The Believable Hero

     Recently, the C.S.O. and I have been enjoying John Nettles’s old Bergerac series. Nettles’s intrepid detective Jim Bergerac, a sergeant in Jersey’s Bureau des Etranges, is a classical hero figure. He gets into any number of personal scrapes, including with his superior, his ex-wife, a succession of ladyfriends, and the rich elite of that island, but resolutely retains his dedication to the law. A few of those dramas feature as an auxiliary quasi-protagonist the character of “Ice Maiden” Philippa Vale, a highly accomplished jewel thief portrayed by the beautiful Liza Goddard. Miss Vale is a figure of a sort that’s become common in contemporary fiction: the severely ethically compromised protagonist we call an antihero.

     The Philippa Vale character, and how she interacts with Jim Bergerac, got me thinking about heroes yet again. These days, antiheroes handily outnumber classical heroes. We even find them partnering with classical heroes, as in the dramas cited above. In part, that’s because we can see a bit of ourselves in them, even if we lack the skills to make a living as second-story men. But in equal or greater measure, it’s because of our cynicism.

     Ours is a cynical age. The cynic is unwilling to believe that a man’s motivations can be entirely high-minded. In this, he is correct; rare is the man who acts exclusively from the demands of ethical principles. We are too conscious of our personal interests and the uncertainties of the future ever to dismiss them completely from our thoughts. Perhaps it was always that way, though the fictions of earlier eras tend to speak otherwise.

     Our cynicism makes the construction of a believable hero an unusual challenge. After all, for your hero to be believable, the reader must be able to imagine that he could exist. More, he must be able to believe that your hero, or someone very much like him, might exist—perhaps even be somewhere nearby. The superhero, who’s defined to possess powers no real man could command, excludes that possibility...but so does the man who’s motivated solely by the dictates of right and wrong.

     A story whose hero is outside the bounds of plausibility demands much more “willing suspension of disbelief” from its reader than it would if its hero were believable in the above sense. That’s not a fatal problem if you’re willing to position your tale in one of the speculative genres. The contemporary vogue for superheroes in fiction testifies to the existence of readers ready to accept and enjoy such tales. But the fuzzy gray zone of stories that tease reality’s limitations along their edges without utterly dismissing their constraints can also be a fascinating place to explore.

     We’re not quite in the realm of magical realism here, though we’re sidling up to it. What I have in mind is a figure who stands apart but does not burst through the envelope of believable human nature. He must be somewhat larger than life in one or two senses, but comfortably well situated within what we know of Mankind in all the others.

     It’s not easy to keep your hero dancing along the border that separates the world of men who could (and do) exist from the realms of impossibility. It takes effort and characterological adroitness. The cynical reader will be ever alert for steps that take your hero across the line.

     There are a few such heroes in contemporary fiction. F. Paul Wilson’s “Repairman Jack” stories portray one. Lee Child’s “Jack Reacher” novels depict another. Stephen King shows us one in Needful Things. But they’re uncommon. The typical writer either stays well within the “cynical zone,” or goes “full superhero,” or adopts the deplorable “antihero” template that currently dominates mainstream fiction.

     I like tales of barely-believable heroes. One kind I’ve attempted to depict is much smarter or more potent than those around him, but remains within the bounds of believable human nature (and the laws of physics). Another is a largely ordinary fellow physically and mentally, but far more committed to his conception of right and wrong than the common run of Mankind. He would never walk away from an injustice muttering that “it’s not my problem,” or excuse a dishonesty on the grounds that “everybody does it.” But both varieties are a severe challenge to keep believable.

     Whichever kind of hero you prefer to write about, the important thing is to keep them heroic: men who’ll dare greatly and risk considerably in pursuing their visions of justice. Remember always that drama arises only from situations in which men must accept hardship and risk to pursue an ethically lofty goal. A man who makes that bargain and sticks to it is a hero, even if he must fight his way past a mountain of personal inhibitions and threats to what he values. Indeed, it’s the need to surmount such fears and inhibitions that makes a hero believable to the contemporary cynic. If you can make your hero believable to the cynic, you might even relieve him of part of his burden of cynicism, at least for the duration of your novel. And cynics’ money spends just as readily as that of the starry-eyed worshippers of steely-eyed superheroes who never sway from the demands of justice, I assure you!

The Real Plague

     New York State has suffered badly under the House of Cuomo. Emperor Mario was disastrous. I was glad to see him go even if his replacement was a centrist wimp. But Mario’s son Andrew is deadly and doesn’t care who knows it:

     What’s that you say, Andrew? It sounded a lot like this:

     And lest we forget, New York sent her, a Democrat carpetbagger with no attachments to our state other than a very recently purchased house in Chappaqua, to the United States Senate.

     How do people with that little conscience get elected to high positions in government? Mind you, Andrew Cuomo has no achievements outside of politics. In that regard, he’s practically the archetype of the left-wing politician. (Cf. Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton.) But he managed to become first the state’s Attorney-General, then its Governor – and he’s left a trail of destruction that may never be corrected.

     How does such a thing happen? Is there no one in the Right who can beat these left-wing monsters in a New York election? Are our Boards of Election too corrupt for a Republican – and a New York Republican is more a centrist than a conservative – to beat a conscienceless, massively incompetent Democrat?

     A great part of our problem is New York City. The Giuliani years, when the city experienced a renaissance that brought it back to vitality and livability, are a memory. The city is now entirely controlled by wealthy Leftists who pander shamelessly to the city’s municipal unions and its large indigent and minority populations – and the city dominates the state politically. Recent movements to break New York into three or more states are motivated almost exclusively by a desire to get the rest of us out from under the city’s hobnailed boot.

     But those initiatives, like the similar ones advanced in California, have a snowball’s chance in hell of being treated seriously. Not only would they deprive Albany of serfs to mulct; they would dilute Democrat power in the United States Senate and the Electoral College. Can’t have that.

     Fortunately, despite Cuomo’s high-handed, completely unjustified “mandates,” New York State has weathered the Chinese Lung Rot reasonably well. We’ve acquired a high degree of herd immunity and are on the way to shrugging the Kung Flu off completely. What we seem unable to become immune to, or to vaccinate against, is the really deadly plague, the plague that’s turning the state into a disaster even lifelong New Yorkers are fleeing in increasing numbers: the plague of Democrat totalitarians who succeed one another ad infinitam in the corridors of power. For that disease, there is no relief in sight.

Tipping Points Journal

     Many have asked, as America slides down the generously Vaselined slope toward totalitarianism, just “where the tipping point is.” That is: What incursion on Americans’ rights would – or will – provoke actual armed insurrection aimed at reestablishing Constitutionally limited government?

     Time was, the most widely agreed such point was a major incursion against freedom of speech. Well, the Usurpers have successfully subcontracted that – with the bonus that their private-sector partners are also helping to destroy unapproved competitors – and no one has yet taken the musket down from the mantel. So maybe freedom of speech was “over-valued.”

     Another much hyped tipping point was blatantly political prosecutions. Well, we’ve already had a couple of those, including Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the fellow whose YouTube video was deceitfully blamed for the Benghazi attack on American installations there, and more recently Brandon Straka of WalkAway. I just went out on my front porch, and I don’t see the militia forming up. Maybe that one was oversold, as well.

     Then there are our Second Amendment rights. That sounded uber-plausible. After all, disarming us would end our possibility of resistance to tyranny for all time. But hark! What have we here?

HR117

     Yes, it’s from the terminally insane Sheila Jackson Lee. No, it’s not law yet. Does it have a chance of passage? Who knows? But if both Houses of Congress pass it – and given the spinelessness of the Republican caucuses, that’s not impossible – the Usurper-in-Chief will sign it. What then, America? Would that be a sufficient tipping point?

     I’m not placing any bets. We’ve become too sheeplike, too reflexively compliant, for me to wager with confidence that any imposition of unwarranted authority would awaken us. Far easier just to change the channel and natter about what the Kardashians have been doing lately.

     Things are, to say the least, not good.

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     We are living through a time I never thought I would see. Blatantly stolen elections. Blatantly unConstitutional government. Blatant law-enforcement indifference to Leftists rioting in the streets. Blatant attempts to criminalize dissent from the Usurper agenda. The blatant garrisoning of the nation’s capital. And private citizens have accepted all of it, as if it were of neither present nor future significance. “Emergency! Everybody to get from street!”

     This is not American. If we accept such subjugation, we are not worthy to be called Americans.

     The violent rioters who’ve desecrated our cities should have already faced massed water cannons and fusillades of rubber bullets, at the very least. But upon whom have the attentions of law enforcement fallen? It’s not the people and organizations rioting and looting in the streets of Minneapolis or Portland. Dozens of federal legislators should have already been ejected from Congress for the violation of their oaths to abide by the Constitution of the United States. Yet upon whom are the media pouring their venom? It’s not the Leftists who’ve dismissed all Constitutional constraints, have demanded that President Trump be tried for murder, and have called for “re-education camps” for conservatives and Republican partisans.

     It’s possible that America has passed a point of no return and can no longer be saved. It’s possible that complete subjugation is our future. But it’s also possible that we could reverse our current course with sufficiently forthright action. Is any such action forthcoming? That’s the question of the hour...and at the moment, the answer seems to be negative.

     Many Americans are in denial. But covering your eyes as a carnivore advances on you won’t spare you from his claws and teeth. Many others are focused narrowly upon protecting themselves, their loved ones, and their own interests. Martin Niemoller could tell them a few things. So could Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

     The time to act is now...if it hasn’t passed by already.

“Is It Safe?”

     Suffice it to say that opinions vary. But the question reposes upon a fallacy: that safe has a specific, objective, and universally agreed meaning. It does not.

There are no safe substances.
There are no safe activities.
There are no safe places.
Only degrees of risk...
Some of which are incalculable.

     I could go into a long explanation of why this is so. I shan’t; it’s too early in the morning for such discourses. Also, unless you know a lot more physics, chemistry, and strength of materials than the average Gentle Reader, it would fail to impress you. So take my word for it.

     Contemporary Americans are fanatics about safety. They exert themselves in a quest for absolute safety – sometimes they call it “security” – without even knowing what they mean by it. The entire Wuhan Virus / Chinese Crud / Kung Flu fear-porn panic is about that and nothing else. That’s what makes it a turbocharged absurdity.

     Consider this story:

     Washington: The US Department of Homeland Security declared a nationwide terrorism alert Wednesday, citing the potential threat from domestic anti-government extremists opposed to Joe Biden as president.

     "Information suggests that some ideologically-motivated violent extremists with objections to the exercise of governmental authority and the presidential transition, as well as other perceived grievances fueled by false narratives, could continue to mobilize to incite or commit violence," the department said.

     The National Terrorism Advisory System Bulletin said a heightened threat of attack "will persist in the weeks following the successful presidential inauguration," which took place on January 20.

     "DHS does not have any information to indicate a specific, credible plot," it said.

     Leave aside that the Usurpers fear to be dethroned from the positions they so blatantly stole. Leave aside the “false narratives” BS – and with all the eyewitnesses who’ve testified under oath to the frauds they saw, you may be perfectly certain that it is BS – and the suggestions that the Right is filled with “ideologically motivated extremists.” Just contrast the tone of the first three paragraphs above with the fourth and most telling one:

     "DHS does not have any information to indicate a specific, credible plot," it said.

     The Usurpers, fear-mongers without equal, propagandized the United States into a state of hysteria we never even approached in wartime...and it’s rebounded on them. Now they’re the ones who are afraid. Yet they can’t even point to a credible threat!

     In part, it’s because they know what they deserve. But it’s unlikely to be what they’ll get. Given their smashing success at taking control of the nation’s electoral mechanisms, it’s even unlikely that their Reign of Terror will get them unseated electorally.

     But fear is often useful. Their fear can be useful to us.

     In the days leading up to the Biden inaugural, the nation’s capital has been turned into an occupied military zone like Baghdad. Armed troops authorized to use lethal force are manning checkpoints to enter and leave downtown Washington, D.C. Green Zone and Red Zone perimeters have been established. Several bridges into the city from neighboring Virginia are scheduled to be closed next week for the inaugural.

SoldiersAtInauguration.JPG

     The more fearful a regime becomes of its subjects, the less control it has. It must separate itself from those peons, for its own safety’s sake. Political power grows more difficult to wield as the distance increases between ruler and subject.

     People have been speculating about what might touch off a true insurrection:

     Some ‘well known’ talking head goes out to some regional disaster, and tries walking around in ankle deep water again, and gets decapitated live on TV by a .338 Lapua Magnum hollow-point, along with his whole crew….

     Or someone seals the doors to a well-known senator’s exclusive house at oh-dark early, and then throws copious amounts of Molotovs through the windows, burning them alive….

     Then there’s always just the “random walks up to someone and gets shot in the face” completely randomly…like in NYC it happens all the time Even with security cameras, dude’ll be walking down the street casually, and all-of-a-sudden, another guy walking towards him whips out a gat, and does a 3 second mag dump, and is never found or caught.

     Those possibilities might strike you and me as farfetched, but to the fear-possessed Usurpers, they appear far more likely. It’s part of why they’re pushing for America to become the total-surveillance society that was the unachievable ideal of Communist East Germany:

     Wolfgang Schmidt was seated in Berlin’s 1,200-foot-high TV tower, one of the few remaining landmarks left from the former East Germany. Peering out over the city that lived in fear when the communist party ruled it, he pondered the magnitude of domestic spying in the United States under the Obama administration. A smile spread across his face.

     “You know, for us, this would have been a dream come true,” he said, recalling the days when he was a lieutenant colonel in the defunct communist country’s secret police, the Stasi.

     In those days, his department was limited to tapping 40 phones at a time, he recalled. Decide to spy on a new victim and an old one had to be dropped, because of a lack of equipment. He finds breathtaking the idea that the U.S. government receives daily reports on the cellphone usage of millions of Americans and can monitor the Internet traffic of millions more.

     “So much information, on so many people,” he said.

     This is actually good news. The Usurpers are drowning in data. No power on Earth could sift through it swiftly enough to make it useful. Yes, they try, but a genuine threat to them could evade detection by a wide variety of methods. There are codes, ciphers, and concealment techniques that fiercely resist adverse analysis. Look into “one-time pads” and “steganography.”

     Let the Usurpers be the fearful ones. The rest of us should relax a bit – yes, about the Chinese Virus, but about many other things as well. For the title question of this piece will always evoke contrasting responses:

     But also:

Concerning The Two Party System

     Recall this political convulsion from more than a century ago:

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     [T]he Republicans, in the early 1890s, led by Ohio Republicans William McKinley and Marc Hanna, launched a shrewd campaign of reconstruction. In particular, in state after state, they ditched the prohibitionists, who were becoming an embarrassment and losing the Republicans large numbers of German Lutheran votes. Also, they modified their hostility to immigration. By the mid-1890s, the Republicans had moved rapidly toward the center, toward fuzzing over their political pietism.

     In the meanwhile, an upheaval was beginning to occur in the Democratic Party. The South, by now a one-party Democratic region, was having its own pietism transformed by the 1890s. Quiet pietists were now becoming evangelical, and Southern Protestant organizations began to call for prohibition. Then the new, sparsely settled Mountain states, many of them with silver mines, were also largely pietist. Moreover, a power vacuum, which would ordinarily have been temporary, had been created in the national Democratic Party. Poor Grover Cleveland, a hard-money laissez-faire Democrat, was blamed for the Panic of 1893, and many leading Cleveland Democrats lost their gubernatorial and senatorial posts in the 1894 elections. The Cleveland Democrats were temporarily weak, and the Southern-Mountain coalition was ready to hand. Seizing his opportunity, William Jennings Bryan and his pietist coalition seized control of the Democratic Party at the momentous convention of 1896. The Democratic Party was never to be the same again.

     The Catholics, Lutherans, and the laissez-faire Cleveland Democrats were in mortal shock. The “party of our fathers” was lost. The Republicans, who had been moderating their stance anyway, saw the opportunity of a lifetime. At the Republican convention, Rep. Henry Cabot Lodge, representing the Morgans and the pro-gold standard Boston financial interests, told McKinley and Hanna: Pledge yourself to the gold standard–the basic Cleveland economic issue—and drop your silverite and greenback tendencies, and we will all back you. Refuse, and we will support Bryan or a third party. McKinley struck the deal, and from then on, the Republicans, in 19th-century terms, were a centrist party. Their principles were now high tariffs and the gold standard, and prohibition was quietly forgotten....

     The election of 1896 inaugurated the fourth party system in America. From a third party system of closely fought, seesawing races between a pietist/statist Republican vs. a liturgical/libertarian Democratic Party, the fourth party system consisted of a majority centrist Republican party as against a minority pietist Democratic party. After a few years, the Democrats lost their pietist nature, and they too became a centrist, though usually minority party, with a moderately statist ideology scarcely distinguishable from the Republicans. So the fourth party system went until 1932.

     [Ron Paul and Lewis Lehrman, The Case For Gold]

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     Yes, things were different then. But be aware, even so, that there have been dramatic political upheavals, amounting to the total transformation of partisanship in its entirety, on three occasions in American history. It can happen again, whether through the transformation of one of the “major” parties or through the emergence of a new, vital third party that commands majority sentiment in one or a few key issues, as in 1856.

     Considering that the Usurper Administration plans to use fear to keep us in subjection, how about a new party whose main slogan is:

Be Not Afraid:
Be Americans Together!

     ...could create quite a stir, don’t you think?

Depression-Era Songs

     There’s a legend of sorts about the Federal Music Project (FMP), a subdepartment of the Works Progress Administration of FDR’s New Deal. That legend holds that many of the songs that became popular during that era were actually commissioned by the FMP – i.e., their composers were paid to compose popular songs. It could be true. Consider these titles:

• We’re In The Money
• Red Red Robin
• The Sunny Side Of The Street
• Brother, Can You Spare A Dime
• Pick Yourself Up
• Boulevard Of Broken Dreams
• No Depression In Heaven

     All these songs were composed and became popular during the Depression years. There were others, of course, but these are the ones I can remember offhand. (No, I wasn’t alive then, but my father was, and he used to hum all of the above until Hell wouldn’t have them.) I’m not sure whether they were FMP-funded tunes, but their association with those years is strong.

     One of my more unusual college classmates was addicted to several of the above songs. He had a habit of bursting into one or another of them in public, and regardless of the circumstances. It made the rest of us consider him a trifle odd...not the sort of bloke who’d enjoy a Led Zeppelin concert, don’t y’know. But then, his favorite band was Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians, so he probably didn’t give a damn about the tastes that prevailed among the rest of our generation.

     Considering the tremendous effort the Usurper Administration is putting into returning America to the conditions that prevailed during the Great Depression, it wouldn’t surprise me if Depression-era songs were to experience a renewed popularity. In fact, just this morning I woke up with “Red Red Robin” playing in my head. Not a pleasant awakening, I must tell you...especially as the clock read 2:15 AM, an early arising hour even for your humble Curmudgeon. But then, I probably would have enjoyed the experience more were it not for the Newfoundland puppy (at ten months of age, well over 100 pounds) drooling into my left ear at the same moment.

     Bread lines and soup kitchens...25% unemployment...indigents with their hats out on every corner...gangland warfare and blood running in the gutters...hairy nuisances in sandwich boards proclaiming that “the end is near”...

     Ah! The memories!

The 13th Day

     The world has been taught to scoff at that which it cannot see, hear, and touch. It has paid a heavy price for its scoffing. I trust I need not enumerate the many tragedies men have inflicted on one another, as faith has retreated and secular humanism, with its innate arrogance and vaulting ambition, has advanced to fill the void.

     Matthew Arnold captured it in verse of crystalline brilliance:

The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

     But while the Sea of Faith has retreated...or has been pushed back by overweening human pride...it has not vanished utterly. The divine Immanence still manifests to those who are willing to believe what they see and hear...even if no one else can see or hear it.

     In 1917, World War I was raging across the length and breadth of Europe. Millions had already died; millions more would follow. The flower of European manhood would fall to the war and to the influenza pandemic that followed. Russia had fallen to Communism, with consequences that would impoverish and oppress three generations. The faith of the Old World had taken a terrible blow. For many, it seemed an illusion the war had disproved.

     On May 13th, 1917, at noon local time in Fatima, Portugal, Lucia dos Santos, Jacinta Marto, and Francisco Marto, three shepherd children innocent in every sense, were granted a vision of the Blessed Virgin Mary. This was the beginning of what is known today as the Miracle of Fatima: a series of Marian apparitions, each of which occurred on the 13th day of the calendar month. It culminated on October 13 with the Miracle of the Sun, a supernatural event witnessed by some 70,000 persons in which the Sun seemed to gyrate, dance across the sky, and as its finale dive menacingly near to the earth.

     It happened. It was not mass hypnosis, nor mass hallucination, nor some kind of enormous hoax. At Fatima, Portugal on October 13, 1917, seventy thousand onlookers witnessed what could only have been a manifestation of divine power: a miracle.

     The Miracle of Fatima brought millions to the Faith, and renewed the Faith in millions who had fallen away. God does this sort of thing when the world slips perilously close to the edge of the Great Abyss. And note: He doesn’t deliver it to kings or premiers, but to the lowest and humblest of our kind.

     There have been other miracles. Many have attracted scoffers certain that they could prove that nothing miraculous – that is, nothing inexplicable by what we think are the laws of nature – had occurred. But many alleged miracles have withstood every test the scoffers have rained on them. Including Fatima.

     The Miracle of Fatima is now more than a century in the past. Yet it continues to inspire men to faith...and to works of art and drama. Including producer-directors Ian and Dominic Higgins, who made of it a movie of exceptional beauty and emotion.

     See The 13th Day. I just did, and I promise you won’t regret it. It’s available on DVD from Amazon, or directly from Ignatius Press.

     And have faith.