“AN unhappy generation has of necessity to distract itself from its own emptiness. Since the beginning of the world, men have sought distraction in sin; our own world has found a further distraction, special to itself, in science. Take science first. It is incredible how long science has succeeded in keeping men’s minds off their fundamental unhappiness and its own very limited power to remedy their fundamental unhappiness. One marvel follows another — electric light, gramophone, motor car, telephone, radio, aeroplane, television. It is a curious list, and very pathetic. The soul of man is crying for hope or purpose or meaning; and the inventor says ‘Here is a telephone,’ or ‘Look, television!’ — exactly as one tries to distract a baby crying for its mother by offering it sugar sticks and making funny faces at it. The leaping stream of invention has served extraordinarily well to keep man occupied, to keep him from remembering that which is troubling him. He is only troubled. His sense of futility he has never got round to analysing. But he is half strangled by it.”

— Frank Sheed, Theology and Sanity, Sheed and Ward, 1946; pp. 337-8.

“DRINK of the chalice which Jesus Himself offers you; if it be bitter to the palate, it is sweet to the heart.”

— St. Paul of the Cross

“FOR a long time now, I have thought that feminism has at its heart a rejection of the idea of virtue (and well that makes sense as virtue comes from the Latin for man.) For instance, humility is not something that a woman is supposed to have anymore — only men are supposed to be humble. Nor are women (according to feminism) supposed to be modest or kind or patient, but men are. In short, women have already been “virtuous enough” and they might sin heartily, egregiously, as they have already ‘expiated in advance an eternity of misconduct.’ And to look around us I suppose we have entered into that brave new world now: into the ‘eternity of misconduct.’ Now, thanks to feminism, women can behave badly without shame.”

— From “The Anti-Feminist Propheciies of Henry James,” 2012

St. Mark the Evangelist, Guido Reni

It is to St. Mark that we owe the many slight touches which often give such vivid coloring to the Gospel scenes, and help us to picture to ourselves the very gestures and looks of our blessed Lord. It is he alone who notes that in the temptation Jesus was “with the beasts;” that He slept in the boat “on a pillow;” that He “embraced” the little children. He alone preserves for us the commanding words “Peace, be still!” by which the storm was quelled; or even the very sounds of His voice, the “Ephpheta” and “Talitha cumi,” by which the dumb were made to speak and the dead to rise. So, too, the “looking round about with anger,” and the “sighing deeply,” long treasured in the memory of the penitent apostle, who was himself converted by his Saviour’s look, are here recorded by his faithful interpreter.

Read more on this feast day about the author of the second gospel here

ROBERT ROBBINS writes in comments here:

I guess I took especial interest in this article because as of late I have rediscovered my boyish love of beautiful cars, though not so ardent a love as when I was ten. I think that fast cars are an expression of power like Alan quotes someone as saying in the article, but that is not a bad thing. On the contrary, power is very good. Weakness is evil. Spiritual or physical weakness is nothing to rejoice in. We only rejoice in Christ on the Cross because He freely laid down his life. No one forced the Omnipotent to lay down is life for His beloved. That’s power. Read More »

TONY S. writes:

From your description, it sounds like the film Late Spring is concerned with depicting a certain type of life that at the time of its production was disappearing with the encroachment of modernity.

Films like this are time capsules, they are historical lessons in how people used to live, what they cared about, where they found purpose and value. Meanwhile, today a film such as The Whale has an agenda to destroy.

It seems to me that all modern entertainment, including film, TV, sports and more, is just one major brainwashing effort to demotivate, demoralize, and degenerate an entire people.

In Orwell’s novel 1984 the population was exposed daily to two minutes of hate. In modern America we are exposed to 24 hours of hate. It helps explain the high levels of mental illness present in American society.

ALAN writes:

Shortly after nine o’clock on Easter Sunday night, I was watching an old movie when a strange noise outside attracted my attention. It was not the sound of an auto collision or screeching tires, but rather a muffled thump, followed by silence. I did not go out to investigate, but I suspected an auto accident of some kind. A few minutes later, the sirens proved me right. For ten minutes, the night air was filled with sirens.

In far south St. Louis, there is a bridge that spans a wide drainage ditch, and two roads that run parallel to the ditch on either side.  Traffic is heavy on all three roads.  Nearby residents call them “speedways,” because that is how they are used by anarchists and morons who compete to show how much they hate traffic laws.

What about traffic law enforcement, you ask? Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! That’s a good one! You must be from another planet or another century. There is no traffic law enforcement in St. Louis or any other kind of law enforcement.

Astronomer Oliver Justin Lee wrote in 1939:

“Every day, when driving, I experience keen pleasure in showing some courtesy of the road or receiving evidence of it from others, usually the mature drivers, rarely the youthful. Note how jealous many drivers are about their cars. They must go fast, they must prove to every other driver that their car can go faster, climb easier or roar louder than anything else on the road. I often feel like saying ‘Don’t be cocky. Anyone, even a witless moron, can push down an accelerator’ …  There is much hysterical driving of automobiles, much ill-nature and thoughtlessness…..”  [Oliver Justin Lee, Beyond Yonder, Chapman & Grimes, 1939, p. 23]

It was precisely one such moron who caused the accident Easter Sunday night by driving his truck at 80 miles per hour along one of the roads perpendicular to the bridge. Read More »

Setsuko Hara as Noriko and Chishū Ryū as Shukichi in Late Spring (production still)

THE 1949 feature film, Late Spring, is a simple masterpiece about a family in postwar Japan.

Available with subtitles on the Internet Archive, it is one of a trilogy directed by Yasujirō Ozu in the style of Japanese cinema known as shomin-geki, a genre that realistically portrays the ordinary daily lives of working class and middle class people. These films though involving a far different culture and people are similar to some of the British movies from that era discussed in previous posts in that they lack the glamorous clothes and settings common to so many Hollywood productions of that time. They do not hide domestic banalities and elevate ordinary conflicts into compelling drama.

Late Spring made it through the postwar censors of American-occupied Japan, but not without some significant alterations. Though it takes place in Tokyo, no scenes of the immense destruction from firebombing were permitted. And while the main characters are dealing with lost relatives and friends, the cause of the deaths is never mention in the film. Changes also were made to modernize some aspects of traditional Japan, part of the American social engineering the conquered nation faced at that time.

It is special too in that it deals realistically with a subject matter — Ozu tackles it elsewhere — so often neglected in movies: the bonds and universal conflicts between grown children and their parents. The film is based on the short novel Father and Daughter (Chichi to musume) by the novelist Kazuo Hirotsu. It centers around a 27-year-old unmarried woman, Noriko, played unforgettably by Setsuko Hara, and her widowed father, Professor Shukichi Somiya, played by the outstanding Chishu Ryu. The two characters live together and Noriko, who also works at an office job, is dedicated to her father. She clearly enjoys the domestic tasks of caring for him and in traditional Japanese style, she brings him tea, prepares his bath or lays out his clean clothes at his command.

Noriko is so attached to her home as it obviously was when her mother died (no cause of death is mentioned) that she is shocked when a widower friend of the family reveals that he plans to remarry. She laughs when her father advises that she herself think of marrying.

Her paternal Aunt Masa, played by Haruko Sugimura, is not happy with this state of affairs. And the professor too is deeply worried about his daughter’s future. They both want the young woman to marry, despite her reluctance to leave her father.

Aunt Masa is a steely negotiator and sets about arranging a marriage for Noriko. She announces she will also find a wife for the professor and this prospect is highly upsetting to his daughter.

Aya, played by Yumeji Tsukioka, is another interesting character in the film. She is the cynical divorced friend of Noriko, a representative of the forces of modernity which by now, in 2023, have thoroughly transformed a society in which the relations between men and women were highly ritualized and differentiated. Aya openly admits she hates her husband, has no intention of ever marrying again, and relishes the luxuries of dress and food she enjoys outside her job.

The man Aunt Masa chooses for Noriko is never shown on screen and, according to Wikipedia (please don’t read the entry before you see the film), this was because the American censors disapproved of arranged marriage. To say more about Aunt Masa’s schemes would be to ruin this beautiful film and its character studies for readers.

Here is a movie both sad and wonderfully uplifting, a story essentially about loyalty and the terrible price it must pay in the onward march of the generations. As the father Shukichi says to his daughter “that’s the order of human life and history.” Late Spring takes its title from Noriko’s belated consideration of a husband, evoked later in the movie by scenes of the gardens of Kyoto. The film conveys the deepest of love between not two lovers, but a daughter and father. If love is to have good will toward another person, then the characters of Late Spring love truly. The film shows a Japan far removed from the vicious stereotypes of American war propaganda and one cannot watch it today perhaps without sensing the terrible cost Japan paid not just in the war but in the onward march of modernity. Read More »

The white, gun-toting, super villain

ANOTHER staged drama for the gullible masses and the anti-gun, anti-white male agenda.

This registers a ten on a B.S. meter.

From Thuletide:

Every racehoax follows the same script; Trayvon Martin, Michel Brown, Philando Castile, George Floyd:

– Media spreads a fictional version of events

– Whips up anti-White hatred

– Libtards go into a frenzy

– Burn Loot Murder riots

– Unveiled months later that it was all a lie

ALAN writes:

In December 1919, Cleveland High School in St. Louis undertook an endeavor called “Better Speech Week.” The idea was to encourage good English and discourage careless use of words.

“A dunce cap, of the old-fashioned pattern, is placed upon the head of the boy or girl who uses slang or violates a rule of grammar.”

Imagine that in an American high school today.

Teachers were not exempt from that penalty.

When a boy in class raised his hand and said, “We ain’t made no mistakes,” he was awarded the dunce cap.

The news article reporting the event makes no mention of profanity, which I interpret to mean that its use was nonexistent or so rare as not even to merit mention. Imagine that in an American high school today.

In the school auditorium, students presented a playlet called “Doctor, Watch Your Speech,” which included a song called “Should Better English be Forgot,” sung to the melody of “Auld Lang Syne.”

Nowhere but in the most extreme science fiction-fantasy could Americans today imagine such a thing as “Better Speech Week” or understand why it was a good idea. If they applied to themselves the dunce cap penalty that Cleveland students and teachers applied to themselves in 1919, then 50 percent of Americans today would be wearing dunce caps. But that is a conservative estimate.

The way that Americans speak today makes actor Frank Gorshin’s beatnik character “Blake Barton” sound good by comparison. (In the 1960 motion picture musical Bells Are Ringing.) In fact, Americans today could take lessons from Frank Gorshin’s clear, crisp speech and diction outside of such character roles and that we heard in his many guest appearances on “The Ed Sullivan Show” on Sunday night television in the 1960s.

“Better Speech Week” in America today is of course unimaginable.

At View from the Right, Lawrence Auster often expressed his insistence on the proper use of words and grammar, and he was right.

What should we do about people who degrade one of the greatest things we possess — the English language? What to do about people who avoid plain English and prefer carelessness, bombast, slang, pretentiousness, or the “ready-made phrases” that George Orwell so rightly decried in his timeless 1946 essay “Politics and The English Language?” Read More »

AN Indiana couple who went into Chicago for some sightseeing last Saturday and found themselves caught up in a “teen takeover” is still shaking with fear and refusing to leave their home. They abandoned their minivan with broken windows on a street in Chicago.

Illinois State Senator Robert Peter has reassured the public that the mass violence was not as it seemed.

“I would look at the behavior of young people as a political act and statement. It’s a mass protest against poverty and segregation,” he said.

Phew, that’s a relief! Here we thought it was just mob terrorism against …. against …. against the people in the downtown area.

In the view of Mayor-elect Brandon Johnson, teens, such as those who surrounded and beat a woman on Wabash Avenue, need “safe spaces.” Johnson is also on record as discouraging tests and homework for frustrated teens.

When he himself was a teacher,

To be quite frank with you, I didn’t issue a lot of homework for students. That was my own way of rebelling against the structure. I don’t think I ever gave a kid an ‘F.’

Chicago teens are also suffering from corporate racism. For instance, Walmart recently announced it will be closing four stores in high-crime Chicago neighborhoods. This may be another cause of the teens’ “protests” last weekend. They need more stores to loot in their own neighborhoods.

ALAN writes:

And when the Congress put their hands, not into their own pockets, but into the National Treasury, for the purpose of bestowing alms on a selected portion of our citizens, it may be well to pause and recall the description given by [Guglielmo] Ferrero, the noted modern historian of ancient Rome, of some of the causes which led to the fall of that proud and prosperous Empire:

‘Little by little, the State let itself be persuaded to do for each of its cities what it had done for Rome….  With a view to easing the misery of the urban proletariat, it took public works in hand in every direction, regardless of their utility.  It distributed victuals free or at half-price….

‘But all these schemes cost money…. The intensification of the evil was met by an increase in the dose of the very remedy which aggravated it….  Matters went from worse to worse, until the system reached the limit of its elasticity, and the whole social fabric collapsed in a colossal catastrophe.  This is precisely the mistake which modern civilization must learn to avoid….’

It is dangerous folly to teach people to regard Government as something which exists to pay their bills.  What we, each of us, need today is a good stiff dose of robust, local, self-reliance.  Self-help breeds self-respect….

— American legal scholar Charles Warren, Congress as Santa Claus  [Charlottesville, Virginia, The Michie Company, 1932], pp. 144-46

Do those words not apply precisely to the gargantuan Welfare State that Americans who work for a living agree to support for the benefit of those who don’t work and don’t want to? Read More »

“BEETHOVEN wrote but one oratorio, “Christus am Oelberge” (“Christ on the Mount of Olives”). It was begun in 1800 and finished during the following year. The text is by Huber, and was written, with Beethoven’s assistance, in fourteen days. The first performance of the work is entirely took place at Vienna, April 5, 1803, at the Theater an der Wien.

“The closing number, a chorus of angels (“Hallelujah, God’s almighty Son”), is introduced with a short but massive symphony leading to a jubilant burst of “Hallelujah,” which finally resolves itself into a glorious fugue. In all sacred music it is difficult to find a choral number which can surpass it in majesty or power.”

Source

“OUR Redeemer owed it to us, therefore, that our certainty with regard to His Resurrection should be perfect. In order to give this master-truth such evidence as would preclude all possibility of doubt, two things were needed: His Death was to be certified, and the proofs of His Resurrection were to be incontestable. Jesus fulfilled both these conditions, and with the most scrupulous completeness. Hence, His triumph over death is a fact so deeply impressed on our minds, that even now, nineteen hundred years since it happened, we cannot celebrate our Easter without feeling a thrill of enthusiastic admiration akin to that which the guards at His tomb experienced when they found their Captive gone.”

See this essay by Dom Prosper Guéranger on proofs of the Resurrection.

IN THIS interesting debate from last September, Peter Dimond and Jeff Cassman take opposing positions on whether the Vatican II popes are true popes.

I recommend listening in full. Dimond makes the far stronger case here, but please note that neither man draws the logical conclusions. A reader elaborates below.

By the way, I found it odd that the moderator was drinking beer.

I guess that’s to make serious theological discussion seem cool, which it most definitely is not and never will be.

Read More »

IT is not the soul alone that lives forever. Our bodies will rise one day to immortal glory or banishment.

Our bodies are sublime, even now.

The martyrs and all the saints loved their bodies far more than does the most sensual voluptuary; they, by sacrificing it, saved it; he, by pampering it, exposes it to eternal suffering. Let us be on our guard: sensualism is akin to naturalism. Sensualism will have it that there is no happiness for the body but such as this present life can give; and with this principle its degradation causes no remorse…. If, therefore, the Christian can see what the Son of God has done for our bodies by the divine Resurrection we are now celebrating, and feel neither love nor hope, he may be sure that his faith is weak; and if he would not lose his soul, let him henceforth be guided by the word of God, which alone can teach him what he is now, and what he is called to be hereafter.

— Dom Prosper Guéranger, The Liturgical Year