Mimsy Were the Borogoves

The somewhat sporadic ritual where rich white liberals wash the feet of minorities has to be the weirdest bit of racism to come out of the compulsory racist teachings of the institutional left. In the first draft I had the adjective “unintentional” in front of “racism”, but any people who publish “white culture” posters that claim it’s white culture to plan for the future, use logic, and understand cause and effect probably understand very well what they’re doing.

It’s interesting to compare this bit of specious invocation of religion with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s I have a dream speech. I have a dream only made sense to people who understood the Biblical references King was making, whether it be people who were themselves religious or people who had seen Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments as little as three years earlier.¹

King’s speech, in other words, required knowledge of its listeners. This modern washing of the feet, in contrast, requires ignorance, at least if it’s going to be taken at face value. If you’re familiar with the event it’s drawing on, it doesn’t make any sense.

The foot-washing in the Bible that this modern foot ritual resembles was the Son of God washing the feet of imperfect man to cleanse them of their sins. The explanation that racists have made up for the ritual that if “even Jesus” can wash the feet of the apostles, surely we can wash the feet of those we’ve oppressed falls completely apart to anyone who actually goes back to the Biblical narrative it’s invoking.

But… it’s not “even Jesus”. It’s only Jesus. Unless the foot-washing goes both ways, this was not something that man can emulate, not without a lot of hubris, especially in the form it takes: it’s always the white liberal in these rituals taking the place of Jesus, and the minority is always the person getting their foot washed.

Jesus was literally washing their feet because he was better than them. Peter said, no way you’re going to wash my feet, I should wash your feet. Jesus replied, in effect, you’re dirty and I’m not. You are not worthy to enter my home unless I wash your feet.

My local Catholic church uses occasional Latin phrases during the Masses leading up to Christmas and Easter. Our pastor reasoned that (a) Latin is the official language of the Church, (b) it makes a distinction between the different seasons, and (c) it “draws us deeper into the mystery of the liturgy”.

This inspired me, on seeing an old Latin grade school textbook at a library book sale, to attempt to learn basic Latin. The book I’m using is Jenney, Thompson, and Smith’s First Year Latin from 1953. This is a very dense book; I’m currently about 19% of the way through it after several years. Had I been one of the students it was meant for back in the fifties, this would have been a lot of work to complete in one year!

I’m not going to talk about pronunciation. Textbook Latin and Catholic Latin are pronounced differently, and Catholic Latin tends to be pronounced at least slightly differently in different churches. My experience solely in American churches is that Catholic Latin basically follows the rules of Italian pronunciation. If you know those rules, follow them but pay attention to how your church might be doing things a little differently. If you don’t know those rules, just pay attention and you’ll get it. The most obvious difference between Italian and American pronunciations is that the “ch” sound is a hard “k” in Italian; the soft “c” of American English (receive, decipher) is pronounced as the American English “ch” (church, for instance…) and with basically the same rule: when the “c” is followed by an “i” or an “e”.

With all that out of the way, one of the simplest prayers sung or spoken in Latin during Mass is the Agnus Dei. Many Catholic prayers are titled by their first words in the original Latin. So the prayer that begins, in English, as “Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary” is called “Memorare” because Memorare is the first word in the original Latin—it means “remember”. And the prayer that begins “Lamb of God” is called the “Agnus Dei” because those are its first words in the original:

• • Agnus Dei, Qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.
  • Agnus Dei, Qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.
  • Agnus Dei, Qui tollis peccata mundi, dona nobis pacem.

One of the reasons for starvation in the world today is that no one cares. But not in the way most people think about it when they say that no one cares.

The easy assumption, made by everyone from American politicians to so many Catholic charities, is that starvation in the world is a failure of sharing, and we need to convince more people to share. And certainly, sharing is a Good.

But even ignoring fake charities and charities that have devolved into Brazil-like bureaucracies more concerned with their own survival than their ostensible beneficiaries, there is demonstrably enough sharing in the world, especially originating from the United States, to end starvation across the globe. The reason we continue to see starvation is a failure of acceptance.

If the failure of acceptance could be solved—if we could convince foreign governments to accept gifts rather than deny them or, worse, filter them through layers of value-destroying corruption—there would be more than enough sharing already today.

This is true even in, perhaps especially in, the United States, where we can see the stultifying bureaucracy that eats up most of every tax dollar taken from us in the name of sharing with our fellow Americans.

Further, sharing itself would increase if there were greater acceptance of it, if it was obvious that our sharing went to the poor who need it rather than bureaucracies that do not. It’s one thing to share and see a lessening of hunger and to see the poor lift themselves out of poverty because of our aid. It’s entirely another thing to share and see food wasted and rotting, to see money lost in corruption and a Brazil^•-level bureaucracy, to see only people with the time to be professional recipients have the time to navigate the welfare system in the United States or the charity system abroad.

At some point, knowingly giving more money to dictators and corrupt bureaucrats changes from charity to a wasteful and deadly form of virtue signaling. Charity has to mean giving effectively or it isn’t charity at all but mere vanity.

If someone were to say that war raises prices, so a country shouldn’t attack a country that has attacked them, it would seem almost a non sequiter. The first statement is almost certainly true, but it has no bearing on the second. If you’re attacked, you defend yourself or you die. Who cares about higher prices at that point?

One of the most interesting policy changes under Trump was regarding tariffs. Trump was willing to use tariffs as weapons to get better foreign trade deals. The general wisdom among the beltway crowd is that the best tariff policy is for America to remove them all unilaterally. Whether that’s true or not is a pure non-sequitur if other countries are using tariffs and dumping as weapons of war. It also makes the very elitist assumption that the only policy you can have is to remove them or have them permanent.

The justification for a failure to respond in kind is that tariffs on raw materials, for example, means that non-US companies get resources cheaper than American companies do. Which in turn means that they can make things cheaper, and be more successful. When we raise the price of raw materials only in America, we raise the price of every American-made good made from those raw materials everywhere in the world.

That means lost jobs, because it means American-made products are more expensive both in the United States and outside the United States.

But none of that matters if jobs have already been lost and are continually being lost because other countries—and even DC politicians and bureaucracies—are waging war against American workers.

It’s even worse if many of those jobs being lost are introductory jobs in higher-wage industries. Introductory jobs are essential to building a manufacturing base. Low-wage introductory jobs in restaurants, on farms, and in neighborhoods train kids to interact with customers and to manage and perform a job’s responsibilities. Higher-wage introductory jobs in manufacturing, in farming, and increasingly in data management and low-level programming, teach young adults resource management, interpersonal dynamics with other workers, and responsibility to the employer, the customer, and to their family.

The latter jobs also teach the basics of their industry in the real world. These jobs are essential to an economically sound America, and an economically sound America is essential to a secure America.

Don Surber recently wrote:

…the Lord did not deflect that bullet just to have The Donald lose on November 5th. I agree with Steve Hayward, who wrote, “I continue to think he is going to win, because I have a near mystical belief that he’s a world-historical figure of destiny.”

I’ve seen a lot of variations on this. But just because God spared Trump’s life in the face of deliberately malicious incompetence, does that mean God’s plan is for Trump to win? I understand the logic, but I think it’s dangerous to try to guess the Lord’s plans rather than take the opportunity to do what is right.

And there’s been a lot of sitting back and not doing what’s right lately.

In 2020 the Left fostered a global pandemic and blocked the most obvious and safest therapeutics. They deliberately destroyed cities with riots and plundered the savings of the poor. They stole a landslide election and criminalized any attempt at discussing what happened. In each case they not only lied about what they were doing, they made no attempt to cover the obviousness of their lies.

That was not a slowly boiling pot. It’s as if God used Trump to goad them into making their evil obvious. And yet what have we done in response? It’s difficult not to think of the parable of the drowning man. What if the Lord’s plan is to make obvious what His people should do?

Chesterton’s quote about the sphinx in The New Jerusalem is on-topic:

I delicately suggested to those who were disappointed in the Sphinx that it was just possible that the Sphinx was disappointed in them. — G. K. Chesterton (The New Jerusalem)

Eight years of economic disaster from 2008 to 2016. The beltway class was practically gloating about the permanent decline of American exceptionalism. But what followed under President Donald Trump were four years of economic boom, even under an unprecedented shutdown. And then a return to Democrat policies restored economic disaster again. The beltway class like to say that decline is inevitable, but it sure looks like policy makes a difference in whether or not we’re a declining or a booming country.

A couple of days ago I heard a clip from a Larry Kudlow interview in which he said that the reason the economy is so bad under the Biden/Harris administration is because “the left hates businesses.” This is completely backward. It’s another example of conservatives buying into, instead of rejecting, the institutional left’s opposite-talk, their lying with fake terms and fake outrage. The left doesn’t hate businesses. The left hates you and me.

The left is fully aware that their regulations cause businesses to raise prices, and the left is fully aware that it is you and I who pay those prices. They hate us, and they love that they can use left-friendly monopolies to screw us over.

In general, the Left loves businesses, if those businesses are run in a manner easily coopted by government. They love businesses that are run as conglomerate-by-committee. They love businesses that are run by fellow members of the beltway crowd. They especially love businesses that are run like the left runs government, although these tend to fail spectacularly the more they emulate the left.

They loved Twitter, when it was run by committee. They hated it when Elon Musk took over. The businesses they hate are businesses run by individuals. Because they don’t hate businesses. They hate people.

Everything they do that the right claims is “bad for business” isn’t bad for big businesses. It’s bad for individuals running a business—and it’s bad for individuals who no longer have the choice of buying from a local, responsive business.

It’s great for well-connected national and global businesses run by disconnected beltway billionaires and bureaucracies. It kills their local competition. It monopolizes their customers. Amazon is not going to starve from Biden’s or Harris’s “anti-business” policies. If Disney dies it won’t be because of government policies but because they act like the left. And none of the board members will suffer from its death. Only Disney fans and retirees invested in Disney, often involuntarily via big, monopolizing investment firms run by the left’s beltway billionaires.

This is the regressivism of the left: to return to a time when only the rich could afford to be businessmen. When only the rich could afford to be investors.

Is this an easily securable space? (Michael Barera, CC BY-SA 4.0)

One of the great things about Texas is that there are so few places that are safe for showboat killers. The reason you hear mostly about schools is that they’re among the very few such places. It’s also why you hear about mass murderers having driven hours or more to reach a movie theater or a church: so few of those locations have been made safe for mass murderers. It takes work to find places in Texas where only criminals are allowed to carry firearms.

Recently, the State Fair of Texas has decided to add one more vulnerable population to the list: the millions of visitors to the annual State Fair.

Guests will be channeled through weapons detection technology which screens for dangerous weapons in the presence of a licensed and trained security officer.

Not wishing to see such a prime target made safe for mass murder, I wrote a very short letter:

The decision to prohibit lawful carriers from defending themselves and others at the Texas State Fair is very disappointing and potentially very dangerous. By only allowing criminals to carry firearms at the Fair, the Fair meets all the classic requirements of showboat killers: dense crowds of young media-friendly targets, maze-like surroundings, and effective self-defense banned.

The critical flaw in their policy is that it amounts to only allowing criminals to carry at the Fair. An outdoor fair is not amenable to effectively screening visitors for weapons. Screening in such an environment is unnecessary for non-criminals and ineffective against criminals. The new policy is nothing more than a deliberate inconvenience to Texans visiting the fair (my guess is that the people running the fair are not the kind of people who go to an agriculture-themed, fried-foods-friendly State Fair). It won’t be any inconvenience to criminals for whom a giant open fair where everyone else is disarmed is prime hunting ground.

The Fair’s response was a canned text that addressed none of the dangers:

I don’t think you can get more emblematic of the modern beltway class than this notion that US troops should be sent overseas and should not protect US borders. It fires on all cylinders: What they used to call imperialism is now the only moral use for the army. And that farm and industrial workers should make less money by undercutting their jobs with people coming here illegally and forcing those jobs overseas.

They denigrate Americans as lazy and snobbish for not wanting to do the jobs that they themselves have made it almost impossible to hire Americans for.

My mom used to do some of those “jobs Americans won’t do”, which in our farm-based area meant picking asparagus and other fruit and vegetables. Many women did that to pick up extra money to improve their families’ incomes and save for their kids’ education.

She did not stop doing it because she didn’t want to do those jobs. I’m pretty she never wanted to do those jobs, but she did them anyway. She, along with the other women, stopped doing it because the farms stopped hiring them.

She wasn’t alone. An Ace of Spades commenter writing under the nom de plume notsothoreau wrote about their experience in farm work:

I used to work cherry harvest. Typically you work 10 hour days straight for about 21 days. When I started, high school kids could still work there. Then Washington passed a law that kids under 18 could only work up to 60 hours a week and there were also limits on the hours in the day they could work. It wasn’t worth it to the company and they stopped hiring them.

The farms stopped hiring people like my mom because it became progressively more expensive to hire part-time workers due to the regulatory burden per employee. They stopped hiring people like “notsothoreau” because they were no longer allowed to hire high school kids for short bursts of long hours—arguably something teenagers are well-suited for, and which many prefer over longer-term commitments.

The paperwork and other added regulatory expenses made it too expensive to hire the Americans who wanted to do these jobs. The paperwork for hiring someone here illegally is by necessity a lot less than for hiring citizens and legal immigrants.