Chateau Lloyd

Yesterday was the Feast of St. Nicholas, more popularly known as Santa Claus.   While reimagined as an elf living at the North Pole, the actual St. Nicholas was a bishop of the Church and some claim he punched out the arch-heretic Arius at the Council of Nicea.

The linked article says that there's no contemporaneous evidence of this, the the oldest source for the story is from the 14th Century.  This is consistent with the scholarly rule of thumb that sources closer to historical events are more accurate.

However, there is one giant caveat here, and that is that often individuals who later become significant, are ignored or diminished in their own time.  In the years afterwards, more information becomes available but this is subsequently lost, and so  all we are left with are more distant recapitulations of those stories.

This trait is akin to how scholars approach prophecy, generally assuming that they are all fake, created by snake-oil salesmen to support their made-up religion rather than honest people who are credulously recording remarkable events. 

For example, if a friend of mine writes down that I correctly predicted in August of 2013 that Michigan State would have an incredible run, there is no reason for anyone to doubt that as he has nothing to gain.  Yet bible scholars would, because (to them) such things are highly unlikely.  Clearly my friend is trying to push a cult or something.

In the bigger picture, this points to how people who ostensibly swear by facts and reason are just as emotional and biased as the religious people they disdain.  One of the reasons I entered the Church and began to take its claims seriously was that the logical contortions to explain away all these well-document events was comical.

Simply insisting that the sum of all knowledge has already been found and that miraculous events - which are meticulously documented - is completely illogical.  

So while it's impossible to prove St. Nick didn't bust Arius' chops, we can't rule it out, either.

While I don't like to follow politics, there is undeniably a link between government action, policies and the spirit realm.  Government can either side with the angels or work for the devil.  The notion that there is some neutral ground where all are free to operate is at best naive and at worst a damnable lie.

Christians across American breathed a sigh of relief that their faith would not be put to more strenuous tests in the near future.  Catholic hospital administrators went to bed free of worrying when and what form of abortion mandate would be imposed on them, and how they would fight it.

Contrast this with the situation in England, where the British Government demands control over the very souls of its subjects, demanding that silent, otherwise undiscernible prayer be banned in certain places.

This is of course nothing new for the British, who ran a martyrdom factory during the Tudor era.  As a sidebar, the other day I came across a conversation where Protestants observed all the important theological reforms made by the English Reformation, and now necessary they were for the development of Christianity.  I managed to restrain my desire to point out that if they were no necessary, why was torture and death employed to implement them, and how's the old Church of England doing these days?  The ancient cathedrals are being used for dance parties and put-put golf games.  But I digress.

Many people have remarked to me over the last few months of the gloom and dread they felt, and former agnostics returned to the faith as a result.  A better example of God letting us see the folly of our sinful ways in order to repent cannot be imagined.

And now there is an undeniable change.  A weight has been lifted.  Other in the paid performance press, the division has largely vanished.  People can get on with their lives and the faithful have the marvelous feeling of deliverance.

At the same time, we have won a battle but the war goes on.  Now is the time to further devote ourselves to God and lock in these gains.  The only way to avoid a recurrence is to so shape society that it becomes impossible.  That means the hard task of conversion and also pursuing individual holiness.  The two go hand in hand as people who are saintly draw sinner to them.  

By saintly I mean truly saintly - modest and humble, not bragging or self-righteous.  Yet at the same time, we must avoid the trap of "Nice Christianity" and speak with unwavering firmness about the evils in our midst.  A great many people still do not understand the full evil of abortion, how its supporters have twisted statistics and lied about medical necessity to kill viable children on a whim.

There is also the issue of the sudden rise of transgenderism.  It is impossible to find a parallel example of such a wicked, cruel belief system being imposed so quickly and so thoroughly.  The damage to souls and institutions will take years to heal, and a full reckoning must be made for those responsible.

Indeed, I think one of the biggest changes in the spirit world is that the faithful now find themselves confident and reassured and the wicked are suddenly troubled and afraid.  The dark powers that sustained them seemed invincible, powered by the "arc of history," but that arc has collapsed.  The secular future is no longer inevitable and the tide of events has unexpectedly turned.

We must not let this moment simply fade away.

With Halloween looming, I thought now would be a good time to look at some modern guides for spiritual warfare.  Over the past few years, Catholic media has gotten a lot more strident about All Hallows Eve and All Saints Day, which is a good thing.  Yes, Halloween is generally a secular excuse to eat candy and dress up, but it also presents a unique opportunity for people who are already in the mood for tales of the supernatural to look at the reality of faith.

Halloween can therefore be a gateway for good, but also evil, since modern "goth" takes and overtly satanic themes and practices are becoming more common.  Witchcraft has never been more popular and naive young people are particularly vulnerable to being caught up in 'naughty' rituals or 'games' that purport to use magic (such as the vile Ouija board).

Two fairly recent books provide good advice on how to avoid these snares and a larger look at the reality of spiritual warfare.

Diary of an American Exorcist by Stephen Rossetti is a fascinating book that explains the modern practice of exorcisms, the difference between spiritual possession and oppression, and provides specific references from the Bible that help explain what is going on.  It's a quick, engaging read and not particularly scary because - as Rossetti points out - God wins in the end.

A Family Guide to Spiritual Warfare by Kathleen Beckman is a bit more detailed and includes some case studies.  I enjoyed it, but she does tend to repeat herself and I found myself skimming ahead a bit because yes, I get the value of prayer, etc.  I can't help but wonder if it was a series of essays that were brought together without sufficient editing, which would certainly explain the repetition.

What's interesting about both books is how mundane evil is. No need for head-spinning and pea soup eruptions - a lot of oppression and possession is just terrible life choices or cruelty that we write off as a personality quirk.

The books also highlight how people can be drawn into evil simply by assuming the spirit world doesn't exist, so cool goth tattoos or Santa Muerte decorations are just fashion statements.

Even after reading the books, I find myself still reflexively defaulting to the secular materialist explanation for things.  Intellectually, I'm well aware of the limitations of the view, but it pervades society and is arguably the greatest victory the devil has ever achieved.  The notion that an abstract principle of individual freedom supersedes God's written commandments is a monumental surrender to the forces of darkness.

The laws of men are supposed to reflect those of God, not the other way around.  It is no accident that having gained the commanding heights of government, nominally secular people now demand that people of faith violate their believes in the name of some abstract right that didn't exist until 20 minutes ago.  The drama regarding silent prayer in England is perhaps the perfect distillation of the wickedness dressed up as bureaucratic bungling.

I remember many years ago thinking that my true political home was "classical liberalism," which had somehow been perverted into socialism.  Thanks in part to reading G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, I now know that it was baked into the cake from the start.  Placing an abstraction like liberty as the highest good must inevitably force constraints on alternative sources of morality, which is why Catholic hospitals are constantly being sued to compel them to perform abortions and public prayer is being criminalized.

Both books provide insight into why these particular issues are being litigated, something unimaginable just a few years ago.

To put it another way, you may not be interested in the spirit world, but it's very interested in you!

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.

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.

Now that my schedule has loosened up a bit, I'm able to seriously think about writing.  The question then turns into what I should write?

After 11 books, I've covered many of the topics that have interested me.  Scorpion's Pass has scratched an itch from my college days, as have both Long Live Death and Walls of Men.  

Battle Officer Wolf got the whole authorship rolling, and it's got a sequel built into the original concept.

The Man of Destiny series allowed me to work out my Star Wars prequel hate and create a new universe of my own.

Similarly, Vampires of Michigan has the potential to be a franchise if I want do go that way.

Three Weeks with the Coasties was originally intended to be an introduction into semi-autobiographic writings on my military experience.

Finally, there's plenty of space for more game designs and even an update of Conqueror: Fields of Victory.

Given this vast amount of open terrain for creativity, why am I not using it?

The answer, I think, is boredom.  Having done a topic, I'm done with it.  I simply cannot relate to authors or filmmakers who want to constantly revisit their earlier work.

That being said, I'm now looking at things a little differently, and seeing if a story I'm turning over in my head might fit in an existing setting rather than needing a new one.

And yes, there is some commercial element to this as a new title will bring the older ones to the forefront and timed with a discount, could boost my sales.  However, since my motivation is pleasure rather than profit, this is not persuasive to me.

A better argument is that I enjoyed creating my characters and settings and revisiting them could be a fun way to tell new stories about people I haven't talked about in a while.  This is beginning to resonate with me.

I'm reading up on the Saipan campaign in June of 1944, and it underlines the theme of one of my earlier posts about the 'rules of war.'

Spoiler alert: there are no rules.

The Japanese defenders of the island breached just about every custom of war they could find. 

They used civilians as literal human shield (herding them in front of their attacking columns). 

They targeted medical corps personnel and would purposefully leave wounded G.I.s in the open so that they could pick off troops trying to treat them.

They even went so far as to boobytrap their own casualties and also taught their wounded to have a grenade, so they could kill American medics trying to treat them.

Because Americans weren't stupid, they came up with countermeasures, which basically boiled down to: kill everything in sight.

What this meant was that wounded Japanese who might have wanted to surrender never got the chance.  Innocent civilians who just wanted to be left alone were pulverized along with everything around them because the Japanese could not be trusted to respect any of the rules of war which were designed to prevent such savagery.

The paucity of Japanese prisoners has led to the myth that the Japanese were everywhere and always fanatical in their courage and devotion, which simply isn't true.  We cannot for certain say how many Japanese troops wanted or even tried to surrender, only to be shot down by disbelieving Americans who may have actually witnessed earlier fake attempts.

The thing is, Japan had previously followed the rules of war, and achieved victories over China and Russia.  By throwing them away, they gained a fleeting tactical advantage but its price was hundreds of thousands of dead and total defeat.

It has long been axiomatic that most film adaptations from books are flawed if not outright terrible.  

What is far less common, however, is for the film to exceed the book.  The three examples I usually cite are Jaws, M*A*S*H and Last of the Mohicans.

The book version of Jaws contains several annoying side plots involving class differences in the seaside community (summer homes vs year-round residents) and Mrs. Brody cheats on the chief with Hooper, who in the book is a tall, stud rather than Richard Dreyfuss' brilliantly played shark nerd.

M*A*S*H bogs itself down with comparisons between service status (draftees vs regular army or reservists), and it comes across as totally cartoonish.  That element was toned down precisely because it was boring and rendered it even less plausible than it already way.

As for Last of the Mohicans, Mark Twain thoroughly dismantled James Fenimore Cooper more than a century ago, and Michael Mann's 1990s production is far superior to the written version.

A similar situation exists with The Big Sleep.  I've long enjoyed the Bogart and Bacall film, which while light on the plot, has excellent acting, great dialog, and is just wonderfully evocative.

When I saw a used copy of Raymond Chandler's book, I picked it up because I wanted to see how much had been changed, and whether the changes work.

In fact, a lot had been changed, and not for the better.  Back in the 1930s and 1940s, movies were still subject to the Hayes Code.

In the modern age, the code has been held up as horrifically stifling censorship, but it is no accident that films were much, much better when they had to use story, character and setting rather than just flash boobs to pack people into the seats.  Books, however, were under no such restriction, and so topics like homosexuality, drug use and pornography could be openly discussed in Chandler's book.

For the film, these topics had to be approached with care and ambiguity, which made for better storytelling.  I'd heard that the book's ending is better, but it's actually much worse - everything is tied into a tidy little bow that makes no sense.

Chandler has some great conversations, and writes well, but his characters as written simply aren't as compelling as the cast of the film.  I have no desire to re-read the book, but I know I will continue to re-watch the film.