Chateau Lloyd

Over the last few weeks I've intermittently been watching Nobel House, a 1988 miniseries based on the best-selling James Clavell novel.

The book was originally set in the 1960s, but was seamlessly brought into the late 1980s, and as such the 1997 handover of the Crown Colony to the Peoples' Republic of China loomed large.

This is a classic tale of corporate raiding ala Wall Street or Dynasty, but with a unique Asian twist.  Hong Kong is a fascinating place, and it dominated Clavell's thoughts for good reason.

In many ways, it is very much of its time, a Miami Vice set in the far east.  There are multiple levels of intrigue and of course remarkable shifts of fortune.  Pierce Brosnan, fresh from his Remington Steele work, is outstanding as Ian Dunross, heir and CEO to Noble House, a British firm founded along with the colony during the Opium Wars.  Noble House has moved on from opium and has weathered the Pacific War and Chinese Civil War, but struggles amidst the wild west 1980s environment of corporate raiders.  As the "Tai Pan" of Noble House, Dunross holds a special place in Hong Kong society, which is modern, cosmopolitan, but still beholden to Chinese traditions.

One of these involves a favor granted by a previous Tai Pan, signified by a broken coin.  Amidst corporate intrigue, the possession of this favor becomes a tale unto itself, and the notion of a modern multi-national business being locked into such agreements seems impossible today.  There is of course an American angle, which is naturally of the Gordon Gekko "greed is good" mentality, but one of the joys of the show is watching the naiive Americans get completely lost in the maze of Hong Kong corporate politics.

Opposing Brosnan is none other than John Rhys-Davies, a rival CEO pledged to destroy Noble House, and I took great joy in this show of Welsh-Irish animosity.  Go Celts!  It is my firm intention to snag this on DVD because it was fun to watch and I'm sure I missed a few things.

What is one to think of the British Establishment's fanatical attempt to stamp out pro-life prayers?

Even silent prayer is being treated as a criminal act.  Setting aside the fact that the constables should sure have more pressing matters, does this obsession with stopping prayer not attest to its potency?

British society is far more secular and far less Christian than ours.  The Church of England is a hollow shell, reduced to holding raves and silent discos in its otherwise empty cathedrals.  Catholicism is slowly returning, but Catholics remain a small minority.

Note also that there is almost no part of the Establishment that objects to abortion.  The "Conservative" Tories are just as supportive of it as Labour.

All of which is to say that there is no rational explanation for caring whether random people pause on the sidewalk near an abortion mill and think things.  Atheists must surely regard these antics as pathetic, pointless, and silly, and therefore no noticed should be taken of them.

But notice is being taken, a lot of notice, to the point that this is regarded as a serious matter regarding a strong police response.

More than anything else, this convinces me of the power of prayer, and its importance in spiritual warfare.  Otherwise, why would anyone care?  Clearly someone can sense what is going on, and they want this praying business stopped right now.

Our British cousins like to pretend that they are the wellspring of liberal democratic government, but they also have a sordid history of killing people for their religious beliefs.  The British Empire emancipated slaves before Catholics, and even today, Catholics are subject to constant slander and abuse.  Just about every British period piece shows Catholics as corrupt, self-flagellating weirdos.  (Seriously, they insert scenes of self-flagellation for no reason.  It's weird.)

Clearly the slow growth of the Catholic faith and the restoration of ancient shrines like Our Lady of Walsingham is raising some hackles and as with other persecutions, I think this will also ultimately prove self-defeating.

Creating new martyrs has never worked.  If burning people at the stake failed to stamp out British Catholicism, harassing pensioners is hardly going to move the needle.  But what it will do is cause people to wonder why these victims are so willing to suffer for their cause.  Why do they chose a prison cell over the comfort of their home? 

Once the questions start, people become more open to the answers that they previously overlooked.

The sordid details emerging from the arrest of music impresario Sean Combs (variously known as "Puff Daddy" and "P. Diddy") highlights the fact that the hedonism exemplified by Hollywood is much worse than the public knows.

This should not be surprising since we have a steady stream of escapees with lurid stories to tell.  Show business has always been sordid and the refuge of perverts, but in large part because of residual World War II patriotism and shrewd marketing, the film industry maintained the illusion that while their morality was certainly looser than that of the mainstream, it was still within the outer bounds of decency.

The infamous casting couch, for example, was in large part consensual.  Yes, young women (and men!) could be pressured to trade sex for money and fame, perhaps even compelled to, but entertainment is always a Faustian bargain.  

To put it another way, if your a sexually chaste, modest person, show business isn't for you.  It belongs to the amoral and ambitious.

For a while, folks thought that there was a floor to the depravity, but as with every human society freed from moral restraint, there are no naturally stopping points.  Adultery yields to orgies which include sodomy and then rape, incest and pederasty all become possible because there is no underlying morality to deny them.

It's not surprising or implausible that Combs could launch massive orgies involving every possible vice and that much of Hollywood attended them.  Like the ancient pagan cults, membership was a mark of distinction and initiation into the sacred mysterious necessarily involved moral outrages to bind oneself to the group.  This the same thing, and it is no accident that the most closely held secret in the world is the Epstein client list.  They protect their own.

For the first time in a long time, I'm involved in a tabletop game of Dungeons and Dragons.  We're using the 5th edition rules, but I'm running an old "Basic" era dungeon.  It works surprisingly well, and I'm sure the similarities are not accidental.

This is not the first time I've done retro-D&D gaming.  I did the same in the 1990s, and it was a hoot.

So when it was time to start a new campaign, our group talked about what worked and what didn't.  One thing I wanted to try out was playing without a map or figures.

This was how we did it "back in the day."  The miniatures industry was not as fully developed, pre-painted figures were unknown, most terrain was modified from model railroading, so it was a something of a challenge.  The rule books mentioned it, but my group just mapped the dungeon as we went along (mostly to avoid getting lost) and when it came to a battle, the DM described it and we went around the room giving our actions.

There were to advantages to this approach.  The first was that rules disputes about terrain, movement, line-of-sight and so forth were almost non-existent.  If a player could give a good account of what he wanted to do, the DM would allow it, or ask for a roll and players accepted it.   I should note that we rotated DMs, so the party-killing ego-maniac DM was something I had to wait until I was an adult to deal with.

The second advantage is speed.  Combats go very quickly when you cut own the measuring, calculating and min-maxing of movement and facings.  The game is less tactical, but much more immersive as people have to explain what they are doing rather than moving a figure so everyone can see where they are.  It's basically competitive storytelling.

Some might wonder how the rules work in such an environment, and the answer is that some do, some don't and we just work things out as they come up.  

Another simplification is initiative, when always seems to bog down a game.  Even with a small group of players, everyone has to roll, the results have to be compiled, and then people work out their moves, often waiting to see what someone else does or arguing about who should do what.

We've reverted to the old system where there are only two rolls: the party and the monsters.  Whoever has the initiative just moves all at once and as before, the discussion is interactive.  So yes, people can hold their actions, declare if/then situations and coordinate their actions, but it feels less like a wargame.

I obviously like wargaming quite a bit, but there's a limit to what it can do in a role-playing environment.  There's also the tendency for rule-mongering and exploits, and for the encounters to take on a competitive rather than collaborative experience.

A practical advantage is that setup and cleanup is much, much faster.  If you have a dedicated space and leave things set up, it's not much of an issue, but for us, keeping the clutter to a minimum is nice.

I may go back to maps and minis and some point, but right now, I'm not missing them.

It's kind of weird, but I think the case can be made that a once-obscure nerd-dominated roleplaying game has had a profound impact on 21st Century theology.

D&D was once a very fringe activity, the subject of television exposes and my very religious Methodist grandparents confronted me with its evil.  In my own limited way, I showed them that it was just a form of telling adventure stories and that the job of the good guys was to beat up on the bad guys.

By contrast, my Catholic grandparents were not troubled at all, because fighting demons is very much a thing.

Anyway, one of the core rules of the game that has descended down from the 1970s is that while there are such things as objective good and objective evil, the rewards visited to various characters are judged solely on their fidelity to their chosen faith.

That is to say, a worshipper of an evil god, who is obediently evil, will have just as happy an afterlife (in its own fashion) as a good character serving a good god.  Obviously, the celestial realms seemed better - clouds, sunshine, evergreen fields vs brass walls and perpetual torment, but as long as you're the one holding the whip, it's not so bad.

While I doubt Pope Francis can tell the difference between a rogue and ranger, he seems to have bought into the "many paths to salvation trope," which is a bit surprising, given that he hold the keys to heaven.

I mean, it is fully within the Catholic faith to assert that nothing exists without the permission of God, and that the various false faiths and heresies are ultimately serving His divine purpose.  But that isn't to say that - on an individual basis - you're better off in the afterlife if you are part of the Body of Christ than a Wiccan.

The funny thing is, the pope's remarks would have been perfectly in alignment with my pre-conversion mentality.  If we're all trying to get to the same place, what difference does it make in the path we choose?  Moreover, observant Christian girls were far harder to get into the sack than the Wiccan ones.

Still, there is something disturbing in the Vicar of St. Peter spouting the theology of a horny 25-year-old agnostic.  I think the reaction has been muted because 1. Pope Francis is assumed to be a bit off, and no one takes him seriously anymore and 2. the whole world is crumbling, and this is just another example of it.

The most remarkable feature of Francis' late pontificate is how little anyone cares about it.  In a sense, he's achieved true "synodality" insofar as the bishops in priests are too busy waging spiritual warfare on the village/community level to pay much attention to what he says.  I'd love to have a pope who speaks clearly, firmly in defense of Church doctrine, but in the absence of that, I am comforted by the Sacraments and the leadership shown in my diocese and parish.

God truly works in mysterious ways.

As is my wont, yesterday I once again attended the annual reunion of the Michigan State Alumni Band.  I'm quite sore today and have a mild sunburn, but it was a great experience.

I think events like this are vastly underappreciated.  Even people who aren't a part of them, and for whom they are just background noise can take comfort that someone else is still into it.  That was my experience on campus.  The faces change, the buildings move around or are renovated, but the atmosphere is the same.

Tradition and respect for one's elders are cardinal virtues which is why the Great Enemy wants to destroy them.  This is why classic works must be disparaged and the respectful relationship between professor and student must be replaced with accusatory activism.

And yet despite all that, there are deeper bonds that remain.  When 74,000 people clap in unison to the fight song or sway back and forth as the Alma Mater is played, something profound is happening: a collective spirit is being renewed.

To put it another way, the sight of 575 graying people gamely trying to march down a street using moves they learned from 1 to 60 years ago might in some respects seem absurd if not pathetic.  Why would these people still to their late teens and early 20s?

The answer is that they are part of something larger than themselves, and wish to see it preserved, and far from reacting with ridicule at their efforts, the bystanders watch them pass shout praise and encouragement because many of them also treasure that time.

I know that when I watched the Alumni Band form and march as a student, I was somewhat in awe of them.  Back then, the "senior" members were from graduating classes in the 1930s, and I recall a sprightly drum major who could still gamely twirl his baton.  During a pause in play, he was allowed onto the field and did his routine to the roaring approval of the student section.

Time remorselessly advances, and perhaps that's another element in all of this.  The graduating classes are continually dying off, and the current "seniors" were born in the 1940s, graduating in the early 1960s.  My generation is now longer newly-graduated but instead settling into middle age and moving from parent to grandparent.  I marched with the son of one of my contemporaries who followed his father's path into the "student band."

I think this unspoken understanding that all traditions are under attack is why attendance is so high, particularly among younger people, which was not the case when I first participated.

Five years ago I first felt this profound sense of continuity, and it only getting stronger as the years have passed.  Particularly in a contentious election cycle, it was nice to leave all of that behind and focus on family updates, withering commentary on the current student band's defects (a venerable alumni tradition), and of course reminiscing.

Having the team win was merely icing on the cake.

My path from wretched "live and let live" sinner to the Catholic Church was not a direct one. 

My military-issue dog tags chronical the path I took, from "Non-Denom. Christian" to "Lutheran" to "Roman Catholic."

The stopover in Protestantism was no accident.  My mother was raised Catholic and raised me to despise the Church.  My father's parents were very devout Methodists, which meant that they also disliked Catholicism.

With the Church out of the question, I had to go through the alternatives and the process inexorably led to the Tiber.

I say this because I have a great deal of sympathy for Carl Trueman's desire for "good Protestant ethicists."

The problem, as he describes it, is that Protestantism has always relied on a culture of Christianity to sustain it rather than developing its own particularly system of ethics:

Today the situation is far different. In the space of a few decades, the moral intuitions of society have not simply parted company with those of Christianity—they have come to stand in direct opposition to many of them. That changes the pedagogical dynamics of church life. The churches now need to teach Christian ethics more explicitly and more thoroughly, because that is where the wider culture will challenge Christian discipleship most powerfully. Indeed, it is already doing so, and orthodox Protestantism seems ill-equipped to address this.

I agree completely.  The problem is that Protestantism by its very nature is incapable of creating this.  Protestantism was born out of the rejection of Catholic authority, insisting that scripture alone had the answers to all of life's questions.  It went further to insist that each person was entitled to their own interpretation, ensuring that the various denominations were spectacularly ill-equipped to maintain theological discipline within their own denominations.

The result is a continued fracturing of Protestant churches.  Don't like what the leadership says?  Make your own church!

Further complicating matters is the Protestant concept of Jesus Christ as a personal savior, one that denies the need for anything more than worshipper's intent.  Since justification is by faith alone, a family utilizing IVF to create one child at the cost of many has every confidence that it will be forgiven for they (and their children conceived through IVF) believe, and that is all one needs.

Some months ago I attended a Baptist funeral, and all present confidently asserted that the recently departed was "saved" because he believed in Jesus.   This is how you get Yard Sign Calvinism.

That being the case, how does a Protestant ethicist argue that using IVF is evil and will have repercussions in the afterlife?  "Yes, pastor, I suppose that is bad, but we love Jesus, want children and we will raise them to love Him.  Surely, God gave this way to raise a family on purpose!"

Catholics have a much easier time of this because they have a clear ethical system built over centuries.  They understand that good intentions are no excuse for committing acts of evil.  Sometimes what we want isn't what God wants, and this acceptance (which Protestants consider fatalism), provides a much stronger anchor for one's faith and actions.

There is also the fact that American Protestants derive much of their identity from not being Catholic.  They don't kneel before statues, give up meat on Fridays during Lent, fast before Easter or have to confess their sins to a priest in order to be forgiven.

This last element (in my opinion) is one of the biggest differences.  Having to confess sin to another human being is entirely different from silently telling God you're super sorry and promise you won't do it again.  And then doing it again.

Priests ask questions, like: "How often do you sin?"  "Have you confessed this before?"  "Why haven't you given up this sin?"

This is a very effective way to give up sinful behavior.  Sins that had dogged me for decades fell before the piercing questions of my confessors, and the (wholly deserved) shame and guilt motivated me to make life-changes for the better.

I don't see a mechanism within Protestantism that has the same effect because faith alone justifies anything to them.  In my time as a Protestant, I never felt the same sting of conscience that I did as a Catholic.

As Trueman admits, Protestantism was at its strongest when social pressure did the heavy lifting, and absent that advantage, both mainline and evangelicals seem to be struggling to define their ethics.

Until last week, the only Vladimir Nabokov book I read was, for obvious reasons, Lolita.  I suppose it is worth a post on its own merits, but my father, who is a serious Nabokov nerd, said it was not emblematic of his other work.

I therefore decided to read Mary, his first novel but one that only received an English translation after his career was well established.  It is a quirky book, not the most accessible and I found its conclusion to be unsatisfactory.  It's very much a first-try kind of book.

As I often say, you write what you know, and Nabokov wrote of being a Russian emigre in Berlin during the 1920s.  The tale is set in a pension filled with Russians from various walks of life.  The protagonist is Ganin, a young man who served with the "Whites" (counterrevolutionaries) and was evacuated from Crimea.  The story (which is quite short, barely breaking 100 pages) is about him finding renewed motivation to move forward with life via recollections off Mary, whom he hopes to meet soon.

Much of the text is taken up by description, which is precise and sometimes unsettling.  Ganin's physical relationship with Mary is described in some detail, which I'm sure was unusual at the time.  I'm sure some readers might fight it erotic, but it seemed to me that Nabokov was trying to recreate the sensations of the relationship with precision rather than eroticism.

While easy reading, I found the pacing to be slow and was heavily tempted to flip ahead to the end.  That speaks well of the tension, but it induced impatience rather than interest.

I've got some more of his stuff and will reserve judgement until I get deeper into his works.

Five years ago, I almost died.

It was the Tuesday after Labor Day, and I was feeling awful.  The weekend started well, and I had a slight fever on Saturday, but by Sunday it had cleared up.

In the interim my kids managed to break first the washing machine (by overloading it) and then the dryer (by filling it with dripping wet clothes).  With school about to hit high gear, my wife implored me to fix the situati  Ion by Tuesday.

So that's what I did.  I went online, found a local store that had both machines in stock ordered them to be ready for same-day pickup, and set about dismantling the old ones and hauling them out of the basement.  That done, I picked up the replacements (which required two trips), and got them installed and running by 5 p.m.  

Not a bad day's work.

The next morning, I drove the kids to school, and I was not feeling well at all.  I'd already made up my mind to call in sick, but even driving was a strain.    My arms were tingling, my chest was tight, breathing was difficult and by the time I got home, there was an edge of darkness around my eyesight.  I laid down on the floor and suggested my wife might want to dial 911, which she did.

It wasn't a heart attack, though it presented as one.  It was instead an attack of myocarditis, an obscure affliction in those days before Covid "vaccines" spread it far and wide.  The ambulance crew was polite and professional, and I quickly rallied.  After every test imaginable over the next two days, no clear cause for the attack was established.  One of the nurses in the cardiac unit suggested it was a combination of physical exertion, general exhausting and whatever bug or virus I was fighting off.

It was during my convalescence that I began the research for Long Live Death and the pleasure (and success) of that project inspired me to write Walls of Men.

If nothing else, my literary output benefited from those extra five years.

I've also lived to see all my kids finish high school and welcome two wonderful grandchildren into the world.  I've lost a few friends along the way, made new ones, and reconnected with others.  My faith has grown by leaps and bounds, which is kind of surprising because I thought I was in a good place back then.

Maybe I was, but now I'm in a better one.

Death has its own schedule, and no society in history has expended so many resources and developed such extensive technological means to forestall its arrival.  And yet we also are craving it to a greater degree than ever before, murdering unborn babies, harvesting their best parts and encouraging the old, the disabled and the depressed to kill themselves.

It is something of a paradox.  The world is worse than it was five years ago, but maybe that was also necessary to people to return to God.  I notice Mass is filling back up with younger people.  The vocations in my area are strong and healthy.

As for me, I'm more attuned to my health, and have had to reluctantly accept that I'm not in my 30s anymore.  This is a realization that is also a paradox because knowledge of my limitations has made me more reasonable about getting word done and I stress less on things outside my control.

In any event, I think it's a good idea from time to time to pause and consider where we are and what else we could be doing.

Amazon Prime's desecration of J.R.R. Tolkien's work continues with the release of the second season of The Rings of Power.

A stunning (but at the same time predictable) development is the decision to "humanize" the orcs.  Tolkien's villains were cruel, cowardly, cannibalistic monsters who lived a debased existence.  They were a twisted mockery of elves created by Morgoth to serve as the foot soldiers for his war against the Valar.

These creatures immediately struck a nerve in the popular culture and were part of the original elements of Dungeons and Dragons and are now a staple of fantasy environments.

Alas, in our decadence, people have decided that what was once obviously evil must now be seen as good, so just as sodomy is the highest form of sex, so orcs are just misunderstood and must be rehabilitated into yet another People of Color oppressed by white bigoted imperialists.

I've dealt with the whole question of whether they are supposed to be an allegory for actual people, and the short version is "yes and no."  Yes, they represent human vices and were written with bloodthirsty and battle-crazed soldiers of World War I in mind.  No, they are not a racial caricature of anyone.

As the old saying goes: if you hear a "dog whistle," you're the dog.  Anyone who looks at misshapen, homicidal, cannibals who delight in cruelty and says:  "You know who this reminds me of..." is the bigot, not the guy who made them up.

It is yet another milestone on our civilization's downward path, and their utter rejection gives me comfort and hope for the future.