Carl Wells Books

Recently I completed what had turned into an 11-month journey through the complete series of Sherlock Holmes books by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. There are four novels and five books of short stories comprising 56 stories.

I had read only a little bit of Sherlock Holmes, in my younger days. Even those few stories were edited, I found out recently. Of course I had seen a large handful of movies featuring Basil Rathbone as Sherlock and Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson. Probably I had read The Hound of the Baskervilles, although I would hate to swear to it in court. Anyway, sometime about a year ago I began reading the Holmes books, starting with the first one, and reading them in the order published. Once I got started, it was pleasant and natural to continue through all nine. I am glad I did it.

Doyle had a fund of ingenuity, to come up with the various plots. Doyle had mixed feelings about Sherlock Holmes. He came to think that Holmes was taking too much attention from his other books, and he tried to kill him off with a story in which Holmes supposedly plunged to his death. The public was appalled, and Doyle brought Holmes back. To try to discourage editors, Doyle began naming outrageous sums for the stories. This failed miserably (wonderfully?), as the editors were willing to pay what he asked. The increased income must have been a pleasant consolation to him!

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) was born in Scotland. He was a doctor, and then he was a writer. He had the usual slow start as a writer, but once he got established, he was prolific and successful. His first Sherlock Holmes/Dr. Watson book, a novel entitled A Study in Scarlet, appeared in 1887. He wrote in many genres, and some people think his historical fiction was his best work. Some will remember his creation Dr. Challenger, a scientist. I haven’t read about Dr. Challenger yet, but hope to try the first book in the series soon.

Sherlock Holmes is, for the moment at least, the character for which Doyle is best known. Sherlock Holmes, as everyone knows, is a brilliant detective. He makes insightful deductions from minuscule evidence–to the astonishment of all of us. Including to the astonishment of his friend and biographer Dr. John Watson.

If your only knowledge of Dr. Watson is through the Rathbone/Bruce movies, reading the books will be a surprise. He is no bumbling cipher. He is a brave and loyal companion to Sherlock Holmes. He never pretends to have the genius of his friend, but he is a sound British gentleman of admirable parts. Holmes depends on him, and sometimes reminds him, when dangerous situations loom, not to forget his revolver. Dr. Watson is always there for him.

To a certain extent, Sherlock Holmes reminds me of William Shakespeare. It seems that every succeeding generation comes to Shakespeare and makes something slightly different–or largely different–of him. The new interpretations may be thoughtful, or daft, but they keep on coming. In a more humble line of literature, the same might be said of Holmes. He has inspired countless written pastiches, from writers wanting to put their own spin on his character. He has also inspired a great deal of film–again with dramatists starting from Sherlock Holmes/Dr. Watson and moving forward with their own vision of what the characters might look like in modern situations.

One recent example is “Sherlock,” a British series of twelve one hour and a half TV movies, starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock, and Martin Freeman as Watson. Both actors are brilliant. The setting is modern day London. The writing is clever, filled with humor, and the production values are superb. “Sherlock’s Theme Melody,” by David Arnold and Michael Price, is rollicking and certain to keep on being played long after we are all moldering in the grave. Be warned: the producers are plugged into some of the silly conceits of modern cliches about how life is put together. Maybe you can scrape it off. The episodes vary in quality, of course. One or two are ridiculous. On the bright side, Holmes and Watson are still trying to defeat evil.

The two main characters are joined by Sherlock’s brother Mycroft Holmes. He has a very tiny part in the books, but a major part in “Sherlock,” and he is very well played by Mark Gatiss, a co-creator of the series with Steven Moffat. Molly Hooper (in real life Louise Brealey), non-existent in the books, is touching as a gentle, shy, attractive young lady in love with Sherlock. How she and Sherlock interact is one of the most fascinating features of the series. Moriarity, the arch-enemy-to-Holmes criminal of the books, is indeed evil here too. There are other recurring characters, some from the books, some not. Dr. Watson’s wife, with a small part in the books, is here turned into a major character. Along with the series of twelve parts, there is a thirteenth film which returns Holmes/Watson to the late Victorian period. I have not seen that yet. (There is some hope that the series may be revived in the future, but no guarantee.)

The Sherlock Holmes of “Sherlock” is brilliant, often arrogant, and like the SH of the books, sometimes operates outside the strict legal rules. He is, as he tells Moriarity once with great insight, on the side of the angels–but not an angel himself. He is right on both counts.

There is also an even newer take on Holmes/Watson. That is the American TV series, “Elementary,” each episode an hour. It takes place in modern New York, with the still English Sherlock, a recovering drug addict, assisted by Dr. Joan Watson. I have seen only two of the 120 episodes (with possibly more to come), but if the next 118 are as good as the first two, this will be a lot of fun as well. The same warnings about “modern cliches about how life is put together” of course apply with this series as well.

Will Sherlock Holmes endure? It has only been 130 years since the publication of the first Holmes book. So it is early innings. My guess is that he will endure, just like Shakespeare has endured (and will endure). Sherlock Holmes is a wonderful character, and Dr. Watson is a worthy friend to him. The friendship of Holmes and Watson is part of the reason we will keep reading and watching. Loyal affection between two flawed but good men, is always going to move us. Doyle was not a Christian–he got deeply involved in spiritualism for much of his life–but he wrote in a time in which the culture was still largely Christian. His characters lived and acted in that twilight time leading up to World War I in which Christian values were still bred in the bone even of non-Christian people. The Christian values may have been dying out, but it was only gradually. Such values may reappear in even greater strength someday, but even if they don’t, Holmes and Watson are still on the side of the angels. And all of us, even those of us who think we hate the side of the angels, or don’t believe there are angels having a side, instinctively know that there really is good, and really is evil.

Mark Steyn’s 2011 book After America: Get Ready for Armageddon, fits in well with the book we discussed last week, Suicide of Superpower by Pat Buchanan. Both books try to tell the truth about where we’re heading as a nation, and why that future may be “nasty, brutish, and short,” in the famous phrase.

Mark Steyn is a 58-year old Canadian living in Woodsville (population 1,081), New Hampshire. He clearly has a vast love and respect for the United States–at least for what the United States was when it had a love of freedom. He has had tremendous success as a writer, and understandably so given his writing skills and his ability to make valuable insights into contemporary life. He is a frequent TV commentator, and sometimes a guest host for Fox’s Tucker Carlson and for radio’s Rush Limbaugh. His website is SteynOnline, and it is a good source not only on political topics but also for those people interested in books, music, and movies. (The feedbackers there are among the most thoughtful and courteous people one will find on the Internet.) He was baptized in the Roman Catholic Church, but has since moved to the Anglican faith, according to Wikipedia.

After America is a warning that the end could be near for our nation. The warning starts with the cover of the dust jacket, where a draped body is stretched out on a slab. The toe tag reads Name: Uncle Sam, and Uncle Sam’s iconic red, white, and blue hat is prominently displayed on the dead body. This fate is not absolutely certain, of course, but the 349 pages of text which will follow show why it is likely.

The prologue is entitled “The Stupidity of Broke.” That is a reasonable way to start. All the crazy stuff the U.S. has been doing for many decades apparently will just keep on going until it can’t go on any longer. We seem unable to learn that stuff has to be paid for. Maybe we can just go on this way! But Mr. Steyn doesn’t think so, and I believe he is correct.

Here are a few quotes from his book. If I interject a comment, it will be in brackets.

He writes, ‘the real problem is that over the last three-quarters of a century the United States has adopted a form of government all but impervious to reality.” (p. 8)

“In the space of one generation, a nation of savers became the world’s largest debtors, and a nation of makers and doers became a cheap service economy.” (p. 13)

“When government spends on the scale Washington’s got used to, that’s not a spending crisis, it’s a moral one.” (p. 14)

“Increasing dependency, disincentivizing self-reliance, absolving the citizenry from responsibility for their actions: the multitrillion-dollar debt catastrophe is not the problem but merely the symptom.” (p. 14)

He writes, “the statists took the vessels of the American republic and filled them up with Big Government happy juice. The United States joined the rest of a cosseted western world in voting itself a lifestyle it was not willing to pay for.” (p. 15)

“Islam is playing for tomorrow, whereas much of the West has, by any traditional indicator, given up on the future. We do not save, we do not produce, we do not reproduce, not in Europe, Canada, Vermont, or San Francisco. Instead, we seek new, faster ways to live in the eternal present, in an unending whirl of sensory distraction.” (p.37)

“Because the governmentalization of health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture. It redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state in fundamental ways that make small government all but impossible ever again.” (p.52)

He quotes from David Warren: “The nation is divided, roughly half-and-half, between people who instinctively resent the Nanny State, and those who instinctively long for its ministrations.” (p. 69)

‘United States income tax is becoming the twenty-first century equivalent of the “jizya”–the punitive tax levied by Muslim states on their non-Muslim citizens. In return for funding the Caliphate, the infidels were permitted to carry on practicing their faith. Under the American jizya, in return for funding Big Government, the non-believers are permitted to carry on practicing their faith in capitalism, small business, economic activity, and the other primitive belief systems to which they cling so touchingly.” (p. 72)

“Once you’ve secured the other levers of power, elective politics becomes a kind of sham combat to distract from the real battlegrounds.” (p. 74)

On page 75 he pointed out that the average civilian employee of the United States government earns approximately double what the average American employed in the private sector earns.

“For Americans, the quickest way to understand modern Britain is to look at what LBJ’s Great Society did to the black family and imagine it applied to the general population.” (p. 204)

Mr. Steyn fears that after America, if some sort of twilight existence of the country continues, ‘it will have fewer stars in the flag, there will be nothing to “unite” it, and it will bear no relation to the republic of limited government the first generation of Americans fought for. And life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness will be conspicuous by their absence.” (p. 22) [Consider also that “fewer stars,” painful though it may seem at the time, may be a necessary correction. The U.S. is just too durn big, and if we are broken up in smaller nations there may be a few places where freedom and responsibility and even Christianity are not the enemy.–C.W.]

However, immediately after that he points out that the U.S. “is still different.” (p. 22) We have “a fighting chance” to recapture the ability to live as free and responsible people. [my paraphrase of his thinking–C.W.]

“Like I said, if you want a happy ending, it’s up to you.” (p. 23)

And, “Your call, America.” (p. 23) [Fair enough.–C.W.]

Mr. Steyn is not a perfect thinker. For example, he was an early proponent of the Iraq war. He was in his early 40s, and should have been old enough and thoughtful enough to know better. He sometimes calls himself an imperialist. We don’t need imperialists, we need Christians who think covenantally and want to help people by taking them the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace (Isaiah 9:6). He calls Bob Dole and John McCain “decent old sticks.” (p. 70) Bob Dole had no particularly high principles. John McCain is far worse–a warmonger well deserving of his nickname “insane McCain.” Nevertheless, Mr. Steyn is a thinker from whom we all can learn, unless we say that we can only learn from perfect people. He has given us a superb book, stylishly written, thought-provoking, and insightful.

After America: Get Ready for Armageddon can be purchased on the Internet for a reasonable price. Today it was for sale at abebooks for $3.64 plus free shipping. (At least one copy of the version with the picture of Uncle Sam on a slab was still available.) Maybe you can buy both it and Pat Buchanan’s Suicide of a Superpower for a “Slash-Your-Wrists-In-Despair-Weekend-Special-Twosome” price.

The year 2011 saw the publication of Patrick J. Buchanan’s book, Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? The succeeding six years have have made the question of the subtitle increasingly appropriate.

Pat Buchanan is a conservative thinker. He has run for president, he writes a nationally syndicated column, he writes books that sell a lot of copies and he is not afraid to challenge left-wing pieties. He is respected on the right at least, while as we would expect the left has no interest in what he is saying. On every issue, the left reminds me of children covering their ears with their hands and shouting, “I can’t HEAR you!”

Suicide of a Superpower is not a perfect book. Mr. Buchanan has blind spots in his thinking. For example, he does not really understand the free market very well. He thinks high tariffs help Americans–whereas high tariffs make it more difficult for ordinary people to afford to buy things. There are other places he goes wrong in his thinking. Nevertheless, when the relatively few minuses are subtracted, he has written a book filled with thoughtful insights.

Part of the value of the book comes in the statistics he compiles. The statistics enlighten and inform. They help us see what we are up against if we hope to preserve Christian civilization. On page 63, for example, he points out that the U.S. illegitimacy rate has gone from 5% to 41%, the black rate of illegitimacy is 71% (up from 23% in 1960), we have committed 50 million abortions since Roe v. Wade [about 57 million by now–C.W.], the U.S. teenage suicide rate tripled between 1960 and 1990, the prison population has increased by 700%. And so on. Have a nice day.

However, here I would like simply to quote a few passages from the book, to show the kind of insights you will find in Suicide of a Superpower. I will put my own comments in brackets.

“Today we have accepted the existence of a permanent underclass of scores of millions who cannot cope and must be carried by society–fed, clothed, housed, tutored, and medicated at taxpayer’s expense their entire lives. We have a dependent nation the size of Spain in our independent America. We have a new division in our country, those who pay a double or triple fare, and those who ride forever free.” (p. 34)

“The age of Obama marks the advent of post-Christian America.” (p. 47)

“Cultural power in America long ago passed to an anti-Christian elite that rules the academy, Hollywood, and the arts. Secularism is now America’s state religion and the people sense it.” (p. 49)

He quotes Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the great Russian novelist and thinker. Men have forgotten God, said Solzhenitsyn; World War I was a cataclysmic blow. The European leaders had lost awareness of ‘”a Supreme Power above them.”‘ (p. 75; Mr. Buchanan and Solzhenitsyn are correct: World War I, as disastrous as it was in loss of blood and treasure, was first of all a symptom of the dying out of the Christian faith in Europe and the United States–C.W.]

“While the struggle between militant secularism and Christianity remains nonviolent, the fate of the West hangs upon its outcome.” (p. 76)

“Our own and our parents’ generations have witnessed an epochal event: the fall of Christendom. From the close of the Edwardian era, with the death of Edward VII in 1910, in a single century, it all happened. The great European powers fought two great wars. All lost their empires. All saw their armies and navies melt away. All lost their Christian faith. All saws their birth rates plummet. All have seen their populations begin to age and shrink. All are undergoing invasions from formerly subject peoples coming to the mother country to dispossess their grandchildren. All of their welfare states face retrenchment even as they face tribal decline and death.” (pp. 164-165) [The Muslim invasion has gotten enormously worse since this book was published in 2011–C.W.]

“Historians will look back in stupefaction at twentieth- and twenty-first century Americans who believed the magnificent republic they inherited would be enriched by bringing in scores of millions from the failed states of the Third World.” (p. 236) [Stupefaction is a very good world here! However, I would contend the republic died as early as 1861, with the North’s refusal to leave the South alone. The empire was born. Or maybe the republic died with the repudiation of the Articles of Confederation.–C.W.]

He points out our country’s recent “compulsive interventionism” and the results. “We are less secure, less respected, less confident, and less powerful than we were in 1991. And is the world a better place?” (p. 371) [But we never learn. Just yesterday I heard one of the contemptible talking heads on television calmly discuss how there was a viable option to give North Korea a “bloody nose”–some sort of limited military strike on that benighted nation. As if the U.S., in its infinite wisdom and purity, has the right to attack any nation any time we want to.–C.W.]

“Is it not a symptom of senility to be borrowing from the world so we can defend the world? How long before we borrow our country into bankruptcy, so our foreign policy elites can continue to play the empire game?” (p. 376)

Speaking of how quickly the country was de-Christianized, Mr. Buchanan makes a telling comment: “What astonishes, even now, was the lack of resistance.” (p. 425) [Bulls-eye. The tragic fact is that we American Christians did not fight back. Our pietist antinomianism, our dispensationalism, our amillennialism, our childish belief that there could be a separation of law and faith, our self-absorbed navel-gazing, encouraged us to turn over the nation to the enemies of God.–C.W.]

Well, the book goes on like that, with countless very thought-provoking comments from Mr. Buchanan. It is an excellent book. You might want to have a fifth of Jack Daniels beside you as you read, because some of the facts presented can be very depressing. But it is better that we face the truth rather than continue to drift along blindly.

Suicide of a Superpower can be obtained for a pittance on the Internet. At abebooks–an excellent source for reasonably priced books–copies are available for $3.64 plus free shipping.

Will America survive to 2025, as the book’s subtitle asks? That’s only eight years away now, so many of us will still be here to find out. (Maybe.) As I said in a recent blog post, we had better have a plan B. The U.S. is too big, anyway. Maybe if we break up into a large or or not so large handful of smaller countries, we can start trying to rebuild Christian civilization, even if the U.S. does cease to exist. What’s the harm in trying?

We’ve all heard the phrase “Failure is not an option.” It is meant to convey the notion that if we act with absolute determination, we can avoid the possibility of failure. (Sort of like Adolf Hitler’s belief in the triumph of the will. How’d that work out for you, Adolf?)

In fact, failure is always an option. Actually, often it is the most likely option.

Here’s an example. Say you were a Russian Christian of moderately decent character and intelligence, living in 1917. You saw the way events were unfolding in your beloved Russia, and you knew or sensed that communism was a very wrongheaded and dangerous philosophy/political movement. You hoped to avoid seeing the communists in total control. Maybe you ended up fighting on the side of the White Russians. Maybe you just did your best to encourage people to think twice before they accepted the communist way of looking at things. You hoped you could avoid seeing your home country have countless terrible things happen. Maybe a friend told you that “Failure is not an option.” He meant well. He also understood the horrors communism might bring. But he was wrong. Failure was an option.

The result of your failure, and that of people who shared a similar outlook with you, was not minuscule. In the Russian Civil War, 9,000,000 people died. Big numbers are always hard for our minds to get around. Break down 9,000,000 a little bit. If you attend a church with 100 people, 9,000,000 represents 90,000 churches of 100 people each–the entire church wiped out. Or if only 30 people out of 100 in your church died, 9,000,000 dead represents 300,000 churches losing 30 people each. Maybe you died too. In any case, you failed. That was just a start of the deaths that were to come. The “lowest credible estimate” of people who died at Stalin’s hands is 20,000,000. Not counting those before Stalin (Lenin was no walk on the beach, himself) and after. Perhaps 56 to 62 million died overall. None of which counts the endless misery short of death, which happened as a result of communist rule.

We need to avoid lying to ourselves that failure is not an option. It is always an option.

This does not mean that we should fatalistically give in to assuming that the worst must happen, and cannot be avoided. We should work to avoid the worst. Maybe we can.

However, we should also plan for the time after failure happens. If we are still alive–never a guarantee when you come up against evil–we need to have a Plan B. Plan A didn’t work. Now what? We need a Plan B, and maybe a Plan C. We need to plan for the future after failure.

In the U.S. we are facing a future of great potential disaster. As a nation we are bankrupt financially, which is what we should expect, given our moral bankruptcy which came first. Illegal immigrants are overwhelming California and much of the Southwest. It is very unlikely that we will be able to stop the disaster which will follow. Plan to stop the disasters, by all means! That is Plan A. But failure is the most likely option. Do we have a Plan B?

On the first disaster, plan for honest money and living within our means sometime in the future. It may be far too late to preserve the U.S. Fine. The U.S. is too big, anyway. Plan for honest money in your part of the ex-U.S. Begin with yourself, of course. Learn to live within your means.

On the second disaster, plan to take the gospel to the illegal immigrants who will have conquered the U.S. Southwest and California. The only thing that really helps people in the long run is the full-orbed biblical gospel. That’s what those people are going to need. They won the battle–they took the U.S. back from the people who occupied it for a while. But unless they learn to live as God wants us all to live, their victory will be hollow in the long run.

You were, in 1917, a Russian Christian of moderate abilities and insight. You wanted Christian civilization to survive and flourish, and you wanted to preserve countless people from suffering death or other disaster. You failed.

However, there is a long sweep to history, as others have noticed. Rising from the grave in 2017, you find that communism is dead in Russia. Russia is far from a perfect place, but the communists are gone, and living as a Christian is possible–perhaps far more possible than you expected given what the communists were doing. Having suffered through the disasters of your own time on earth, you may be surprised to see that your country has come back from the depths of the horror you tried to stop but failed to stop.

God still is in control of world history. We are supposed to help God, but even when we fail to help Him successfully, He has many other cartridges in His pistol.

Failure is always an option. We need to face that fact squarely and with good humor. We should try to avoid despair. God is not asking us to do what we can’t do. He is asking us to do what we can and should do. Christian civilization is worth preserving. If we try to help preserve it, we may fail. But God is still there, and at least we tried. Unless we didn’t try.

Dump dispensationalism and dump amillennialism. They don’t tell the truth about how God acts in history. He acts covenantally. That is, he looks at our hearts, and rewards our heartfelt obedience. Even if we fail.

Failure is an option. Have a plan B. God will win in the end. Let us be found fighting on the side of good. As Esther said, “if I perish, I perish.” (Esther 4:16) She didn’t perish, but she might have. She did what she could, and God honored it.