Author: J. Arthur Bloom

J. Arthur Bloom is the blog's editor, opinion editor of the Daily Caller, and an occasional contributor to the Umlaut. He was formerly associate editor of the American Conservative and a music reviewer at Tiny Mix Tapes, and graduated from William and Mary in 2011. He lives in Washington, DC, and can be found, far too often, on Twitter.

Chris Morgan on Don Colacho

A great writer on a great thinker, go read his piece in TAC on Nicolás Gómez Dávila:

“Democracy has terror for its means and totalitarianism for its end,” Gómez Dávila once wrote. In that single stroke an argument is initiated and ended. It is just one of thousands of sentences Gómez Dávila composed in his nearly 81-year life, but which very few have read. They covered every deep subject imaginable in the same terse, confident, clever, and intransigent manner, at only slightly varying lengths. These aphorisms, called escolios (“scholia” or “glosses”) by their author, stand on their own, ever at attention like a verbal infantry with bayonets armed, ready to return fire rather than to facilitate civil dialogue. In his lifetime Gómez Dávila would publish these passages only reluctantly, often at the insistence of others, and usually on his own publicity-averse terms. …

“If the reactionary concedes the fruitlessness of his principles and the uselessness of his censures,” Gómez Dávila wrote in his essay “The Authentic Reactionary,” “it is not because the spectacle of human confusion suffices for him. The reactionary does not refrain from taking action because the risk frightens him, but rather because he judges that the forces of society are at the moment rushing headlong toward a goal that he disdains.”

Gómez Dávila’s reactionary gaze was a vast one applicable to any subject previously worthy of intellectual dissection: from politics to economics to the arts to manners, and certainly religion. Gómez Dávila found corruption not only in democracy but in capitalism (“The Gospels and the Communist Manifesto are on the wane; the world’s future lies in the power of Coca-Cola and pornography”); in the rise of industry and technology (“God invented tools, the devil machines”); in individual liberty (“Liberalism proclaims the right of the individual to degrade oneself, provided one’s degradation does not impede the degradation of one’s neighbor”); and in blind patriotism (“That patriotism which is not a carnal adhesion to specific landscapes, is rhetoric designed by semi-educated men to spur the illiterate on towards the slaughterhouse”). This is to name but a few cultural felonies that protrude from our mundane striving for betterment. As Gómez assesses: “The cultural standard of an intelligent people sinks as its standard of living rises.”

Whole thing here.

Robert Caruso and the grey tribe: The tweets his future employers, editors, and clients should know about

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It was with great interest that I watched one of the security state’s more aggressive propagandists get dragged into the #GamerGate maelstrom last month. I don’t have strong feelings about the movement, but anything that gives Gawker a taste of its own medicine is probably not all bad. This is the first point of contact in the national security realm in what Pax Dickinson calls the grey tribe’s rebellion against the blue tribe.

Meet Robert Caruso, a consultant, columnist seen at the Daily Beast, The Hill, Huffington Post, The Guardian, and elsewhere, former spokesman for the Afghan reconstruction, and is a frequent source for anti-Snowden perspectives for Business Insider’s Michael Kelley. He hasn’t written a word that doesn’t argue for more war. Since surfacing as a columnist he’s argued the best way to stop ISIS is to go after Iran and arm the Syrian opposition, obscured the administration’s denials of NSA spying in a quote at Buzzfeed, said we should arm the Kurds and put boots on the ground in Iraq, thinks the man who thought we could bomb Libya into liberal democracy is a “consummate realist,” and also at Buzzfeed, written a listicle on why the NSA is a-OK. There’s this one:

Once again, the United States finds itself embroiled in a debate over whether or not to “go to war.” It’s a choice the country shouldn’t have to make, and it wouldn’t with a bigger, more lethal clandestine service like France or Israel has. …

In remarks offered right here in Massachusetts, the CIA’s own deputy director once observed dryly, “People in the 1950s and early 1960s concluded that the United States was facing a ruthless and implacable enemy. Our only hope of survival was to match their dedication with our dedication and their ruthlessness with our ruthlessness.” That ruthlessness is sorely needed again.

More humorously, he was published in a Tufts publication, but misspelled the school in a column he wrote quoting a graduate.

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WASP as cultural bellwether: Bp. David Colin Jones and the zeitgeist vs. Solzhenitsyn

If too many Salon articles and SPLC reports have got you doubting that liberalism is the dominant cultural force in America, listen to an Episcopalian sermon. The standard criticism of the historical WASP elite typically involves the charge of being indifferent to common people, preferring rules to justice, and being reluctant to examine their society too closely lest doing so imperil their social privilege. In the past, this was deployed on behalf of institutions like Jim Crow. Today, with the left occupying most positions of cultural power, this patrician diffidence now works to the benefit of left-wing causes and state power.

I was in Williamsburg several weeks ago for homecoming, and went to services at Bruton Parish (est. 1674). It was confirmation Sunday and Suffragan Bishop of Virginia David Colin Jones was preaching. They’ve finally put his sermon online; it begins with a weird dig at the Synod of Bishops (italics mine): (more…)

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Secession lagniappe

Journalists don’t really know how to talk about secession:

For example, look at how The Root is describing the proposed incorporation of St. George in East Baton Rouge Parish:

The rich, white folk who live in Baton Rouge, La., want to secede and form their own town called St. George.

Or at least that’s how their critics are articulating the initiative, the BBC reports. The secession, of sorts, is being sold as a well-intentioned plan that will allow St. George’s hypothetical residents to gain more control over how their tax dollars are being spent to improve public education and other services. But because St. George’s racial makeup would be 70 percent white, skeptics are seeing the initiative as nothing more than a new-age attempt at white flight or a gerrymandering of sorts.

The problem is, St. George isn’t part of Baton Rouge city, it’s part of East Baton Rouge Parish, and they just want to form a new city within it.

Two treaties, between Hawaii and Spain, and Hawaii and Denmark, which Hawaiian independence advocates claim are still in force.

You know why I love Examiner.com? Because their “Honolulu Political Buzz Examiner” is Michael Salla, who also runs an institute on political relations with extra-terrestrials. Anyway, for what it’s worth he and others are claiming that the feds are going ahead with their plan to recognize the native ancestry roll as a federal tribe. Virtually no Hawaiian independence advocates support the effort.

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Sacred Harp 404: ‘Youth Will Soon Be Gone

A good one for All Souls Day:

Youth, like the spring, will soon be gone,
By fleeting time or conqu’ring death;
Your morning sun may set at noon,
And leave you ever in the dark.
Your sparkling eyes and blooming cheeks
Must wither like the blasted rose;
The coffin, earth, and winding sheet
Will soon your active limbs enclose.

Ye heedless ones who wildly stroll,
The grave will soon become your bed,
Where silence reigns and vapors roll,
In solemn darkness ’round your head.
Your friends will pass the lonesome place,
And with a sigh move slowly on,
Still gazing on the spires of grass
With which your graves are overgrown.

Ye blooming youth, this is the state
Of all who do thy grace refuse;
And soon with you ’twill be too late
The way of life and Christ to choose.
Come lay your carnal weapons by,
No longer fight against your God;
But with the gospel now comply,
And heav’n shall be your great reward.

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Yeats: ‘A Prayer On Going Into My House’

From The Wild Swans At Coole:

God grant a blessing on this tower and cottage
And on my heirs, if all remain unspoiled,
No table, or chair or stool not simple enough
For shepherd lads in Galilee; and grant
That I myself for portions of the year
May handle nothing and set eyes on nothing
But what the great and passionate have used
Throughout so many varying centuries.
We take it for the norm; yet should I dream
Sinbad the sailor’s brought a painted chest,
Or image, from beyond the Loadstone Mountain
That dream is a norm; and should some limb of the devil
Destroy the view by cutting down an ash
That shades the road, or setting up a cottage
Planned in a government office, shorten his life,
Manacle his soul upon the Red Sea bottom.

(Image source)