with him and turned instead to prayer and fasting on his behalf, hoping that they might succeed where arguments had failed. At a certain point in his life, Augustine went to Rome to study rhetoric and then went on to Milan. Monica followed her son to Rome and caught up with him in Milan, where he announced to her that he wanted to become a Christian. In Milan Augustine met the saintly bishop of Milan, Ambrose who helped Augustine towards a deep moral conversion as well as acceptance of the Christian faith. He was baptized in the year 387. Monica had followed him to Rome and Milan. After Augustine’s baptism she set out with him and some of his friends on the journey back to North Africa, but she died on the way at Ostia, just outside Rome. In the gospel reading, Jesus says to the Pharisees, ‘You who shut up the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces, neither going in yourselves nor allowing others to go in who want to’. Monica was the opposite of that; far from preventing others from going into heaven, she made it possible for them to do so. Her role in the conversion of her husband and her son reminds us that we are all called to lead each other to the Lord.

Fr. Martin Hogan.

[reyenii]

'i can't think of any better blokes,' said lewes.

riley brought with him another sergeant, jim almonds, a fellow veteran of tobruk who had caught lewes's eye by dragging a wounded soldier to safety during the twin pimples raid. his deceptively soft voice and courtesy had earned him the soubriquet 'gentleman jim', and there was an old-fashioned air about him, grave, careful and serious.

married, with an infant son at home, in many ways he was the least wild of the bunch. intensely practical, almonds was also a person of intelligence and sensitivity: his diary and letters depicting life in the early sas are a trove of close observation and good sense. the sas would attract many rough and fierce individuals in the coming years, but in riley and almonds, the bedrock of the unit, it had two men who were anything but intemperate: older, married NCOs, combat veterans who were keen to fight but who also knew how to calculate the odds, retreat if required and fight again.

[blackswaneuroparedux]

λόγος γὰρ ἔκ τ’ ἀδοξούντων ἰὼν κἀκ τῶν δοκούντων αὑτὸς οὐ ταὐτὸν σθένει. **

- Euripides

**The same argument, coming from someone unknown, does not possess the same strength as when it comes from those with a reputation.

In 1888, Frederick William Victor Albert (Wilhelm II) ascended to the German throne as Kaiser. Much has been written about Kaiser Wilhelm II. All accounts agree that he was hyperactive, enthusiastic and able, but lacking in self-discipline or the ability to focus his energies constructively. He had a very strong sense of the importance of his position, but could not command the respect of his ministers and advisers who increasingly became irritated by his violent and impetuous outbursts and intemperate views.1 Germany empire now was in hands of two mans - Bismarck and Wilhelm II. Their political views were very different and it, probably, cause problems in Germany’s foreign policy. Slowly Bismarck’s Realpolitik changed to Wilhelm’s II Weltpolitik. Weltpolitik included aggressive diplomacy, overseas colonies and the development of large navy.

The dismissal of Bismarck by Kaiser Wilhelm II and the setting of a new more ambitious course in 1890 signified the end of an era, a watershed in modern German history. Many contemporaries looked back upon Bismarck's dismissal as a tragic mistake, believing that he would have avoided the foreign policy blunders that plunged the German Empire into the disaster of World War I.

Bismarck’s seemingly impregnable position had a weak spot: the emperor had to regard him as indispensable. The old emperor, William I, remained faithful until his death on March 9, 1888. He never forgot that Bismarck had saved him from “liberalism” in 1862. Frederick III, his son and successor, was bound to Bismarck by memory of the triumphs of 1870. Liberal in phrase, he was at best National Liberal and, like the other National Liberals, would have made his peace with Bismarck in exchange for a few concessions. He was already a dying man when he took the crown, however, and his reign of 99 days ended on June 15, 1888.

William II, the third and last German emperor, had no memory of past dangers or past victories to bind him to Bismarck. He represented the new Germany which knew no moderation, the self-confident Germany which recognised no limits to German power. At the same time, he was impatient with Bismarck’s social conservatism, which seemed to estrange the emperor from the mass of his subjects.

The dispute came to a head after the general election of 1890. Bismarck had failed to hit on a national cry and failed to carry the election. The Bismarckian coalition of conservatives and National Liberals fell from 220 to 135; the Radicals, Centre, and Social Democrats rose from 141 to 207. Bismarck wished to tear up the imperial constitution which he himself had made and to set up a naked military dictatorship. Kaiser Wilhelm II was determined to continue on the path of demagogy, appealing still more strongly to German national sentiment.

There were, of course, also elements of personal conflict. Bismarck objected to the emperor’s interference on questions of policy, while Wilhelm II objected to Bismarck’s attempts to manoeuvre with the party leaders, especially with Ludwig Windthorst, the leader of the Centre. It was essentially a clash between the old Junker Germany, which tried to maintain moderation for reasons of conservatism, and the new imperialist Germany, which was without moderation.

Once Bismarck had quarrelled with the emperor, he had no real support, for he had always fought the parties of the German masses. He tried without success to engineer a strike of Prussian ministers. Finally he was opposed even by the leaders of the army. On March 18, 1890, he was forced to resign.

[constantly-deactivated]

Nancy Pelosi Hanged at GITMO

President Donald J. Trump was at Guantanamo Bay Tuesday to witness Nancy Pelosi’s execution, which took place at 10:00 a.m., JAG sources told Real Raw News.

The embattled president reportedly arrived at GITMO aboard a U.S. Marine Sikorsky VH-3D Sea King helicopter and was escorted to the execution site at about the time base staff pulled Pelosi from the six-by-nine-foot cell she’d been living in since arriving at Guantanamo Bay on 1 December. As reported previously, Pelosi was among a bevy of Deep Staters arrested after attending a taxpayer-funded, billion-dollar party honoring socialist Emmanuel Macron. Following a lengthy military tribunal, a JAG panel convicted Pelosi of treason and conspiracy to commit murder, sentencing her to hang by the neck until dead.

Camp Delta staff have called Pelosi an irascible prisoner, second only to the late Hillary Rodham Clinton, who, coincidentally, lived in the same cell ahead of her hanging in April 2021. Perhaps Hillary’s poltergeist inhabited the cell and haunted Pelosi, letting her know what awaited her, an afterlife of eternal damnation in limbo.

GITMO guards said a bellicose Pelosi spent her first week in confinement detoxing from alcohol withdrawal. Pelosi, they said, would sit shivering in a corner of her cell wrapped in a blanket, her mood shifting between melancholy and intemperate—sometimes catatonic, lost in her own thoughts, and sometimes untamable, screaming in fits of unbridled rage and even urinating on the cell floor.

But Pelosi couldn’t scream and shout when taken from her cage Tuesday morning, for the guards had spiked her final meal, waffles and two scoops of ice cream, with a sedative that left her conscious but subdued, our source said. Nonetheless, she was gagged and placed in arm and ankle restraints for her ride to gallows.

The sedative lasted only a short while—Pelosi was trying to free herself as Marines yanked her from an armored Hummer and walked her to the shallow flight of steps leading to the platform where a uniformed soldier awaited orders to flip the switch and a Navy Chaplain stood ready to give Last Rites.

And then Pelosi saw President Trump. Her eyes, our source said, narrowed, and she trembled in apoplectic fury, as the hangman fitted the noose around her bulging neck.

Beside Trump were Vice Adm. Crandall and a military cadre. Trump, our source said, whispered words into the admiral’s ear but was otherwise stoic and silent. Vice Adm. Crandall said he felt obligated to offer the condemned a final statement, and asked Pelosi whether she’d behave if he ordered that her gag be removed. He cautioned Pelosi that acrimonious outbursts would not alter her fate.

Nancy nodded, and the hangman momentarily removed her gag.

“F*** all of you, especially you. This is all your doing.” She was looking at President Trump. “I represent the real president. That’s not Joseph Biden and it sure as hell isn’t you. Kill me, and I’ll haunt you until your dying day.”

The admiral asked if she wanted Last Rites.

Nancy turned to the chaplain. “F*** you too.”

“I guess that’s a ‘no,’” the admiral said.

Finally President Trump spoke: “Good riddance, Nancy.”

Nancy Pelosi was pronounced dead at 10:07 a.m. EST, December 27, 2022.

For Trump, her death must have been a catharsis; she had plotted to murder not only him but also his family, including his youngest son, Barron.

Source:👇

https://realrawnews.com/2022/12/nancy-pelosi-hanged-at-gitmo/

I know people don't believe this website but let me say this... I've been following this site for a long time, I know they are classified as satire. But what do you think would happen to this site if they didn't? They have had their share of problems keeping it up and running as it is. Piglosi was executed yesterday morning and I could not access the site and this has happened multiple times, I lost track of how many times they were taken down. To me that says something. You can believe what you want but you better do your research on Piglosi when you see her on tv or whatever, because she is dead now. 🤔

[mybeautifulchristianjourney]

Music For the Soul

by Alexander MacLaren

The Tyranny of Sin

Every one that committeth sin is the bond-servant of sin. - John 8:34

Every wrong thing that we do tends to become our master and our tyrant. We are held and bound in the chains of our sins. The awful influence of habit, the dreadful effect upon a nature of a corrupted conscience, the power of regretful memories, the pollution arising from the very knowledge of what is wrong,- these are some of the strands out of which the ropes that bind us are twisted. We know how tight they grip. I am speaking now, no doubt, to people who are as completely manacled and bound by evils of some sort - evils of flesh, of sense, of lust; of intemperance in some of you; of pride and avarice and worldliness in others of you; of vanity and frivolity and selfishness in others of you - as completely manacled as if there were iron gyves upon your wrists and fetters upon your ankles.

You remember the old story of the prisoner in his tower, delivered by his friend, who sent a beetle to crawl up the wall, fastening a silken thread to it, which had a thread a little heavier attached to the end of that, and so on, and so on, each thickening in diameter until they got to a cable. That is how the devil has got hold of a great many of us. He weaves round us silken threads to begin with, slight, as if we could break them with a touch of our fingers, and they draw after them, as certainly as destiny, "at each remove" a thickening "chain," until, at last, we are tied and bound, and our captor laughs at our mad plunges for freedom, which are as vain as a wild bull’s in the hunter’s nets. Some of you have made an attempt at shading off sin, - how have you got on with it? As a man would do who, with a file made out of an old soft knife, tried to work through his fetters. He might make a little impression on the surface, but he would mostly scratch his own skin, and wear his own fingers, and to very little purpose.

But the chains can be got off. Christ looses them by "His blood." Like a drop of corrosive acid, that blood, falling upon the fetters, dissolves them, and the prisoner goes free, emancipated by the Son. That death has power to deliver us from the guilt and penalty of sin. The Bible does not give us the whole theory of an atonement, but the fact is seen clear in its passages that Christ died for us, and that the bitter consequences of sin in their most intense bitterness, even that separation from God which is the true death, were borne by Him for our sakes, on our account, and in our stead.

His blood looses the fetters of our sins, inasmuch as His death, touching our hearts, and also bringing to us new powers through His Spirit, which is shed forth in consequence of His finished work, frees us from the power of sin, and brings into operation new powers and motives which free us from our ancient slavery. The chains which bound us shrivel and melt as the ropes that bound the Hebrew youths in the fire, before the warmth of His manifested love and the glow of His Spirit’s power.

[metalshockfinland]

THE INTEMPERATE SONS Release Heavier, High Energy Cover of Nirvana's 'Dumb'

Photo Credit: Nate Schiefelbein The Intemperate Sons have unveiled their latest song, a heavier more high energy cover of Nirvana’s “Dumb,” featured on their newly released album, Dark Day’s Night. STREAM “Dumb” at https://ffm.to/tisdumb This album takes a darker turn from their debut, mirroring the tumultuous times we live in today. In Dark Day’s Night, The Intemperate Sons explore the hidden…

[askinkiskarma]

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZGJXfByca/

here’s an edit for you 🫶🏻

Truly his daddy’s son, and i will die on this hill. He’s a military man like jake, and lo’ak is the intemperate wild-hearted one like his mommy 😩💕

[stoicbreviary]

Xenophon, Memorabilia of Socrates 20

I suppose it may be taken as admitted that self-control is a noble acquirement for a man. If so, let us turn and consider whether by language like the following he was likely to lead his listeners onwards to the attainment of this virtue. 

"Sirs," he would say, "if a war came upon us and we wished to choose a man who would best help us to save ourselves and to subdue our enemy, I suppose we should scarcely select one whom we knew to be a slave to his belly, to wine, or lust, and prone to succumb to toil or sleep. Could we expect such a one to save us or to master our foes? 

"Or if one of us were nearing the end of his days, and he wished to discover someone to whom he might entrust his sons for education, his maiden daughters for protection, and his property in general for preservation, would he deem a libertine worthy of such offices? 

"Why, no one would dream of entrusting his flocks and herds, his storehouses and barns, or the superintendence of his works to the tender mercies of an intemperate slave. 

"If a butler or an errand boy with such a character were offered to us we would not take him as a free gift. And if he would not accept an intemperate slave, what pains should the master himself take to avoid that imputation. 

"For with the incontinent man it is not as with the self-seeker and the covetous. These may at any rate be held to enrich themselves in depriving others. But the intemperate man cannot claim in like fashion to be a blessing to himself if a curse to his neighbors; nay, the mischief which he may cause to others is nothing by comparison with that which redounds against himself, since it is the height of mischief to ruin—I do not say one's own house and property—but one's own body and one's own soul. 

"Or to take an example from social intercourse, no one cares for a guest who evidently takes more pleasure in the wine and the viands than in the friends beside him—who stints his comrades of the affection due to them to dote upon a mistress. 

"Does it not come to this, that every honest man is bound to look upon self-restraint as the very corner-stone of virtue: which he should seek to lay down as the basis and foundation of his soul? Without self-restraint who can lay any good lesson to heart or practise it when learnt in any degree worth speaking of?  

"Or, to put it conversely, what slave of pleasure will not suffer degeneracy of soul and body? By Hera, well may every free man pray to be saved from the service of such a slave; and well too may he who is in bondage to such pleasures supplicate Heaven to send him good masters, seeing that is the one hope of salvation left him." 

Well-tempered words: yet his self-restraint shone forth even more in his acts than in his language. Not only was he master over the pleasures which flow from the body, but of those also which are fed by riches, his belief being that he who receives money from this or that chance donor sets up over himself a master, and binds himself to an abominable slavery. 

—from Xenophon, Memorabilia 1.5 

IMAGE: Karl von Blaas, Allegory of Self-Control (1859)

[lyledebeast]

"Deserve's got nothing to do with it:" Violence and Change in Unforgiven and The Patriot

Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven (1990) and Roland Emmerich's The Patriot (2000) are two films I've wanted to compare for a very long time. To begin, their protagonists have surprisingly similar backgrounds. Both are middle-aged men who engaged in violent practices when they were younger, later married and fathered children, and claim in the present that they are no longer the men they were. Both speak of their deceased wives as angels who showed them the error of their ways and turned them to a more righteous path. And yet both turn back to violence over the course of these films for, they claim, the sake of their children. Did they change, or only their circumstances? The films not only answer these questions very differently but conceptualize both violence and change differently.

Benjamin Martin's initial choice of violence in The Patriot is presented as no choice at all. Just as he warned the rest of the Charlestown assembly in the film's first act, their choice to join in the war for independence has borne consequences. The British have burned his home, murdered one of his sons, and convicted another as a spy without evidence. William Munny's choice to revisit the violence of his younger years is made under somewhat less dire circumstances. He sees that taking up the Kid's offer to split the bounty may help him care for his children more effectively than continuing to struggle with his hog farm. Moreover, the men he will kill are not a threat to him or his family; he has to travel a great distance to even find them. At the outset, Ben's violence seems more justifiable than Will's, but the impact of this violence on them bears a closer look.

I would point out that The Patriot is more gruesome than Unforgiven, fitting given that it deals with 18th C warfare. However, the bloodiest violence in the former happens to Ben's fellow Patriots while Will and his fellow bounty hunters are responsible for most of the deaths in their story. The deaths of Ben's sons are drawn out, anguished affairs. The British soldiers he kills, with a couple of notable exceptions, simply drop like flies. In Unforgiven, it is the men the bounty hunters kill whose suffering is on display. One is shown sweaty and in agony as he asks for water; the other holds his hands in front of him, terrified, begging for his life. While British soldiers make similar pleas in The Patriot, the camera is positioned behind them; we only see the faces of their killers. Ben's emotional response to violence is uneven at best. While he claims to still hear the screams and see the faces of the men he killed in the last war, he shows no hesitation to kill the British soldiers who take his son into custody and only protests killing surrendering British soldiers when it is too late. He offers mercy to one British officer only to admit to General Cornwallis that he orders his men to target officers first in their engagements only a couple of scenes later.

The Kid, when he arrives at Will's farm, has nothing but romantic notions about violence, but the film undermines those quickly. Ned, a fellow outlaw from Will's past, cannot bring himself to shoot the young man who is their target. Will does, but is so disturbed in the aftermath that he orders the dying man's companions to give him water. After the Kid shoots the other target, all his bravado about killing disappears. He confesses that this is the first death for which he has been responsible and vows to never kill again. Unforgiven's position on violence is best captured by Will's words to the Kid in this scene. "It's a hell of a thing, killing a man. You take everything he's got and everything he's gonna have too."

Nowhere is killing another person treated with such gravity in The Patriot. Ben Martin shrugs off his violent past with a dismissive "I was intemperate in my youth." But when his oldest son is also killed by Tavington, he seeks reasons in the past rather than the present: "I have long feared that my sins would return to visit me, and the cost is more than I can bear." Will seems to share the same fear as he insists to Ned no less than four times in a single conversation that he "ain't like that no more," that Claudia has "cured" him of the drinking that always precipitated his past violence. When Ned offers no argument, it becomes clear he is not the intended audience of Will's pleas. He is trying to convince himself that he has changed permanently, and he is unsuccessful. It is difficult to say with any certainty whether Ben changes or not because the standard by which the film judges him changes like the tide, for the convenience of the moment. Will, however, changes quite dramatically by the end of the film from rejecting the notion that his past defines him to affirming it. "Yes, I've killed women and children. I've killed everything that walked or crawled at one point or another. And I'm gonna kill you, Little Bill, for what you did to Ned."

For all that Will kills his adversary for the same reason Ben kills his--vengeance for the death of a loved one--he shows Little Bill a surprising degree of grace. Ben agrees with Colonel Tavington, his sons' killer, that he (Ben) was "not the better man" because "my sons were better men." On the one hand, it is an assertion that both he and Tavington both fall short of the righteousness his sons represented, but it also underpins his own righteousness in that he is killing Tavington on their behalf. Then he stabs Tavington through the throat to assure that his words will be the last. Will, having defeated and disarmed Little Bill, gives him a chance to talk. He asserts that he does not deserve this fate because "I was building a house," and Will replies, "Deserve's got nothing to do with it." When he chose violence, downing a bottle of whiskey upon hearing of Ned's death, he also rejected any need to be the most righteous man in the room. He cannot judge Little Bill because they are are both violent men; Will is just better with guns.

Ben never accepts that his violence is a choice; perhaps that is why he finds the cost too much to bear. He wants the positive consequences it can bring about--land, independence--but also to retreat into domesticity to avoid the negative ones. In this, he has more in common with Unforgiven's antagonist than with Will. Little Bill's house, with its crooked angles and hole-riddled roof, is a metaphor for his failure to set himself above the "men of low character" that he terrorizes. The heap of failed rocking-chairs in Ben Martin's barn may be meant to both humanize him and hint at the temper that will come into play later, but I would argue it makes more sense to interpret it in the same way. These men attempt to set themselves up as judges of other violent men by building a home/raising a family, but the foundations are shaky at best. The quotation in this meta's original title came from one of Little Bill's deputies but could as easily be applied to Ben: "He may be tough, but he sure as hell ain't no carpenter."

Ben wants, and the narrative allows him, to have his cake and eat it too, a desire Unforgiven presents as ridiculous. Will knows that violence is not compatible with domesticity. That is why he chose to give up drinking for the sake of Claudia and continues to make that choice for their children after her death. But the view of change Unforgiven posits is bittersweet. It is possible for anyone to change, even someone guilty of all Will Munny's monstrous actions, if they choose to do so. But the change is never permanent; it is always possible to choose violence again. And once that choice is made, the consequences are inevitable.

[psalm22-6]

Everybody would like to know: what are the 

?

Of course, they also want to know:

The answer is Les Misérables (sometimes).  While I was looking through the California Digital Newspaper Collection, I made note of the articles which mentioned that Les Misérables was included in the local library.  To begin, in 1885 the Napa Free Library opened in Napa, California, which seems to have been a subscription library furnished with  a watercooler “where he who seeks the fountain of knowledge may at the same time slake his thirst tor water.” The library’s board of Trustees selected which books the library would carry, and Les Misérables was among the first 35 selected.  Missouri’s Saint-Louis Republic reported in 1889: “When ‘Les Miserables’ first appeared fifty copies answered the demand, although this is one of the most constantly read books in the library.”

In 1890 the Chicago Tribune quoted a bookseller as saying “I sell a copy of Victor Hugo's ‘Les Miserables’ every ten days regularly.” (I know I said this was about libraries but I just thought that one was interesting). 

In 1891, in the town of Springfield, Massachusetts, “of French books, the one most read is Victor Hugo's ‘Les Miserables.’” Of course it’s not just about what people like to read, it’s also about what is considered to be “good literature” and “worth reading” by those in charge. For example, see this headline from the San Pedro News Piolet in 1919

The high school’s librarian writes: 

What do we mean by “better books?” During the last hour I have been considering the subject with a group of young people who happened to be gathered in the school library for study. The discussion was precipitated by the following request from a young girl:

“Please get me something to read that will be good for, me.” You may think that such a request must be either unusual or insincere, but it is neither. It comes to me constantly in one form or another. “What is a real good story?” “I want something beside fiction.” “Will this book be good enough to make an English report on?” “What is the difference between Harold Bell Wright’s stories and those of Ralph Connor?” etc., etc. The debate today drew into its vortex all the occupants of the study hall and, at times, grew a little warm. Several were enthusiastic supporters of Harold Bell Wright, and I tried to explain to them the difference between the sentimental, poorly written novel and the vigorous tale of adventure and romance. The following list of books is the one the young girl in question actually considered reading. It might be interesting to look through the titles and check those we have read or that we know something about. They can all be found at the public library, and I feel sure that anyone who reads them all will be richly rewarded. To make the acquaintance of a great book is in itself an education. She chose from the list Les Miserables, the greatest of all novels. If she reads it intelligently it will be an addition to her mental life that she must appreciate and feel as long as she lives and thinks. Following is the list: Victory — Joseph Conrad. Adam Bede — George Eliot. Fathers and Sons — Turgenev. Smoke — Turgenev. The Crime of Sylvester Bonnard — Anatole France. The Rise of Silas Lapham — William U. Howells. A Modern Instance — William D. Howells. Eugenie Grandet — Balzac. The Iron Woman — Margaret Deland. Anna Karenina —Tolstoy. Les Miserables — Victor Hugo. Jane Eyre—Charlotte Broute [sic]. This is a chapter from real life, and this list is given because it is one actually discussed on this occasion. Other lists as good might be made.

A little out of order for the timeline but that same theme was explored by E.L. Kellogg, the library of the Carnegie library located in San Luis Obispo in 1917 and she had this to say: 

But the reading of light, overdrawn, ephemeral fiction only, is a species of intemperance, which not only vitiates the taste, but shuts out a whole world of profit and pleasure among the works of real genius. There is Dickens whose “every page is crowded with jostling life,” to read whom is like taking a walk down some "highway of life where we may come into contact with humanity.” What a pity to go through life unacquainted with the episode of the stolen candle-sticks In Les Miserables, or the splendid Doctor of the Old School in The Bonnie Brier Bush!

In the San Mateo Daily News Leader, in 1912, it was reported that the local library was able to purchase “a handsome four volume edition of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables with recent gift money.” However reader’s desiring other books not in the library’s collection, they would have to consult the state library or “kindly confer with the librarian. If a number of books are ordered at one time the cost for each applicant will be trifling. Expressage is the only expense.”

Books were not just for solitary reading and individual improvement. As reported in the Hanford Journal in December of 1913: 

There are a number of useful books and magazines that are full of the suggestions that will aid any one who plans on entertaining during the holidays. These volumes will be found at the Hanford public library: Powers' “Dialogues for Little Folks” contains a couple of plays for children, entitled a “Christmas Gift” and “Edna’s Christmas Wishbones.” Knight's “Dramatic Reader for Grammar Grades” gives Dickens' famous story of "Ebenezer Scrooge's Christmas," written in dramatic form, and "Little Cosette” and “Father Christmas” adapted from Victor Hugo’s “Les Miserables.” [Wow I just learned about another adaptation thanks to this.]

Great holiday fun for the whole family.  In 1916 they got a whole lot of new books in Calexico (sorry for the low quality. Les Mis is in there): 

In 1911 an advice columnist for the San Francisco Call advised readers that “if you have never read ‘Les Miserables,’ you might attack that this summer.” (Or, of course, if that isn’t your cup of tea, “promise yourself that you will read a dozen good books on hypnotism and clairvoyance and the other manifestations of the unknown world into which science is trying to peek.) (Two years later that same columnist reported that her neighbor was forced to stop reading most magazines due to financial problems, but that that neighbor had said “It has driven us to make more use of our fine library, and the other day we discovered we hadn’t read half the books on our own shelves. So now I’m absorbed in Les Miserables and Jack is reading one of Thackeray‘s that he hadn’t happened to read — both books right off our own bookshelves.”) And that’s just about it as far as anything remotely interesting goes!