FROM the unpublished writings of Lawrence Auster:

The radical individualism that has undermined our collective sense of nationhood expresses itself not only through ideologies such as feminism, but, perhaps even more harmfully, through a leveling, “pop-culture” ethos that has insensibly replaced the old bourgeois-Christian ethos of the West. This popular culture is so much a part of the fabric of our lives that even conservatives hardly seem to notice it. In their complaints about cultural disorder, conservative moralists tend to focus on easy-to-identify, hot-button moral issues such as abortion and homosexual liberation, while taking for granted–and often happily participating in–the loosening of standards in every area of life, the systematic downgrading of speech, dress, and manners, that has made sexual immorality and its attendant ills inevitable. (more…)

A GRATEFUL READER writes:

I was struck by a paragraph that appeared to me with force on the eve of Ash Wednesday. The book, A Landscape with Dragons, The Battle for Your Child’s Mind by Michael D. O’Brian, discusses the dangers of Gnosticism and the Occult in literature for children. Below, I have placed in bold the phrase which struck me. Addressing the parent of a child who has been severely bent in the wrong direction by reading bad books, O’Brian writes:

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IMAGINE what it was like to live in a society in which a season of penitence was observed by all. In the Middle Ages, meat, eggs and even dairy products were banned during Lent in much of Europe, making abstinence unavoidable for most. There were many people who were not holy, of course, but there must have been a “supernatural energy,” as Dom Prosper Gueranger refers to it, in the air. The French abbot wrote in his Liturgical Year:

There are but few social questions which have not been ably and spiritedly treated of by the public writers of the age, who have devoted their talents to the study of political economy; and it has often been a matter of surprise to us that they should have overlooked a subject of such deep interest as this: the results produced on society by the abolition of Lent; that is to say, of an institution which, more than any other, keeps up in the public mind a keen sentiment of moral right and wrong, inasmuch as it imposes on a nation an annual expiation for sin. (more…)

CAREY writes:

The interesting thing to me about TV awards ceremonies, the fashion industry’s lust for all things Dark and Occult, and even Jay-Z adopting the single commandment of Thelema (‘Do what thou wilt is the whole of the law’ of Thelema) as a motto is that the people in these industries read blogs too. They’ve seen over this past year that there are quite a few people out here who have read up on the occult. And while there have always been what culturally are known as conspiracy theorists, the entertainment industry has taken notice that the people who have noticed that something is horribly wrong and have thus tried to learn more about the occult are not the typical cultural idea of that: many even-handed, calm people are now speaking up about this. So the people in the entertainment industry have seen this and have adjusted their tactical position.

They don’t deny it, they simply laugh at it all and dare anyone to call it what it is: blatant homage to very old, very evil gods and demons. Continuing with the age old idea that the best tactic Evil ever managed to come up with was convincing humanity that It doesn’t exist in any singular mind or entity—that there is no such thing as what we might call ‘Primary Evil’ (Satan) and that only the hearts of men do evil—the entertainment industry is now openly worshiping and laughing it off with the support of Western Culture. And tacit support is still support. So long as people continue to chuckle at the notion that this is even happening, the entertainment industry will simply get bolder.

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READ about it at Tradition in Action.

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  The ancient Ninevites, Jews and, later, Christians wore sackcloth as an expression of self-mortification and repentance. The Pope in former times blessed the sackcloth of penitents guilty of grave sins at the beginning of Lent (today is Ash Wednesday). Cool people today wear athletic gear when they engage in great feats of self-denial. They eat protein bars and drink vitamin water. Fasts last all year long. Sackcloth is expensive. The desire to repent cannot be eradicated from human nature. Sin is universal. "Remember, man, thou art dust."

ADAM writes from Arizona:

Inquiring minds want to know: what happened to Renner after his house burned down? Did Renner die in the fire? Or did he live to face an arson charge? What a cliffhanger of an ending to the story!

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   ROBERT Tracinski at The Federalist perceptively argues that college rape hysteria (as distinguished from the real, but uncommon phenomenon of college rape) is caused by "an attempt to create a scapegoat for the emotional dark side of promiscuity." It’s a system which systematically preys on and exploits the emotional vulnerability of young women in order to use them as publicity fodder for an ideological agenda.

A MOTHER writes from New Mexico:

I am Catholic and I understand you don’t believe in the post-Vatican II church. Do you take your children to mass? Do they do CCD classes through a local parish? Should I attend these masses? Also I would like your advise on what you think of the Church’s rule of being open to life. I am 28 years old and have four children ages eight, four, two, and four months. I’m not sure I should have any more. I am constantly tired and don’t have family nearby to help. I would appreciate your thoughts. Thank you.

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  IN A 2014 article on Mardi Gras traditions, Charles A. Coulombe wrote: Our ancestors celebrated [Mardi Gras] to the best of their ability because they kept Lent very strictly: indeed, Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the wise author of The Physiology of Taste, tells us what Lent was like in pre-Revolutionary France: No body breakfasted, and therefore all were more hungry than usual. All dined as well as possible, but fish and vegetables are soon gone through with. At five o’clock all were furiously hungry, looked at their watches and became enraged, though they were securing their soul’s salvation. At eight o’clock they had not a good supper, but a collation, a word derived from cloister, because at the end of the day the monks used to assemble to comment on the works of the fathers, after which they were allowed a glass of wine. Neither butter, eggs, nor any thing animal was served at these collations. They had to be satisfied with salads, confitures, and whitemeats, a very unsatisfactory food to such appetites at that time. They went to bed, however, and lived in hope as long as the fast lasted. I hope you are planning to enjoy some of your favorite things today, dear reader, (perhaps a triple-stuffed-crust pizza hubcap with extra latex) and then say goodbye to all that until Easter. I personally think that giving up industrial-grade pizza does not count as a form of penance. In fact, I think…

HANNAH writes:

I have read your website for some months. I differ with you on several issues but that’s not important now. I agree wholeheartedly on the subject of race, and black criminality in particular and I would like to tell you about something that happened the other day which illustrates this.

I don’t want to go into a long-winded bio, so, in brief: I was raised a liberal. I learned the hard way how to deal with blacks. I will provide anecdotes in future, if you want, but here’s an example from today.

I live in Brooklyn now. And I’ve noticed that any neighborhood except black ones is mixed – because that’s the way it goes in modern urban America. Blacks go where ever they please. Whites and Asians stay out of black neighborhoods. (more…)

ALAN writes:

If the FBI Director wants “to learn from our mistakes,” a good place to begin is with his statement that the FBI’s wiretap of Michael “Martin Luther” King was “without fact or substance, and is predicated on the naked assertion that there is “communist influence in the racial situation.”

His statement and implication are utter nonsense.  J. Edgar Hoover said King was the most notorious liar in the country.  He and the Kennedy brothers knew that King surrounded himself with his Communist friends and “advisers.” There is good reason to believe that King was a Communist-trained agitator.  The Communists were involved up to their ears in the “Civil Rights Revolution” of the 1950s-‘60s. It is a sad state of affairs indeed when Mr. Hoover’s successor either does not know or does not want to know or does not want to acknowledge these facts. (more…)

PAUL writes from Louisiana:

I finally watched The Help a few weeks ago.  It is a 2011 movie about the supposed life of black maids in Jackson, Mississippi in the early 60s. It was wonderfully acted, cast, and directed. But was it accurate? It was fiction. The author is much too young to have witnessed the events.  Maybe she interviewed some maids, or maybe she did not.

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FROM the unpublished writings of Lawrence Auster:

Deep in the American mind there is the ideal of America as a country where advancement is open to anyone, where “it doesn’t matter who your parents were.” The problem with this lovely-sounding ideal of race-blindness is that it can only work within reasonable limits, i.e., when it is applied to groups and persons who, notwithstanding some mutual differences, share a civilizational commonality. Taken literally, it becomes absurd and dangerous. Applied en masse to radically diverse populations and cultures, the ideal of race-neutrality turns out to be not race-neutral at all, but becomes a weapon used by some groups to dispossess others.

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