If you visit Walden Pond in Massachusetts, it does not take much of a look around to realize that Henry David Thoreau, the famous author of Walden, was a fraud. His retreat in the woods was not a retreat at all, but right smack in the middle of nineteenth century suburbia. For an excellent look at Thoreau, the brilliant contemplative, see Leon Edel’s work Henry D. Thoreau. Edel wrote:

Of the creative spirits that flourished in Concord, Massachusetts, during the middle of  the nineteenth century, it might be said that Hawthorne loved men but felt estranged from them, Emerson loved ideas even more than men, and Thoreau loved himself. Less of an artist than Hawthorne, less of a thinker than Emerson, Thoreau made of his life a sylvan legend, that of man alone in communion with nature.          (more…)

   If there was any doubt that The New York Times is an enemy of the American people, it should be dispelled by the newspaper's analysis of the victory of Scott Brown in Massachusetts. There are three basic reasons Brown won: a mysterious lack of energy by Democrats; the deceptions and "stealth" of Republicans; and the petty materialistic concerns of Americans. Only ruthlessness and selfishness could possibly explain resistance to socialism. The relevant pieces can be found here and here and here.

  The Rev. James Jackson writes: I looked around for an image which would express a little of what you said about the clergy [here and here], and came up with this. It's a Carthusian monk entering the door of La Grande Chartreux. The picture is worth a thousand words I think.    Laura writes: Thank you. That's the perfect image of brutal force and oppression. It does nicely capture what I was saying. Think of all the women outrageously beaten back from the gates of monasteries where power-hungry men like this fellow observed extreme solitude and labor. This truly is where the idiocy of the male conspiracy theories is exposed. It's one thing to say women are oppressed because they're not presidents or Nobel Prize winners. It's another thing to say they're oppressed because they're not poor celibates.

“In the duel of sex, woman fights from a dreadnought and man from an open raft.” 

“A bad man is the sort who weeps every time he speaks of a good woman.” 

“A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married.” 

“Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.” 

“No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.”

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  Massachusetts is the most beautiful state in the union. Its hills, its harbors, and its homes; its whalers and sailors; its history and erudition; its tea - all are part of the colossal greatness of Massachusetts. The Boston accent is music to the ears. Harvard still retains some sense. Lexington and Concord reverberate with revolution. The cod is out of this world.  Stand on the dunes at Truro or tour the alleys of Edgartown, walk through Boston Commons or hike the Berkshires, take the ferry to Nantucket or eat lunch at Faneuil Hall. Tell me there are any finer sights in the world. How could we ever have forgotten its majesty and love of liberty? The Pilgrims landed in the right place. We are all Massachusettians now.

When a beautiful woman is photographed often enough, and her picture appears everywhere, she becomes a powerful cultural force. Such is the nature of female beauty.

Two women who typify this phenomenon are Princess Di and Michelle Obama. The deceased princess had spectacular clothes and the current first lady does too.

Interestingly, they are both viewed as women of great feeling,conspicuously compassionate and supportive of a politics of emotion. There seems to be an inexorable law of fashion under modern socialism: Power women dress with heightened exuberance, glorying in their vitality, while dress standards overall deteriorate. Children look much worse, as if they rolled out of bed in their pajamas, and most women and men do too. This is an age of the horribly dressed. But elite women are triumphantly feminine and wear some genuinely fantastic threads.

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  The centuries-old tradition of half-day schooling in Germany is breaking down as more women go to work. The trend will likely accelerate as a tipping point is reached. More women are likely to feel forced to work by changes in prices and wages and by a shift in cultural norms. Unless there is conscious social policy to resist the loss of the male breadwinner, this shift cannot be prevented in the modern world. This cultural revolution in one country relatively resistant to advanced feminism is presented by the New York Times as it is presented everywhere. The change is necessary for the larger economic good. But the departure of women from the home leads to economic losses and social decay in the long run. Birth rates fall, education and manners decline, marriage rates decrease, and divorce increases. The workforce of the future grows weaker. Any economically vital society cannot be sustained at high levels over the long term by absentee parenting and childlessness. Already, one third of German women in their mid-40s do not have children.

You’ve heard of marriages between Christians and Jews, but what about between those who believe in recycling yogurt containers and those who do not. That’s an interfaith affair too.

The New York Times explores marriages and romantic relationships across denominational lines in the environmental movement. It’s not pretty:

Linda Buzzell, a family and marriage therapist for 30 years who lives in Santa Barbara and is a co-editor of “Ecotherapy: Healing with Nature in Mind,” cautions that the repercussions of environmental differences can be especially severe for couples.

“The danger arises when one partner undergoes an environmental ‘waking up’ process way before the other, leaving a new values gap between them,” Ms. Buzzell said.

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A former president and major journalist claim that religion is oppressive to women and unless women are allowed to break into the remaining all-male clergy, the major organized religions will continue not just to oppress women religiously, but to indirectly cause the full-scale oppression of women in all areas of life. Any act of foul play by a man against a woman – and the implication is that there are many such acts of foul play – reflects this injustice. 

Now let’s examine the facts. Ever since the apostles abandoned their fishing nets by the Galilee, millions of men have followed in their footsteps, taking vows of relative poverty and often celibacy, consigning themselves to austerity and reproductive oblivion, and performing spiritual and material services, at all hours of the day, for their followers, at least half of whom have been women.

A small percentage of these men acquired power and tasted luxury. Popes and bishops fathered children and drank from vessels of gold, with the full imperial regalia provided by an established church. Anglican ministers lived in genteel and undemanding circumstances, able to pursue fossil collecting and literary studies. Televangelists became rich celebrities and famous theologians altered the intellectual landscape. But, by any measure, these men represent a minute fraction of the whole. The life of the average Christian cleric is not taken up by most Christian men for good reason. It is too hard. 

Now how is it possible to conclude that men have, out of animus, excluded women from this life, forcing them instead to taste the relative freedom of being mothers or daughters who were cared for by their fathers? It is only possible if one ignores the truth. Like so much of the prevailing opinion regarding male power, it is a myth. The exact opposite is true. Men have been the play things of anti-male prejudice, the widespread expectation that they must assume tasks women do not want or cannot perform and that they must give way to cultural prerogatives whatever they may be. Not only must they assume these tasks, they must perform them well, sometimes spectacularly well. (more…)

Mass rape, bride burnings, the brutal disfigurement of young girls in Afghanistan and wife beatings – who is responsible for these things? Not criminals, but Christian clergy who have never hurt a fly. It is religion that “creates the context” for any crime anywhere in the world perpetrated against a woman. Anytime a woman is slapped in the face or paid less than a man, the evil of faith is to blame, unless of course it is a New Age faith.

Such is the claim of the preposterous, babbling King Lear of modern politics, Jimmy Carter, and his New York Times fool, Nicholas Kristof, who wanders with the former president on the windswept heath of advanced political dementia. Religion is one of the “basic causes of the violation of women’s rights,” Carter said not long ago, and last week Kristof echoed this refrain in a column. (more…)

Fitzgerald writes:

This article by Jennifer Roback Morse posits several excellent points about the deeper implications of endorsing same-sex unions. Most women have no intention of becoming lesbians regardless of creed or culture. But I can definitely see the young women our feminized culture is churning out going for the concept of a two-parent household under the cover of a same-sex union to further game the system. (more…)

Hannon writes:

Your portraits of marriages are always singular and moving. They seem to cast a special light on the fact that two different people, two souls, inhabit a marriage. This is a special notion that deserves more reflection. The idea that they all end– husband, wife and bond– often seems haunting to me, in a strange nostalgic way. (But then you do not write about prosaic couples!). (more…)

At a dialogue with the Metropolitan Opera’s general manager Peter Gelb that was partly broadcast on public radio today, directors of controversial new productions spoke of the small-mindedness of audiences that have the audacity to boo.  Bartlett Sher, director of the new Les Contes d’Hoffmann, called booing “a self-interested expression of ownership.” Gee, that’s weird. I thought booing was a self-interested expression of contempt. (more…)

Craftsmanship is more than skill. It is a disposition, a state of mind, and a stance toward the world. The crafted object is idea and spirit made manifest. Robinson Crusoe was the craftsman par excellence. No one has more vividly described the inner world of the craftsman than Daniel DeFoe in his classic tale of the shipwrecked man on his island. Crusoe cured his solitude. He cured it with manual effort and small acts of creation. The most radically isolated of men, he lived in peace. 

Here is DeFoe on Crusoe’s work to make an umbrella:

“After this I spent a great deal of Time and Pains to make me an Umbrella. I was indeed in great want of one; I had seen them made in the Brasils, where they are very useful in the great Heats which are there. And I felt the Heats every jot as great here, and greater too, being nearer the Equinox; besides, as I was oblig’d to be much abroad, it was a most useful thing to me, as well for the Rain as for the Heats. I took a world of Pains at it and was a great while before I could make anything likely to hold; nay, after I thought I had hit the Way, I spoil’d two or three before I made one to my Mind; but at last I made one that answered indifferently well: The main difficulty I found was to make it to let down. (more…)

In an excellent essay at Upstate Conservative, Thomas F. Bertonneau explains why ‘gnostic’ is an appropriate label for today’s liberal. As defined by Eric Voegelin, gnosticism stands for religious, and profoundly anti-spiritual, political radicalism. No other word encompasses this toxic combination of religious fervor and existential disappointment. Bertonneau writes:

The term “liberal,” like the term “change,” lends itself rather more to mendacious abuse than to just employment, especially when adopted as a label by the Left, which likes to hide its havoc-making program of transforming the un-transformable beneath the “L-word’s” ointment-like blandness. That the term “liberal” had long since devolved into something meaningless or misleading struck Voegelin already in the 1960s as a hindrance to transparent discourse.

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Kristor writes at VFR:

It seems to me that when Darwinians express awe or reverence for nature, they are not so much dishonest as inconsistent. Honestly and straightforwardly carried through to their logical conclusions, their principles make a mockery of such feelings. Yet they cannot help having these feelings that they do have. They have these feelings because it is bliss to be alive, bliss to exist; it is bliss to know, and so to know is to love, to adore, and willy nilly to worship. (more…)

The blogger Justin at Truth Shall Set You Free  argues that Walt Disney’s The Little Mermaid is a perfect introduction to female psychology for young boys. He writes:

… The Little Mermaid contains everything you need to know to understand women. It is exactly the movie you would want to show your sons, and make sure they fully understand its lessons. Which may seem odd at first, because it is usually identified as a girl movie, being, in fact, one of Disney’s big five Princess Movies.

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