Author: John

The rite of spring
riot of blooms
rout of cold winds winters bane
shivering bones
clattering in dismal dungeons dark

Violets are gone now
and iris and lily
bluebonnets take the stage
peerless blue to shame a cloudless sky

Pretty pink primrose too
takes the eye and
pink petal’s secret promise folds
virgin thighs’ blissful path

See me touch me
feel me smell me-
please don’t pick me
let me cast seed and wither and die

I’ll be here every spring
past winter’s baleful fling
and if you fail to come again
my bloom our last visit will still contain

Of all I am the flowering sum
Pinnacle of the past
nadir of the future
purpose centered everywhere bounded nowhere.

The past few days, during discussions with my new GOE associates some thoughts have been percolating and it seems appropriate that I should put them down here.

This is an answer to Why GOE?

To most of the people I have been talking to lately this might seem a dumb question. Well, maybe not. All involved in the germination of this project have an understanding on some level in their own minds as to Why GOE? Some of these are complex, some simple, some from the intellect, some from the gut. Here, briefly stated, is my thought.

The American people want, whether they consciously know it or not, to be intimately connected with the “real” thing, by which I mean something greater than themselves as individuals. Duty, honor, truth, courage, crowned by liberty. Those are “real” things in the deepest most spiritual sense. Given proper leadership people will weld themselves to action that will rekindle these.

Everyone remembers the image of Pres. Bush, his arm around a grunged up firefighter standing on a pile of rubble at the WTC. All easily recall what he said that day and how a special kind of energy ran forth from that moment and instantly crossed the nation and informed a national purpose with a very special resolve. Where I live seemingly every vehicle and home instantly sprouted American flags.

An image like the one of which we speak, of course, awakens in our breast feelings that feed on these sentiments. People were first filled with dread, anger, fear, yes, even guilt and self loathing. But with one image, one simple phrase, these instantly gave way to courage, duty, honor and the like.

We literally swell up when duty calls and we can, following our conscience, find honor in a courageous act that further enshrines liberty in the hearts and minds of all who will follow her light.

A terrible resolve went forth that day and the world trembled at the thought of coming retribution. But, alas, this resolve has waned at the same pace as a diminishing national leadership. In this leadership vacuum opposing forces have taken the stage and pose an existential threat internally as grave as the external threat from Islamofascism.

It is the need to counter this internal threat that is the impetus for GOE. GOE is an answer to a need that is in the air for this kind of renewal.

Absent adequate leadership at the top we, the people, must provide it from the bottom. Our very existence as a nation depends on whether an enduring and terrible resolve to advance the cause of freedom can be rekindled.

The fire burns low precisely because, bombarded with negative images and associated negative tag lines, people become bewildered, lost, purposeless. People respond to images. It is in the fabric of our society. We are oriented to and from what we see. The failure of our leadership is in their inability to sustain the propagation of images and POSITIVE tag lines contrary to the daily drumbeat of the mainstream, liberal, defeatist, essentially soulless enemies of victory over tyranny. These are the blame America first crowd. All are apologists for those external threats of Islamofascism, Communism, and the like. They will fight for nothing. And, essentially are nothing in their nihilistic, atheistic solipsism. Their highest achievement in life is a kind of banal or vapid political correctness. This and their guilt and self loathing as seen in their perpetual anguish for minority rights becomes the apotheosis of their self invention as multiculturalists. What is lost is allegiance to something greater than the self. There is no “greater than the self”. The self, for the moonbat, is centered everywhere, bounded nowhere.

This is the enemy within. He is a statist, a fascist, but thinks, knows, those who oppose him are these things. Until he is utterly vanquished it will be difficult to face external threats.

Yesterday I read Aristides post Sociobiology and made a comment to which he made a reply:

John P. said…

…..

Wilson’s thought is rigorous to a degree that most of us never achieve and I am humbled by the reach of his intellect. My personal reaction is that one needs to appreciate the limitations of knowledge which I view as restricted by its contingency on existential matter. Knowledge can never be complete, all encompassing. No body of knowledge is ever going to fully and finally give absolute expression to reality. Like material things knowledge is limited to a participatory role. It may be so that whatever absolute truth, or beauty, if you like, exists is coextensive with all being but at the same time each instantiation of that truth or beauty conveys no meaning beyond itself because of the ubiquitous nature of the substratum. Thus it takes a leap of faith or “belief” to dig out the “metaphysical” reality.

To me and others before me the emergence and the appreciation of values such as consciousness, truth, beauty, wisdom, conscience, justice, liberty, love, courage, nobility, and the like are essential clues to the true purpose of life. These do not have an existence of their own. St. Thomas Aquinas, if my memory serves, characterized such entities as contingent on the existence of another. In this instance that would be mankind. My own thought, borrowing from LeComte DeNouy, is that these things are actually imbedded in existential matter and given the right set of circumstances come into being. Taking these into consideration it is not to subtle a leap of the intellect that these evolutes, fragile as they might be, nurtured by religious and philosophical traditions and, yes, political ideology too, are, as the ancient Greeks (Socrates) pointed out, mechanisms by which man has commerce with a divine reality. Or, to put it another way, they are facets of the divine by which G_d’s nature finds expression, and I might add, self awareness, through sentient beings. Life emerges from matter in order that the spark of consciousness will give rise to these divine qualities. I heard that the nuclear scientist is the atom’s mechanism for attaining self knowledge. Well, the universe perhaps is G_d’s way of seeing into his own nature.

Your insert regarding “…implications in the choice-migration to America..” provoked the thought that what is really at work in America is the evolution of the “Good” in a political mechanism that will tend to evolve and if it prevails impede the propagation of its antithesis, evil. Wilson, I suppose, might see this as mere tribalism. I don’t.

In a nutshell the Universe is self aware, operates heuristically in the sense that discovery IS the action of the unknown. And as far as Nietzsche’s void is concerned it is the great mystery of the real that out of nothing something does indeed come and passes back to its origin, the void. In a sense this accounts for the fact that knowledge can never be complete. How could you ever fill the void? Or, isn’t the void filled with every experience and simultaneously emptied? So, instead of taking the view that, as Samuel Beckett wrote in his “Waiting for Godot”, “They give birth astride graves, eh Didi?” one can alter the focus with a simple act of will. There is little reason not to rejoice in the fact that on the way to the void there is much to see and many wayfarers with whom to share the journey, such as Mr. Wilson.

1:04 PM

Aristides said…

John P.,

First, I’d like to thank you for your thoughtful post. In many ways your views mirror my own.

Nietzsche always claimed that the proper symbol for reason is Uroburos, the snake that inevitably twists back to bite its own tail. I think this is beyond any doubt, a consequence of the Void as both condition precedent and condition subsequent of being in time. As you noted.

But this is not so for finite things. Microcosms are immanently accessible to reason precisely because Genesis is already presupposed. It is true that knowledge, even of a microcosm, can never be complete; but it is also true that relevant understanding does not depend on completeness. This is a basic tenet of information theory, and a basic truth of the world. To be complete, a theory of cell division would have to account for quantum electrodynamics in addition to cellular and chemical phenomena. However, to be efficacious–i.e. to be known or cosmically self-aware, as you put it–it does not. Information can be compressed by dropping redundancy, and yet the signal still gets through. Cosmic self-awareness and its attendant actualizations still occur.

Therefore, I am very confident in the prospect of ultimately understanding Man as Microcosm, even if we can never truly know Man’s relation to the Void. A complete science of man is possible, though it is only recently back in favor. What’s held us back is not the inadequacy of reason but rather an extremely daunting level of surface complexity which stems from the combinatorial capacity of the human mind and its manifest behaviors. Of course, Science needs to acknowledge its limitations, but it must do so without discarding its confidence. So long as its method emulates evolution–which is procedurally congruent to science–its confidence is justified.

But fundamentally you are right. Science can tell us that man, to avoid a cognitive phenomenon called despair (what Qutb called the “hideous schizophrenia”), must self-elect a submission to a particular metanarrative or purpose (i.e. get faith in the Kierkegaardian sense); and it can tell us that a society, once it’s lost or exhausted a unity unto which it collectively submits (its soul in a Spenglerian sense), will eventually devolve and dissolve and factionalize around the quest for power.

What it can’t tell us is a universally correct metanarrative, and the right unity. In fact, it warns against them because both history and evolution are complex non-abelian processes–neither predictable nor static.

Four white doves. Three had pink rings around their eyes. Black eyes. One dove had a black ring around his. White doves, black eyes, blue, peerless sky. Spotless birds, and pure white, the frost white of a rose. A frost white felicity to shame the moon. And the abyss, the dark, dark deepness of the black eyes, jewels encircled, set in pink and black, standing on dainty pink feet in a little white church with a glass door.

The young lady opened the door and gently took one dove. I immediately had the sense that this God’s creature knew in some sense what was transpiring, its role in the unfolding of events this afternoon. There was only the flutter of the flags in the breeze to mark the time, a gentling backdrop to the sounds of grieving mothers, dads, sisters, brothers. The dove so gently held was paraded around the circle then a lady, Brian’s mother, I think, handed off the just folded flag, and carressing the dove to her breast she let it go with a tear and a kiss.

The bird flew straight away and immediately it’s three companions were set free. They quickly joined and flew, fluttering white sapphires in the peerless blue sky, circling the funeral rites below, and finding their bearing on the westering sun, they set off into the heavens, free spirits, liberated from the surly bonds of earth.

Rest in peace, Brian Kubik.

Laid to rest near Killeen, Texas.
August, 15, 2006
Died of wounds received in combat operations, Bagdad, Iraq.
He was 20 years old.
Patriot Guard Riders honored this American hero.

Here is a comment I posted on Tigerhawk.

The middle east circa July, 2006

If you have your ear to the ground and are in possession of a particular sensibility you can detect a certain tectonic shift in the march of time. The landscape has been slightly altered and the ebb and flow of events follow the slightly different contours of the terrain. The infrahuman forces of embodied evil, the satanic in nature, the death cult that is Islamofascism, collides spectacularly and openly with the life enhancing element again. Millions of souls are in the thrall of this metastasizing evil incarnate. They sacrifice their children as suicide bombers knowing subliminally that their opponents’ moral sensibilities recoil and tend to acquiesce to their demands just to make them stop their barbarism. “They give birth astride graves”.* And in the brief moment that life’s potential is folded into the cold eternal night they rejoice clutching and holding dear the darkness of their perverted god as it snuffs out the potential for apotheosis. The world has seldom seen more blatant flowering of evil. And the Israelis, having done, as their name implies, battle with G_d and joined forces with him, now, as in the recent past, are again at the spearhead of a world civilization teetering on the brink of a darkness void of the light of truth and liberty, the warmth of love, the sweet voice of understanding and knowledge and wisdom. My heart cries out for victory, for clear eyed leadership willing to take up the sword of righteousness and join battle with and utterly dam up and contain and destroy this tide. Never in the history of the planet has the choice been so clear. This is the eschatological unfolding of the apocalyptic flower of human history. This events the ultimate destiny of humanity’s total devastation or doom. You had better be on the right side for the sake of your immortal soul and the light of G_d seeking expression therein. Make the wrong choice and it is like trying to get to the west by going east. You can never arrive at your destination and merely tend to a certain direction.

The spin of planet earth in the infinite darkness of space allows a daily rekindling of life by the light of the sun. How far north from south on this very lighted thing we call home? The pole pins us to the firmament giving direction to all movement. Hence purpose and order. How far east from west? Infinity? Latitudinal alignment of destiny provides an infinite regress. A journey in this aspect is never completed. Opposing this is the Longitudinal path. Go far enough in this direction and you end up heading in an opposite direction. It is a function of spin. Time, too, has a spin. As time travelers we need to orient ourselves Longitudinally in time. Otherwise we can never fulfill our destiny, achieve true understanding of life’s meaning. If we loose this struggle with evil man’s opportunity to discover and properly align his efforts with truth as such will be set back thousands of years to the time when god’s were appeased through such things as child sacrifice. Remember the bible story of Abraham and his son Isaac? He is on the mountain, close to G_d, about to sacrifice his son in an act of worship when G_d stays his hand. This is a pivotal point in the evolution of man and Israel is the focal point. Compare that with the Islamic culture that still sacrifices their children. Not hard to see the choice here, if you are in possession of a particular sensibility. Can you find Polaris? Choose poorly and succumb to the long dimming of the light of truth in service of a dhimmitude in a perverted theocracy. This will be our lot as we find ourselves constrained to hopelessness and slavery.

* “Waiting for Godot”, Samuel Beckett

They give birth astride graves, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.

And from Macbeth:

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more

Mike Strank
b. 1919 Jarabenia, Czechoslovakia.
d. 1945 Iwo Jima, Japan.

Their leader and Sergeant, it was Mike who got the order to climb Mt. Suribachi. Mike picked his “boys” and led them safely to the top. Mike explained to the boys that the larger flag had to be raised so that “every Marine on this cruddy island can see it.” It was Mike who gave the orders to find a pole, attach the flag and “put’er up!”

Continue reading about the “Flag Raisers” at http://www.iwojima.com/raising/raisingc.htm

And, when is the last time you carefully read this:

IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776.

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.–Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences
For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

“You should not think of it as a fight for certain nations against others…It is a struggle for an ideal that has to establish itself on earth in the life of humanity, for a Truth that has yet to realize itself fully and against a darkness and falsehood that are trying to overwhelm the earth and mankind…..” Sri Aurobindo

My bike is the blue green Beemer.

This is Brother Gary and wife and two grandchildren. To right is the inimitable “Top”. He drove a pickup pulling a trailer to rescue broken bikes. He was very outgoing and boisterous and I had the audacity to ask him whether he was called “Top” because he was a former First Sergeant or because he always spoke at the “top” of his voice. That took him back and I am lucky to have gotten away with my head intact.

Your humble author and brother and Chaplain Arnie.

Ditto.

Healing. In the background is another chaplain. The bearded guy. He is talking to an active duty Army Chaplain, who, in fact, was the Chaplain in chief for the run. His son is to his left. As far as I can tell they made the whole ride. The boy will not soon forget the “bonding” with dad.

On to the post for today.

Another Chaplain. Dan, from Pennsylvania whom I met in Williams, AZ one day out from Ontario. He almost daily checked me out, looked me in the eye real hard and said, “how are you doing”. Much appreciated Dan. When I took this picture Gary quipped that he learned how to fly in one of these birds. Noting that it was a slick (nomenclature for an unarmed Huey) I retorted that he was attracted to the craft because he too, back then, was a pretty “slick” dude.

Me and Gary at the Huey. You can just make out the manikens in the cockpit.