Carl Wells Books

Last week I mentioned what a disgrace it is to have Joe Biden be the president-elect of the United States. That is so whether he stole the election, or won it fairly. A nation in which 70,000,000+ people (or almost that many, if several million votes are fictional) vote for the baby-killing socialists Biden/Harris is a nation deliriously corrupt.

But I also noted the obvious fact that life on the planet doesn’t just stop because things go badly sour. For proof of that, plug into world history at any place. Lots of bad things keep happening, and life seems to keep on going anyway.

We can expect the same in our future. We are going to keep living until we die, and we would be well advised to try to search for a way forward. Giving up is not a very honorable option (although admittedly tempting at times).

Last week we began with five fundamental good things we could do, and then added an additional eight things. So in part II we will begin with #14. Needless to say, none of these ideas are likely to be original, and they are in no particular order (after the fundamental five of last week).

14/Consider that having an upper middle class lifestyle is not necessarily important. For countless people, much of their energy goes into getting lots of wealth. That does not give them time to think about more important things. Consider the option of saving, and living under your means rather than buying and spending up to the extreme limit of your means. Jesus Christ tells us that ‘”not even when one has an abundance does his life consist of his possessions.”‘ (Luke 12:15) Your life is way more than your possessions, even if you are wealthy. Consider the value of living simply rather than always climbing the middle class ladder another rung or two. Probably we make such a fetish out of getting rich because we are empty of more interesting ideas. Yuck.

15/Avoid large debt. This sort of follows naturally from point #14. When we fall into large debt, suddenly our options are more limited. We have to keep bringing in (or begin for the first time to bring in!) huge income, just to pay off debt, when maybe we should be working at something that doesn’t bring in as much money but which is more important. Are we trapped in an area or trapped in a job because we have huge debt? Very low debt, or zero debt, will give us increased options in what we can do.

16/Pay your bills promptly. Why should ordinary people, Christian or non-Christian, have to hold their breath to see if we are actually going to pay them what we owe them? Similarly, we should not be resorting to the bankruptcy laws to get out from under our legitimate debts. Pay back what you owe, even if it takes many years.

17/Plan ahead for how you will leave your wealth, if any. It should not automatically go to family members. If they are enemies of God, why would we give what we have saved to them? We are trying to build the kingdom of God. Giving huge amounts to God’s enemies is a bad strategy. Would you give your wealth to the Democratic Party, to Nazis, to communists, to Planned Parenthood, or to any other evil organization? Then why give it to family members who have proven to be enemies of God? Granted, it is difficult to leave one’s wealth wisely! Think about this problem a lot–especially if you have much to leave.

18/Understand that complete sanity is impossible on this earth. We are all insane in one way or another. Rafael Sabatini’s hero Scaramouche was born with “a sense that the world was mad.” (Scaramouche, p. 1). Understanding the insanity of ourselves and of others will help us to be realistic about life. We can and I believe should strive for semi-sanity, but sanity in fullness will come only after death, if/when God completes our sanctification.

19/Laugh. Scaramouche, in the same sentence mentioned above, is also described as having been born with “a gift of laughter.” So he was doubly blessed, despite being born poor and of uncertain parentage. We need to develop our sense of humor, and learn to laugh with our friends. There could be incredibly frustrating and evil things ahead of us, but if we have the ability to laugh we have gained something very important and useful and enjoyable.

20/Try to develop an objectivity about your children and grandchildren. As an obviously rough estimate, 90% of the misery of the world comes about because Christian parents do a mediocre or poor or terrible job of raising their children. The parents never have a clue that this is so. But it is. We tend to expect little of ourselves, and then, surprise surprise, in return expect little of our children. They deliver the expected little, and countless numbers of our children end up enemies of God in the way they live. All of us have a hard time seeing that our [blank] stinks. When it comes to our children and grandchildren, we are even less honest about their character than we are about our own. Admittedly, it is very hard to develop objectivity about ourselves, about our children, and about our grandchildren. But it needs to be done, and even a modest beginning will help us and them in the long run. With pain involved for all of us on the way, of course.

21/Begin to read good books a lot. This ability can be developed. It won’t come automatically to everybody. But we are not likely to change the way the world goes on if we refuse to read books.

22/Become an expert on something. It is best to pick something for which you have a knack. I am unlikely ever to become an expert on countless things. No one will ever call on me to do their plumbing, or to install their electricity, or to build their needed box girder bridge. But there is one topic about which I am a leading expert in the world: the writer Gwendoline Keats (pen name Zack). This happened not because I am brilliant, but because God led me down a path where I was apparently the only person in the world who appreciated Gwendoline Keats enough to do some research on her. My expertise is a modest accomplishment for which apparently there currently is no competition from other people, and admittedly I stumbled into it, but it encourages me to know that a person of no particular brilliance can become an expert on something. If I can do it, so can anyone.

23/Relax part of the time. Life is challenging. The enemies of God have been winning a lot of battles lately, and we can get worn out trying to fight back. Most of us need some time just to relax and enjoy life. Watch a DVD or read a non-improving book. God went out of His way to tell us to take off one day in seven to rest and to worship. Worship is part of that, but so is rest. Kick back plenty of times. And not just on Sunday.

24/Consider the possibility that we can begin to have Christian law courts, which people resort to voluntarily rather than submit themselves to courts of the civil magistrate. Biblical justice is always going to be practical and helpful. The U.S. is moving steadily away from what is sometimes called the rule of law. We can begin to provide something better than what U.S. courts provide. This must start very small, but could become very big.

Well, it is going to take a part III to finish this. Meanwhile, enjoy Thanksgiving Day. Despite the bad things that have been happening to our country, we have much for which to be thankful.

Last week I lamented the national disgrace that Joe Biden was voted for by more than 70,000,000 people. A Biden/Harris administration is a grim prospect for people who love freedom and responsibility. But we have to accept the fact that life goes on. God is not going to rapture His people off the face of the earth. (Sorry, dispensationalists. I wish you were right, and that Christians would escape soon. But God doesn’t work like that.)

Since life goes on, we are going to have to keep living until we die. So what are we going to do in the coming years?

It may help us to remember that even if Donald Trump had won, things were not going particularly well in this country. We have been a basket case for a long time. We had a lot of work to do, even if Biden/Harris had been dramatically rejected by the voters. In fact, if someone had time-traveled from the 1950s and had seen the policies of Donald Trump, he would have assumed that a spend-spend type of leftism had captured the country. Nor did Mr. Trump do much to extricate us from foolish foreign interventions, or to defend our borders. His election would not have been much help to us. Our nation’s policies still would have been basically insane.

This is all depressing, but we have kind of earned our disaster. God gave us plenty of time to change the way we think and act, but we preferred not to use the time wisely. Now we are reaping the consequences.

I am going to list a large handful of things we can do if we want to try to find a way forward. We can’t go back. We have to go forward, like it or not.

The reader may object that the list could be summed up as “Be like Carl, and all will be well.” That is true to an extent, but not entirely. I reserve the right to refuse to follow my own advice. Certainly those who know me well will probably scratch their heads over some of these points, wondering where I get the gall to mention them. Please just examine the value or non-value of each point for yourself, and act accordingly. I’m just a guy. If what I say rings true, great. If it doesn’t ring true, reject it.

The first five points are sort of foundational. After that there is no particular order.

1/Consider the possibility that Christianity as presented in the Bible might be true. I understand that this cannot be proven. But we all live by faith of one sort or another. (See Cornelius Van Til.) And experience continues to show us that when we reject Christianity and Christian morality, things don’t go well. Disasters happen. People’s lives are ruined. So just consider the possibility that maybe Christianity is true. If you decide it is true, or might be true, don’t just say, “How interesting,” and move on. If it is true, it has consequences for how we live. On the other hand, if it isn’t true, you will find you have no solid intellectual foundation for living life.

2/Do something to end abortion. If killing unborn babies is not evil, then nothing is evil. The 70,000,000+ people who voted for Joe Biden unanimously agreed that killing babies was not evil. How can a person striving for semi-sanity accept such an idea? Abortion is perhaps the key issue of our era. If we eradicated all theft, ended corporate welfare, got taxation down to 1%, stopped intervening in the affairs of other countries, had honest money, and did many other good things, but still murdered unborn children, we would not be thinking clearly no matter how excellent the reforms we had made.

3/We have to learn to love truth more. Truth is under great attack in this country. A male is a female, and a female is a male; children can choose their gender. At least, so we are told. The best writer on the topic of truth is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Read especially his essay “The Smatterers” in the book From Under the Rubble. The book may be hard to find. If you can’t find the book, I’ll photocopy a handful of the most important pages and send them to you. Solzhenitsyn quoted a Russian proverb in one of his speeches: “One word of truth outweighs the whole world.” Truth is always crucial, and the decades ahead are likely to challenge us to give up the truth when pressure comes. Ponder the central importance of truth; that is, really think what kind of position we put ourselves in when we reject truth and believe lies. Solzhenitsyn backed up his respect for truth by the way he lived. It was not always easy for him, but he persevered. We can imitate him.

4/Honestly face the fact that our current brand of Christianity is not worth the powder to blow it to hell. I insist that there is much potential for good in the American Christian church. But it is mostly potential rather than rubber meets the road productive thought and action.

5/Cultivate a sense of sin. Humility is a rare virtue, but a lovely one. We are all pretty rotten, even after Jesus Christ regenerates and converts us. If we can remember that, it will help us in countless ways.

6/Pastors need to preach hard truths to us. Not 52 sermons a year, but maybe six or eight times a year. We need to be challenged, because we Christians aren’t thinking very clearly and aren’t acting with practical wisdom.

7/Be willing to be hated. If we speak the truth, we run the risk of being hated. None of us likes to feel the hatred of others. But it may become necessary.

8/Tithe to a Bible-believing church. The tithe (10% of one’s increase) is very important. If we are willing to steal from the God who died on the cross to save us from eternal death, who can trust us not to steal from our neighbor? If you are not yet a Christian, consider giving your tithe to some other worthy cause.

9/Be otherwise generous with your money.

10/Pray often. That includes praying for our enemies. They need God’s grace. But then so do we. If we are willing to extend grace to our enemies, then maybe God will be more likely to extend grace to us. We are not in control of reality. We are dependent on God. We can have increased peace of mind, if we pray. That way we show Him that we realize we need Him.

11/Marry and have several children. Pick a godly spouse. Don’t concern yourself overmuch with the physical appearance of your potential spouse. Pick a spouse whose character you can respect over the long haul. The family is a building block of Christian civilization.

12/Stop wanting to live off the production of others. That means we will need to give up public education, Social Security, Medicare, unemployment compensation, farm subsidies, and countless other things. If we are unwilling to give up subsidies stolen from the production of others, how are we different from the hardcore left represented by Biden/Harris and their allies?

13/Educate your children outside of public schools. But don’t automatically trust Christian schools. Right now and for the immediate future, they seem to be mostly just baptized humanism. They will probably not teach your children how to think and act as a biblical Christian should. Your children will have to learn that at home. Which means you will have to learn first, so that you can teach them. (There’s always a catch, isn’t there?)

That is enough for today. Next week I hope to publish part II. Despite the wretched condition in which the U.S. finds itself, there can be a practical way forward. Perhaps if we follow enough of the good paths, we will merge onto a pleasant thoroughfare helpful not only to us but also to people who currently are our enemies.

The votes are counted in the 2020 presidential election held on November 3, and Joe Biden appears to have won. Here I will give my initial thoughts on the election.

Personally, I have not voted for a major party candidate since Richard Nixon. I learned my lesson at a fairly young age, and early on I opted out of the fantasy that Republican presidential candidates were principled and would ever stand for something real. I didn’t vote even for Ronald Reagan, and am glad I didn’t. In 2016 I wrote in the name of the Constitution Party candidate. In 2020 I wrote in the name of Ron Paul.

That said, I am vastly disappointed that Joe Biden appears to have won. I preferred Donald Trump, although clearly not enough to vote for him. Perhaps these introductory words will allow you to see the angle from which I approach this topic.

So here are nine of my initial thoughts on the election, in some sort of order with the last two being perhaps the most important.

1/It is an absolute disgrace to the United States that we have elected Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. One website says 77,170,769 people voted for Joe Biden. In 1790 the U.S. census counted Americans as 3,929,214 in our young country. Now, only 230 years later, 19.6 times as many people who existed in the U.S. in 1790, have voted for a candidate who is an enemy of freedom and responsibility, is a murderer of unborn babies, and is a man of zero godly principles.

Even if we subtract 4,000,000 votes from Mr. Biden’s total, as possibly stolen, that is still 18.6 times as many people as existed in the U.S. in 1790 who hate freedom. My guess is that the founding fathers, for all their faults–and I think they were foolish to engage in the American Revolution in the first place–are whirling in their graves to see what we have done with the country they founded.

Paul and Barnabas told one gathering of Jews that those Jews had judged themselves unworthy of eternal life (Acts 13:46), so from now on they (P. and B.) were turning to the Gentiles. We Americans have judged ourselves unworthy of freedom and responsibility–and perhaps unworthy of eternal life. But who can we turn to? We are mostly Gentiles. Maybe somehow we need to turn to ourselves. I don’t know. Anyway, what a disgrace that we have done this to ourselves.

2/The election was likely stolen. A very high percentage of the thinking right (or call it the quasi-right, rather than get into a long discussion of what is the right exactly) believes it was stolen. My guess is strictly a guess, but my guess is that it was stolen. As Douglas Wilson pointed out, a group of people (Democrats) who are willing to murder unborn children are not going to be shrink back in horror at trying to steal an election by counting fraudulent votes.

If the election was indeed stolen, that means none of us can trust the voting process anymore. Surely that means the end of the U.S. as a country. If people know that their vote means nothing, why vote? So this may take some time to shake out, but if the election was stolen and can be proven to have been stolen, we can kiss the U. S. and A. goodbye.

I still try to hope that Joe Biden will legally (and honestly) be denied the election, but I admit I am not optimistic.

3/Donald Trump betrayed us deplorable irredeemable ones. People in 2016 went out on a limb to vote for a man who showed some signs of wanting to fight against the Deep State. As a people, many of us voted for Mr. Trump rather than vote for the usual suspects of the quality of Jeb Bush and company. President Trump could have ended the foreign interventions, could have fought bravely against immigration, could have appointed honorable men to positions of authority, instead of people like John Bolton and Mike Pompeo and on and on endlessly. But he frittered away his opportunity.

4/The Mainstream Media are hopelessly corrupt. Truth means nothing to them. They want to manipulate us rather than do the hard work of searching for truth. The election might be stolen? What a silly notion! Why would anyone waste time trying to find out if there were a few stolen votes here and there? The important thing is we have gotten rid of Donald Trump! Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth!

5/Mainstream Conservatism Inc. is worthless. Don’t count on them to defend your freedom. They care about their careers. Yes, there are a few honorable conservatives, mostly of the paleoconservative variety. But for the most part the conservatives are an empty drum.

6/The break-up of the United States is absolutely essential. A country where 77,000,000 people can cheerfully vote for the baby-killing Joe Biden, is a country ripe for division into smaller units. By all means let the baby-killing majority have control of as much of the country as they can get. Fine. But let there be a few places where deplorable/irredeemables can be left alone.

If some states break away from the empire–sorry, I mean from the union–it is absolutely fine if Democrat city-states have control of big cities. No complaint from me.

One translation of Amos 3:3 reads, “How can two walk together unless they are agreed?” How indeed? At this point we Americans no longer share a common vision of what is good and what is evil. We can’t walk together any more. Splitting up is the only sensible thing to do.

A peaceful break-up of the United States hurts no one, and lets everyone do their thing and see what works. Granted, secession is only 5% of the solution toward what ails us. But 5% is a start.

7/Amillennialism and dispensationalism are deadly enemies of the Christian faith. They are satanic. I don’t mean that amillennials and dispensationalists are Satan worshipers. I do mean that Satan is pleased to see such unbiblical ideas hamper the ability of Christians to think and act biblically. We can’t understand our responsibilities to the present and the future as long as we swallow the amillennial or dispensational snake oil.

God blesses obedience. That is what the Bible teaches. Love or hate that fact, it is what the Bible teaches. Face it.

8/American Christianity is an absolute failure. Final figures are not in, but it is clear that if a truly high percentage of professing Christians had voted against Joe Biden, he would have been sent packing easily. Of course that would not have solved all our problems! But the complete disgrace of having a moral monster like Joe Biden as president would have been readily avoided.

A few weeks before the election, it was clear that a large number of professing Christians were planning to vote for the baby-killing Joe Biden. Here are some of the stats. 17% of white evangelicals were planning to vote for Mr. Biden. Of mainstream churches, 43% of whites were planning to vote for Mr. B. White Roman Catholics? 44% for Mr. Biden. Hispanic Catholics were expected to vote 67% for Mr. Biden. Black Protestants? 90% for Mr. Biden. Now no doubt the actual vote will vary considerably from the prospective vote. Mr. Trump may have done better among Christians than those numbers indicate. But the improvement will be only marginal.

Roll those numbers around in your punkin head for a while. Christians needed only to vote in high percentages against Biden/Harris, to deny those moral cretins a victory. Note that I am not saying that Trump was an ideal candidate or that his election would have solved our problems. But we would have avoided the disgrace–and the danger–of having Joe Biden as president. Not even the most gifted vote thieves could have stolen enough votes to get Mr. Biden elected, if only a very high percentage of Christians had rejected Mr. Biden’s candidacy.

So, our Christianity is not very practical, and not worth very much. I have claimed in recent months that there are reserves of goodness in American Christians. I still believe that. But we are not acting with practical wisdom. We are not thinking God’s thoughts after Him. We can blame the godless liberals until we’re blue in the face, but a picture of the real enemy is hanging just over the sink in the bathroom.

9/There is no way back. Even if Mr. Trump is elected, not much is going to change for the better. His over three and a half years in office should have taught us that. We can’t go back to the 1950s. We have to move into the 2020s, because that is how reality is organized.

The only way is forward. Like it or not.

We can quit, or we can pout. (Both have their attractions, admittedly.) Or we can begin to grow up into thinking Christians who act in principled ways. If we act in ways that please God, the future can be brighter than we currently expect. Change for the better will not happen automatically, but it can happen. Maybe the disgrace of having Joe Biden as our president will help us to wake up to our responsibilities.

Next week I hope to begin to examine what we could do if we wanted to find a good way forward.

We come to the third of three bleak movies, after having looked in previous weeks at “Nil By Mouth” and “Nebraska.”

“Detachment,” (2011) is a relatively unknown film. While complete statistics were unavailable at IMDb, it surely must have been a financial failure. If it really did gross only $1.68 million worldwide (investment unknown), it is difficult to see how it earned a profit.

However, the film has not escaped recognition and admiration. It was well-received at various film festivals, and the IMDb rating was an excellent 7.7 (out of 10), on a very hefty voting total of 75,762 votes. So lots of people have respected this almost unknown film.

Once again I have to warn my readers that here is a film that is not for everyone. The f-word is frequent and there are naked female bodies (including a woman who has committed suicide). Each of my readers will have to count the cost, and decide if he is willing to pay that cost. Also, some of the plot will be revealed below.

The film stars Adrien Brody, who in 2002 was the youngest person ever to win the Academy Award as best actor. He is joined by some other very big name stars, including Tim Blake Nelson, Lucy Liu, Blythe Danner, and James Caan.

How in the world did all these big names end up in such a low budget movie which clearly they all must have known had little prospect of gaining a large audience? I can only guess that they were willing to act for peanuts because they loved the script and thought it was a movie worth making even if they weren’t going to get rich doing it.

The director is Tony Kaye, and the writer is Carl Lund. There is controversy over whether or not Tony Kaye drifted too far away from Mr. Lund’s script. If he did, we can certainly say that he had something substantial from which to drift. The script is crucial to any film, and Carl Lund gave the director something serious with which to work. Tony Kaye in turn has somehow managed to get superb performances not only from his big name performers, but from lesser known actors (including his own daughter Betty Kaye).

“Detachment” features Adrien Brody as Henry Barthes, a substitute teacher in New York City public schools. Henry’s specialty is to replace a teacher for a fairly long time (a month or more), so that students have one substitute week in and week out instead of a series of subs for a day or two. Then, after his month or three runs out, Henry moves on to another school. He is not seeking to find one school where he can stay. He wants to keep moving.

Henry, given Adrien Brody’s age at the time of the film, is probably in his mid to late 30s. He has a pretty tough hide. The students do not intimidate him. He is able to shrug off their viciousness. He can match them f-word for f-word, and then can continue to move forward. He tries to give them what he has about the value of reading and literature to life. They need to read and cultivate their minds, if they are to escape being destroyed as thinking human beings. They listen, eventually, at least to some extent.

This is not, however, basically a movie about how one remarkable person begins to make a serious difference in helping public education students mature. No, this is a movie about how “We’re failing. We’re failing,” as one brief segment of the film has it.

The failure is not fundamentally about the failure of public education. The failure is a failure of a people. There are many powerful scenes in the movie. In one brief portion, it is Parents’ Night. “Welcome Parents” is written on the blackboard of one classroom. But we see no parents. We hear that one parent showed up for one teacher–but that is it. No parents.

There was a time when parents showed up, some years in the past. No more. That rings true for me. I’m old enough to remember when a lot of parents would show up for Parents’ Night. But that has changed. “Where are all the parents?” as one line in the movie has it.

Clearly the parents are a huge part of the problem of why we are failing. We see one black woman play the race card about the problems her child is having. We see another man blame the school for the problems his child is having. We hear another parent (off camera, but very much on mic) berate his daughter. (She later commits suicide.) It is not the public schools which are basically to blame. It is the United States as a whole which is failing.

Henry too is failing. While he is an interesting protagonist with some excellent qualities, he is detached from life. Eventually he comes to see himself as empty–after some very sad happenings. Moreover, he is himself a flawed person. In one painful scene he reams out the nursing home worker who has forced him to come out in the night to rescue his grandfather from being locked in the bathroom. While he is probably correct that she needs to be reprimanded, his way of doing that is unnecessarily insulting.

Actually, although neither Henry nor the filmmakers seem to understand it, Henry being unnecessarily called out into the night is perhaps the most providentially blessed happening we can imagine. It is because he is (unnecessarily) called out, that he rides the bus and first comes in contact with the teenage prostitute Erica (Sami Gayle). She is servicing a man in the back of the bus. For payment, she gets a blow to the face instead of the $100.00 which we eventually learn is her price.

When she and Henry exit the bus, she tries to entice him to be her next paying customer. He rudely escapes her.

But on another day chance (Providence) brings them together again. He is still not willing to pay for her services, but when she says she is hungry he takes her home and feeds her. She is ready to do what her profession has prepared her to do, but Henry is really not trying to take advantage of her. He is giving her a temporary home.

There are many people who are hurting in this film, most definitely including the teachers and administrators of the school. Henry is the only one for whom we get much of a backstory. His mother (who had been a suicide victim when Henry was very young) had probably been sexually molested by her father, Henry’s grandfather. This background needless to say has helped turn Henry into partially damaged goods, a man detached from life.

We get zero backstory for Erica. This is wise on the part of the filmmakers. We don’t need backstory. We see what she is, and we don’t need to know the details of how she got there.

We get no real backstory for the teachers and administrators. But we get short clips of their current lives. Mr. Wiatt (Tim Blake Nelson) is treated with contempt in his classroom. He wonders if people can even see him. When he returns home from school, it is the same. He comes in to a wife who does not even glance up from the TV screen. Again, he is not even seen.

The principal Mrs. Dearden (Marcia Gay Harden) (going through the process of being fired, despite the fact that she is a sincerely committed administrator) at a brief home scene is treated with arrogant and cruel contempt by her husband.

Mr. Seabolt (James Caan) gets through the school day with the help of pills, and a vulgar sense of humor in which the f-word is prominently featured.

His close friend and protege Dr. Parker (Lucy Liu) suspects that earlier today she has gone over the top. Bullseye. Then we see the episode in question, which is one of the most powerful in a movie of countless powerful episodes.

Missy (Renee Felice Smith) has been called into the presence of Dr. Parker to discuss Missy’s grades. F, F, and F, all the way to the end. Missy has no real plans for the future. Modeling, part of a band? She is ravishingly beautiful, but is sullen, and clearly unwilling even to try in school. Dr. Parker does indeed go over the top in her comments to Missy. Dr. Parker is crude and vulgar and furious. Missy, she knows, is headed for disaster. This prospect is not presented gently. It is the kind of encounter which could indeed lead to the end of a teaching/counseling career, but in the atmosphere of that school it is quite realistic that there are no repercussions except Dr. Parker’s belated understanding that she may have gone too far. But we don’t blame her. The frustration of seeing so many of the students destroy their own lives is incredibly hard to bear for Dr. Parker.

In one bleak scene near the end as Henry sitting alone reads aloud from Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” we see papers blowing through the school empty of students. It is a vast wasteland. There are no students, there is no learning, there are only empty desks, trashed classrooms, and blowing papers. Something else is falling apart, not just a decrepit house in an Edgar Allan Poe story. It is our society.

The most powerful scene in the movie is predicated on the detachment of Henry. His voice-over sort of warns us what is coming. I don’t remember the exact phrasing, but he is setting us up for what he has done.

The situation with Erica staying with him was always intended to be temporary. But now apparently Henry has acted. He has called the people responsible to take care of wayward youths. They have come to remove Erica. He has, without warning her what was coming, given up Erica to the authorities. He has betrayed Erica. The scene which follows tears your heart out.

Erica is devastated. I may get some of the dialogue wrong, but Erica tells Henry such things as that “You’re kind and gentle. I love you, Henry. You’re all I have. You’re the only family I’ve ever had.” She is crying out over and over, “No, no” as she is forcibly removed from Henry’s apartment. Her pleading goes unanswered by Henry. He has told himself that the temporary arrangement had to be ended; his detachment has indeed shown up with a vengeance.

Under Henry’s protection Erica has blossomed into a young woman who is capable of loving another human being and of acting with dignity and kindness of her own. Now the “all I have” person in her life is throwing her out. This is more than she can take, and more than we can take, watching. But she has to take it, and so do we.

Henry finally sees himself as empty. (Another suicide helps.) This leads to the most encouraging moment in the movie. Near the end he goes to the facility which houses Erica. She sees him coming, and runs to him and leaps into his welcoming arms, filled with joy that her only family, the man who has respected her, the man she has come to love, has returned to her.

Is this too much hope for us? Can this relationship blossom further? It seems almost too good to be true. But maybe it can work. If Henry is willing to stop being empty, stop being detached, good things can happen. The movie tells us nothing more about what will happen. We can at least have some hope. As bleak and as hopeless as the movie has been, we are left with some hope.

Is there any hope for this country? The filmmakers give us little. No doubt it did not even occur to them that we could find hope if we cultivated a biblical brand of Christianity in the way we treat people. For this I blame them very little. We Christians are pretty empty and detached ourselves, as near as I can see. It is hard to care for and help another person. When Henry did it, it changed two lives for the better, although we can’t see into what will happen to those two lives in even the near-term future. But it wasn’t easy to do for him, and it is not going to be easy to do for us. That is to be expected. Something really, really good, is probably going to be really, really hard to get to. But it will be worth it if we are willing to try to get there.

Used DVDs of “Detachment” are readily available on the Internet. I found several copies available for around $6.00 (shipping included) today on Amazon.

“Detachment” is a bleak, thought-provoking movie. (I have watched it at least three times and if I live long enough no doubt will watch it again.) We are afraid to trust the hope that is given us by the movie. The hope is beautiful if we can honestly believe in it. Can we believe in it? I think so, but we may have to work for such belief.

We come to the second of three bleak movies about which you will have to decide whether or not they are worth your time. We discussed the English film “Nil By Mouth” written and directed by Gary Oldman, last week. Today we will move to the heartland of the U.S. “Nebraska” takes place largely in . . . well, yes, “You’re more than a match for me, I can see that,” as Monty Python would say. It starts out in Billings, Montana, and moves through Wyoming, into South Dakota, and finally into Nebraska, where most of the action takes place.

Once again I offer fair warning. There will be vulgar things spoken, including the f-word. (Not nearly as often as in “Nil By Mouth.”) So count the cost. Also be warned that the following discussion will reveal the plot completely.

“Nebraska” is a black and white 2013 film written by Bob Nelson and directed by Alexander Payne. It was nominated for six Oscars, although it won none. Bruce Dern won the Cannes Film Festival award as best actor for 2013. The film was a modest financial success: made on a $13.5 million budget, with $27.7 million coming in at the box office.

The plot is simple. Woody Grant (Bruce Dern) is an aging man who receives something in the mail that leads him to believe he has won a million dollars. He wants to go to Lincoln, Nebraska (from his home in Billings, Montana) to pick up his winnings. He is an alcoholic, and thus has lost his driver’s license. He starts out walking. The police pick him up before he gets far, and he is soon back at his (very modest) home with his frustrated wife Kate (June Squibb).

The couple has two grown sons. The one who figures most prominently in the story is David (Will Forte). He and the rest of the family fully understand that the “million dollars” prize is simply a way to cause people to subscribe to magazines. But Woody doesn’t believe them.

David is not doing all that well himself. He has a job selling stereo sets (or something of the sort), and it is not necessarily going well. We see him interact with a couple who are potential buyers, but he fails to close the sale. Financially he is simply getting by, we sense. Worse, his personal life is in a shambles. His live-in girlfriend Noel has just left him.

We see them together briefly. The filmmakers have made a wise decision in the casting and portrayal of Noel. She is chubby, and not gorgeous. She seems like a real person, not a Hollywood actress. David misses her and wants her back. But of course not enough to commit to a marriage.

To spend some time with his father (and also to get him to shut up about the winning prize) David decides to drive his father to Lincoln, Nebraska. David tells his employer that he is sick, rather than straightforwardly ask for time off.

They leave Billings and begin the long journey to Nebraska, dipping down into Wyoming, into southern South Dakota (where they stop to see Mt. Rushmore). Woody’s drinking leads to a fall and a brief stay in a hospital. In Nebraska they stop to visit family in Hawthorne (a fictional name; it is real life Plainview).

In Hawthorne we meet lots more of the Grant clan. Woody has many brothers, most still living but some deceased. The living ones are almost as silent as the dead ones. In one scene the brothers sit watching a pro football game. There seem to be about seven living brothers. They have almost nothing to say, except a few words about cars. The contrast between the articulate and fast-talking announcer and the silent brothers watching the game, is very real, and darkly humorous.

The two sons of one brother are the fully grown Cole and Bart. They are not doing well. They don’t work; they live at home. David tries to make cousinly friendly conversation, but Cole and Bart are mean mockers, only partially redeemed by the saving grace of stupidity. One of them sometimes has to pick up trash as part of his community service for his conviction for sexual assault. They provide comic relief. (Of which there is a lot in the movie; it has been called a comedy-drama, and correctly so.) The mother puts as good a face on the situation as she can. She tries to paint them as doing voluntary work; she scolds them to control their vulgar tongues. Here is another dysfunctional family. The older generation may be quiet and hard working and polite, but Cole and Bart give us zero hope for the future of that branch of the Grant clan.

The news of Woody’s million dollar winnings gets around, thanks to Woody talking about the prize. (David advised him to say nothing, knowing that there are no “winnings.”) Here we get a realistically mixed response. Some people want to take advantage of Woody, cashing in on his success. Many others are genuinely happy for him, and hope he will enjoy his new-found cash.

Kate and Ross eventually join the family gathering in Hawthorne. Kate visits the cemetery with Woody and David. Her crudeness about her late sister-in-law shocks David. Woody silently endures it.

David gets revelations about his father and mother from other people. Some revelations are good. Others are very bad. The vicious Ed Pegram (played very believably by Stacy Keach) reveals that before David’s conception Woody had been engaged in an extra-marital affair with a “half-breed” Indian, and had wanted to divorce Kate. All this is news to David.

Kate, frequently angry with Woody, comes to his defense when one branch of the family claims Woody owes them some of his winnings. Here we get one of the few uses of the f-word, as she sets the record straight about who owes whom.

In one extended part of the movie, Woody, Kate, Ross, and David visit the dilapidated home place of the Grant clan. They see the room where Woody’s brother died at age two. Kate snidely says that the house looks about in the same condition Woody’s mother kept it years ago. The place is falling apart. Life brings hard changes.

Later the four are still touring the countryside. Ross and David, to get revenge on Ed Pegram, steal back the old air compressor Pegram has stolen from Woody years ago. But they are at the wrong house. They hurriedly turn around and return the air compressor, just as the innocent owners are returning to their home.

Cole and Bart the Mensa rejects mask themselves and rough up Woody and David outside a bar, stealing the letter announcing the million dollar winnings. Alas, even they are bright enough to see that there are no winnings. David readily understands who has stolen the letter. When he returns to their home, the brothers are offended that there is not going to be a million dollars. They have thrown the letter away.

David and Woody return to the scene of the crime, trying to find the missing letter. No success. David suggests they take a break. They enter a bar, where they find Ed Pegram reading the letter to the hilarity of the other denizens of the bar. Now they all know what a fool Woody has been. Woody quietly takes the letter back, and folds it up and leaves. David starts to follow him, but reconsiders. He turns back and slugs Ed Pegram on the head. (If you are unable to rejoice that Ed Pegram gets a fist to the face, “You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din.”) No bar fight follows. Shaking his wounded fist, David rejoins his father.

His father has a dizzy spell, and they make another trip to a hospital. They are going to return to Billings. Woody agrees.

Except that in his inner soul he has not agreed. David wakes from his chair in the hospital room to find that his father is missing. Once again Woody is walking toward Lincoln.

David tracks him down and picks him up. They head for Lincoln. They arrive at the address on the letter. The young woman waiting on them types the numbers on the letter into the computer. There is no off the charts miracle. The numbers don’t match the million dollar prize. Woody has not won a million dollars. They start to leave, but the woman offers them either a seat cushion or a cap. Woody chooses a cap. It says “Prize Winner.”

As Woody goes outside, the (very polite, friendly) woman says that they occasionally have other people who come for their possible prize. Does Woody suffer from Alzheimer’s? David says that it’s just that “He believes things that people tell him.”

David starts to drive them home, but warns his father that he wants to make a couple stops on the way. At the first stop, he goes inside while his father waits in the car. When he gets back, he tells his father that the truck in front of them is Woody’s. It is not exactly new, being five years old, but it is a very good used truck. David has put his father’s name on the title. He has traded in his car for the truck. (Possibly adding a good deal more payment for the truck, via credit card, although we are not told this.)

They make a second stop. This time David emerges with a new air compressor, which is loaded in back of the truck.

They resume their journey. In Hawthorne, David stops the truck and tells his father he can drive. The road is clear of traffic. Woody drives through Hawthorne. He tells David to get down. David obligingly hunkers down on the floorboard, and Woody makes his way through the town where they had mocked him. Only a few people see him, but one of them is (providentially, we may say) the vicious Ed Pegram with his wounded head.

Outside of Hawthorne they stop, change places, and David is once again driving. They resume the journey back to Billings. The picture fades to black.

This is a movie about a United States that is wounded and dying. The ravishing beauty of the countryside (even in black and white) is contrasted with the confusion of the lives of many of the people. At one time the protagonists drive by a simple but handsome Christian church building. But the Christianity of the heartland is largely a “whiff from an empty bottle,” as one famous phrase has it, just as is the Christianity of the rest of the U.S.

The family of Woody and Kate may have had some sort of Christian background. (At the cemetery there are Lutheran and Catholic sections.) But the children have not really been raised to believe anything about Christianity. Ross says to David of his father, early on in the movie, “He never gave a s— about you and me.” Woody’s was not a mean desertion of his children; he just did what he wanted and if that was self-indulgent, well, so be it. David knew at age six or eight that his father was an alcoholic.

The family has been profoundly wounded. But among the father, mother, and two sons, we are glad to see family solidarity of a reasonable sort. Ross is correct that his father had not cared enough about the boys, but Ross later rises to the defense of his family just as did Kate and David in times of crisis.

There is sadness here. The future looks dim. Woody has his truck (which he quite properly will not be permitted to drive on the roads of Billings). He has a new air compressor. David has shown himself to be generous of nature, and we have come to care for him deeply. But will he understand that if you are going to lie down with a woman you need to marry her? We have no sign that he has begin to think his life through from a biblical perspective. Except that he has indeed honored his father. His father is a profoundly flawed man, but David has honored him. That is a good start.

The performances, even of very small parts, are consistently excellent, for which the director surely must deserve some credit. He had a thoughtful script with which to work. The movie-makers probably have no clue that a dying out of biblical Christianity is the root cause of the problems of these dysfunctional families. But they are not making fun of heartland Americans. They have given us a bleak movie, but one with a few gleams of hope and humor. At the worst, surely they are making us think.

DVDs of “Nebraska” can be obtained for a very reasonable price. Today I saw used copies available for as low as $5.33 (sales tax extra) at Amazon.

If you can stand the vulgarities–every person must suit himself–“Nebraska” is a thought-provoking and moving film. It is the kind of film which two or three like-minded people could watch and discuss and enjoy together. But it is certainly not a film for everyone. I’m glad I have seen it three times, and if I keep on living there will probably come a time when I will see it again.

Today I want to discuss a bleak, relatively unknown British movie entitled “Nil By Mouth.” It came out in 1997, garnered multiple awards, and only three years ago was voted the 21st best of all British films. So it has not escaped notice, although it is not terribly famous.

The first thing I need to make clear is that this movie is definitely not for everyone. It is dark; horrible and depressing things happen. The language is incredibly vulgar. At one time it was the heavyweight champeen of the world in uses of the f-word in its various forms–428 by one count. It was subsequently surpassed in that regard by “Summer of Sam,” but when it comes to utterances per minute of film it still may hold pride of place even half a generation after its debut. So consider yourself forewarned. This is not family viewing, nor is it viewing for a lot of adults. Count the cost.

“Nil By Mouth” is very bleak. I first heard of the film years ago, not long after its release. It sounded like it might be interesting. It was written and directed and produced by Gary Oldman. I think Gary Oldman first came to my attention as the corrupt DEA agent Norman Stansfield in the 1994 film “The Professional.” He played a deliriously and murderously evil man, and I was impressed with his performance. “The Professional” is another bleak film laced with bad language–again not for everyone. (It is also a love story, and love survives even after much violence and death. I repeat: not for everyone.)

“Nil By Mouth” was inspired by the facts of Gary Oldman’s own life. His father was an alcoholic who deserted the family when young Gary was seven.

The discussion which follows will give away part of the plot.

The working class family in “Nil By Mouth” is hugely dysfunctional. Raymond (Ray Winstone) is a drinker, and abusive to his wife Valerie (Kathy Burke). He beats her savagely at one point in the film. As a result she miscarries. She decides to leave him. Kathy’s brother Billy is a drug addict and is likely headed for prison. (Bullseye.) The plot holds together logically, but chaos is the way of life of all these people, and is the true star of the show. Among friends and family, there is no one who has more than a faint clue as to how life could be and should be lived.

It all plays out in unrelieved misery. Kathy and Ray are back together at the end, but we know it will probably be only a temporary peace. More alcohol abuse, more beatings, more drug use are the way the smart money is betting.

What is the value of this film? Well, this really is how life goes on in a very large subsection of British society. If you think I am kidding, please read Theodore Dalrymple’s masterpiece, Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass (2001) which came out just four years after “Nil By Mouth.” It confirms that the behavior in the film is the behavior that goes on in real life for many people in the England of our era. (We in the U.S. have no such problems, of course.)

Gary Oldman, born March 21, 1958, escaped his environment and is “regarded as one of the greatest actors of his generation” (Wikipedia). Well, he sort of escaped, anyway. He has been married five times; that’s not an encouraging sign. He, like his father, became an alcoholic. It seems he is in recovery, living a teetotal lifestyle now, and quite willing to praise Alcoholics Anonymous for being crucial to his sobriety. So he escaped, but not without lingering demons.

Kathy Burke won the Best Actress award at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival for her portrayal of Valerie. It was well-deserved, and the other players in the film are also superb. The film won, or was nominated for, many awards. However, it is not surprising that so celebrated a film nevertheless runs under the radar of great fame. It is too depressing to gain a large audience. I have seen it only twice, and I suspect it will be quite a while before I get the nerve to watch it again. Or maybe twice in my life will prove enough.

The main takeaway for me is that once you give up the principles of Christianity, the elevator only runs down. These people need to anchor themselves in Christ. But of course that option is never considered.

I don’t necessarily “recommend” the film to anyone else. It is extremely well done, but hard to watch (and to listen to, given the language employed). Understand what you are getting yourself in for if you decide to watch.

“Nil By Mouth” DVDs are not cheap. It will cost you close to $20.00 for a copy at Amazon. Or you can just read Life at the Bottom, which you can find for about $10.00, also at Amazon. The book and the movie are telling the same sad story. The fictional movie wonderfully shows us the consequences of the worldview ruling and ruining countless lives. We see on the screen the world that Theodore Dalrymple describes in print.

Jesus Christ understood the value of fiction in helping us understand real life–thus the parables. He was able to tell his stories without the use of vulgar language, but then I suppose we might agree that He was a greater artist than Gary Oldman, gifted though the latter certainly is.

That is the first of three bleak films I want to review. It is also the bleakest of the three. In weeks to come I hope to discuss “Nebraska” and “Detachment.”

What is hormegeddon? Well, it is a play on words, for one thing. We have all heard about Armageddon, right? We may be a little bit vague on the exact meaning, but we have a rough idea. Here is what Wikipedia says, which is close enough for us to go on with:

‘Most traditions interpret this Bible prophecy to be symbolic of the progression of the world toward the “great day of God, the Almighty” in which God pours out his just and holy wrath against unrepentant sinners, led by Satan, in a literal end-of-the-world final confrontation. Armageddon is the symbolic name given to this event based on scripture references regarding divine obliteration of God’s enemies.’

So, sort of “a bad day at Black Rock,” at least for some people.

Hormegeddon is a word apparently made up by Bill Bonner, to talk about disasters of a financial nature. The cover of the book features a picture of an atomic bomb exploding. We might be heading for that magnitude of disaster, because of the policies we insist on following. Hormegeddon is Mr. Bonner’s “shorthand way of describing what happens when you have too much of a good thing in a public policy context.” (p. 6)

Hormegeddon: How Too Much of a Good Thing Leads to Disaster, was published in 2014 by Bill Bonner. Mr. Bonner heads a successful financial firm. But more fundamentally he is a thoughtful and intelligent guy who likes to think about how the world is put together.

He says Hormegeddon has “a modest ambition: to catch a faint glimmer of truth.” (p. 5) Actually, the glimmer is there, but I think it is more than faint. He has told us a lot of very true things. If we listened we as a nation could avoid disasters. But, as he points out early on, who ever listens to good advice?

Napoleon, for example, had enjoyed a spectacular military career. He decided to invade Russia. His aide-de-camp, obviously a supporter of Napoleon, knew that was a mistake.

“He knew better. He had actually been to Russia. Napoleon was the one who sent him there as France’s ambassador to St. Petersburg. He knew invading Russia was a bad idea. He warned the emperor of the terrible weather, the bad roads, and the savage people. He begged him not to go. It would be the ruin of France, he said.

“The Emperor ignored him and a few months later there they both were, freezing their rear ends off as they fled the smoldering ruins of Moscow.

“We have a chart in our library at home that shows what happened next. It records the temperature dropping to minus 30 degrees centigrade…as the size of the French army dropped along with it. Soldiers burned down barns to try to get warm, but many of them froze. Many of those who survived the cold got shot by the Russian army while still others were attacked by partisans on the roads, packs of wolves in the forests, and prisoners the state had released into the city streets. If that didn’t get them, they starved to death. Napoleon entered Russia with 300,000 troops. Only 10,000 got out.

“I told this story to my kids over and over again as they were growing up. And I can tell you with some confidence that it has had beneficial effects. None of my children will ever invade Russia. They won’t make that mistake!” (p. 3)

Food, he points out, is a very good thing, and necessary. But if we eat too much, the benefit goes down, and the bad consequences go up. “You feel bad. You look worse.” (p. 7) Life expectancy is cut.

He asks himself when do nations begin to throw their weight around and begin to act like empires? “‘When they can,’ we answered.” (p. 9) This is almost a throwaway line, but this insight is extremely important. I doubt if he has read Leopold Kohr’s wonderful The Breakdown of Nations, but Kohr made the same point. If the U.S. would look in the mirror, we would see that we have fallen into the trap warned against by Kohr/Bonner.

Mr. Bonner gives an example of what he calls “‘public thinking.'” A man making conversation at an investment conference responded to the fact that the Bush administration wanted to invade Iraq.

‘”I guess we’ll have to go in and clean that place up,” he said.

‘Had he ever been to Iraq? Had he ever met an Iraqi? Did he speak the language? Where was the detailed, specific, precise real knowledge that you would need to make sense of it all? What, exactly, was unclean about Iraq? And how would this lack of hygiene be scrubbed up by a foreign invasion?

‘A million nuances, an infinite number of real ‘facts’ based on experience and direct observation, a whole universe of assumptions, misapprehensions, muddled thinking, all reduced to a single phrase. And that, there, is ‘public thinking.” (p. 23)

Gosh, I wonder if we in the U.S. conservative/Christian community might ever have been involved in such public thinking? Oh, probably not. But I digress.

Mr. Bonner points out how difficult it is to reverse bad policy, because “predatory sub-groups” benefit from bad policies, and defend the bad policies’ continued existence with fervor. He calls such people zombies. (p. 12) It is a favorite word with him, and summarizes the situation perfectly. The people that live on tax money and produce nothing of value, are indeed zombies. But try getting rid of them!

Mr. Bonner points out how dishonest are the numbers given for inflation. Numbers?

“But in North America as in South America, the quants work over the numbers as if they were prisoners at Guantanamo. Cristina [Fernandez de Kirchner] is right. The numbers all wear orange jump suits. The Feds are the guards. Waterboard them a few times and the numbers will tell you anything you want to hear.” (p. 43)

Such sentences are quite typical of Mr. Bonner’s writing style. Not only does he have great insights to make, he quite often makes them with superb humor. This reminds me of the gifted writer Bill Kauffman. Both men seem to have an approximate attitude which might go something like this: “Hey, just because unprincipled scoundrels are running things and hurting all of us and quite frequently ruining (or even ending) lives, doesn’t mean we have to be grumpy about it.” This type of attitude is an inspiration to me–at least aspirationally. Let’s at least try to salvage a giggle or two out of the nonsense these scumbags put upon us. No need to be bitter about it all. (Remember, I did say “aspirationally.”)

Here is another bit of humor. People who want a truly free market economy are pretty rare.

“Even those who call themselves friends say nasty things about it when its back is turned. Believers and supporters are so few that they could all probably be rounded up and gunned down in an afternoon.” (p. 170)

Funny–and probably exactly accurate.

These few words above just scratch the surface of the value of Hormegeddon. Anyone, and I do mean anyone, who wants to begin to think honestly (about economics, but also just about life in general) will greatly benefit from reading Hormegeddon–and be entertained as he reads. Mr. Bonner is not a quant working over the numbers. He is a man trying to give us a faint glimmer of truth–and succeeding perhaps far beyond what he might have hoped. May his tribe increase.

Bill Bonner publishes an Internet daily column under the title “Bill Bonner’s Diary.” Or the name “Diary of a Rogue Economist” will probably work as well, if you start searching for it.

Hormegeddon is a superb book of 298 pages, still readily available on the Internet, and for a pittance. Today I found several used paperback copies available at AbeBooks for the astonishing price of $3.74 (free shipping, but sales tax will be additional). $3.74! Is this a great country or what?!

The Bagthorpe Saga was the creation of Helen Cresswell, an English writer of children’s books. She actually wrote more than 100 books! (Only ten are about the Bagthorpes.) She was born July 11, 1934 and died Sept. 26, 2005, at age 71, of ovarian cancer. Her marriage lasted about 32 years before it was “dissolved.” (Wikipedia) Here is how Wikipedia describes the Bagthorpe Saga:

“The saga follows the farcical, satirical and blackly comic lives of the eccentric, ultra-competitive, friendless, relentlessly self-absorbed and largely disloyal Bagthorpe family, who live at Unicorn House in the fictional village of Passingham, near the small market town of Aysham.”

Pretty close. The books are written for children, but I think most adults would would enjoy them–that is, if you enjoy dark humor. The ten books in the series are written over 24 years. I have read nine of them, while the tenth is notoriously elusive (read expensive) and so far I have not read it. I haven’t given up. Checking the inside cover, I see that I have read each of the first four, three times, while once each for the next five.

However, not all the Bagthorpes are self-absorbed and disloyal. Jack, age 11, is the third child of four. The other three, William (16), Tess (13), and Rosie (8) [all ages are as the first book opens, and I am sure about only three of them], all have specialties–often called “Strings to their Bows.” They are legends in their own minds. But Jack is “ordinary.” Hence the title of the first book in the series, Ordinary Jack. Jack, moreover, has a more kindly nature than his siblings, or his father. (His Uncle Parker calls Jack ‘”a pearl among swine.”‘) Most of us readers will probably find ourselves identifying with Jack–a boy ‘”who hasn’t got anything to boast about.”‘ (p. 6)

Jack has a dog, Zero. His name seems to sum up his accomplishments. Zero is even known to have been chased by cats. However, in volume two, Absolute Zero, Zero turns the tables on the arrogant Bagthorpes. You can find out exactly how if you read the book.

Beyond the four children, the household consists of the father Henry, the mother Laura, and the grandfather and grandmother. The grandfather is “selectively deaf”–choosing not to hear everything going on (showing great practical wisdom), while the grandmother is a force for chaos. Laura writes a newspaper advice column. Henry is a semi-successful writer of television plays. He is often sarcastic.

Uncle Russell Parker has married Celia, sister to Henry. Uncle Parker is financially successful, loves Celia, and annoys Henry constantly. Uncle Parker and Celia have a child, Daisy (age 4). Daisy has a genius for creating mayhem, and often joins forces with the grandmother in bringing misery to the lives of others. Daisy often blames Arry Awk, her imaginary friend, for the horrors she unleashes.

Mrs. Fosdyke comes in to work daily for the Bagthorpes. Here is one description of her, from Ordinary Jack:

“Mrs. Fosdyke had to a fine art the ability to move around fast without actually doing very much. Mr. Bagthorpe said a lot of people in the army had this gift, and in the civil service, but that it was rare in a Daily.” (p. 38)

In book three Daisy put some maggots in a box of chocolates for Mrs. Fosdyke. This does not go over well with Mrs. Fosdyke, as you can imagine. Daisy is encouraged to write an apology to Mrs. Fosdyke, which she does.

‘”Dear Miz Fozzy I am sorry you got my magots in your choclots and pleese can I have them back becos I reely love them and can play with them instead of bruthers and sisters becos mummy says I cant have anny bruthers and sisters. I hop your teef is beter and we al reely and trully luv you we reely do and reely mean it that we luv you. Daisy.”‘ (Bagthorpes Unlimited, p. 114)

In volume four, Daisy is described to Mrs. Fosdyke as ‘”original”‘ by Mrs. Bagthorpe. When Mrs. Fosdyke is unimpressed by that description, Mrs. Bagthorpe ungrudgingly adds ‘”tiresome,”‘ but Jack sees that for Mrs. Fosdyke, “even this description came nowhere near doing justice to the case.” (p. 59)

One of themes of the Bagthorpe family appears on the cover of volume three: ‘”If A Thing’s Worth Doing, It’s Worth Overdoing.”‘ The Bagthorpes have a lot to do, and thus a lot to overdo.

I checked out the availability of the first four books in the series. I looked only at AbeBooks, usually the best place for such a search (but not always). The first two are very reasonably priced. Ordinary Jack was only $4.97 total (sales tax extra), Absolute Zero even less at $4.19 (sales tax extra). Volumes three and four started to climb in price, at about $10.72 or $10.76 before sales tax, shipping again included. No need to panic, however. Try Ordinary Jack and then Absolute Zero and you will know if you feel inclined to follow the series further.

There is actually a 6-part television series adaptation of the first two books. I have not seen that yet, but will explore its availability and price.

The Bagthorpe Saga is fun for children and adults–well at least for some children and adults. The humor can be dark. Jack and Zero are our ordinary allies as we watch the chaos unfold. I for one have enjoyed looking on from a safe distance.

Does the Deep State even exist? If it exists, what is it?

Today I will spend just a few words mulling over the Deep State. These thoughts are preliminary, at best. First, let’s look at what Wikipedia says about the Deep State:

“A deep state (from Turkish: derin devlet), also known as a state within a state, is a type of governance made up of networks of power operating independently of a state’s political leadership in pursuit of their own agenda and goals. In popular usage, the term carries overwhelmingly negative connotations, although this does not reflect scholarly understanding. Potential sources for deep state organization include organs of state, such as the armed forces or public authorities (intelligence agencies, police, secret police, administrative agencies, and government bureaucracy). A deep state can also take the form of entrenched career civil servants acting in a non-conspiratorial discretionary manner to further their agency mission or the public good, sometimes in contravention of the current political administration. The intent of a deep state can include continuity of the state itself, job security for its members, enhanced power and authority, and the pursuit of ideological or programmatic objectives. It can operate in opposition to the agenda of elected officials, by obstructing, resisting, and subverting their policies, conditions and directives.”

[Note: supposedly the overwhelmingly negative connotations do “not reflect scholarly understanding.” So, think for yourself. Overwhelmingly negative connotations works for me, but it may not work for you.]

I think the U.S. is definitely largely in the control of the Deep State. This does not necessarily mean that there is a conscious conspiracy on the part of individuals or groups to be the Deep State. Conspiracies do exist, I think. But it seems to me that the Deep State has come about in a kind of natural progression, with lots of people acting the way they act for simple and understandable reasons.

“Occam’s razor is the principle that, of two explanations that account for all the facts, the simpler one is more likely to be correct,” to quote an Internet definition of Occam’s razor.

I think the Deep State has come about because lots of people want to protect (and increase) their large salaries, and their large prestige. Plus human nature is that unless we really watch ourselves, we enjoy pushing other people around. And we like to think well of ourselves, and like to assume that anything we do is automatically good because we do it and we are naturally good. All these factors are motivating people in the Deep State.

I looked up a the money involved in just a few government agencies or government responsibilities. The FBI has a budge of $9.6 billion, the CIA $15 billion, the Department of Energy $31.7 billion, the Department of Education $68 billion. The Department of Agriculture dispenses $146 billion. Federal welfare payments are $668 billion; state and local payments drive the total figure over $1 trillion. The budget for the military is $738 billion. (Industry joins the military to form the military-industrial complex; both like huge budgets. Thus we are “shocked, shocked” to find that both are part of the Deep State.) The financial services people are all private people, but they too are part of the Deep State, because they manipulate the system so as to receive large amounts of bailout money.

All the above are involved in the Deep State. They want their huge salaries. They want jobs that don’t really require production, but which bring a lot of money for themselves. There is prestige. If you are deputy director of this or that, you are somebody special.

George Orwell warned us: “the object of power is power.” Countless people like to be powerful, and like pushing other people around. (What does the CIA do except try to push other people around?)

Look again at the paragraph detailing the budget of various government agencies. What do you get for your $68 billion spent on, for just one example, education? You get zero, or rather less than zero. You could teach kids to read, write, add, subtract, multiply, and divide, for a few hundred dollars a month. The kids would perform better, probably hugely better, than they do now. The $68 billion just means thousands of people are removed from the possibility of doing productive work, by being in the Department of Education.

Military? Countless idiotic foreign interventions, with more tens of thousands removed from the possibility of doing productive work. Are they defending this country? Of course not. They are making this country more hated. Our country is defended by two huge oceans, and by a sparsely populated Canada on the north, and by non-military power Mexico on the south. Mexico may conquer us, because we refuse to enforce our border, but that won’t be because we were militarily defeated.

One could go on and on. We are getting nothing, or rather far less than nothing, for our money. The denizens of the Deep State don’t need to come up with a conspiracy to want to run the country. They just instinctively support everything that enlarges their budget, and instinctively oppose anything that threatens their budget.

There are people who are part of the Deep State, but there are also countless tens of thousands of what I would call fellow travelers of the Deep State. Public education teachers and administrators are fellow travelers. Their instinct tells them that a large budget for public education is helping preserve and possibly increase their income. So they instinctively vote for people who want to keep spending more money for public education.

Most of the people in Mainstream Media are fellow travelers of the Deep State. Why? I am not completely sure. To make a guess, as enemies of God they hate freedom and responsibility and truth. They prefer lies, they fear truth. It is instinctive for them to suck up to power, rather than to do the hard work of pointing out how those wielding power are doing evil.

None of this has happened in a corner, as Paul would say. We ordinary people let it happen. The church? Please, don’t make me laugh. The church has decided that biblical Christianity has no application to real life. Therefore, it follows naturally that the state, including the Deep State, can do whatever it wants. I even know of one church which sent one (probably two, actually) men into the Deep State. Of course with the church’s blessing.

With Nehemiah, we lament,

‘”Behold, we are slaves today,
And as to the land which Thou didst give to our fathers to eat of its fruit and its bounty,
Behold, we are slaves on it.”‘ (Nehemiah 9:36)

The Deep State exists, it is parasitic, it instinctively does evil, it thinks well of itself and holds the rest of us in contempt. Sadly, it has good reason to hold us in contempt! We preferred our pietism, our antinomianism, our public education, our Social Security, our Medicare, our unemployment compensation, our this and our that. Many of us are fellow travelers of the Deep State, and most of us are compromised one way or another. So we are slaves today in a land in which we were once largely free.

The Deep State is the enemy of freedom. But to defeat it, we are going to have to love freedom and responsibility and truth. To do that is simple but by no means easy–or we would have done it already.

This one had been on my bookshelf for a while. I got to it finally, and am glad I did. The book is Conquests and Cultures: An International History (1998), by Thomas Sowell.

Thomas Sowell is a black economist/scholar/thinker who has stood bravely for the free market and personal responsibility, for about 60 years. He was born June 30, 1930, and is still living at age 90 as I write. He has published around 30 books. Here is a link to his website: https://www.tsowell.com/.

Dr. Sowell was born in the South, and for a long time had little interaction with white people. Eventually as a child he was taken to Harlem. As late as about age 30 he still considered himself a Marxist. Then the light bulb gradually went on, and he was soon a champion of free market economics. He has been fighting the good fight ever since, for his people and against the race hustlers. His book A Man of Letters (still my favorite among the eight or so of his books I have read) will be very enlightening to anyone who thinks race hustling is a recent phenomenon. Dr. Sowell has been fighting that battle for a long time. He wants to help his own black people, but he knows the way to do that is to tell the truth and to have high standards of scholarship and behavior. A Man of Letters was published in 2007. I have a blog post dedicated to it on November 23, 2017. It will also be featured in my forthcoming book, Books I Have Loved (dv).

Conquests and Cultures is the concluding volume of a trilogy. which also comprises Race and Culture (1994) and Migrations and Cultures (1996). I have read Race and Culture, but not yet Migrations and Cultures.

Conquests and Cultures was not squeezed out in a day. This is the work of many years of research. The footnotes make clear that Dr. Sowell has read very widely before he has written. Anyone wanting further to pursue the topics he covers will have countless sources to examine, simply by looking at the footnotes.

Conquests and Cultures did at least one thing for me: it helped me see that there is a big picture. Sometimes there have been enormous injustices one group of people enforce upon another. But Dr. Sowell helps us see that with the injustices there very often come benefits to the people originally injured. This is in no way to excuse the injustices! But we can take heart from the fact that along with the injustices, quite often in the long run the conquered people also receive benefits.

That is encouraging. Also, we see that a people can be down, but not necessarily out. A people known for their backwardness, can over the course of time become a people known for their large contributions to world history. Scotland stands out in that regard (pp. 52-63).

The role of geography in how world history unfolds, is another point which I had not considered. The presence or absence of navigable rivers, or of natural ports, can make a huge difference in the economic prospects of a people.

What Dr. Sowell calls human capital is perhaps the most important form of capital there is. A people willing to learn, to work hard, to save and invest rather than to live for the moment, has an enormous advantage over people who do not have that self-discipline. Natural resources are of course a great blessing, but human capital is the greatest resource of all. Here is a small snippet on human capital:

“Human capital must not be confused with formal education, which is just one facet of it, and still less with the growth of an intelligentsia, which may be either a positive or a negative influence on economic development and political stability” (p. 349)

Dr. Sowell goes on to show how the intelligentsia, educated but not productive, can be a serious problem to any people. I would ask, is this the situation we have now in the U.S.? Our intelligentsia for the most part is comprised of people who have earned a few university degrees, and who consider themselves an intellectual and spiritual elite, but who contribute far more problems than they do value. The artificial (government) support for higher education has helped raise up an intellectual “elite” of people who would be better off working at jobs that produced something we really need.

Susceptibility to disease has been a large factor in world history. Here, the experience of the Americas and Africa have been exactly opposite to one another. In North and South America, the white man brought diseases that largely wiped out the indigenous people. Africa was completely different. There the white man ran into diseases which he could not handle; the white man was the one to die from disease rather than the African.

Another point which is very important, but which we often don’t consider, is the great value of just laws. When England became known for the fairness of its laws and its courts, that encouraged European countries to risk investing in England. This is logical. Just laws are of benefit to everyone. That starts with the people living under them, but the benefits do not end there.

In his concluding chapter, An Overview, Dr. Sowell has this to say about racism:

‘”Racism” as a blanket explanation of intergroup differences is not simply an over-rated explanation. It is itself a positive hindrance to a focus on the acquisition of the human capital or cultural capital needed to rise economically and socially. If there is any central theme that emerges from the histories examined in these three volumes, it is that the cultural capital of a people is crucial to their economic and social advancement, whether that people is a racial minority, a nation-state, or a whole civilization. In some cases, the factors inhibiting the development of this human capital have been geographical or historical. But they need not include self-inflicted ideologies or ideologies congenial to sympathetic outsiders, whose sympathies may prove to be more of a handicap than the hostility of others.’ (p.368)

Black race hustlers and their white fellow-travelers would do well to consider the implications of that paragraph. They won’t, of course. Truth is hard, virtue-signalling easy.

The above review barely scratches the surface of the many things to be learned from this book. It is thought-provoking and informative.

Unhappily, the book is not easy to find at a reasonable price. The best I could come up with today was $18.80 (free shipping, but sales tax will be extra) at AbeBooks. Inter-library loan would allow one to read the book for free–but with the painful caveat that one could not underline the many passages that cry out for such action.