All the Secrets of the Universe and Some Really Important Stuff Too!
There is in fact a manly and legitimate passion for equality that spurs all men to wish to be strong and esteemed. This passion tends to elevate the lesser to the rank of the greater. But one also finds in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to want to bring the strong down to their level, and which reduces men to preferring equality in servitude to inequality in freedom.
Alexis de Tocqueville
One of my guilty pleasures every week is listening to the Voice of Saruman on his Friday morning podcast. I refer of course to the mellifluous musings of the ZMan on his on his Z Blog’s Power Hour. As with others on the Far Right, I find it easier to agree with his analysis of the modern world’s dysfunction than with his solutions to these problems. So back on Friday I listened as he regaled us with the tragicomic details of the War of the Sexes or, as he called it, “Wammin’s World”. And after enjoying the mockery of the absurd antics of the feminists I reflected on the takeaway message that the speaker was making;
“The thing about the war of the sexes is that it is really a war on normal women. When you examine the arguments from the Left and from feminists, not a lot of it is aimed at changing male behavior that is beneficial to women. Mostly it is aimed at eliminating the protections a healthy society has for its women. The resulting social breakdown creates more unhappy women, who can then be recruited into the coven of feminism.”
With that analysis I agree wholeheartedly. But the ZMan doesn’t specify how this lunacy can be ended. Being the pragmatic fellow that I am I tried to think what practical changes could be made that might move us in the right direction.
And the first thing that came to mind was something else that the ZMan touches on often; that the way that our civilization cannibalizes its less affluent members is by setting up institutions that monetize the social capital of the family in ways that end up destroying the family. So, for example, parents bankrupt themselves to send their daughters to expensive colleges and this ensures that the daughters will attempt to recoup that investment by entering the economy as corporate drones. And during their time in both college and the corporate world it will be drummed into them that their real value and their happiness is as drones, busily making up power point slides and decorating their cubicles with colorful diversity slogans. And so, between working in the corporate environment and drinking the Kool-Aid of female empowerment they either never get around to marriage and children or they raise their one or two children by proxy with nannies and daycare. And the next generation doesn’t even know what a normal family life even is. This is social capital (families trying to do the right thing) being monetized by the colleges and corporations. The schools and the corporations that use these women profit immensely from the process. But the families that underwrite the whole thing are basically cutting their own throats by doing it. And flooding the labor force with women depresses the value of labor for the men trying to find a place in the world too. This along with the rampant female affirmative action makes it more than likely that a man will find his wife making more money than him. This further degrades the likelihood of a normal happy family relationship for all involved. Society might as well just turn us into Soylent Green and save the time.
So, the practical changes should be a way to avoid this whole family destroying cycle. And the first change would be, Don’t send your daughters to college. I could expand it to don’t send any of your kids to college but let’s start small. As the father of daughters who went to expensive colleges, I can tell you that not doing this would first of all restore solvency to many an American family and also allow families to provide much needed help to their daughters when they want to get married. In other words, reinstitute the dowry. This might sound almost medieval but can you imagine if the money that a father spends on his daughter’s college education could be diverted to a down payment on a house? That could be enough to allow his son-in-law to support his new family with just his own salary. In other words, letting a woman stay home to raise her kids. Additionally, if parents don’t have to bankrupt themselves to turn their daughters into childless drones then those parents will have the wherewithal to help the young married couples when the pitfalls of life intrude on their world; illness, unemployment and Acts of God.
And a non-financial benefit of this arrangement would be the restoration of the normal relationships within the extended family. Parents would be respected and appreciated for the financial and familial leadership they would represent when decisions like home purchasing occurred. Husbands as the primary bread winners would be appreciated by their wives and this would give the men the psychological reinforcement to value their roles that they currently lack. But most importantly, it would allow young women to fulfill their most valuable roles in our world. They would be the mothers that every child needs and deserves. Modern society has denigrated and devalued the role stay at home mothers play in producing happy and sane children. Anyone who has seen how children are raised today knows that it is a miracle that any of them avoid becoming psychopaths. This alone would justify any productivity to our economy associated with women withdrawing from the workplace during their childbearing and childrearing years. But another facet that people rarely discuss is the satisfaction that a woman gains from being a mom. Now granted there are some women who are unsuited for motherhood. I wish there were a blood test that could identify these poor things and redirect them to something where they’ll do less harm like loan sharking. But for the majority of healthy well-adjusted women motherhood is fulfilling as well as extremely valuable to society.
Reclaiming the Family – Part 2 – The Family Business
If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions.
Calvin Coolidge
Collecting more taxes than is absolutely necessary is legalized robbery.
Calvin Coolidge
When the story opens an adolescent boy named Thorby is being sold on the slaver’s block in the ironically named Plaza of Liberty in Jubbulpore, the capital of Jubbul, which is itself the capital of the Nine Worlds ruled by the Sargon. The Nine Worlds is presented as an oriental despotic empire complete with a caste system that includes slaves, beggars and thieves as acknowledged roles in the society. Now this is embedded in a future that includes interstellar space ships, faster than light communication and a human civilization that has spread hundreds of light years from Earth.
Baslim the crippled beggar manages to purchase the boy. He overcomes the boy’s ferocious hatred of his owners and uses kindness and fatherly discipline to raise the boy to be an honest and resourceful man. As time goes on Thorby figures out that Baslim is a lot more than just a beggar. Inside his lodgings in the underground slums of Jubbulpore, Baslim has modern teaching equipment that he uses to teach Thorby languages and mathematics and the history of the world he lives in. Also, Baslim seems to be a spy, collecting information on the slave trade on Jubbul. Eventually Baslim tells Thorby that someday Baslim would be gone and Thorby must leave Jubbul to escape from the squalor and injustice that was life in the Nine Worlds. He uses hypnotic suggestion to implant a message in Thorby, that when delivered by the boy, would tell one of Baslim’s friends, who was a starship captain, that rescuing the boy would be the payment for a favor Baslim had done for the captain’s family.
And one day Thorby finds that Baslim has been arrested and executed as a spy and that the Sargon’s men are after Thorby. Luckily Thorby had spotted Captain Krausa of the starship Sisu. The message and the implied debt are acknowledged the Captain and by clever subterfuges performed by Thorby’s friends he is smuggled aboard the Sisu and escapes Jubbul.
Overcoming his grief at the death of his adoptive father Baslim, Thorby is adopted into the family that is the crew of Sisu. A complex phratry and moiety arrangement connects the “family” on Sisu with the other Trader ships with their own “families.” Thorby struggles to adapt to the strange ways of his new family but the connection to his ship mates stabilizes the boy and gives him the sense of belonging he needs.
But what Thorby doesn’t know is that Baslim had told Captain Krausa that Thorby probably had a family somewhere out in the free worlds beyond the Nine Worlds. Krausa was committed to hand Thorby over to the authorities of the Space Guard, when he could, for reunion with his family. But Thorby’s relation to Baslim means that the Sisu would gain great status with the other Trading families by keeping Thorby in their family.
After many adventures including shooting a space pirate ship out of the skies Thorby is finally returned to the Space Guard. He learns that Baslim was a highly decorated officer in the Guard and he was doing espionage to help destroy the slave trade. For someone associated with Baslim the Guard does everything humanly possible to help Thorby and finally finds his true family. The details of this final chapter take him back to Earth and solves the mystery of his years as a slave.
Heinlein has crafted a story that combines facets of adventure stories from many sources. Others have noted that there are some elements of the story that are reminiscent of Kipling’s novel Kim. But mostly it contains the elements of Heinlein’s Future History Universe. I especially found the world of the trader ship Sisu very imaginative and enjoyable. But the whole book keeps the reader engaged, the characters are excellently drawn and the plot is lively. Once again this is a Heinlein juvenile that is highly recommended.
The short story by Ambrose Bierce that the film is based on is relatively famous having been included in an anthology of short stories that was ubiquitous in the reading lists of mid-twentieth-century grammar and high school literature survey courses. It was a carefully written story and I think, well worth reading. This episode of the Twilight Zone was not produced by the show. It was an independent short film made in France. It won various film awards and caught Rod Serling’s attention and so it was added to the series.
The opening scene shows a bridge with Union Civil War soldiers guarding a detail of troopers performing a hanging. Peyton Farquhar is being hanged. He is a civilian southerner who was caught trying to destroy this railroad bridge. The soldiers methodically perform the details of the hanging, tying his hands behind his back, restraining his legs at the knees and ankles, and putting the noose around his neck. Farquhar is positioned on a plank that extends out over the river with the weight of a Union soldier on the other end of the plank as the only thing preventing Farquhar from plunging to his death at the end of the noose.
At a signal from his officer the Union soldier steps off the board and Farquhar plunges down. But the rope breaks and Peyton Farquhar plunges into the river. He struggles to escape from his restraints and then swims desperately to avoid the rifle fire from the troops on the bridge. He survives the escape and begins his trek back home to his wife and children. When he reaches home, he sees his wife running joyfully toward him. A slow-motion scene shows us the husband and wife approaching each other and then embracing. But suddenly Peyton cries out and his neck snaps back. The scene shifts back to the bridge where we see Peyton Farquhar fall from the plank and reach the end of his rope and die on the hangman’s knot. The earlier version was just a quick dream in Peyton’s mind before he reached the end of his rope.
I like the story and I like the film. But the soundtrack includes a jazz song called, “A Livin’ Man” which, frankly, is horribly distracting and out of place. If that song were replaced with a simple instrumental melody it would have improved the film immeasurably. This should have been an A. Let’s call it a B+.
The nation which forgets its defenders will be itself forgotten.
Calvin Coolidge