#it looks like I draw ayn a lot but he’s so easy to draw

[vivsicx]

Some extra ayn from the depths of my files

[jokertrap-ran]

(时空中的绘旅人—For All Time—) Clarence Route Translations (Chapter 5 红枫: Red Maple)

*For All Time Master-list *Spoiler free: Translations will remain under cut *Maintaining Si Lan’s name as Clarence *Route Tag is #Chapter of Legacy

MC: Phew...

What a close call. I can’t afford to relax even for a moment when fighting against Clarence.

But this time, I managed to end it in a draw.

I had trudged on, constantly honing my painting skills during my journeys through time and space, accumulating lots of experience in utilizing my Painting Spirit to fight.

Now that I’ve finally ended the match with Clarence in a draw, he’ll be obligated to listen to me and not turn a deaf ear to my words now that I’ve proven myself qualified to speak before him.

He scowled. It was obvious that he was surprised by my strength.

MC: Look, there’s no way you can hold me. However, I’ll obediently enter that cage that’ll imprison me so long as you allow me to live in the Mage Tower.

MC: This is a deal, Master Clarence. You won’t be suffering any drawbacks and I’ll even be going along with you willingly.

Clarence: Don’t regret your decision.

Clarence scoffed lightly and turned to leave. He paused for a moment when he reached the door, as if beckoning for me to follow after him.

Rorschach faced me with interest.

Rorschach: (Y/n), that Mage Tower is all doom and gloom. You’re definitely not going to be used to it.

Rorschach: I’ll get someone to send you warm bedding and some dresses for you to change into. Allowing such an adorable Lady to live comfortably is also a chivalry of sorts.

Ayn: I’ll be patrolling around the Mage Tower tonight.

Ayn: You would do well to stay alert. I’m not inclined to save you if something happens because of your own stupidity.

I thanked the pair of Royal Brothers before turning to look at Alkaid at the back. His eyes were like pools of deep water as he silently watched me.

Alkaid: The Mage Tower holds the secrets of Mages. And any place with secrets will be a dangerous place.

Alkaid: Take care. 

Clarence: Follow me if you wish to come to the Mage Tower. I don’t have the time to wait for you.

I waved to Alkaid before running up to chase after Clarence, bounding up two steps at a time.

We walked towards the Mage Tower in the night. Walking from the Palace Corridor to the end of the place and crossing a bridge, we arrived at the Mage Tower.

⊹ ˚✩ ━━━━━━━ ∘◦ ✥ ◦∘ ━━━━━━━ ✩˚ ⊹

The Mage Tower stood tall. It was very high, the blue and white buildings decorated with mysterious magical runes. It’s slender and sharp spires seemingly making it known that that was where the highest secret of magic was being hidden.

Clarence and I walked in absolute silence. He was very cold, walking ahead of me and never once looking back.

⊹ ˚✩ ━━━━━━━ ∘◦ ✥ ◦∘ ━━━━━━━ ✩˚ ⊹

Walking into the Mage Tower, I spotted a Maple Tree standing in the Front Courtyard.

The Maple Tree remained as red as an autumn’s flame, it’s leaves fluttering to the ground as the wind blew past.

I looked up and noticed that the number of red leaves on the tree hadn’t decreased in the slightest at all. I thought it a little strange.

Clarence: You’ve looked at this tree in a daze for a long time now.

It’s been a pretty long time now. I’m guessing that there definitely must be a Mage who’s using magic to protect this tree, preventing it’s red leaves from ever falling out of bloom.

▷ Choice: Who’s using magic to protect this tree?

Clarence: Me.

MC: Does this Maple Tree… facilitate the practice of spells?

Clarence: No. You don’t need to have a purpose for every spell you cast. I simply wish for there to be a Maple Tree in front of the Mage Tower’s entrance.

▷ Choice:  Is this tree useful to the Mage Tower?

Clarence: No. You don’t need to have a purpose for every spell you cast. I simply wish for there to be a Maple Tree in front of the Mage Tower’s entrance.

▷ Choice:  I’m looking at the Maple Tree… it’s growing very well. Who planted it?

Clarence: Me.

MC: Does this Maple Tree… facilitate the practice of spells?

Clarence: No. You don’t need to have a purpose for every spell you cast. I simply wish for there to be a Maple Tree in front of the Mage Tower’s entrance.

⊹ ˚✩ ━━━━━━━ ∘◦ ✥ ◦∘ ━━━━━━━ ✩˚ ⊹

Clarence: Everyone has something they like. I just happen to like Maple.

I was a little surprised at how calmly he had answered me. I’d always thought that he’d have his guard up against me since I was an uninvited guest and that he wouldn’t tell me any truths related to the Mage Tower at all.

Clarence: You can’t sleep out here, and I’m sure a single tree like this isn’t worth your scrutinizing for an entire night.

He unceremoniously urged me to leave the place. I sighed, following after him as he went up the stairs of the Mage Tower.

⊹ ˚✩ ━━━━━━━ ∘◦ ✥ ◦∘ ━━━━━━━ ✩˚ ⊹

The stairs of the Mage Tower were long and dark, and every segment looked the same.

It seemed to circle on upwards, with no end in sight.

Walking along a path like this sure gives people a nagging fear of claustrophobia with how claustrophobic it was in here.

Clarence continued walking on before me, occasionally looking at me from the corner of his eye. For some reason, I’ve always found him to be more daunting in such dark and gloomy places.

I couldn’t help my footsteps faltering for a moment.

⊹ ˚✩ ━━━━━━━ ∘◦ ✥ ◦∘ ━━━━━━━ ✩˚ ⊹

Clarence’s hand suddenly darted out, pressing into the wall behind me. He looked straight at me through the lens that he wore, his long dark blue hair hanging down before me.

He leaned his face closer to me, a hint of playfulness within his eyes.

Clarence: You’re scared deep down inside. You’re just an ordinary girl, (Y\n).

...So, what if I’m weak? Is being weak a crime?

Clarence: Strange runes, dark stairs, spiraling upwards, never to end.

Clarence: Black monsters will spring from the corners anytime in a place like this. And what lies at the end of the stairs might very well just be an abyss that you can never return from.

Clarence: This isn’t a place you should have come to. Sacrifices should stay obediently cooped up within their cages. 

▷ Choice: Be a little nervous (Bad END)

▷ Choice: Don’t ever back down

Clarence had always been absolutely wary towards me.

But I mustn't show weakness in front of a man as powerful as he. I raised my head and looked him straight in the eye, unwavering, un-retreating.

MC: I’m not your Sacrifice.

⊹ ˚✩ ━━━━━━━ ∘◦ ✥ ◦∘ ━━━━━━━ ✩˚ ⊹

MC: That’s right. I’m afraid of the monster that might suddenly jump out of the corners at any given moment in time. I’m afraid of being hurt, of the night, of the abyss… I’m just an ordinary girl who fears many things.

MC: But the more afraid of something you all, the more you cannot retreat. Escaping means exposing your back to your enemy in the process, after all.

Saying so, the Painting Spirit appeared behind me.

MC: I’ll be under your care, Chief Mage. Of course, I’ll accompany you as many times as you wish to try me.

MC: But I will use all my strength to tell you every time you try―— that this ordinary girl isn’t that easy to deal with!

───⋅𝕿𝖎𝖑𝖑 𝖓𝖊𝖝𝖙 𝖙𝖎𝖒𝖊…⋆⋅☆

⊹ ˚✩ ━━━━━━━ ∘◦ ✥Chapter of Legacy✥ ◦∘ ━━━━━━━ ✩˚ ⊹

Previous Part: (Chapter 3-2) | Next Part: (Chapter 7)

[tessatechaitea]

Teen Titans Spotlight #7: Hawk

I finally found Rob Liefeld's reference for drawing guns!

This was the airport in Denver before it was replaced by the Illuminati.

I thought this scene was going to instantly morph into the cover. Stupid airports and their no guns policies! Although this was 1987. Couldn't you bring anything you wanted onto a plane in 1987?! Maybe I'm thinking of flying in the seventies. Once when I was seven, I remember sitting next to a guy flying with fifteen goats and a keg of sulfuric acid while I let the tired Catholic priest seated next to me rest his head in my lap. Excuse me while I draw a MAGA cap onto Hawk in every panel of this comic book so it reads more like 2019. He's got their philosophy down pat on the first page! "I love everything lefties hate even if I don't know anything about those things! At least I fucking know what the 'AR' in AR-15 stands for! Idiots!" The only problem with this initial scene is that the anti-nuclear canvasser puts his hands on Hawk and then security proclaims there was no provocation. No wait. I used the phrase "the only problem" wrong because there are multiple problems with this scene. One of the problems, I admit, stems from me reading this in 2019. When I first read the panel with security saying, "Let's go," I didn't read it as security breaking up the fight. I read it in the voice of every fucking kid on Twitch or Mixer ready to escalate some shit. I thought the fight was just getting started! Another problem because I should probably wring out more than one extra problem after saying this scene had more than one problem with it is that the canvasser even continues to argue his point with somebody who threatened to give them a fat lip. He's never going to get any signatures from willing people if he spends all his time arguing with people who are obviously not into his groove. Canvassers need way thicker skin than this guy has! Just say "Have a nice day!" and move on!

I didn't know that stripping down to your underwear was a valid defense for violently going apeshit bananas in public.

It's actually worse than stripping down to his underwear. Hawk actually had to unpack his costume and get into it to prove that he had the right to punch a hippie. Security is all, "Well, since you got the Twinkie product placement in, I guess we have to let you go. But don't go punching anybody who isn't a terrorist from now on, you got me?!" The Stapleton Airport Security team have ferreted out a plan by "one of these Middle Eastern terrorist gangs" to sabotage the Crow Mountain Nuclear Power Plant. Hawk pulls his mask down and screams, "Not Crow Mountain! Nuclear is my favorite!" The Security Chief says, "Hopefully the guy you punched was actually one of the terrorists because that would make your actions seem less crazy in context later (even if you didn't actually know he was a terrorist) and also make our story seem less bigoted by making the terrorists white guys." Hawk responds, "Why isn't anybody biting my Twinkie? Don't you understand what an imperative is?!" Now I wish Hawk was a violent, short-fused asshole who was only concerned with proper grammar. Hawk tells the security guys that he'd love to help kill a few terrorists so call him if some shit goes down. Security is all, "Apparently we can't charge Teen Titans with assault so, um, enjoy your stay! Try not to punch too many Coloradans!" But they seemingly come to their senses when Hawk is out of punching range.

With all these snack references, I suspect the terrorists will be stopped by their love of fruit pies.

Hawk is in Colorado to attend an anti-terrorism seminar at a corporate funded think tank called the Kellogg's Group. Why is this comic book insisting on making my mouth water?! Does it know I'm currently not eating sugar?! Hawk is the only hero to attend this anti-terrorism seminar because the other Teen Titans, the Justice League, and the Outsiders declined because they didn't want to be seen endorsing any particular group. Infinity Inc. wasn't invited. Hawk makes a huge splash at the seminar with logical statements and incendiary truth bombs.

Almost got that terrorism sorted! Time for a Ding Dong!

Hawk leaves the meeting to go look at Colorado's natural beauty while fuming about wimps and losers. I'm sympathetic to writer Mike Baron's leftist viewpoints so I'm not going to start calling Hawk "Strawman" during this commentary. But, I mean, he's really quite the caricature of the super-patriotic, support-the-police-at-any-cost, hippies-fucking-suck redneck, isn't he? I probably didn't use dashes correctly in that last sentence but I felt it made it somewhat clearer. For the layman! I know grammar nerds are going all Grammar Hawk on me! "You wimp! You loser! You should be gunned down the Israeli way!" The National Guard stops by in a helicopter to tell the Kellogg's Corporation that they need to evacuate. The Stapleton Airport Security Guard Detectives were right! Terrorists have captured the Crow Mountain Nuclear Plant! Hawk watches from his idyllic perch on the mountain and thinks more of his profound thoughts.

MAGA!

What the fuck is Hawk toting around in that ginormous case? Is it Mike Brady's architectural designs for a new theme park? Or is it a Banana Splits poster?! I'm only five pages into this comic book and I don't think I've ever been so entertained. Hawk is fucking nuts. Is every character with "Hawk" in their name a ranting aggressive conservative bastard? Maybe it's characters with "Hawk" in their name or characters whose names begin with "H" and end with "K"? Is that what made Hulk so angry? Was it welfare queens, immigrants, and the estate tax? Inside Hawk's gigantic tube is the Hawkglider. That's just a hang-glider made from PVC pipe and a re-purposed parachute.

"If you want something done right wing, you've got to do it yourself!" is the original Ayn Rand quote.

Hawk is a big dumb fucker. He might be the anti-Batman. He glides into the power plant to discover a guard unconscious on the ground. In one panel, he notices the guard has an insect bite on his neck. In the next panel, Hawk gets big by an insect and doesn't make any kind of intuitive or logical connection between the two. Instead he just explodes again, calls the bug a wimp and a loser, and rushes inside to kill some terrorists.

For such an angry guy, he sure sneaks comically.

Hawk discovers more guards out cold with bug bites. That makes him think, "More bug bites...what the heck...they should have called Orkin." Immediately followed by this panel:

"Gah! Where's my gun?!"

Hawk needs to stop being so comically angry, conservative, and stupid or I'm going to scan every panel in this issue.

Now I need to add misogy...wait. Is her name "Stupid Broad"?!

Hawk recognizes Stupid Broad because she was with Jerry, the hippie trying to stop nuclear power. She was outside protesting when the terrorists took over and since she had a wrench on her, she thought maybe she could stop them. Stupid Broad introduces herself as Bonnie so I guess Stupid Broad is her superhero name. Hawk continues to curse the bugs and tells Bonnie to keep her wrench handy. At least he recognizes a superhero team-up when it's happening. How long before he accidentally calls her Dove?

Now I'm imagining Batman hunting The Riddler with some Gotham Police while he mumbles, "Never let it be said that Doctor Wayne's little boy was stupid!"

Christ. I'd forgotten just how long we've been dealing with this whole "leftist media" bullshit. But it fucking worked. The media was so fucking upset that they kept getting called biased that they simply stopped actually reporting on news and just became parrots of right-wing talking points. It's no surprise that I probably have spent more time shitting on journalists and newscasters in these comic book commentaries than I've spent shitting on Republicans. Because the journalists should know better and have instead chosen the easy, cowardly way of avoiding constant criticism. Hawk continues to ignore the bug situation until a giant Preying Mantis made out of bugs approaches. It calls itself Arachnid and it wants an end to all sort of fun things: nuclear power, the destruction of the rain forest, the use of chemical pesticides, the production of acid rain. It's practically asking for an end to humans! I hope Hawk kills it! At one point during the confrontation, Bonnie asks about the Arachnid, "What is it?" This is how Hawk responds:

At first I thought he was being controlled by the bug bites. But, no, this is just his standard demeanor.

After Arachnid states its grievances, Bonnie shouts, "Right on!" Hawk yells, "SHUT UP!" Is this the kind of comic books Comicsgaters are dreaming of going back to? Except for the part where the audience understands Hawk is a huge asshole. They probably read this and, every few pages, rush out into the street to find another guy to high five. Bonnie starts talking about some Frank Herbert book while Hawk asks out loud, "How does a bunch of stupid bugs expect to destroy a nuclear power plant?" Luckily, Arachnid is a helpful bug golem. It's all, "Termites!" Hawk should have saved his Orkin line for this moment! There's only a few pages left so when do they introduce the Fruit Pie Wizard and his magic wand of fruit pie creation? Arachnid disappears into some cracks while the nuclear plants alarms go off, warning of an imminent meltdown. Hawk's plan is to randomly throw switches hoping to get lucky enough to stop the meltdown. Bonnie's plan is to look disaster in the face and find the silver lining.

So every thing he said up until this point was supposed to be encouraging and complimentary?!

Before Hawk can start throwing switches and writer Mike Baron has to do some actual research on what effect that might have on a nuclear power plant beginning to meltdown, Hawk notices an organ in the control room. Hawk's new plan is to hook the organ up to the PA system, play some screechingly high notes, and drive the bugs away! If this works, lawmakers will probably introduce a bill to put organs into every public space, just in case of another terrorist attack by insects. Hawk's plan works and the police thank him for saving Colorado. Then they immediately turn on Bonnie and threaten to arrest her for trespassing. She doesn't strip down to her underwear to prove she's a Teen Titan though, darn it. Instead, Hawk uses his pull as a Titan to get her off the hook. The cop doesn't appreciate it but what can he do? This is Teen Titans Spotlight On: Hawk, not Teen Titans Spotlight On: Podunk Denver Police Officer. Later, Hawk returns to the anti-terrorism seminar and basically proposes organs in every public place. What a fucking douche. The issue ends with Arachnid extending an invitation to Hawk to meet with its queen to discuss negotiations of peace with the insect kingdom. Or maybe it's just Queen Bee behind this all and she's in some serious need for an angry fuck. Teen Titans Spotlight #7: Hawk Rating: B+. Fuck, I was entertained. No wonder all these assholes love Fox news. It's fun having people tell you that what you think is right and confirming your beliefs that the people who think differently are angry fucking dumbies.

[avanneman]

John McCain, Paul Ryan, and the Myth of the Virtuous Republican

John McCain is one of those guys who, when he dies, people say “he was the last of a dying breed.”

No one will ever say that about Paul Ryan.

John McCain was a genuine war hero, a man who preferred to face hardship, torture, and even death rather than abandon his comrades. Paul Ryan has the suit, haircut, and soul of a TV personality. Yet both ended their careers kissing Donald Trump’s ass. Strange! More than strange!

It could justly be said—and often was—that John McCain approached politics with the mindset of the fighter pilot he used to be, an adrenaline junkie who wanted to see every issue as a struggle of good against evil, or at least us against them, which, in his mind, constituted the same thing. He was always wanting to go to war, wars in which, he was sure, the good guys always won and everyone’s problems were settled once and for all. My most vivid memory of McCain is video showing him striding around Baghdad in an armored vest, surrounded by heavily armed troops, with assault helicopters circling overhead, and proclaiming “Mission Accomplished”.

McCain made himself a national figure in the 2000 Republican primaries by wowing the national press corps with his war stories, young men and women stunned to be in the presence of a man who’d seen and endured things they, with their pampered backgrounds, could not even begin to imagine. This was a man!

And so he was, but as a senator he wasn’t so much. McCain was furious—well beyond furious—at George Bush because he believed, with some reason, that he’d been done out of the Republican nomination by some seriously subterranean backstabbing during the South Carolina primary, which may well be true, but one can also wonder how deliberate noncombatant Georgie W. beat a war hero in what is often regarded as the most militaristic state in the union.

McCain continued to cultivate the press in defeat, playing the beloved role of “maverick”, charging like a bull at a variety of issues, but never really succeeding at anything. For McCain, the passionate display of “passion” was its own purpose and end. His was not to reason why, and he never did.

Yet however harshly one wishes to criticize McCain, his ultimate obsequiousness to Trump remains baffling. Trump publicly ridiculed McCain’s heroism. Why wasn’t McCain at the Democratic Convention, standing beside Hillary Clinton, whose foreign policy views were almost identical to his own, and proclaiming her “America’s Choice”? What kept the proud maverick in such humiliating harness?

Well, as I say, I’m baffled. Perhaps he was intimidated by the Republican base, which had shifted so heavily against the “free trade, open borders” orthodoxy to which he had always subscribed.

But, in fact, there was always a bit of smoke and mirrors when it came to McCain’s “bipartisanship”. He had a knack for choosing issues, like campaign reform and immigration reform, that never, or rarely, managed to make it into law.1 On tax and spending issues, he almost always voted the straight party line, never giving an inch to either Clinton or Obama, though he did draw back a little from the “burn the house down” efforts of the newly elected Tea Party Republicans to drive the federal government into default—though probably more because he was worried about the possible impact on defense spending, which was the only fiscal issue he really cared about.2

But as for “leadership”, McCain was almost always absent. He voted in favor of removing President Clinton from office and, most infamously, brought Sarah Palin and her brand of “Americanism” into the national spotlight for the first time. And when the country really needed some bipartisan leadership, during the first onslaught of the Great Recession when Obama took office, McCain said, and did, nothing.

What’s remarkable about Paul Ryan is that, for a long time, he received press almost the equal of McCain’s, with far less substance. While McCain’s warrior ego was always front and center, deciphering Paulie’s slippery humility has always been a chore. He eagerly promoted—and the press eagerly bought—his Wisconsin Boy Scout demeanor. His incessantly repeated claim to be a “wonk” was, I think, deliberately designed to insulate him from the continuing bro-ha-ha3 over “social issues”—abortion, homosexuality, the “war against Christmas”, etc.—that so obsessed most ambitious Republicans. Paulie always looked east, towards Wall Street, but I’ve never been sure of his motivation. Was he gunning for the presidency? Then why stay in the House?

For many years, Ryan was sort of a hero—or perhaps fig-leaf—to many Republicans. In fact, to “recovering Republicans” like (former) conservative broadcaster Charles Sykes (author of How the Right Lost Its Mind), WashPost columnist and long-time Literature R Us whipping boy George F. Will, and former Republican strategist Rick Wilson (author of Everything Trump Touches Dies), who, unlike the first two, is deeply disappointed in the “new Paulie,” Ryan is (or was) a true hero. Nonpartisan centrists like Josh Barro are also deeply disappointed in the Ryan reinvention, which I will demonstrate—at length–is not new at all.

Sykes, in his book, gives us a taste of the true Paulie believer:

Whatever you might think of his policies, Paul Ryan is inarguably the most formidable intellectual leader the Republican Party has had for decades. For years, he was known for his dogged advocacy of budget and entitlement reform in opposition from his party’s establishment. His rise from conservative backbencher to Speaker could have been seen as one of the great success stories of the conservative movement. “I spent more time, I’d say, in the backbench than the leadership,” Ryan told me during a conversation on my last radio show. “The party really tried to isolate me a number of years ago and tried to explain to our members, ‘do not touch what Ryan is talking about, don’t deal with these fiscal issues, these entitlements, it’s political suicide.” And I just decided instead of trying to win the argument internally, I tried to win it externally, and that took hold,” he explained. “What happened, really, was the 2010 election, I think. The 2010 election brought all these, sort of Tea Party conservative Republicans into office.”

I suppose it’s possible to pack more self-serving nonsense into one paragraph than Paulie (and Sykes) just did there, but it isn’t easy. Ryan was always an eager self-promoter, though, as I say, it’s a bit of a mystery—again with the mystery! Republicans are mysterious!—exactly who Ryan was trying to sell himself to. Ryan has spent nearly all his adult life working in politics, either as a legislative aide or a congressman, and has claimed that all he wanted was to be chair of the House Budget Committee, but I don’t quite believe that. He has always appeared to me to have national aspirations, but for what? If you want to be president, you have to get out of the House, and, as far as I know, Ryan never showed interest in running either for governor or senator. If he wanted money, sure, a Budget Committee chair can retire after five or six years and make $2 or $3 million a year as a big-time lobbyist, but why bust your ass in your fifties for $2 or $3 million a year when you could have been making $20 or $30 million a year on Wall Street in your twenties?

So is Ryan telling the truth when he claims that he’s just a wonk, just wants to make the world a better place via free-market capitalism? No, he isn’t. To coin a phrase, he’s a big fat liar. Ryan lists the late Rep. Jack Kemp as his mentor and role model. Kemp was perhaps the most passionate advocate of the holy gospel of supply-side economics this side of George Gilder. Both men believed that the absolutely unfettered free market would solve all of mankind’s ills. Ryan was/is also a disciple of the legendary Ayn Rand, the Queen of Mean, saying that he frequently reread Ayn’s exercise in übermenschlichkeit, Atlas Shrugged, but, grudgingly aware that Ayn’s atheism and frequently expressed hostility to the Catholic Church (Ryan was raised a Catholic) didn’t sit well with the evangelical set, pulled in his horns just a bit, so to speak, and more recently pronounced himself a big fan of supposed big thinker Yuval Levin, who celebrated the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives in 2010, so hailed by Ryan as essentially his work (“I just decided instead of trying to win the argument internally, I tried to win it externally, and that took hold”), with a piece for the National Interest entitled “Beyond the Welfare State”.

According to Ryan, Levin “does a very good job of articulating why these are good ideas and the right way to go and how they’re philosophically connected with one another and consistent.” Indeed, Levin has made a career out of pretending to be a student of Edmund Burke, but back in 2011 he sounded a lot more like Herbert Hoover, making a multi-pronged assault on the welfare state: “The reason is partly institutional: The administrative state is dismally inefficient and unresponsive, and therefore ill-suited to our age of endless choice and variety. The reason is also partly cultural and moral: The attempt to rescue the citizen from the burdens of responsibility has undermined the family, self-reliance, and self-government. But, in practice, it is above all fiscal: The welfare state has turned out to be unaffordable, dependent as it is upon dubious economics and the demographic model of a bygone era.”

Despite his “the bottom line is the bottom line” pitch, Levin was not at all shy about making Randy/Hooverian generalizations about the welfare state as the source of modern-day moral collapse:

This is the second major failing of this vision of society [the first is that it is grossly inefficient] — a kind of spiritual failing. Under the rules of the modern welfare state, we give up a portion of the capacity to provide for ourselves and in return are freed from a portion of the obligation to discipline ourselves. Increasing economic collectivism enables increasing moral individualism, both of which leave us with less responsibility, and therefore with less grounded and meaningful lives.

Moreover, because all citizens — not only the poor — become recipients of benefits, people in the middle class come to approach their government as claimants, not as self-governing citizens, and to approach the social safety net not as a great majority of givers eager to make sure that a small minority of recipients are spared from devastating poverty but as a mass of dependents demanding what they are owed. It is hard to imagine an ethic better suited to undermining the moral basis of a free society.4

In other words, it is not only means-tested welfare programs that are morally corrupting—and it is these that the general public thinks of (and often resents) as “welfare”—but Social Security and Medicare as well. In fact, they’re the really bad ones!

Unsurprisingly (but predictably) Levin doesn’t have the courage to follow his own argument and simply eliminate Social Security and Medicare. Instead, he’d make them means-tested. Most people would still get some retirement assistance (but why wouldn’t this still be “bad”?), but most people—the middle class in particular—wouldn’t get as much. And everyone would have to buy their own health insurance, with some assistance from the federal government to cushion the blow: “This approach would seek to let people be active consumers, rather than passive recipients of benefits — which would be good both for the federal budget (since consumer pressure in a free market keeps costs down far better than price controls) and for the character of our nation.” Naturally, the less expensive social programs, such as Head Start, would be trimmed and, ultimately, one could hope, be eliminated, since they simply waste money and make us more dependent.

It’s “interesting” to look both backwards and forwards with regard to Levin’s manifesto, looking backwards first to Ryan’s own conduct in office when, as he pictured it, he was more or less howling in the wilderness, rejected by the Republican establishment and forced, basically, to take it to the streets. Because what did Ryan do? He voted for every budget-busting Bush proposal, starting with the massive, and massively unnecessary and counter-productive, Bush tax cuts, which turned a $172 billion surplus in 2001 into a $210 billion deficit in 2002 (using 2014 dollars), and continuing through all the “unnecessary” (not to mention morally corrupting) social programs like No Child Left Behind, which added billions in education spending, through the ultimate budget-buster, the disastrous invasion of Iraq (the bold Mr. Levin makes no mention of defense spending at all in his manifesto) plus the ultimate outrage, a new entitlement program, adding billions to the Medicare tab yearly to cover prescription drugs, with no provision for funding whatsoever! Mr. Ryan, one has to say, believes that words speak louder than actions.

Supposedly, the 2010 election brought “Paul Ryan” Republicans into Congress. This is nonsense. As Ryan and Levin surely noticed, the Republicans’ ace in the hole in the 2010 election was Barack Obama’s decision, via the Affordable Care Act, not to talk about cutting Medicare, but to actually cut it—something that, of course, neither Ryan nor Levin ever talked about. Over and over again, Republicans promised never to cut “a dime of Grandma’s Medicare”, and of course they never did. Ryan and Levin “proposed” to cut Medicare 10 years down the line, which is rather like promising to go on a diet in 10 years,5 but as for the present, hey, nothing’s too good for Grandma! And Social Security, presumably the most corrupting program of all, at least in Levin’s philosophy, would never have lost a dime under Ryan’s proposals.

The one entitlement Ryan was always willing to cut was, of course, Medicaid, cutting spending for the poor, not to balance the budget but rather to hand out tax cuts to the rich, which was always the first priority of all.6 Ryan produced a variety of budget plans that were supposed to produce a balanced budget in X number of years, but they were always phony, with the popular provisions, like reduced tax rates, spelled out, while the unpopular ones, like “base broadening” (elimination of tax exemptions and other “loopholes”) left for further discussion. Medicaid would be cut immediately (it was somehow “fair” to cut benefits for the poor immediately, but not to do the same to the middle class, i.e., “Grandma”), and further spending cuts would be made in “domestic discretionary spending”, which had expanded enormously under Bush from 2001 through 2008, under legislation for which Ryan had repeatedly voted. But these cuts, like the “base broadening”, were left unspecified, to be worked out in further negotiation. In other words, Ryan would spell out the popular provisions, which would, in fact, expand the deficit dramatically, and the leave it to the Democrats to repair all the damage he had created. It would be the Democrats who would have the responsibility for balancing the budget, not Paul Ryan.

It was all a shell game, as Paul Krugman and others repeatedly pointed out, a mere partisan hustle, but it made moderate Republicans like Sykes and Will and Wilson proud. We’re serious! We’re fiscally responsible! We’re still the party of ideas! We’re not like those crazy Democrats, who are turning us into Greece!

Well, that was then. When the era of Trump dawned, Ryan was clearly in a quandary. His Wall Street buddies, whose willing servant he had always been, had no use for Trump’s bad ass, xenophobic, race-baiting populism. But Trump had the votes, so Ryan caved. And once he started, the caving never stopped.

To be fair, Ryan caved to everybody, everybody with power. He finally got his chance to cut Medicaid in the course of overturning the Affordable Care Act, but in his eagerness to both help the rich, by eliminating one of those opprobrious Obamacare abominations that actually increased taxes on innocent millionaires/billionaires, and stick it to the poor by denying health insurance to millions, he overreached himself. “It’s curious,” Republican health care maven Avik Roy opined, “that extending tax cuts [to the rich] was a higher priority for the House than addressing the fact that the bill will make insurance unaffordable for millions of Americans.” Actually, it isn’t, but fortunately the naked hypocrisy of it all caused three Republican senators, including John McCain, greatly to his credit, to gag and Obamacare was granted another day.

Yes, Paulie was denied on that occasion, but he was not denied on his tax bill, where the hypocrisy was even greater, but with so much money on the table, well, what’s a little nudity among friends? I mean, this is the way God made us!

As originally crafted, Ryan’s tax bill was revenue neutral, thanks to a “controversial” provision, a “border tax adjustment” that would have brought in $1.5 trillion over 10 years, that was furiously opposed by most corporate outfits, including Koch Inc. Ryan could have said to them, “okay, guys, you don’t like my proposal. So how are we going to make this thing revenue neutral?” But he didn’t say that. Both Ryan and the Koch folks, who had been shouting, shouting, shouting “It’s the deficit, stupid!” for eight long years, turned around and added a cool $1.5 trillion to the deficit at a minimum7 and celebrated! And then followed that up with a budget-busting spending package with both massive and entirely unnecessary increases in defense spending and equally large increases for “domestic discretionary spending”, which Republicans supposedly hate!

Charles Wilson (remember him?) at least had the honesty to be openly ashamed. Writing in his book Everything Trump Touches Dies, Wilson wrote

The bill does nothing to reduce the complexity, expense, opacity, and general brain-frying shittiness of the tax code for ordinary Americans. So much for our “Do your taxes on a postcard!” rhetoric. The tax code, baroque and ludicrously convoluted before, is even more baffling unless you can afford a fleet of corporate tax attorneys and consultants.

A prominent tax lobbyist I know wrote, “This is almost too easy. Even I feel dirty.” This person literally sat in the majority leader’s office crafting parts of the tax bill, laughing all the way to the bank. The members of the House and Senate who voted for this 479-page bill had only a few hours to consider it. I asked this lobbyist at the time what the job-creation effect would be from the corporate tax cut, and he replied, “How the fuck do I know? Something? Maybe?”

This is the legislation Paul Ryan “crafted”, or at least put his name to, and this is the legislation that John McCain voted for, a massive change to the U.S. tax code to which the U.S. Senate, the world’s greatest deliberative body, had zero input. The bill was written for them by Paul Ryan and a gaggle of lobbyists, and they contributed nothing. Decades of lying and deceit came to their full fruition. This was Paul Ryan’s achievement, and John McCain’s submission made it possible.

For whatever reason, the election of Bill Clinton to the presidency in 1992 essentially drove the Republican Party mad. Both the elite and the base were seized by a compulsive need to destroy Clintonism by any means necessary. The base seethed with paranoid rage against blacks, Hispanics, feminists, homosexuals–“the other”–while the elite sought to manage the monster and perpetuate itself first with tax cuts and “culture war” then with the intoxicating self-righteousness of a real war in the Middle East.8 But the elite discredited itself with disasters both home and abroad, and the triumph of the Tea Party signaled the collapse of elite power. For eight long years during the Obama Administration Paul Ryan served as the mask of Republican corruption. But now we see–as if it were hidden before–that the mask is as corrupt as that which it concealed.

McCain first became an advocate of campaign reform perhaps as an ass-covering measure, when he was identified as one of the “Keating Five”—five senators who aggressively promoted the interests of savings and loan hustler Charles Keating. Later, after his defeat by George W. Bush in the 2000 Republican presidential primaries, McCain was widely, and accurately, suspected of wanting to “get” evangelical groups who helped Bush defeat him. On immigration reform, McCain, like both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama (and, pretty much, myself), was a strong advocate of the “open borders” approach favored by Wall Street. The same could be said of Paul Ryan as well, but Ryan did not dare cross the rabid Republican base—much stronger in the House than the Senate—on this one. ↩︎

In what was very likely a fit of pique rather than common sense, McCain voted against George Bush’s 2001 tax cuts. It was rare for McCain to care about deficits, unless a Democrat was in office. ↩︎

Word accepts this spelling, because it accepts “bro” as a word (as well as “ha”). I find it hard to believe that I typed “bro-ha-ha” but apparently I did, if only because Word will correct “brohaha” to “brouhaha” rather than “bro-ha-ha”. I guess I was really drunk. ↩︎

Levin, who is Jewish (he was born in Israel), titles his discussion of the shortcomings of the welfare state “The Passing of an Illusion”. In 1927, Sigmund Freud published a withering critique of Christianity under the title The Future of an Illusion. You don’t have to be a Freudian (cause I sure ain’t one) to suspect that Levin unconsciously—but not consciously—echoed Freud’s title. ↩︎

Back in the eighties, when Ronald Reagan introduced Americans to “modern deficits” (Reagan doubled the size of the entire national debt in eight years, in constant dollars, although an expanding economy meant that as a percentage of GNP the increase was only 43%), Congress enacted several elaborate deficit reduction packages. All of them employed the same strategy: cosmetic cuts to get Congress through the next election, followed by “real” cuts afterwards. Inevitably, after the next election, the new Congress would “discover” that the “real” cuts were in fact “crazy” ones, and rewrite the legislation to push the new “real” cuts to after the next election. The notion that the Congress elected in 2010 could “force” the Congress elected in 2020 to make massive, and massively unpopular, cuts in Medicare is ludicrous. ↩︎

Levin, in his paper, briefly explains that he wants a simplified federal tax policy, with low rates. Despite his supposed obsession with soaring deficits, he doesn’t even discuss the possibility of raising taxes to reduce them, probably because he knows that would work, as it did under Clinton, and he doesn’t want to balance the budget on the backs of the rich. ↩︎

The bill made tax cuts for the rich permanent but set the tax cuts for the middle class to expire in 10 years. Now Republicans are “proposing” to make them permanent. This is probably an election-year gambit, but if it works, what are they going to do? Say they were lying? ↩︎

For many evangelicals, the events in the contemporary Middle East are a direct continuation of the events of the Bible–God’s Will in action. ↩︎

[ramrodd]

COMMENTARY:

Neil Richardson, what you need to understand, as an alleged leadrship guru, is that there is your version of leadership based on 3rd Wave High Performance and there is the US Army Ranger School leadership model, which Terry Collins and I employed to put the process in motion that created the PAC Rugdy national championship. Everybody at SUD was bought into Ken Green's vison of producing test level rugby players in the Good Ol' US of A just like the teams he played for in Argentina back in his day. My role, as the resident 5th Wave High Performance guru, was to make that happen. It did  As far as I know, I am the last Sud skipper to win a tournament in the fall of 1975. I might have the timing off, but Terry can tell you. He was my Sherman to my Grant before Vicksburg.  I don't know if he understoos what I was doing, but he was my 6 until we both more less left active participation in the Sud community. Sud was my first Learning Community I can point a finger at and say "This is how it works. I's fun and easy to do.

The community is a capitaist tool AS EXISTS the first time I look at it.

What this appointment of Mulvaney means is that the big money behind Trump want to recreate the economic conditions leading up to the 2008 mortgage crises. These people what America to blow so they can pick the pieces like they did with the Resolution Trust Corporation. In terms of the dynamical processes of 5th Wave High Performance, the Resolution was a direct result of Bob Dole's 1986 Tax Reform. What they did was to remove a bunch of tax shelters that evolved beginning with Nixon's domestic program into the sort of Yupped Liberation Front vaction tax shelters like White Water that was drinving the economic recovery of America from Stagflation and blew up several strata of wealth I associate with Nixon's Affirmation Action agenda, including properties associated with S&Ls that had done a lot fo Junk Bond financing to support the growth of the Yuppie Liberation Front's rising afluence associated with the New Deal and Democrat Party. You remember that constant stream of investigatons into White Water by the Conservatives, the basis for the Crooked Hillary narrative? This was collateral damage from Bob Dole's 1986 Tax Reform. The Resolution Trust Corptoration was the strategic goal of the legislative design. The outcome was the largest transfer of wealth from the American middle class to basically the class of Olligarch's associated with the Koch brothers and Jeff Bezos flogging Trump for Paul Ryan's Ayn Rand inspired Tax Reform.

These poeple want to bow up the country, some because they are anarchists like Bannon and Newtie who like to watch things burn, like the arsonist in The Stand, but most, like the Koch brothers and Jeff Bezon, just want to privatize America because they are really smart guys, like you, the smarest guys in the room, like Enron, but greed has made them stupid.

Whatever it is that informs your attitude about greek letter fraternaties is what makes you stupd, It's a characteristic of 3rd Wave High Performance. Moral compromise elevated to high principle.

Now, when I took over as skipper in the spring of 1975, Sud was one of the top Rugby clubs in America in terms of tactical elegance and strategic efficacy. Our culture was based on attracting players at the leading edge of test level capacities on a walk-about of some sort and put on entertaining rugby while constantly training Americans by immersion on state-of-the-art international play. I was fortunate to be a part of that dynamic at the A-Level before I became skipper, and, in different circumstances, I never would have considered become captain, but we were at a crises of sustainabiity that could have stalled, if not killed, the achievement of Ken Green's vision for ever.

The crises was that we relied far too heavily on John Muir's foot to humilate our rivals with hair-breadth escapes and near disaster, We could keep the game close with the most physical, and athletic teams west of the Mississippi with our supeior understand of Rugby and it's Laws and draw them into a fatal error which gave John a shot at goal from practically aware in the same ZIP CODE as the uprights and watch the Washington assholes wilt in the face of a superior moral truth.

But, after a series of brillian seasons, our sail began to luft and not real headway towards Ken Green's vision for a SUD National Champion faded. I had played on a championship rugby team my freshman and sophomore year at Indiana and watched that focus drain awary my junior and senior year. I played with an All American, Art Stump, and with a Green Beret bootstraping a masters degree and I absorbed those quailities as performance metrics I continue to apply. Dynamical metrics. And what had happened at IU was happening at SUD and I was seriously concerned and I campaigned to be come club captain and got the job and won the tournament which was the result of the transformation process I put the SUD community through to install 5th Wave High Performance, Not to put to fine a pont on it, but I developed the club's operational performance the same way I did my platoon in Vietnam, with the help of Terry and a British Army officer who voluteered his time coarch us. I built on the existing of the club, which was exemplified by the attitudes of Kent and Trish Daniels, Peace Corps veterans from a tour in Kenya and their sort of White Mischief savoir faire, but in a stew of a totally cosmopolitan community. It was a time of a moveable feast.

Now, it took a long time for that National Champion to emerge as the fulfillment of Ken Green's vision, but it has and it was as result of a deliberate process I set in motion. After we won that tournament, I began to search for my replacement, We had the advantage of the Bottom Line as an international destination for expatriate ruggers looking for a warm hearth and conivivial society and the entire social calendar was basically a continuous focus on recruiting and you can ask Terry how that worked out. It was a wonderful time, But I knew I had to leave because I had not vision on how to build the corporate aspect of the club and, when Quinton Lawson finally arrived, I was able to get out of the way, There was an element in the club that wanted me to move a whole lot faster than I did, but I left when the future of Ken Green's vision was a assured by competent stewardship and Quentin Lawson was that man, I asked him to stand as my best man so that some day I could explain why he was part of my wedding. So I could help you become a serious leadership guru instead of a captive member of the Yuppy Liberation Front and an unintended co-conspirator with Steve Bannon and Mike Mulvaney.

Putin had nothing to do with the election hacking. If you agree with Hillary Clinton's assessment of Putin, you are part of the problem and the other side of the same cultural warfare bullshit that began between the SDS and YAF and continues with Trump voters and the Yuppy Liberation Front coalition of the Democrat party who voted for Adrian Fenty's gentrificaion agenda. It's something of a package deal. Fenty's agenda was a liberal version of privatization.

I also began to curtail my rugby in order to continue to assemble Plan B after being scare out of PLan A (a military career) by a crypto-Nazi up my chain of command in Vietnam. Plan A was to make my bones in Vietnam, marry my college sweet heart and retire as the Commanding General of Tradoc and watch the hurricanes come across Cape Fear from the picture window on the second floor of the Commanding General's quarters at Ft. Monroe,

Plan B was to get filthy rich and marry my college sweet heart, To this end, I began working on the Soviet airplane deal November 1975 and I was being purely on the come by 1977, when Terry raised $150 to keep my out of jail on the sidelines of a C Side Sud game, Terry can tell you about it, I was living in my offices in Dulles and the Soviet airplne deal, the X-Avia Project, was my path to getting filthy rich and marrying my college sweet heart and becoming even richer by doing lots of business deals witht the Soviet economy like Armand Hammer.

I was working at the leading edge of the Nixon-Brezhnev initiatives and Nixon's domestic program. Because of their hatred of Nixon, similar to your hatred of fraternities, Democrats, with the exception of Stuart Eizenstadt, have never understood Nixon's domestic program and, consequently, have bought into Reaganomics more or less whole cloth, which is why Fenty's gentrification agenda attacked affordable housing: you didn't know any better. Democrats were out of ideas when they let Reagan beat Carter (and Trump beat Clinton) and Reagan seemed to be good for their new wealth.  Nixon's domestic program was based on implementing Eisenhower's 1956 Presidential Platform and Eisenhower's 1956 Presidential Platform was an validation of, and a double-down on, the New Deal. Stuart Eisenstadt understood this and was making Nixon's domestic program work and an essential element of that program was a gentrification model based on the complete continuium of housing, which Muriel Bowser finally embraced as the theme of her administration, and not the truncated Trump version of gentrification employed by Fenty and his Yuppy Liberation Front warriors.

You see, I worked for Elizabeth Falcon's Housing for All campaign, which restored the original intent of gentrification through her determination to capitalize the Housing Production Trust Fund with $100 million commitment for affordable housing, I live in a building with long-term financing from the Housing Production Trust Fund as a direct result of the Housing for All campaign, I testified before Bowser's economic committee when she was running for mayor. I didn't vote for her or Fenty, but it was nothing personal and she is doing the right thing in terms of the corruption of the original intent of Nixon's gentrification. If we hadn't gotten that financing through the TOPA process, the house would now be either a Air B&B for the Yuppy Liberatin Front Sharing Economy or very expensive condo's for young, upperwardly mobile members of the Yuppy Liberation Front farm team. Without that room, I am a homeless veteran.

Which is why you need to understand, as an alleged leadership guru for the Yuppy Liberation Front that there is your verion of 3rd Wave High Peformance leadership and the 5th Wave High Performance leadership model of the US Army Ranger School . You aren't broken, but badly oriented, which is easy to fix. I've sent you The Leadership Secrets of 5th Wave High Performance. We can do for America what I did for Sud American de Rugby in 1975. Ask Terry Collins what he remembers.

But, here's the larger thing, the first thing Democrats, including Hillary, need to do is recalibrate their understanding of Putin's agenda. American needs to take his "Sovereign Democracy" agenda seriously.  We were working at the leading edge of what has become Sovereign Democracy with the X-Avia Project in 1975. Armand Hammer led the way on that, to some degree, but George Soros was doing similar work in the Warsaw pact countries, espeically Hungary, at the same time. Vietnam had completely crippled the Soviet economy: if your business model is based on conquest and plunder, but the conquest fails and there is no plunder to cover even the cost of the investment in conquest, you're fucked. That's what Nixon and Brezhnev were trying to fix and Putin is still working on the problem

What Ken Burns Vietnam (as an example of the Oliver Stone version of Vietnam) is that, when the military was talking about a war of attrition, it had nothing to do with body counts. That was Hanoi's decision: uncountable cost. Vietnam was a battle in the larger Cold War and the war of attrition was against the Soviet economy. We lost Vietnam, fair and square, but achieved a win-win when Gorbachev pulled the plug on Marxism.  The problem is, because Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, agree with Hillary Clinton about Putin, we are losing the war against the Deep Agenda backing Trump and proposing Tax Reform in order to put Reaganomics on steroids. For the Soviet Union, Vietnam was like the battle of Borodino for Napoleon: it was a battle he coudn't afford to fight and a battle he couldn't afford to lose. We fought, we lost, no more Soviet Union.

Now, that's not a popular opinion about Vietnam amoung the Yuppy Liberation Front.

Anyway, the people who control the selections for the American Eagles Rugby Team employ the same 3rd Wave High Performance model you use, This was a problem with American rugby in 1975: it was dominated by draft dodgers who selected people to play test matches based on their ideas of what transcendent performance required. I protested against the staus quo selectors as skipper by asking three players, John Muir, Art Weber and Mike Green, to not play on the Potomac select side because the politics of the PRU was producing inferior rugby and that continues to bubble up to the Eagles, who are slowly becoming a credible test competitor. If I could have been a player/coach at that point in the same way I was at SUD, the All Blacks would becoming to America to challenge the Eagles for possession of the World Cup. That's the difference between your model of leadership and mine.

And, as you come to see this, the fraud of Reaganomics will become evident> Muriel Bower is headed in the right direction with the Housing for All version of gentrification, which is an element of the economics of Jesus as defined by Mark 9:37.  It's a paradigm shift that will crush Trump and all he represents.

And it will begin to spill over into Putin's Sovereign Democracy in constructuve ways far more efficacious than the current carrot-and-stick approach of sanctions.

Just ask Terry Collins.

[thirdpoliceman]

Chapter 2.2 - No and Thou Shalt Not

Spoiler: The narrator is killed by a booby-trap mine planted by Divney in lieu of the cash box. He then sees Mathers, sittting in a maroon dressing gown, bandaged about the face and neck (from the jellying the narrator delivered) with a tea set and oil lamp on a small table next to him.

After steeling himself, the author gets into a negatory-heavy back and forth with Mathers wherein Mathers explains that he led a sinful life and upon reflection had decided that the best way to avoid sin was to say no to everything, especially every offer or suggestion, whether from others or from within himself, including every question the narrator had been asking. (pp. 27-31)

Saying no to everything could be taken as a comedic reflection of the self-denial incumbent in Christianity, most prevalently in its monastic expression. The author would have been exposed to western monasticism growing up in the thoroughly Catholic Ireland of the 1920s. This would have included his school days at Blackrock College, which was founded by French Spiritans, formerly the Holy Ghost Fathers, though this is a spiritual congregation (with priests and lay brothers) and not a monastic order. Nonetheless, O’Nolan, like nearly all Irish of his time, would have witnessed around him many nuns, brothers, priests, and monks who had undertaken vows of poverty or other forms of “saying no” to the offers of the world around them, for asceticism, while being viewed somewhat skeptically in Western Christianity (Peter King, Western Monasticism, 33 (Cistercian Pubs., 1999)), nonetheless is featured in at least some aspects of all Catholic religious and clerical life. He would also have carried with him his own Catholic catechesis of self-denial as virtue.

Saying no to everything is actually also a pretty good strategy for avoiding sin. This makes sense because the universe of bad or sinful things one can indulge in is much larger than the world of good things one can do that can bring one closer to God. After all, eight of the Ten Commandments, say what not to do. 

I am the Lord your God . . . You shall have no other gods before me. This has to be the only commandment that’s gotten easier to keep in modern times. There are just not as many other gods competing for your worshipping these days. Jehovah and Allah? Same God, in theory. Hindu pantheon? Couldn’t say much about it other than lots of arms; not really grabbing me. Buddha? Not a god. Shinto? That’s just folding paper animals. Thor? Marvel fans and Norwegian metal heads. Amun-Ra? Thanks for the founding myths, but no more pharaohs. Greco-Roman pantheon? Mostly planets, as it turns out. In the classical Mediterranean, this one might have been tough, what with the wide variety of sincerely-believed in gods around and the prevalent pantheism and so forth. But now? I got this one. . . . Unless you mean figurative gods, such that money, or booze, or certain videos that could become “gods” before God to me if I were greedy, or gluttonous, or lustful. Then that could get sticky. But those are their own sins (see below) and if this commandment covered those, it would render them superfluous which is against a cardinal rule of statutory construction. So this one is basically aimed at idolatry and mishy-mashy, let’s be Christian, but also Muslim or whatever too-ism. I’m on pretty solid footing here.

You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain. I slip up on this one a lot, but with some practice, following this one is very doable. It’s clear, unequivocal, and sets a pretty low bar, honestly. Thanks a lot, God. (That wasn’t sarcastic. Still, was that vain? I hope not. Otherwise, I’m off to a bad start.)

Remember the Sabbath and keep it Holy. There’s a lot more temptation here than there used to be (there’s always been some gray area, too, for “essential” professions and those with work reports due on Monday). Still, keeping this commandment is not a cakewalk. For starters, everyplace but that weird, locally-owned appliance store and Chick-Fil-A is open until at least 6 on Sunday in an effort to compete with Amazon, so shopping is tempting on Sundays. Dining out is too. For starters, I’d recommend the Avocado Egg Rolls at Kona Grill. No one has ever told me shopping or dining out are no-nos on Sunday, but you are making the employees work to serve you and its not exactly essential, except the Avocado Egg Rolls--you have to try them. Also, in today’s economy it’s a lot more likely you might have to work on Sunday even if you’re not a nurse or a quarterback. Fighting your Sunday work schedule with the religion excuse is pretty tough for most people who aren’t Amish or something as it’s usually greeted with a look that conveys, “What, you think you’re going to Heaven and I’m not, church boy?” or “Well, you’ll have plenty of time to go to church when you’re fired. Long live Ayn Rand and Mammon!” Luckily, I don’t have to work Sundays, so I’m good here.

Honor your father and your mother. Love you guys. Once you’re out of this house and financially independent, this one is a lot easier. Don’t hold a grudge. Respect their shit. I got this one . . . Wait, this gets a little more complicated for Catholics, with all the extending of it to siblings and society and raising your own kids right and what not. Still though, I think I can get this one. Just have to be diligent.

Thou Shalt Not Kill. You’d think this is easy! But, not so fast. This also includes not injuring yourself by abuse of food, alcohol, drugs, and the like. Now, as a married parent of a newborn who spends all day at home, this one is a lot easier than it used to be, but its one you really have to watch out for in this era of low alcohol and drug prices, oversized entrees, and the cocktail renaissance (“I’m not an alcoholic, I’m a tastemaker and a chemist!”).

You shall not commit adultery. Oh boy. I knew we were going to get to this one. Well, you knew it was going to come up eventually, so to speak. This one is tough. No doubt about it. It includes basically everything you’ve ever thought about doing that you don’t talk about in front of your mom that’s not included in Cmdt. 5. Essentially, if it is not sex inside marriage with no impediment to pregnancy, you’ve run afoul of this one. Also, it gets a little touchy on the homosexuality front in today’s political and civil rights climate. But remember, while you have to try, you get infinity second chances through confession . . . if you’re contrite. I know what you might be thinking, “But I’m not sure how contrite I’ll be tomorrow. And there’s so much temptation! Women’s Health today is basically Playboy from thirty years ago! And the tanning, forget about it. And the bras. And the shorts. And the INTERNET!!!! People sixty years ago or more had it much easier. They had to seek out temptation and they still failed all the time on Commandment 6. And you expect me to comply in the age of 4GLTE and incognito browser windows?” To that I say, draw some solace in the Didache, the oldest of Christian instruction manuals, dating to the first century:  “For if indeed thou art able to bear the whole yoke of the Lord thou shalt be perfect; but if thou art not able, do what thou canst.” Probably the most helpful advice ever given. I wish it was advertised a little more. So, good luck with this. I’d recommend getting married ASAP. Moving on.

Thou shall not steal. OK, we’re breathing a little easier now after the double-whammy of 5 & 6. Keep in mind though, that this includes a lot of economic stuff, like not paying an unlivable wage, price manipulation to get advantage on the harm of others, corruption, appropriation of the public goods for personal interests, work poorly carried out, tax avoidance, counterfeiting of checks or any means of payment, any forms of copyright infringement and piracy, and extravagance. So just remember, being a slack-ass piece of shit at work is stealing too. And, on the flip side of the coin, so is being a hard-ass, greedy owner/boss.

You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. This commandment covers a lot of ground about just not being a bad person. In addition to outright perjury, this bad boy covers rash judgments and presumptions, disclosure of another’s faults without reason (detraction), calumny, gossip, flattery, bragging, boasting, etc. But if you can avoid talking shit about others, lying, and bragging about yourself, you should be OK here for the most part. There’s also a lot of ways to venially violate this commandment (e.g., white lies), unlike with six. So even if you mess up here, just pray about it. You won’t get caught in a state of mortal sin if the Second Coming happens before confession on Saturday (whether this Saturday or the last one before Holy Week next year, whenever you might go). OK, so don’t talk shit about people. Got it. We’re almost there, and the last two are basically one!

You shall not covet your neighbor's house . . . wife . . . or anything that is your neighbor's. This one is pretty tricky because it covers internal dispositions of covetousness of the flesh. So, basically lust. I feel like this one is there just to really hammer home that you should try to keep your mind pure, not just your body. But obviously, impure sexual thoughts is one of the most difficult of the sins to keep at bay, so it seems a little onerous to have this commandment on top of “Big Six.”  Maybe there’s another reason for it, though. Maybe it’s here to serve as a tax evasion charge that the U.S. attorney hits a criminal with when they can’t prove the extortion racket. Or the constitutionally dubious sodomy charge when they can’t quite prove the rape, or the false imprisonment, or Mann Act violation. “What’s that? You say you didn’t actually have sex with her. You were just over at here house, eh? Well, guess what? NINTH COMMANDMENT, buddy! We saw you looking at her at the bar. Listen, you can plea this out to coveting now, but if you want to go to trial we’re going for lust, adultery, the whole smear. You’re lucky we came in when we did.” OK, so there’s been some good and some bad so far, but only one to go.

You shall not covet your neighbor's house . . . wife . . . or anything that is your neighbor's. (Wait, what?) This one takes much the same language of Cmdt. 9 and focuses on the coveting of material goods, not the flesh. So this one covers greed and envy, primarily. This can be hard for some to keep, I’m sure. Keeping up with the Joneses is a national pastime after all. But just don’t be greedy, be happy with what you have, and you should be OK. There, you did it! Even if you didn’t keep all the commandments, you tried. Now go to confession.

So other than remembering the Sabbath and honoring your mother and father, and going to church on Sundays, there’s not much else you have to do. In fact it’s the doing that gets you into trouble: doing drugs, doing “it,” etc. In fact, if you said no to everything but what you had to do to stay alive (like Mathers), kept the Sabbath, honored mom and dad, and went to Church on Sunday, I’d say you’d have a guaranteed ticket to Heaven. You wouldn’t even have to go to confession because you wouldn’t have done or failed to do anything you had to do or not do. So with so many more things to say no too than to say yes to, if you are looking to lead a holy life in a Catholic worldview, as Mathers is in the novel, it is wholly logical for him to conclude that the best way to redeem himself from his sinful life is to say no to everything.

This being a darkly comic novel, however, both Mathers and the author quickly discover a Jesuitical workaround to Mathers’s principle of prohibition. The narrator will just start questions with, “Do you refuse to tell me...?” Then Mathers will say no, and answer the question. Ta da! Mathers slyly admits that he’s okay with this sidestep:

So if you ever hear someone offer a priest a drink by saying, “Father, would you turn down a glass of whiskey?” you now know what’s going on.