Carl Wells Books

For the first time ever I attended a rodeo on Saturday night. This was a junior high/high school event, and it took place just down the road from my home, at the local county fairgrounds.

Few people would associate the word rodeo with Indiana, but there we were–and it was clear from the start that rodeo has a stronger foothold (hoofhold?) in Indiana than one might expect.

I began to understand that fact early on Saturday morning, long before the rodeo was scheduled to start. Doing my usual morning walking/running, I found myself, as I often do, at the fairgrounds. There were dozens of recreational vehicles camped there. Horses were penned in beside many of these RVs.

This is a lifestyle. These families had left home on Friday afternoon, traveling from other towns in Indiana (and probably a few from out of state), and had settled in for the weekend. The rodeo would take place Saturday and Sunday both, then they would head back home. As near as I can tell, rodeos for the Indiana High School Rodeo Association take place every two or three weeks during the season. I was not able to find a full schedule for the season, but that pattern seems in effect for this latter part of the year, and I would guess it holds from springtime on through the fall.

Indiana rodeos, then, are not a rarity. They may take place under the radar, but they take place often, and lots of young people, supported by their families, participate. The amount of time, money, planning, and organizational skill required to pull off even one of these events, must be huge. The adults manage the participation of the young people. But they also have to manage the participation of the animals. The families manage the horses of their children, of course, but lots of other animals are involved. The people running the rodeo have to have the animals there, in the right place, and ready at the right time, good weather or bad. It must be an enormous job. They must do it because they love rodeo.

I was glad I attended the rodeo. The results were about what one could realistically expect–some notable successes, and a good deal of failure. There were many failures, but no quitters. I saw a lot of young people who had become comfortable with riding horses–surely a good thing. The roping didn’t always succeed. The animal would not always cooperate in being thrown and tied. But it must be good for young people to try something difficult and stick with it no matter what the immediate results. Some of the more gifted participates eventually go on to participate on college rodeo teams–another type of rodeo operating under the radar for most of us.

We had a heavy rainstorm on Saturday afternoon. The sun came out after that, but there was no time to dry everything out by the 7 p. m. start time for the rodeo. The arena was muddy, some parts worse than others. Walking to the grandstand seating Saturday night, one had to pick one’s way carefully or one would have soaked feet for the duration of the rodeo. The participants in the rodeo (or more likely their mothers) may have had a challenge in getting some of the clothing clean.

A small handful of the participants were from my county. I think a grandfather of a local girl was seated beside me, filming his granddaughter. There was a good-sized crowd, with plenty of children. A concession stand sold food. The ticket price was reasonable–$5.00, and very well worth the money invested.

Prior to the beginning of the rodeo, there was a public prayer. It is good to see that not everyone is afraid to pray, publicly, to the God of the Bible and His Son Jesus Christ.

But balanced against that fact, was the fact that the second half of the rodeo was scheduled for Sunday at 10 a. m.–precisely at the time when Christians should be in church. So rather than attending church on Sunday, lots of people were attending rodeo.

This seems to me completely typical of the United States at this particular time in our history. Our Christianity is a sort of backdrop to life–there to make us feel good about ourselves, and feel confident that we are not enemies of God, but not something that has a lot to say about our behavior. Miss church for rodeo? There is nothing unusual about that, for other sports, so why should rodeo be different? Christian people whose children play volleyball, basketball, softball, and baseball, frequently arrange their schedules to allow the children to participate in sports on Sunday, which leaves church attendance out in the cold.

Sports, like many other things, are a good servant but a bad master. If parents refused to compromise, the sports world would soon adjust, and the situation would change.

Public prayer, but missing church. Thus the U.S. zigzags to the end–or perhaps to an eventual revival of biblical Christianity. One sees some good signs here and there. Perhaps young people bravely accepting the very real possibility of failure as they do challenging things in the rodeo, is a good sign in itself. We may zig when we should zag, and occasionally zag when we should zig, but we as a Christian people are not quite dead yet.

I am currently editing and typing up another book, If: God’s Covenant of Grace. It may be another half-year or year before the book is out (out, Lord willing). Yesterday I typed up a portion in which I pointed out that the welfare state has two sets of victims. Belatedly, I began to understand that there are really three sets of victims. (I can be very slow.) I made an on the spot revision.

First I will mention the two obvious sets of victims, and then I will try to make a case for a third set of victims.

1/Anyone who is productive and has his tax money taken from him to give to the unproductive, is a victim. It is vastly unfair that people who are willing to work for a living, should have a portion of their income taken from them to give to people who are unwilling to work. Since the welfare state includes almost endless facets, the amounts of money involved are not small, for any individual who works. The ordinary productive person, whether his income is small or large, unfairly loses a high percentage of the money for which he worked.

2/The second set of victims are those who are recipients of those stolen tax dollars. Once you give up your responsibility to provide for yourself and for your family, you have given up a significant aspect of your birthright as a human being. You have sold your birthright for a mess of pottage, as did Esau. (Genesis 25:27-34)

So far so good. Or rather, so bad. But I think there is a third set of victims of the welfare state. This set of victims is not as obvious–I only figured it out yesterday, so at least it was not obvious to me. Here goes.

3/The third set of victims includes those people who advocate for and administer the welfare state. Instinctively, it is hard for us (okay, at least hard for hard-hearted me) to sympathize with this group. After all, they are doing wretched things to huge numbers of people. They are stealing from the productive. They are encouraging the infantilization of enormous numbers of people. These advocates/administrators are not people for whom I easily find affection. But these people are in some sense also victims of the welfare state mentality. Imagine the horror of being a person who steals from some and destroys others. What kind of a life is that? Imagine going through life trying to pretend that what you do is valuable, when in fact what you do is helping destroy civilization.

We have allowed these advocates/administrators to lie to themselves. We have not given them a thought atmosphere in which they could reach clear thinking. They live in fog, because we have not provided a place where intellectual and moral fog is dispersed.

Why have we done this?

One clear reason is that we have lied to ourselves about what welfare is. We see the damage wrought by food stamps and by giving money to women to have illegitimate children. These people are on welfare, and it steals from us and destroys them. However, we don’t admit that Social Security, Medicare, public education, and the warfare state are just other forms of welfare–welfare for us, the middle class, many of whom are Christian. We Christians, taken as a whole, are just as involved with the welfare state as are the visibly poor people–perhaps more involved. But we are incapable of facing this truth. We lie to ourselves. That makes us unable to speak truth to advocates/administrators of the welfare state. We can’t help these people, because we are not standing on thoughtful and firm moral ground ourselves.

Yesterday I typed my revision noting that there are three sets of victims of the welfare state. Today, providentially, I read something by the gifted English writer Theodore Dalrymple which providentially supports the point I am trying to make. Did I mention that I consider having run into his comments as being providential? I meant to, if I haven’t yet.

Mr. Dalrymple published an article entitled “Bad Form” on “Taki’s Magazine,” on the Internet, dated August 18, 2018. He discussed a letter mailed to a former colleague by Trudy, one of the denizens of the administrative state (part of the Deep State apparatus–my word formula, not Mr. Dalrymple’s). The letter was the sort of thing you expect from people writing these sorts of letters–bureaucratic nonsense. But having written insightfully on the letter, Mr. Dalrymple’s final paragraph had this surprise:

“But to return to Trudy. An odd thing happened to me as I wrote about her: I began to feel sorry for her. Imagine doing a job that does not need to be done, or worse still that needs not to be done! Imagine doing such a job because it seems to you the only viable way to advancement and the decent standard of living that you desire for yourself and your children! Imagine that to achieve such advancement you have to adopt a language that, at bottom, you know to be intrinsically and purposefully dishonest and mendacious! You have to pretend to believe what you say, however outlandish it may be. You can never face the world head-on; you are forever condemned to sidle down corridors, talking in euphemisms and averting your gaze from that of those who know what you are about. This is an unenviable lot, and there are millions of Trudys (or is it Trudies?) in the world, ever more of them, in fact.”

Isn’t this very similar to the point I belatedly began to make in my revision about the victims of the welfare state? I consider his comments as coming at a providential time for me.

How do we help the millions of Trudys (or Trudies)? The welfare state, the Deep State, the administrative state–call it what you will–has hurt them just as it has hurt ordinary taxpayers and has hurt welfare recipients.

The first thing to do is to stop lying to ourselves about what welfare is. Most of us are welfare recipients in one way or another. The second thing to do is to get off welfare for ourselves. Once we have taken the beam out of our own eye, maybe we can help our neighbor take the speck out of his. (Matthew 7:3-5) Then, thirdly, we have to start reforming our thought universe. We have to construct a biblical brand of Christianity. What we have now is not honest enough. When we think much more clearly, we will be able to help other people think more clearly.

I would contend that a Christian thought universe is the only game in town which has a chance of working. (Mr. Dalrymple, an atheist, would probably disagree). Biblical Christian thinking is the only kind of thinking which will allow us to negotiate real life in a semi-sane fashion.

We can help all three types of victims of the welfare state mentality. But it is going to require us to think and to live more honestly than we now do. It will be hard, but it will also be worth doing. Isn’t it good to try to think as honestly as we can? And maybe honest thinking on our part will allow us to help other people where they have their deepest need.

We still sometimes hear someone called a Pollyanna. A Pollyanna has come to mean a person who takes an unrealistic, and too optimistic, view of life. But if we return to the original source, we find a very different creature. The Pollyanna of (fictional) history was no self-deceived fool. She was a bright 11-year old orphan girl who may have more to teach us than we expect.

Pollyanna was the title of a children’s book by Eleanor H. Porter. It was published in 1913, had enormous success, and is still read today. It is readily available on the Internet. AbeBooks will find you a copy for about $3.59 (shipping included).

Eleanor H. Porter (b. Dec. 19, 1868–d. May 21, 1920) was born in Littleton, New Hampshire. She married at age 23. Her first novel was published in 1907, and six years later came Pollyanna. A sequel followed in 1915. She had only five more years to live. She died at the relatively young age of 51.

Recently I viewed the 1960 Walt Disney movie “Pollyanna,” starring the gifted Haley Mills as Pollyanna. That drove me to the original novel. The movie conveys the spirit of the book, but the book is even better. Hollywood insisted on changing the plot somewhat, for no benefit that I can discover, but, in the spirit of Pollyanna herself, I am “glad” that the movie gave us a reasonable introduction to an interesting person and story. There is a more recent movie version of “Pollyanna,” which I have not seen yet, but which sounds as if it might be good.

Pollyanna had experienced suffering. She had lost both her parents to death. Other children in the family had died at a very young age. Her father, a Christian minister, was the last in the family to die, leaving Pollyanna a homeless orphan depending in the Ladies Aid to stay alive. Her late father had not been well-to-do in financial terms, but clearly he had helped his daughter to a sort of spiritual wisdom and spiritual wealth. Pollyanna has learned–it is by no means always easy–to find something to be glad about in as many situations as possible.

Delivered to her wealthy Aunt Polly back in New Hampshire, Pollyanna quickly begins to have a subtle effect on the family (her unmarried aunt and the servants) and on the town as a whole. She is described more than once as a “love-hungry child,” but she treats others with respect and kindness, and thereby attracts affection from the people with whom she interacts. She may be love-hungry at bottom, but that hasn’t soured her attitude toward life; she is also loving, and finds joy in living.

Visiting Mrs. Snow, a grumpy bed-ridden woman, we hear the following exchange, beginning with Mrs. Snow:

‘”I never slept a wink last night–not a wink!”

“O dear, I wish I [in italics] didn’t,” sighed Pollyanna, placing the jelly on the little stand and seating herself comfortably in the nearest chair. “You lose such a lot of time just sleeping! Don’t you think so?”

“Lose time–sleeping!” exclaimed the sick woman.

“Yes, when you might be just living, you know. It seems such a pity we can’t live nights, too!”‘ (Chapter VIII)

Well played, Pollyanna! You make a good point. Sleep does reduce the amount of time we are awake and ‘”just living.”‘ Living–just living–is a blessing we too often take for granted.

Playfully taxed, by a good doctor, for loving to do a good many things, Pollyanna doesn’t disagree. Pollyanna says she didn’t have to learn how to live. The doctor responds that some of us do have to learn. Pollyanna senses his discouragement, and wants to ‘”do something”‘ to help him.

‘”Dr. Chilton, I should think being a doctor would be the very gladdest kind of business there was.”

The doctor turned in surprise.

“‘Gladdest’!–when I see so much suffering always, everywhere I go?” he cried.

She nodded.

“I know; but you’re helping [in italics] it–don’t you see?–and of course you’re glad to help it! And so that makes you the gladdest of any of us, all the time.”

The doctor’s eyes filled with sudden hot tears. The doctor’s life was a singularly lonely one. He had no wife and no home save his two-room office in a boarding house. His profession was very dear to him. Looking now in Pollyanna’s shining eyes, he felt as if a loving hand had been suddenly laid on his head in blessing. He knew, too, that never again would a long day’s work or a long night’s weariness be quite without that new-found exaltation that had come to him through Pollyanna’s eyes.

“God bless you, little girl,” he said unsteadily.’ (Chapter XV)

Eleanor H. Porter, in writing of a love-hungry child whose immediate family had all died, seems to have had a firm grasp on exactly what she was trying to say. I quote from an article at Littleton’s website, “Eleanor Hodgman Porter–Littleton’s Remarkable Woman of History”:

‘Although the personality and popularity of Pollyanna eclipses the author even today, the message of the book was never intended to be “blind optimism”. About the storybook, “Pollyanna did not pretend that everything was sugar-coated goodness,” her creator Mrs. Porter insisted, “instead Pollyanna was positively determined to find the good in every situation.”‘

I very much enjoyed the book Pollyanna. I have purchased the sequel and the recent movie, although neither has arrived yet. There were also about 14 other Pollyanna books, written by authors other than Eleanor H. Porter. I have purchased the first one of those, but again it has not arrived yet.

There are lots of things to be gloomy about at any time in world history. An 11-year old orphan girl, Pollyanna, reminds us to be glad that we are living, and that life is good, even when it has trials.

Mrs. Porter, rest in peace.

Mainstream Media continues to obsess with whether or not Russia interfered in the U.S. election of 2016. This raises several interesting questions. Let’s look at a few.

Let’s just assume, for the sake of argument, that some sort of interference occurred, whether it was sponsored by the Russian state or by Russian individuals acting for their own reasons.

Does the media really believe that Russian meddling in the U.S. election was crucial in swinging the election to Donald Trump, and away from Hillary Clinton? Probably not. The media is not so foolish as to believe that. Granted, they are not very self-conscious people intellectually, but it is difficult to imagine that they are so foolish as to believe that Russian intervention swung the election toward Donald Trump. I doubt if one person in the U.S. voted differently because of anything Russians did. Most of us knew how we would vote before the candidates were nominated.

So, if the media understands that the Russian intervention (again, assuming it really happened, which it might) had zero effect on the U.S. election, why the obsession? The ultimate goal is to overthrow Donald Trump. Any stick to beat him with is fine. The media would like to see Donald Trump impeached, and removed from office. If they can not accomplish that, next best is to hamper and annoy him so much as to damage his ability to act.

Does Mainstream Media know that the U.S. has meddled in countless foreign elections through the decades? Yes, many of them know that–but they are hoping that we ordinary people don’t know. They want us to be shocked by supposed Russian intervention in our election. But we wouldn’t be shocked if we had done the slightest modicum of reading of U.S. history. MM is probably correct, however, in assuming that most of us peasants have no understanding of what the U.S. has been doing. It turns out that failing to learn from history has the consequence of keeping us peasants ignorant. Who could have guessed?

One question is never asked. Why would Russia want Donald Trump as president, rather than Hillary Clinton? But it is an interesting question. The answer might be in part that Hillary Clinton’s opinions and actions show her to be a globalist interventionist with a propensity to push other countries around. Libya, anyone? Mr. Trump, on the other hand, while he is all over the map with his comments, at times showed an understanding that Russia is by no means a natural enemy to the U.S. I would say that any Russian citizen who wanted Hillary Clinton as U.S. president rather than Donald Trump, was a few bricks shy of a load.

Why does MM media hate Donald Trump so much? He doesn’t seem to be some sort of wild-eyed right-wing conservative. I think the answer is that our elites (of which Mainstream Media is part) feel cheated. They had their dream president in Barack Obama–black, reliably leftist on everything. History was moving in their direction, as of course it should. The next step was clear–a woman president. Of course she too was reliably leftist on everything. History was doing its duty. Donald Trump was a joke. But ordinary people don’t share the sensibility of the elites. In the primaries and in the fall election, ordinary people said, “Wait a minute; we don’t really want another person like Barack Obama or George W. Bush.” So the election went much differently than the confident elites expected. They feel cheated.

Why the hatred and fear of Russia? It seems childish. Russia is a big country in size, but tiny in population density. Russia has nuclear weapons, but so does China, so does Pakistan, so does Israel, and so forth. Russia, by most standards, is struggling. Its population is shrinking. It has about 143,000,000 people, but population projections say that might drop to 111,000,000 by 2050. (The U.S., by contrast has about 320,000,000 people.) Russia has one of the highest suicide rates in the world. It has one of the highest rates of alcoholism in the world. It aborts more babies than come to term. Its economy is far from a powerhouse. Its economy is only three-quarters that of Texas. In comparison with California, it does even worse–Russia’s economy is about 52% that of California. The U.S. population density is almost four times as high as that of Russia–84 people per square mile for the U.S, 22 for Russia. It turns out that 70+ years of communist rule is not overcome in a couple decades. Again, who could have guessed?

Why, then, the hatred and fear of Russia? I think it is instinctive on the part of the left. The left must have enemies. Russia, taken as a whole, is not a sucker for globalist morality, unlike most of Europe. In Russia, Christianity seems to be making a comeback. The stats in the paragraph above show that such a comeback–if it really exists–is barely beginning. But maybe Christianity really could take hold in Russia. For the left, that would be a disaster. Those pesky American Christians are bad enough.

For the left, success is a zero sum game. Your success is a threat to my success, says the left. For Christianity, neither financial nor any other kind of success is a zero sum game. If you succeed, fantastic, under Christian morality. The left lives by envy, by stirring up conflict, by hating the morality of Jesus Christ. A resurgent Christian Russia is a threat to the left. Just as a resurgent Christian morality in the U.S., an anti-leftist morality, would be a threat to the leftist elites in this country. (Don’t panic yet, guys, we’re still pietist antinomians.)

Why did Mainstream Media try to paint the summit between Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin as a disaster for the U.S.? Again, instinct. They can’t find anything good to say about anything Donald Trump does, because that would reduce the likelihood that they can replace him as soon as possible.

I am already on record (blog post of Jan. 12, 2017) that if the warmongers succeed in manipulating us into a war between the U.S. and Russia, I am rooting for Russia. Mainstream Media is a far bigger threat to my well-being than is Russia.

Very little reading of books, fiction or non-fiction, is done by most Christians. This is sad, and has sad consequences for how we think and live.

What little reading Christians do is often limited strictly to religious books. (Alas, my own non-fiction Christian books have not yet found their way on to the reading lists of Christians.) But even of religious books, most Christians read few.

Fiction? Forget about it. It’s unimportant stuff, not worthy of the time of Christians. So at least seems to go the thinking of most Christians.

Why do Christians read so few books? I think the main reason is simply that mankind by nature is inclined to not exercising our minds. We like resting. That includes Christians and non-Christians. Reading is work. Mankind in general has a lack of interest in learning; otherwise we could not remain so ignorant on so many issues for so long. The default position of mankind is not to read books.

Supplementing the main reason is the brand of Christianity held by almost all Christians. Dispensatinalism, amillennialism, pietism, antinomianism all encourage us to believe that the world is a much smaller place than it is in reality. But d., a., p., and a. are only supplementary factors to our general uninterest in learning.

I think it is vastly sad that Christians read so little. And it has consequences for how we live. For example, if Christians read some history–it wouldn’t necessarily take a lot–we would not be such idolatrous suckers for the U.S. and the U.S. military. A bit of honest reading would nip that in the bud. But because we can’t be bothered to read books, nor bothered to think about how history has unfolded, we become easily manipulated shills for the warfare state.

We Christians–at least most of us–don’t even read the Bible much. Many Christians have not read the Bible through even one time. We got the basic idea of the faith, and that was enough for us. Well, the basic idea is better than having no idea at all, but the Holy Spirit compiled the Bible for a reason. Apparently He thought it was all important enough to collect in one place. Who knows? Maybe He was on to something useful with that idea. It’s just a theory.

Reading the Bible multiple times permits us to get a better idea of the character of God, and a better idea of how reality is put together. The Bible is a challenging book, and there is a lot to learn there. Even if we just read the Bible only, we could learn a lot about life.

There is a quote, in various forms, often attributed to Mark Twain. It goes something like this: “A man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.” A little research indicates that Mark Twain may not have said that. But it is the kind of thing he could have said–and would have said if he had thought of it. Whoever said it first, it is true. We go to the trouble of learning to read, then most of us make little use of that valuable skill.

Do we Christians not read because we are doing so much more important stuff? We’re conducting Bible studies, visiting widows and orphans and relieving their distress, organizing political parties with truly Christian principles, volunteering at the local crisis pregnancy center, and doing lots of other valuable things. Probably not so much, for most of us. Most of us are watching television. Some of the television may be pretty good, but a lot of it is mediocre or worse. And we’re watching lots of TV sports. We are wasting time rather than using it. And time is not a renewable source, here on earth. The sands of time are rapidly running out, for each one of us. Eternity will have plenty of time, but our time on earth is strictly limited. A bit of reading might be a better use of time than watching yet another silly sitcom.

Christian civilization includes . . . everything. Life is very big. Great writers, fiction or non-fiction, are a gift to us from God. Fiction is very valuable. Jesus Christ used fiction, when he told the parables. It is a legitimate way to interact with reality. Fiction allows us to stretch ourselves into a bigger world emotionally. But we have to open the gifts we have been given, or they remain packages on the table doing us no good.

I have had close to zero success encouraging people to read great fiction writers. Still, I’m no quitter. Here are six books every Christian might enjoy. He or she (or it) might find his emotional world enlarged, by reading these books. In alphabetical order by author: 1/Jane Austen–Pride and Prejudice, 2/Charles Dickens–The Adventures of David Copperfield, 3/Fyodor Dostoyevsky–Crime and Punishment, 4/C. S. Lewis–That Hideous Strength, 5/Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn–The Cancer Ward, 6/Mark Twain–The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Of course there are countless other books and authors I could name. The six authors/books listed above are sort of a taste of the wonderful variety available to us.

The ability to read can be developed. Anyone watching ten hours of television a week, can cut that down significantly. Some of the saved time can be used to read a book. At the start it may require great self-discipline to read X number of pages of a book in a week. But it will probably get easier. Our minds were given to us for a reason. When we learn to use them, we are coming slightly closer to what we were meant to be.

This may sound like I’m saying, “Be like me and everything will be fine.” Yes, okay, I think reading is a good way to spend time, and I’m glad I do a lot of it. If that makes me an arrogant monster, so be it. But I don’t expect or want anyone to be a carbon copy of me. One of me seems to be about the maximum adult legal dosage for the world, as Bertie Wooster might say. I readily admit that I would love to see lots more Christians be vastly more well read in both fiction and non-fiction. I think reading books would give people great joy and would help them understand the world far better. Christian civilization will be better defended by Christians who read than by Christians who don’t read.